Trump World Wants to Start a Fight With Harris Over Trans Rights
The ex-president has launched the first-ever general election attack ad on the issue.
WHEN DONALD TRUMP ACCUSED Kamala Harris during their debate of supporting transgender surgery for illegal immigrants in custody, the accusation sounded so wild that critics wondered “what the hell was he talking about.”
Trump’s attack, however, was mostly correct, according to fact-checkers who often find the opposite with the former president.
One might imagine that Trump would be peeved to be told, erroneously, that he had botched his facts. But in fact, he and his team didn’t mind much.
They’d delivered the line not to pass muster with the press corps but to start a high-profile culture war and define the vice president as too liberal for the general electorate. They believe they have succeeded.
Starting last week, Trump became the first presidential candidate to run a general-election TV attack ad on transgender issues. The ad featured a clip from an October 2019 video of Harris discussing transgender surgery and therapy for prisoners—“Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” she says—and an image of a questionnaire in which she affirmed her support for taxpayer-funded “comprehensive” transgender treatment, including surgery, even for illegal immigrants.
The Trump campaign spent about $2.5 million to air the spot in the seven swing states, according to data from the media-tracking firm AdImpact. The campaign made sure also to air the ad in Washington, D.C.—likely to reach political pundits and insiders—and during college and pro football games.
More is on the way, said Chris LaCivita, the co-manager of the Trump campaign.
“This has been a defining issue for the new left for the last ten years. So now we’re going to make sure Harris has to run on it,” said LaCivita, pointing to polling that shows support for Trump’s opposition to transgender surgeries for minors, trans athletes in women’s sports and subsidizing transgender therapies. “What makes this effective is she’s on video saying it. They can’t deny it.”
Harris’s campaign declined to comment on Trump’s ad beyond pointing to prior remarks from a spokesperson who indicated the issue is “not what she is proposing or running on.”
Transgender advocates, who complained of being sidelined last month at the Democratic National Convention, refrained from criticizing Harris for her silence and accused Trump of desperation and transphobia for running the ad.
Trump’s elevation of the issue and Harris’s reticence to discuss it with the same vigor she did as a candidate in the Democratic primary five years ago is the latest indication that public opinion is shifting around transgender rights.
The resurfacing of Harris’s 2019 comments linking transgender surgeries with immigration—Trump’s favorite issue—was viewed as a major opening in Trump land. They believe the topic animates social conservatives, some of whom were dispirited by Trump’s recent mixed messaging on abortion. And though other Republicans have tried to wring political advantage on transgender issues before, Trump’s team believes it will be more effective this time, partially because their attacks are being supplemented by allied groups.
Just as Trump’s ad began airing on TV, CatholicVote announced it would run a 30-second digital ad in swing states concerning Medicaid funding for “penis amputations,” hysterectomies, and mastectomies. At the beginning of the month, the American Principles Project, a social conservative political group, launched an $18 million text-and-digital ad campaign featuring three separate transgender-related ads. The spots highlighted the issues of transgender athletes in women’s sports and featured the testimony of a detransitioner who expressed regret for having taken gender-transition therapies.
Terry Schilling, American Principles Project’s president, said his group used large-sample online consumer research panels to market-test the ads. He said they had broad resonance with men, swing voters, working-class Democrats, and even suburban women who otherwise support liberal positions on health care, guns, and abortion.
“Democrats can’t play this gender identity stuff to a draw because if they moderate on it, they lose some of their base. And if they double down on it, they lose the middle, and even some in their own party,” Schilling said. “It’s the one area [Trump] has a clear advantage.”
HOW BIG AN ADVANTAGE, IF ONE AT ALL, is not clear, however. The same polls that document majority opposition to trans athletes in women’s sports, for instance, also show an even larger percentage don’t want families of trans kids attacked. Also, politicians who spend too much time campaigning against trans people lose support, according to a poll conducted this year for the pro-trans group GLAAD. Advocates note that conservative candidates who made transgender policy a campaign issue lost in 2022 and 2023.
“Former President Donald Trump’s latest ad serves as a convenient distraction to the real issues Americans are facing, like an affordability crisis for middle class families and inadequate access to healthcare,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality. “The ad uses the same tired rhetoric about trans people, unsupported by actual facts. Every trans person is a part of someone’s family, yet the Trump campaign is desperate enough to scapegoat these families just to score points with the most extreme parts of his crumbling base.”
Both sides agree that trans-related issues are not high priorities for voters. And the Trump campaign has made sure to spend much more of its ad time and money on other issues: the economy, inflation, immigration, and crime.
Harris, likewise, is focused on other matters with the topic receding in emphasis compared to four years ago.
During the 2020 campaign cycle, Harris, then the junior U.S. senator from California, mentioned transgender rights in her January 2019 announcement for president. Running to the left in a crowded Democratic primary, in the summer of 2019 she answered an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire by affirming she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”
In her expanded answer she noted that as attorney general in California she had “pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates.” (It is this questionnaire that appears in the Trump ad.)
Trans activists were not universally persuaded, noting that her tenure in California was not always aligned with their causes. In the on-camera interview in October 2019 with the National Center for Transgender Equality that is excerpted in the Trump ad, Harris was pressed on her decision as attorney general to represent her state’s prison system when it denied gender-assignment surgery to an inmate. She explained she worked “behind the scenes” to change the policy and the law so inmates could get the medical care they had a right to receive.
Harris’s comments had been largely forgotten until CNN reported about the ACLU questionnaire earlier this month.
Trump then mentioned it in the debate against her and his campaign stitched together an ad at his insistence.
“This is a gateway issue,” said a top Republican consultant briefed recently on the Trump campaign’s internal polling and strategy. “The campaign spent the better part of six of the last eight weeks defining her as too liberal and now more than 40 percent [of voters] in swing states see her that way.”
Delphine Luneau, a spokesperson for the pro-trans Human Rights Campaign, said most people don’t know a trans person because the population is so small and that the “fundamental lack of awareness of what trans people are about makes it easier for misinformation and outright lies to fill the knowledge gap.”
LOOMING OVER TRUMP’S EFFORTS to weaponize transgender issues is the fact that he has shifted somewhat on the topic himself. In his 2016 convention speech, Trump spoke about protecting “LGBTQ citizens” from “violence and oppression.” As an ally of Caitlyn Jenner—one of the most famous transgender Americans— Trump said in 2016 that he’d be comfortable with whatever bathroom Jenner wanted to use.
But while in office, Trump banned transgender service members in the military and reversed an Obama administration transgender health policy. (A Jenner spokesperson says “she still is fully behind Trump as she has been since 2016.”)
President Joe Biden restored the Obama health policy and scrapped Trump’s transgender military ban. Two months after taking office, Biden issued an executive order requiring the federal government to interpret Title IX, which bans sex-based discrimination at federally funded schools, as also banning discrimination based on gender identity—outraging Republicans who said it would be unfair to female athletes. The change was blocked by federal courts in 26 states that sued to stop the order.
Although the ads are new, the transgender issue has been a part of Trump’s 2024 campaign for some time. In his rallies, he has more than once alluded to supposed transgender surgeries being performed on children during their school day. (“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this?”) He has also denounced the use of puberty blockers, as well as transgender athletes in women’s sports. More than a year before launching this presidential campaign, in a speech at the America First Priorities Institute, one of a handful of think tanks created by staffers from his former administration, he made it clear that “we should not allow men to play in women’s sports.” The line received some of the loudest applause of the night, after which Trump criticized unnamed consultants who, he said, had told him not to discuss the issue because it’s “very controversial.”
“So it just shows you what these political geniuses, I have all these consultants, all these great brains,” Trump said. He pointed out that his remarks about transgender athletes were not part of the teleprompter script he was occasionally reading from.
“That’s not written down anywhere. I just said, ‘This might be a good time.’ And that gets the biggest [applause] I’ve ever heard,” he said.