This story was produced in partnership with the Accountability Journalism Institute.
Terry Schilling, a main architect of Republicans’ transphobic campaign messaging in 2024, exuded a brash confidence in what has become the party’s single-minded repeat of that strategy this year. “After gay marriage, the left wanted to go for full victory,” he told a podcast interviewer this spring. “The magic really came when we convinced politicians to run on this.”
“Gender,” said Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles Project, “should be a national issue.” His organization, funded in good part by the right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, has shifted its public focus almost entirely to anti-trans campaigning, but the broader backdrop was clear.
“How do we win, how do we replicate this on other issues?” Schilling told his interviewer, Bradley Devlin of the Daily Signal, a hard-right website recently spun off from the Heritage Foundation. In his own remarks, Devlin lamented the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell, and said there is “a direct line from the logic of gay marriage to transgenderism.”
If you trace the right wing’s money through the Uihlein family, the American Principles Project’s main benefactor, there are other direct lines: opposition to women’s reproductive rights and government environmental regulations, along with the promotion of strict voter ID laws that encourage disenfranchisement.
But is the Republicans’ “magic” coming to an end? The center-left think tank Third Way, which has been criticized in the past for drawing an equivalency between trans advocates and transphobes, is now decrying the party’s “sheer obsession and extremism” on trans issues.
Scant Evidence
Until now it has been an article of faith in some media and political circles that transphobic ads won the election for Trump in 2024 and will be decisive again in the mid-terms, but the evidence is scant.
“It’s very clear Republicans think this works, and even when you listen to political pundits talk about this on CNN or elsewhere, they seem to have accepted this idea,” said Don Haider-Markel, a professor at the University of Kansas who has studied the links between public opinion and policy for 25 years. “But as a social scientist, I can say there aren’t any studies to say this worked in 2024. And the evidence from special elections and off-cycle elections in 2025 suggests that it didn’t help Republicans at all.”
One person who needs no convincing is Elon Musk, whose personal animus toward trans people has led him to pledge $100 million on ads through his America PAC, benefitting Republicans, emphasizing transphobia and targeting pivotal states such as Iowa, Ohio, Texas and Alaska. So far this year, Republican advertisers overall have spent more than $60 million on 190 TV ads focusing on trans people, CNN reported, citing data from the tracking firm AdImpact.
“I think this election is really important, because it will be a testing ground for the extent to which this backlash against trans people will continue,” Haider-Markel said. “This could be a really important election for knocking Republicans away from that idea that this is effective, that punching down all the time isn’t a good strategy.”
Trans issues consistently rank at the bottom of voters’ concerns in polling, but strategists aligned with the Democrats say that confronting the Republicans’ transphobic attacks directly is important for the party’s candidates this year.
So far, our analysis found, the Democrats’ response is decidedly mixed with some candidates such as Alaska’s Mary Peltola and Ohio’s Amy Acton and Marcy Kaptur going so far as to adopt Republican talking points and misgendering.
“For Democrats, it’s really not clear to me they have had good messaging on this issue,” Haider-Markel said. “I think it’s historically comparable to any point in history, when those in power are punching down at the weakest in society. When you concede to them these points, you’re conceding that it’s OK to punch down and letting them position themselves to ask for even more.”
How Winning Looks
Democrats don’t have to look far to find examples of winning and principled messages, said Tyler Hack, the founder and executive director of the Christopher Street Project, which works to elect candidates who will defend trans people. Hack pointed to the election of Abigail Spanberger as governor of Virginia in 2025.
“When her opponent spent the majority of her paid media budget on anti-trans ads,” Hack said, “Gov. Spanberger didn’t cede ground. She went on the air, talked about why she cares about children’s safety, and her experience as a former public safety officer. It was incredibly compelling, and she’s now been able to undo some anti-trans rules in Virginia.”
Hack also pointed to Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan this year. ”He’s a medical provider and is saying that decisions about care should be between a doctor and their patient, and if it’s a minor, the parent.” Hack said. “These are candidates who understand we can win without throwing people under the bus.”
Democrats can also succeed by pointing to the extremism of transphobic policy proposals that demand sex-verification and encourage self-appointed gender police. “Republicans are the ones who want genital inspections in schools. Republicans are the ones pushing rules that led to a girl in Minnesota being followed into the bathroom and forced to take her top off.”
Still, she said, “There are places where I’m concerned about Republican attacks and lackluster Democratic responses. This issue becomes most effective only when Democrats handle it poorly.”
Republicans are using transphobia “as a wedge issue for the broader erosion of rights,” Hack said. “We saw this playbook with abortion where they incrementally rolled back reproductive rights. And it’s incumbent upon Democrats to prove to us that they will stand by our fundamental freedoms.”
Disenfranchising Americans
Studies of the 2024 election, though they provide little evidence that transphobic ads were decisive, seem clearer on two almost dichotomous points: Most Americans broadly oppose anti-trans discrimination, but the wave of stereotype-driven transphobic attacks has eroded public acceptance of trans people themselves.
On Musk’s social media platform, where much of the U.S. media and political elite conduct business, transphobic extremism thrives. Leading anti-trans figures regularly promote the false notion that trans people are seeking “special” rights or “privileges.”
Nowhere have these propagandistic claims collided more with the discriminatory reality faced by trans people than in the exercise of voting itself.
A new study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that one in four transgender Americans will face significant hurdles in voting this fall and nine percent will face the real prospect of disenfranchisement because of mismatching identification documents.
Williams, a leading research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, has released reports on the potential impact of voter ID laws on transgender voters each election year since 2012. The obstacles facing trans voters voting have risen considerably.
“We’ve seen states increasingly adopt voter ID policies in the last few election cycles. We’ve also seen Supreme Court decisions that make restrictions on voter access easier for states to enact,” said Will Tentindo, the study’s lead author. “At the same time, we’ve also seen some states make it more difficult for transgender people to change their gender marker on their identity documents.”
This fall, voters in at least 19 states face new restrictions that were not in place for the 2024 general election, the study found.
“In those states, transgender people have to deal with barriers to changing their identity documents, as well as the barriers to voting and voter ID laws that every other American citizen has to deal with,” he said. “So there’s increasing levels of barriers that transgender people have to deal with in particular.”
“We do in the report, link voter ID very concretely to the history of the civil rights movement and barriers to voting that were particularly put in place to stop Black people from exercising their right to vote,” he added.
Young people, poor or homeless people, people of color and people with disabilities are disproportionately affected because they are more likely to lack updated IDs that meet stricter requirements.
“If the interest of these laws is to protect democracy, what our data show is that there’s a sizable population of transgender people who could be disenfranchised because of a lack of careful policy making,” Tentindo said. “They have to deal with overlapping voter ID laws and restrictions on their identity documents, plus instances of discrimination when they show up to vote. It can be prohibitively expensive, a prohibitive administrative burden, and antithetical to the idea that everyone who is eligible should be able to cast their vote.”
‘Dynamic Has Shifted’
The Republicans’ transphobic ads focus on health care bans for young people and sports exclusion, repeating medical falsehoods, promoting stereotypes and preying upon the public’s understandable lack of knowledge about trans people. Only about 40 percent of Americans personally know a trans person, surveys show.
Though these attacks may seem narrow to the general public, Republicans and right wing groups have used these two areas as entry points into wider national assaults on rights such as the invalidation of IDs like passports and the ouster of honorably serving members of the military. In Kansas, the state government’s retroactive application of newly restrictive ID rules has made daily life a fear-inducing hazard for thousands of trans people. Many face the prospect of disenfranchisement on Election Day.
Not so long ago centrists aligned with the Democrats broadly cast this civil rights struggle as one of moral equivalency, a fight between two sets of extremes. As recently as May 2025, Jonathan Cowan, the president and co-founder of the influential think tank Third Way, was urging Democrats to “express their frustration and disgust with the ways extremists on both sides have weaponized the issue.”
For Third Way, the terms of engagement have changed, Lanae Erickson, the group’s senior vice president for social policy, education and politics acknowledged in a wide-ranging interview, although she cast the shift in terms of a changing political landscape.
“On this issue, the dynamic has really shifted,” she said. Republicans and the right have grown far more extreme, while advocates for trans people have moved to a “more pragmatic place.”
“The MAGA folks took from the 2024 election that this was a great issue for them, that it was one that united their base and made Democrats uncomfortable,” Erickson said. “And that was all true at that moment, but now they’re going way beyond any concerns the public had.”
She added: “Going after healthcare for adults, kicking people out of the military, taking people’s driver’s licenses away, they can’t pick up their kids at school – these are well beyond the pale for most American voters. We’ve got an HHS secretary right now who believes the only appropriate healthcare for transgender people is conversion therapy. That’s crazy.”
“I think protecting trans people, trans kids in particular,” Erickson added, “has become an important part of the agenda for the entire progressive movement.”
Addressing trans issues directly while refocusing attention to Republicans’ policy failures – including a war with no clear goal, economic distress and rampant corruption – is the tactic widely promoted among strategists advising the Democrats. Translating that into effective responses at the ground level in the heat of a campaign has not always gone well.
“I’ve implored folks to practice talking about it,” Erickson said of the candidates. “You know, practice saying ‘I trust parents in my district to make decisions for their kids more than politicians.’ Practice saying, ‘sure, we need rules but politicians aren’t the right ones to make it.’”
Rules ensuring fairness and safety in sports – which have been in place for at least 15 years – and parental involvement in youth health care – which has long been standard protocol – are the two prongs of effective Democratic messaging, strategists say.
Adoption of the Republicans’ transphobic language, they say, is not.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat whose past record was generally supportive of LGBTQ people, referred to “transgender ideology” and keeping “boys out of girl’s sports” in an ad. The state’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Amy Acton, said in a statement that she opposed “boys playing in girls’ sports” and then her campaign set off several negative news cycles with its adversarial stance to queer people who were taken aback by her calling trans girls “boys.”
“A, it’s disrespectful, which is the most important part,” Erickson said. “And B, I don’t think it’s helpful to the political cause. A lot of the research we’ve done has shown as much – that repeating that language makes voters picture something that’s not helpful.”
She added: “Some candidates are repeating the language of the attack, which is not helpful on a policy ground or a political ground, but there are others who have more nuanced responses, and I’m hoping that some of those folks are going to win their races, and then we can show examples of how you can respond to these attacks in a way that combats them politically, but also does not give ground in the important policy context.”
“One person who’s done this extremely well is Jon Ossoff,” Erickson said of the senator from Georgia. “You talk about the corruption, about all the things that are wrong in our government and what is making people’s lives hard.
“And then he adds, ‘and it’s not transgender kids.’ And I think that has helped to really inoculate him against some of these attacks.”
“I am just hopeful that Republicans’ sheer obsession and extremism in combination with Democrats responding better than they did last time will show that these ads don’t work like that anymore,” Erickson said. “The impact on transgender people who have to watch this happening and watch people who are supposed to be their advocates looking scared and saying things that are offensive is very damaging.”
Past Is Prologue
Congressional Democrats, Erickson noted, have beaten back a series of transphobic measures that sought to impose sweeping sports and health care bans. Other Democrats agree.
“For two years, near-unanimous Democratic opposition has prevented any anti-LGBTQ bill from becoming law since Donald Trump took office,” said Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, whose victory in 2024 made her the first trans person elected to Congress.
As on other issues, though, the impact on individual rights advanced by the Trump administration’s extreme policies, and enabled by a deferential Supreme Court, has been significant. Government agents have killed and kidnapped people on American streets. Tens of thousands are held in detention camps, deprived of due process and subject to inhumane treatment.
MAGA’s attacks on trans people have been the tip of this spear, advocates say, an entry point into wider abuses that threaten American democracy. Its transphobic attacks were less about sports and health than they were about trans people themselves. The disenfranchisement of voters is evidence of that broader campaign.
The past is prologue. Haider-Markel, the University of Kansas professor, points to historical parallets “whether it be Reconstruction, or the post-Reconstruction era, the treatment of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s, or the treatment of gays and lesbians in the backlash we observed in the 1970s.”
Said McBride: “This November, after millions of dollars will have been spent by Republicans, once again, on anti-trans ads, we have the opportunity to show that these ads didn’t work. That instead of focusing on what is keeping most voters up at night, Republicans were, instead, focused on attacking our community.
“And in the vast majority of races across the country, including competitive ones, Democratic candidates are holding firm in defense of all of their constituents,” McBride added. “We can elect a pro-equality majority in November, which will not only stop anti-LGBTQ bills from coming to the floor, but will lay the foundation for equality for the entirety of our community nationwide.”
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her), a freelance journalist and advocate, is a regular contributor to Assigned Media and a board member of the Accountability Journalism Institute. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted anti-trans disinformation.
