I wrote a diary the other day about my experience seeing Trump’s disgusting, nay, ABSOLUTELY FUCKING RAGE INDUCING anti-trans ads that were playing during the World Series and every other sporting event, and every other non-sporting event, and every other TV channel that allows political ads. As many of you know, they are UBIQUITOUS.
Well, turns out that the Trump campaign has gone all-in on their anti-trans demagoguery and are spending vastly more money on anti-trans ads than on any other issue facing the nation. More than the economy. More than immigration. More than crime, punishment, inflation, or anything else that Trump rails against night after night at his hate rallies.
Because apparently Mango Mugabe has a SERIOUS bug up his ass about transgender people. In fact one might suspect that he may have hit on a trans woman in the past given his rampant and unceasing hatred for our community.
I mean look at the numbers:
Trump has spent more than double on anti-trans ads than on immigration, which I always assumed was his main target. But no.
This is, of course, a huge gamble for Trump as the Republicans’ relentless anti-transgender campaign in 2022 failed to deliver the Red Wave that pollsters promised was going to happen. But Republicans are never one to learn from their mistakes and always choose to double down on those mistakes instead.
And double down they have. HARD.
Viewers across the nation are being bombarded by Trump’s anti-transgender ads, which paint Harris and Walz as dangerous radicals for supporting transgender rights. The ads often use a badly edited and completely taken out of context quote by Kamala Harris that says she personally approved gender affirming surgeries for prison inmates while she was California’s Attorney General. Now keep in mind that exactly TWO inmates were granted gender affirming surgery PER EXISTING LAW that was signed when Trump was in power.
“I will follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,” Harris said. “Now it’s a public report that under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available to, on a medical necessity basis, to people in the federal prison system.”
However the intent is to paint Harris in a negative light in order to drag her down to Trump’s level and polling shows that this effort is working as her positives have decreased while her negatives have increased. Yet at the same time she has erased Trump’s lead on the economy and is essentially neck and neck.
Trump, of course, has gone all-in on demonizing the transgender community even going so far as to concoct a completely ridiculous conspiracy of school children being given transgender surgeries IN SCHOOL without their parents’ knowledge or consent. In any other Universe he would have been completely laughed out of the race with such an absurdity but that does not seem to be the case in our Universe.
Despite spending over $50 million on anti-trans advertising in 2022 and the main focus of that advertising was in Michigan where they failed to prevent Democrats from winning the trifecta for the first time in 40 years. Republicans also failed to gain wins in battleground states where similar advertising was deployed.
The net effect, of course, is increased hostility towards the transgender community and a decrease in compassion overall. Democrats and trans advocates say Republicans are overplaying their hand, pointing to a 2024 GLAAD Voter Poll that showed 53 percent of voters said they opposed a candidate who speaks too much about “restrictions that target trans youth.”
From The Bulwark:
The saturation spending by Republicans has appalled trans advocates, who worry it has made trans Americans political pariahs and punching bags. To counter that, the nonprofit trans advocacy group GRACE launched a counteroffensive this week by releasing a new digital ad featuring an Army veteran who opposed home-state politicians in South Carolina interfering with his family’s healthcare decisions concerning his trans child. The advocacy group GLAAD and its partner organization Ground Media have also begun an ad series of their own.
On Thursday, Ground Media unveiled a study it had conducted showing that Trump’s first trans-related ad had not improved his political standing, but had hurt perceptions of trans people.
"What this demonstrates is that attacking the trans community isn’t just a weak and feckless political strategy—it’s a deeply cynical one,” David Rochkind, CEO of Ground Media, said in a written statement. “These ads weaponize trans-identity to sow fear and division, making our country less safe for everyone.”
Again, transgender and gender non-conforming people are the canaries in the coal mine for fascism as we are the most visible and easily attacked subset of the population. It is incumbent upon decent people in this country to reject the Republicans’ anti-transgender agenda which has caused lasting and serious damage to the transgender population, especially among gender non-conforming youth who are now experiencing a 76% increase in suicide attempts.
Transgender healthcare is LIFE SAVING healthcare that Republicans want to take away from us. And that is absolutely immoral.
This diary was crossposted from my Substack blog WokeAF. Come join the fun, it’s free!
