Maybe Democrats Can Hold Off On All the Transphobia

You’ve gotta be kidding me with this.

WFAA

As we enter the last few weeks of the 2024 election season, a disquieting and disturbing sense of utter desperation has started to pervade every level of politics. Nothing should really surprise us at this point, but the lows are getting low, the last-ditch efforts should in fact be in a ditch, and we’re arriving at some very dark and depressing places. Katherine wrote earlier this week about the bleak state of the Harris campaign, and we’re seeing echoes of the same behavior from a few Democrats running for U.S. Senate too, particularly when it comes to trans rights. What’s worse, the Harris campaign is also putting some very weird signals out about the issue.

Let’s start with Texas’ Colin Allred, who made the choice last week to combat opponent Ted Cruz’s anti-trans messaging with… more anti-trans messaging: 

In case you missed it, this man really said, “Let me be clear. I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.” (He repeated these lines during his debate with Cruz this week, though he added vaguely that he is against discrimination.)

The layers of harm here are astounding. It’s like he might as well have said, “Ted Cruz and I actually agree on this,” which worked so well for Tim Walz in the VP debate earlier this month (jk). We already knew that transphobia turns your brain to mush, but we had no idea it was this bad. 

This ad is a response to Cruz campaign claims that Allred’s support of transgender rights threatens fairness in youth sports—a thematic continuation of the tens of millions of dollars the Trump campaign has spent on hateful, dog whistle anti-trans ads attacking Kamala Harris for her support of gender-affirming care. (It should be noted that those spots focus on comments from 2019, and Harris' communications director said this past September that it’s “not what she's running on." Yes, we will be getting back to that in a minute!) 

It goes without saying that this is an odd response, especially from a candidate who has previously run on a platform of supporting LGBTQ+ rights (he was even endorsed earlier this year by the Human Rights Campaign, an org that’s now publicly asking for him to explain himself). It’s also odd for a party in which the majority of voters—particularly young ones—support protections for trans people, and most don’t consider it a high priority issue.

There would maybe, possibly be a small comfort in this infuriating situation if we could chalk this whole thing up to one bad decision or an anomaly in the field, except it’s not. There’s way more where this came from—including from the Kamala Harris campaign.