December 24 2025, 08:15 
Republicans in the House of Representatives can’t get much done – except when it comes to attacking the trans community. Then they can still manage to pull out all the stops.
Just last week, Republicans, joined by a handful of Democrats, passed a bill to ban Medicaid from funding any gender-affirming care for minors. That was on top of another bill that they passed to criminalize gender-affirming care for trans youth.
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The odds for each bill in the Senate look pretty weak. But getting the measures passed into law is not really the point. The point is to gin up an electoral strategy to rescue the GOP from what’s increasingly looking like humiliating mid-term elections.
Past experience has shown this tactic to be, well, dumb. That doesn’t lessen its cruelty, however.
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Previous elections are littered with examples of how anti-trans campaigning flopped with voters. Republicans only have to look to last month’s returns to see just how badly anti-trans attacks fared. In the Virginia gubernatorial race, Republican nominee Winsome Earle-Sears blew through a ton of money on ads attacking Democrat Abigail Spanberger for her support of trans rights. Spanberger walloped Earle-Sears on election night.
Similarly, in New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship despite attacks on her support for trans rights, although the losing Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, believed it was a winning issue.
The polls showed voters ranked trans issues at the bottom of the list of their concerns. It was a top concern for a paltry 3% of voters in Virginia.
Indeed, except for the motivated few, attacking trans issues has been consistently overrated as a winning strategy for years. The problem is that, when an anti-trans candidate wins, the mainstream media are quick to pin victory on the anti-trans attacks.
The most significant case in point is
Republicans were quick to hype this as a winning issue for the party. The mainstream media echoed that hype, even though polling showed the economy was by far the biggest concern for voters. Transgender rights ranked at the bottom of a Gallup poll list of the most important issues in the election.
Part of the reason that Republicans think transphobia is a winner for them is that Democrats act as if it is. It is far easier for the party leaders to scapegoat the trans community for their shellacking last year instead of grappling with the real problem: the party has no real vision for the future.
One appeal that transphobia has for Republicans – besides their natural affinity for it – is that it’s a distraction from issues that they don’t want to address: Jeffrey Epstein, affordability, and an increasingly erratic president intent on converting D.C. into Pyongyang on the Potomac. Trump keeps echoing his anti-trans attacks, but even he can’t escape voter disdain for what Republicans have done to the nation.
However, as with all things MAGA, the cruelty is the point. Even a losing strategy will still inflict untold harm on transgender people, especially trans youth. The move by Robert Kennedy Jr. and his fellow anti-science junkies to cut off any money for trans youth care will increase the risk of suicides. But the Trump administration already addressed that: it ended funding for the LGBTQ+ youth suicide hotline. Instead, the administration wants to channel trans youth into the equivalent of conversion therapy.
If lives are lost, Republicans don’t care, even at the cost of their own electoral success.
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