Republican lawmakers nationwide seem fixated on anti-trans issues over all other issues this year as midterms approach.
In Maine, a ballot initiative meant to restrict transgender students’ access to bathroom and sports was removed from an upcoming ballot due to its petition not receiving enough signatures after over 12,000 signatures were deemed invalid. The initiative’s removal was announced on Tuesday by Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, following an examination of the nearly 80,000 total signatures. The reasons for invalidating signatures ranges from duplicate signatures and out-of-state signatures to collection methods not abiding by Maine regulations.
The group responsible for the petition, Protect Girls Sports in Maine, is bankrolled by far right billionaire Richard Uihlein, and the ballot initiative is widely believed to have an unstated aim of driving conservative turnout in the hotly contested Maine senate race. The group has said that they will be reviewing the ruling and intend to appeal the Secretary of State’s ruling. Their push for this initiative is the latest in a long line of attempts by the right wing and anti-trans groups to restrict trans students.
There are only two known transgender students playing sports in the entire state.
Last week, Stephen Miller took to Twitter to call the Texas Democratic candidate for Senate, James Talarico, Texas’ “first transgender Senate candidate.” The DNC responded to Miller from its official account with the short, scathing response of “shut up you ugly fuck.” While Talarico is not, in fact, trans, he has had a history of support of LGBTQ+ people; which the right wing has taken as their main angle of attack against him.
Later in the week, Fox released a sneak peek of an interview with Donald Trump where he also referred to Talarico as transgender. Following the release of the clip, numerous responses admonished the lie, with some users speculating whether Trump actually believed what he was saying.
These two comments are some of the highest profile instances of the right increasingly using “transgender” as a pejorative in attempts to demonize its opponents.
Numerous other pieces of anti-trans rules and legislation have been pushed over this last month, with increasing frequency and scale. At the Wisconsin Republican convention earlier this month, Republican politicians and speakers attacked transgender youth, setting their crosshairs on transgender participation in sports.
At the federal scale, we have also seen the House pass a Don’t Say Trans bill, which would seek to restrict funding from schools that teach “gender ideology” if it also manages to pass in the Senate. The FCC has also been pushing to increase the severity of parental ratings in media for the inclusion of trans content, a proposal which is currently open to public comment.
The increasing fervor and focus on trans issues by the Trump regime and its allies comes in stark contrast to the real issues that the nation is currently faced with, rapidly increasing food and gas costs, ICE’s imprisonment of Americans and immigrants in concentration camps, engagement in an illegal and unprovoked war with Iran, and increasing support for a genocidal state abroad. With these issues consistently polling as more important to the majority of Americans than transgender healthcare or participation in sport and with Trump’s approval ratings in freefall, it is hard to read the right’s focus on those issues as anything more than attempts at distraction from the regime’s deeply unpopular positions and policies affecting far wider swathes of Americans.
Valorie Van-Dieman (they/she) is an Associate Editor at Assigned Media. @valorievandieman.bsky.social
