By Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis–
As Election Day 2024 draws ever closer, we were deeply disturbed to read in major news outlets last week how the campaigns of Donald Trump and other Republicans are pouring millions of dollars into vicious anti-trans advertisements that grossly misrepresent the truth of the lives of transgender people and exploit potential swing voters’ latent transphobia. A New York Times headline read: “Trump and Republicans Bet Big on Anti-Trans Ads Across the Country.” The Times story reported that a Trump ad often aired during NFL and college football games ends with the callous and cynical tagline: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
“Same old playbook,” as Vice President Harris described Trump’s blatantly racist attacks on her, aptly characterizes this year’s Republican deluge of anti-trans ads that attempt to ostracize gender nonconforming members of our community as the “other.” These cruel ads, which Republicans are employing in the presidential race as well as in key swing Senate contests such as Ohio and Montana, are unfortunately all too familiar to LGBTIQ people.
For example, Republicans twenty years ago advanced anti-marriage equality ballot initiatives in 11 key states in an effort to turn out their vote in the 2004 Bush-Kerry election, and the Bush campaign advocated for a federal constitutional amendment banning marriage for LGBTIQ couples nationwide. Significantly, data later demonstrated that their efforts were completely ineffective in increasing Republican turnout. For over 40 years, from Anita Bryant’s “Save the Children” campaigns and the notorious Briggs Initiative of the 1970s to the Proposition 8 campaign in 2008, conservative political forces have attacked and demeaned LGBTIQ people in stigmatizing political advertisements.
We know where Vice President Harris and the Biden-Harris administration stand on LGBTIQ issues. This summer while Biden was still at the top of the ticket, Harris invited the cast members of the immensely popular television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to the White House to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the show’s premiere, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the first queer marriages in San Francisco. In their White House conversation, which took place four months before election day, Harris recounted how her first campaign manager was the legendary Jim Rivaldo, Harvey Milk’s political consultant, and how she embraced Rivaldo’s understanding of the LGBTIQ movement “as a collective fight for freedom and for justice.” Sadly, a divisive Republican attack now uses an image of Harris joyfully greeting the Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness wearing a white dress in an attempt to vilify trans people.
On the same day of the New York Times story, major media outlets also ran another major transgender news story about the first nationally representative study of transgender and gender questioning youth by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The study extensively documents the detrimental effects that queerphobia and misinformation, such as that disseminated in the Republican political ads, have on gender nonconforming young people. It describes “disparate health outcomes and challenges in school, including violence and discrimination” that these queer youth face, compared to their cisgender counterparts.
However, as we examined the data tables in the CDC survey, we discovered rainbows amidst the dark clouds in the data. The first was the fact that the CDC found that an amazing 5.5 percent of high school students nationwide now describe themselves as transgender or as questioning their gender identity (3.3 percent transgender and 2.2 percent questioning).
We were tremendously heartened by those numbers. The fact that so many high school students had the self-awareness and understanding of gender fluidity as well as the confidence and courage to reveal their inner feelings to a federal government agency incredibly inspires us. The data reveal a flowering of our movement as increasing numbers of young people move beyond the strictures of the traditional gender binary to express and live as themselves—even in the face of the conservative, Republican, queerphobic onslaught.
Another bright rainbow in the CDC data is that over 20 percent of cisgender high school students identified their sexual orientation as either LGB or questioning, or described their sexuality in some other way than heterosexual. Despite all the challenges that being queer can still entail, more and more queer high school students—now 1 in 5 students—are choosing to be themselves on their own terms.
And returning to politics, another bright rainbow—with radiant pink and blue hues—is that queer history is virtually certain to be made on November 5th with the election of the first transgender person to the United States Congress. Democratic Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride, who is transgender, holds a whopping 21 percentage point lead over her Republican opponent in the race for Delaware’s only House seat, according to a September 19 University of Delaware poll. We are ecstatic that in all likelihood we will soon have a powerful trans member of the U.S. Congress standing up in their own authentic voice for trans and queer rights.
Elections by their very nature involve voters choosing between two or more candidates. But they don’t have to fuel separation of people into “we” and “they.” As the campaigns of Trump and other Republicans seek cynically to divide between “they/them” and “you,” Kamala Harris understands—and the CDC survey demonstrates—that “you” are in fact “they/them.”
John Lewis and Stuart Gaffney, together for over three decades, were plaintiffs in the California case for equal marriage rights decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. Their leadership in the grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA contributed in 2015 to making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
6/26 and Beyond – Election 2024
Published on October 17, 2024
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