Republican Reliance on Transphobia to Defeat Abortion Fails First Test
Republicans hoped that Issue 1 would make it impossible for Ohioans to protect reproductive rights in November. To sell it they tried transphobia, and failed.
by Evan Urquhart
Protecting abortion is popular in Ohio. According to a poll by USA Today and Suffolk University, 57.6 percent of Ohio voters say they support a November ballot measure proposing a constitutional amendment to protect access to abortion in the state. Their voter’s preference for reproductive freedom doesn’t sit well with the Republicans who control Ohio’s legislature, so they tried to make it harder to amend the constitution before the vote was held. Yesterday that effort failed as voters resoundingly defeated the measure, known as Issue 1, which would have required a 60 percent vote for that and any other future changes to the constitution to succeed. (Why Republicans were allowed to attempt a sudden change to the rules on how referendums work to stymie voters from enacting their will in the first place is another question, and one I haven’t seen addressed.)
So far, so good, but what does this have to do with trans stuff? By all rights the answer ought to have been “nothing” but likely because protecting abortion is so popular anti-abortion forces decided to sidestep abortion in their attempts to pass Issue 1. They also sidestepped the question of what Issue 1 would actually do, instead cutting a vague and menacing ad urging parents to protect their children’s innocence from the threat posed by, you guessed it, trans people (and drag queens). Assigned covered these ads when they came out last month.
The defeat of Issue 1 is a sign that voters aren’t so activated by transphobia that they’ll fall for an obvious bait-and-switch when the text of the measure in question has nothing to do with parents rights or trans youth in public schools or anything like that. It’s also a sign that Republicans are desperate for their anti-trans gambit to work because they’ve got little else. However, the defeat of Issue 1 doesn’t seem likely to be the end of anti-abortion groups’ attempting to convince voters that voting to protect abortion would be bad because protecting reproductive freedom might somehow also wind up applying to a transgender youth. A story in the Columbia Dispatch laid out anti-abortion advocates argument here:
screenshot from the Columbia Dispatch
The Dispatch also provides the context that law professors find the idea that the courts would interpret the wording of the law as superseding requirements for parental consent in health care, particularly because the Ohio Supreme Court is currently dominated by conservatives. So, that’s the weak link that Republicans are going to try to use to convince voters not to protect abortion in the constitution: The possibility that the courts might interpret an individual right to make decisions about reproductive health care as a right for transgender youth to get surgery without their parents’ consent.
We’ll have to wait and see whether, like with Issue 1, this strategy is literally all Republicans have or if they’ll take the failure of this messaging to connect with voters during its first test as a sign that fearmongering over trans people is a dud. For the trans community in Ohio and beyond, the stakes are high. A popular backlash against anti-trans messaging as dishonest, manipulative, and unconnected from the issues voters actually care about could be quite good. However, repeated negative ads casting trans people and drag queens as terrifying stereotypes who are coming from people’s children are likely a sign of what we can expect in the presidential election season of 2024 from a party, and a conservative movement, who has nothing but transphobia and just keeps doubling down.
