In my swing state of Pennsylvania, it's common for people to joke about how exhausted they are by all the campaign ads. But this year, the jokes fail to capture the ongoing psychic damage Donald Trump and his allies are inflicting with their lie-laden appeals. While ads for Vice President Kamala Harris are largely soothing promises of middle-class tax cuts, every Trump spot is maximum-volume bile. We're routinely threatened with rape and murder at the hands of roving gangs of dark-skinned immigrants. Or we're subjected to wildly distorted tapes of Harris laughing as if she's a horror movie villain about to torture us in a basement. But what makes me cringe the hardest are the anti-trans ads.
Because all of the Trump ads are vicious garbage, I spent a lot of time pondering why the hatred against trans people stands out. It's the tagline: "Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you." Whoever wrote this no doubt thinks it's a cutesy troll, but what's striking is that it's more blunt than any other ad in its zero-sum mentality. According to these ads, one can either be for trans people or cis people, but it is not possible to be for both. (Never mind that Harris is a cis woman herself.) The not-so-subtle implicit message is that the mere existence of trans people threatens cis people.
To be certain, this is the central message of the Trump campaign, regardless of topic: If any two people are different — whether due to gender, sexual orientation, skin color or background — they must be in a locked battle for dominance, and there can only be one winner. If women gain, men automatically lose. If people immigrate here, it can only be at the expense of those who live here. But rarely is it stated so nakedly as in the anti-trans ads. We're told it is impossible that there's room enough for both cis and trans people in our communities.
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It's so obviously untrue, given a single moment's thought. Even for those who don't fully understand trans identities, this is a classic "mind your own business" matter. The correlation between someone else's gender identity and chromosomal arrangement does not affect you. The efforts to make someone else's gender identity relevant to a cis person's life are laughable in the level of stretching. Oh, you heard some 5th-grade soccer team has a trans kid on it? The person in the stall next to you might have different-looking genitals? You saw pronouns on a nametag? How empty must your life be, to even care? It affects you less than a moth's fart in China. It makes no sense, which is why Republicans have turned to QAnon-level lies — such as Trump's bizarre claim kids are being forced into sex change surgeries in the course of a school day — to give this nonsense juice.
And yet, as Melissa Gira Grant wrote in the New Republic, anti-trans attacks "have become the 'closing message' from Trump and other Republican candidates to voters." Anyone living in a swing state can confirm. While Trump at his rallies talks more about his racism, calling immigrants of color "garbage" who "poison the blood" of the nation, the "they/them" ads dominate on TV.
It's gross, but it's also confusing. Research repeatedly shows that anti-trans messaging doesn't move the needle, electorally. Most voters hate these ads, calling them "shameful" and "mean-spirited." As Dave Weigel reported in Semafor, Republicans went all-in on anti-trans messaging in past elections, but the issue "hasn’t previously worked for GOP candidates in swing states." Weigel argues that the Republicans are ignoring all the data showing this issue falls flat, mostly on a gut sense that it will resonate this time.
One certainly hopes they are wrong, and voters will continue to be puzzled as to why they're being told to be scared about the personal business of strangers. But even if this strategy fails another time for Republicans, there's every reason to be worried about the long-term impacts of blanketing the airwaves with such hateful rhetoric. The most immediate consequence is to further mainstream this unhinged hatred towards trans people. A lot of people, perhaps most, are under this illusion that a mysterious "they" wouldn't allow these ads on TV if the rhetoric was that bad. This isn't true, but this false assumption allows people to see these ads and believe that it's normal to be this fixated and angry over the gender identities of other people. That creates a permission structure for unstable people to wallow in their irrational hatreds.
We can already see the impact of the previous election cycles, where Republicans dangled trans people out as a hate object for their followers. It didn't win them more elections, but it likely contributed to the alarming rise in hate crimes, most of which is due to a dramatic increase in attacks on people perceived to be trans. In the past, a person like Chaya Raichik would be widely regarded as needing medical interventions for her all-consuming preoccupation with trans strangers. Instead, she's a thought leader inside the GOP, despite the constant drumbeat of terrorism against people and schools she's targeted for being LGBTQ-friendly. The terror campaign is spreading internationally and against anyone the right deems somehow not fitting into their narrow gender roles. Cis Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was subject to an international harassment campaign — egged on by Trump and his running mate, Sen JD Vance of Ohio — after false claims she is a "biological male" because she beat a lighter-skinned woman in an Olympic match.
The abuse and violence against trans people is reason enough to be concerned, but the attacks against Khelif illustrate how this dark cloud of hate is billowing out and consuming ever more people. It all goes back to the nasty "they/them" tagline in the Trump ads. Implicit in those ads is a belief that any difference between people, no matter how inconsequential, creates a zero-sum conflict between them, even if there's no rational reason to think their differences should matter. That mentality breeds paranoia, alienation, and fighting between people who otherwise would be fine to live peacefully as neighbors, even friends. For people told to hate each other for irrational reasons, no good comes from it — just stress and pointless anger. The only people who benefit are scummy politicians like Trump, who ruin lives to gain votes and dance away from the social ruins the rest of us have to live in.
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