The Republican Party has been investing millions of dollars in anti-trans advertisements in a play to reach moderates and voters on the left who feel uncomfortable with or confused by transgender rights. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the New York Times Opinion deputy editor, Patrick Healy, and the columnist M. Gessen discuss these ads and the fear they’re tapping into in American society.
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Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. I’ve covered American politics for decades as a reporter and editor and running our New York Times focus groups.
M. Gessen: My name is Masha Gessen. I’m an Opinion columnist at The New York Times. I write about politics. I specialize in Russia and autocracy and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
Healy: Election Day is just over a week away, and one thing I’ve been watching is this onslaught of anti-transgender ads that Republicans are blanketing across swing states.
Since the beginning of August, Republicans have poured more than $65 million into these ads, and they’re running a lot in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — these states that the election is going to come down to. There’s this huge amount of money being spent on an issue that’s not a top issue for voters. It’s not like the economy. And I think something really important is going on here, and it’s really what I want to talk to you about today.
Masha, I do want to show you one of the Republican ads, just so we can dig into what we’re talking about.
Audio clip of a political ad:
Narrator: Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.
Kamala Harris: Surgery —
Interviewer: For prisoners.
Harris: — for prisoners, every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.
Narrator: It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.
Harris: Every transgender inmate would have access.
Narrator: Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.
Healy: So, Masha, this ad draws on an A.C.L.U. questionnaire that Kamala Harris filled out in 2019 when she was running for president.
Clearly, they’re trying to use her own words from five years ago against her. Talk to us about what you think Republicans are saying, both explicitly and implicitly, with the messaging in this ad.
Gessen: Yeah, the ad is pretty amazing. There’s the text of the ad, which — I find it kind of fascinating because it basically frames transition as a privilege, because why would you object to spending taxpayer dollars or just supporting gender-affirming surgery or other gender-affirming care for inmates and people that they’re calling illegal aliens? So I think that’s kind of funny, right? The transitioning is portrayed as a kind of desirable, privileged thing.
The subtext is much more crude. I think the ad is aimed at placing Kamala Harris in association with three severely othered groups that are perceived as menacing. She is with inmates. She is with asylum seekers, whom they’re calling illegal aliens. And she’s with trans people. All people that the voters that the ad is aimed at never have personal contact with but have a great fear of.
Healy: So I asked several Republican and Democratic pollsters about the strategy behind these ads. What they kept pointing out was that there are moderate and independent voters, including Democrats, Democrats with children, liberal women, who are pretty uncomfortable with trans and gender-nonconforming students playing on girls’ school sports teams. Some of these Democrats feel that their party is kind of in the thrall of trans activists on issues involving kids.
Now, these anti-trans ads, they’re trying to play on that discomfort, these pollsters think. And it’s strange because the number of trans and gender-nonconforming kids is just so, so small. So part of the political challenge for Kamala Harris, these pollsters say, is that a lot of voters don’t really know her well enough to say what she truly believes in.
So when Republican ads say that Harris is for they/them and not for you, these ads have a certain effectiveness in making voters say, “Well, what does Harris believe in?” or “How do Democratic leaders see these issues?” And so I’m really curious about what you make of all that.
Gessen: I think that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party perceive these issues very, very differently. And I think that the Republicans may have it a little bit more right in terms of what voters feel and fear than the Democrats.
I think that Democrats are looking at straight-up answers to questions about what’s important to you and seeing that for most people, trans issues are not that important or at all important, because, of course, they’re much more worried about the price of eggs than about somebody’s access to gender-affirming care.
What Republicans are seeing or feeling is that people are anxious about the future. They’re anxious about their economic future. They’re anxious about their social future. And it can all be boiled down to this anxiety about one’s children — that one’s children are going to come home from school one day and speak a different language than the parents or use a different name and generally be a stranger.
That fear of being alienated from your own children is at once fundamental and also a great stand-in for this generalized anxiety about the future. I think that that’s something that Republicans understand super well and Democrats don’t understand at all.
Healy: How do you think Harris is responding to that anxiety? Because these ads — we hear about them in focus groups that we do — are all over the swing states now. How do you see her in this?
Gessen: I don’t think she’s responding well. I think it’s also part of a larger issue. She spends very little time speaking directly to these anxieties. Donald Trump spends all of his time speaking to people’s anxieties about the future. Harris does this on housing. And the only other issue that she is really direct on is abortion rights.
Healy: Yeah.
Gessen: And I don’t know that that addresses people’s anxieties about the future, or if it does, it doesn’t for specific cases. But it’s not the same kind of generalized “I don’t recognize the world that I’m living in. I can’t imagine myself in 10, 15 years. Help me” kind of feeling.
She is not speaking to people that it matters to, and the calculus is probably — and not incorrectly — that those of us who are trans are going to vote for her anyway. The people she’s not speaking to are the people that those ads might actually work on.
Healy: I’m not entirely sure how effective these ads are ultimately going to be, at least in a direct way. We just haven’t seen a lot of evidence in 2022 and 2023 that voters themselves were going out and taking ballot action to respond to trans rights issues or that they were motivated by this.
I found myself wondering if something larger is at work in the Republican Party, and that’s to tell its base, but perhaps independents, that the Democratic Party leadership has a view about traditional gender roles that are different from what you may believe. Or Kamala Harris may see certain issues differently. That there’s kind of an othering going on that’s part of a broader strategy.
Gessen: If you look at how autocrats around the world have wielded trans issues — and this is pretty consistent wherever you look, but let’s look at Vladimir Putin, whose money and muscle have been very important in fostering this international traditional values movement, or what Putin calls the “traditional values civilization”: Women are women. Men are men.
Putin has spent a lot of time talking about transness, and Russia has outlawed transness completely. They’ve outlawed being trans. They’ve outlawed medical transition. They’ve outlawed social transition. For people who have already transitioned, they’ve made it illegal for them to marry.
But they’re using the specter of transness as a stand-in for a whole way of life and a whole way of understanding the world. And I think we have to acknowledge that that picture is internally coherent. If you believe that women should be women and men should be men and if you believe in marriage and if you believe in family, then all of this follows.
I think that’s the way Trump’s Republican Party is wielding transness as well. As a kind of foregrounded issue of a larger picture of the way things should be.
Another thing that’s going on — and this is something that we know a lot about from anti-gay campaigns of old in this country or not so old in other countries around the world — it’s actually super easy to target people who are a very small minority. Because if most of your audience doesn’t know a trans person, then it’s much easier for them to perceive trans people and transness as something monstrous and terrifying.
That used to work with gay and lesbian people back when nobody knew a gay or lesbian person. And as we know, one of the driving forces in the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement was coming out. It’s much harder to sell something to Americans or anyone else when they feel like you’re talking about their kid, their brother, their cousin, their next-door neighbor. But a very small minority is actually an excellent target.
Healy: I agree with what you’re saying, and I think I would add one more, which is going back to your point about gender-nonconforming people. There are a lot more gender-nonconforming people in society today, including in positions of power and visibility, and I think that creates, to some degree, a panic, a fear, a worry about what direction that’s going in.
And it leaves politicians and lawmakers to want to take, to some extent, power into their own hands to shape or reshape the culture in ways, whether it’s making them more comfortable or just stopping something that they don’t like.
Gessen: Absolutely. I think most politicians have children. They know that their children are actually living in a different world. Even I know that my children are living in a different world. For my 12-year-old or my 23-year-old, it’s so much easier for them to wield pronouns than it is for people my age, however well intentioned the people my age are.
That perception of a major social shift is inescapable. What we have is, on one side, the Republican Party speaking to the anxiety that a major social shift inevitably causes.
And on the other side, the Democratic Party not having the courage to say: Social change is great. We change. There’s progress. The greatest thing about humanity is that we invent things that have never been done before. That’s what actually lies at the root of political hope.
Instead of saying that, they downplay it. And when they downplay it, they come off as disingenuous or perhaps not connected to the world that people are actually living in.
Healy: I see it a little bit differently. I think you’re right about the Democratic Party leadership not having that kind of courage. But I can’t forget the number of, particularly, women who identified themselves as Democrats or liberals in conversations to me who have a bit of a “What is going on here?” attitude and an anxiety about it.
For them, I’m not sure if courage is the issue. I think that they, to some degree, see the Democratic Party as believing essentially one thing, let’s say, about support for trans rights. And that can include medical care, gender-affirming care for adults, for younger people as well, and they’re not comfortable with it.
I don’t know if it’s an issue of persuasion, if it’s an issue of science, if it’s just a sense among some Democratic people that they feel like their party is out of step with where a majority of voters are. Essentially, whether this is a political issue, a social issue, a medical issue —
Gessen: Sometimes parties are and party leaders are out of step with where a majority of voters are. That’s called leadership. And I think we see that around major social change or minor social change, right? But social change. There was leadership in this country when a majority of voters held to profoundly racist positions.
I think there was leadership in this country when a majority of voters held to profoundly anti-immigrant positions. But we don’t see that anymore. Or certainly we don’t see that in the Democratic Party. We basically see populism on steroids in the Republican Party, where the whole point of the entire politics is to reflect what a majority of voters want.
And we see a kind of subdued populism in the Democratic Party, where the point is to play to the things that a majority of voters think and never to take risks.
Healy: I can’t tell whether it’s the fear that fueled that kind of racism and misogyny that you’re talking about that’s animating this or something that is — and I’ll call it, you may disagree — a little more benign, which is just uncertainty.
“I don’t know what’s right for my kid” or “I don’t know who my kid really is, and it scares me,” but there’s still love in that fear, if that makes sense.
I’m throwing all that at you without answers. I don’t have children. You do. But I find myself, when I interview some voters like this, feeling a mix of “What’s really going on here?” with them, in terms of what’s actually driving their views, I guess, with some degree of empathy, again, because I’m not a parent and I don’t know what it would be like to have a child who suddenly you aren’t recognizing, for lack of a better word, the way you once did.
Gessen: I actually have empathy for that as well, precisely because I do have kids. Your children will, as one of my friends says, never run out of ways to disappoint you. But, of course, fears around gender and children are so basic. They really just go to something that is fundamental to the way we organize the world.
In my imagination, there can be a politician who says, “Look, it’s not a big deal. You can still love your child. We can live in a world that’s organized not like the world of our parents. That’s what political leadership and invention and futurism are about, and it’s going to be OK because we’re all going to figure it out together.”
I think that a Kamala Harris or a Tim Walz in a different political situation is totally capable of transmitting that kind of message.
Healy: Masha, thanks so much for talking to me about this.
Gessen: Thank you, Patrick.
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