Those Republican “anti-trans” ads again

I guess I just can’t leave well enough alone

October 22, 2024

In two recent podcast episodes, I talked about an October 8 New York Times article titled “Trump and Republicans Bet Big on Anti-Trans Ads Across the Country.” The first episode is here and the second is here.

The gist of the story is that Kamala Harris is on record in 2019 saying that she supports tax-payer funded so-called “gender affirming care” (including surgery) for federal inmates and immigration detainees. This is, of course, wildly unpopular among the American electorate. 

Elizabeth Warren is on record saying the same thing in 2019, prompting comedian Bill Maher to tell all the Democratic presidential candidates to please “stop being weird” in an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. In the episode, he mocks candidate Julian Castro’s support for “abortion rights for transgender women.” Maher pointed out the ridiculousness of this and exclaimed, “They can’t get pregnant! They don’t have a uterus (unless they’re in prison and Elizabeth Warren buys them one)!” He ended the episode, “THIS SHOULD BE EASY, JUST BE LESS CRAZY THAN DONALD TRUMP! ARE YOU GUYS SERIOUSLY STRUGGLING WITH THIS??”

That was 2019, and yes, the Democrats have been struggling with this ever since. And “trans” surgeries for inmates is just the tip of the iceberg. The Democratic Party also supports allowing male athletes to compete in women’s sports, male inmates to be housed in women’s prisons, and men invading women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. I know plenty of readers think I’m exaggerating, but that’s because for the most part, the media has been complicit in covering it all up. I wrote about all this in The Reckoning. The feminist publication Reduxx reports on these matter routinely.

Every single Republican ad on this topic during this year’s election cycle has ended with the narrator saying some version of “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” 

On October 14, the group Gays Against Groomers posted on Facebook a Trump speech that begins, “The left wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse.” This is hardly a “right wing” talking point. The well-regarded investigative journalist Gerald Posner said the same thing in The Wall St. Journal in 2023. In the speech, Trump lays out his plan to stop the “chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth.” “On day one,” he says, “I will revoke Joe Biden’s cruel policies on so-called gender affirming care.”

This morning, the Washington Post got in on the game with an article titled, “Republicans’ closing argument: an attack on transgender rights.” 

I submitted the following comment, which went up immediately:

Feminists have been telling the Democrats in power how their embrace of "gender identity" harms women and girls since at least August of 2016, when the Women's Liberation Front sued the Obama Administration for redefining sex to include "gender identity" under Title IX. A radical feminist lesbian explained it to the Democrat-majority House Judiciary Committee live and in person on C-SPAN in April of 2019. The US chapter of Women's Declaration International has been explaining this in no uncertain terms since 2020. I submitted written testimony to the Democrat-majority Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of WDI USA in March of 2021. I have published two books on the topic: The Abolition of Sex (2021) and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls (2023). Several of us have met repeatedly with Democratic lawmakers at the federal and state level to explain it. WDI USA has asked the Democratic Women's Caucus for a meeting and offered to connect them with feminist lawmakers abroad who have successfully challenged their own left-leaning parties on this topic; they ignored us. In August, I published an open letter to Kamala Harris, asking her to say at the DNC that a woman is an adult human female; she didn't. I could provide countless other examples. Rank and file Democrats, including many lesbians and gay men, have been screaming about this for years. The WDI USA Lesbian, Black Women's, and Detransitioned Women's Caucuses have spelled out their critiques of "gender identity" clearly; their statements are all at www.womensdeclarationusa.com. I personally know lifelong Democrats who are voting for Trump for this reason (among others). The Democrats in power have ignored our pleas. They are perfectly happy to sacrifice women and girls at the altar of "gender identity" and this Republican onslaught of ads is the inevitable result. Women are female and men are male. It's not complicated. Signed, a lifelong registered Democratic adult human female.

It’s going to be a long two weeks until November 5.