Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was sometimes criticized for his ability to create a “reality distortion field” with his marketing skills. They were formidable indeed, but they were nowhere close to the power that Republicans and right-wing media have demonstrated in their attempts to make transgender rights the subject of a massive national debate.
This is a political controversy that simply should not exist.
Regardless of your stance on trans rights, the fact is that implementing them would have very little impact on most cisgender people’s lives since transgender people are around 1 percent of the population according to most estimates. They are much less numerous in the world of sports: National Collegiate Athletic Association president Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of about 510,000 in his leagues. That means that 0.002 percent of NCAA players were trans, according to the official numbers. A few trans athletes have competed in the Olympic games, but none of them has ever won a medal.
But in the Republican alternative universe, trans athletes are an omnipresent menace. Curiously, it’s one that did not exist until Glenn Youngkin won a 2021 race to become governor of Virginia while heavily incorporating anti-trans messages into his campaign. Republicans and the mainstream media became convinced that transphobia had given him the victory, rather than the fact that Youngkin was from the opposite party of then-president Joe Biden and that such candidates historically have done very well the year following a presidential election.
Despite thin evidence that fear-mongering about trans people had been electorally effective for them, Republicans and allied groups have made it a centerpiece of their final campaign messaging and advertising. Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign set the tone with an ad accusing his Democratic rival Kamala Harris of being “for they/them” and claiming that “Donald Trump is for you.” The Trump operation spent more money on the ad than on the topics of housing, immigration, and the economy combined, according to independent journalist Erin Reed. Trump repeatedly attacked trans people on the campaign trail, falsely claiming that schools were taking children to gender surgeries.
The effectiveness of the they/them campaign is disputed. Video advertising in presidential elections is regarded as largely ineffective by political scientists, but both parties seem to believe otherwise based on their campaign disclosures. Some analysts have said that it moved votes, while others have cast doubt upon that claim.
In any case, the catchiness of the attack line is undeniable, and it, along with other trans-panic messages, has since become a fixture of Republican and allied political messaging.
The large constellation of reactionary media outlets has followed suit, making transphobic segments a big part of their content. According to a 2025 Media Matters study, Fox News Channel aired more than 400 stories about trans athletes in a four-month span, including one week in which it aired 59 stories.
This year, gender fear-mongering is especially important to Republicans. Amid a weak economy, high inflation, a disastrous foreign war, and record-breaking fuel prices, Trump and his party are understandably eager to shift campaign conversations to anything else. The anti-trans hoax has thus become the core of their desperate plans to avoid a wipeout in next month’s elections.
Despite Republicans’ reliance on them, however, transphobic messages have not been able to carry their candidates to victory. Last year, Virginia Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, who was running to succeed Youngkin, lost in a 15-point blowout despite spending 57 percent of her campaign’s ad budget on anti-trans bigotry. Her victorious opponent Abigail Spanberger estimated that Earle-Sears and outside groups favoring her spent about $30 million on these commercials. A similar barrage of ads targeting New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill failed to prevent her from winning a 14-point victory. Neither candidate backed down in her support for trans rights.
While anti-trans messaging has not been a panacea for Republican candidates, the far right’s years of propagandizing against trans people seem to have influenced public opinion. According to a study released last year by the Pew Research Center, support for anti-trans policies increased significantly between 2022 and 2025. In 2022, 58 percent of American adults supported laws requiring athletes to compete with others of their birth sex; by 2025, that figure had risen to 66 percent. Notably, the increase in support for restrictive laws came from Democrats. In the first survey, 37 percent of self-identified Democrats indicated that they supported making trans athletes compete against people of their birth sex, while in the second, the number had increased to 45 percent.
Similar declines in Democratic support for trans rights were observed across every question, including bathroom restrictions, censoring teachers who wanted to teach about gender identity, and even laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations such as restaurants. (The study did not provide percentages for self-described political independents.)
The increase in negative attitudes toward trans people among Democrats is so recent that few studies have examined its potential causes. Among Democrats, overestimating the share of the U.S. adult population that is trans—about 1 percent—appears to be correlated with negative attitudes toward trans rights.
That was one finding of a study published last April by YouGov that examined people’s estimates of the sizes of social minority groups and their opinions about those groups. Among Democrats who thought that trans people made up 5 percent or less of the population, only 13 percent supported laws banning people from bathrooms matching their gender identity; 66 percent were opposed. The contrast with Democrats who thought that trans people made up more than 5 percent of Americans was stark: 41 percent backed the bathroom restrictions, while only 24 percent opposed them.
Among Republicans, the correlation between accurate knowledge and support for bathroom laws was reversed. Eighty-six percent of Republicans who estimated the trans population more accurately supported restroom restrictions; 75 percent of Republicans with less accurate estimates backed the discriminatory policy. Just 3 percent of Republicans with more accurate estimates said they opposed the laws, while 15 percent of those with less accurate estimates opposed them.
More broadly, Americans seem to greatly overestimate the size of the trans population. The same YouGov study found that respondents estimated that 12 percent of Americans were trans, much greater than the more accurate number of 1 percent.
A similar pattern seems to exist in perceptions of trans athletes. In a YouGov survey conducted earlier this month for The Bulwark and podcaster Pablo Torre, only 31 percent of adults correctly answered that fewer than 1 percent of NCAA athletes were trans. Nine percent of respondents said that 11 percent or more of college athletes were trans.
It’s still unclear how substantial or durable the apparent increase in negative sentiment toward trans people among Democrats may be or which demographic groups might be particularly affected by anti-trans messaging.
In interviews with the New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher in 2024, Republican ad makers said that they liked anti-trans advertisements as a way of portraying Democrats as out of touch, an important component of Republican campaigning since reactionaries became increasingly dominant within the party. Operatives said that ads focusing on trans girls and women athletes seemed to have particular appeal to college-educated suburban women.
“One of the things you see in the focus groups is the moms get really visibly angry on this issue,” a consultant told Goldmacher. Republicans also believed the ads were effective among men from racial minority groups, Axios reported.
According to a validated voter study by the Pew Research Center in 2025, Trump’s share of the vote among Black men increased by 7 percentage points from 2020 to 2024. His share among Hispanic men rose by 11 points.
How much anti-trans fear-mongering influenced voters is impossible to know with certainty, especially since asking poll respondents to retrospectively characterize their decision-making is fraught. Among the problems are that people seem increasingly unable to recall how they voted as time passes. A poll released earlier this month by Strength in Numbers found that 6 percent of people who had previously said they voted for Trump now say that they did not. Four percent of self-described Harris voters now claim to have done something else.
Overall, transgender rights seem to be a low priority for most Americans. In a post-election survey by Gallup, trans issues ranked last among issues that voters said had influenced their decisions, with only 38 percent of respondents saying the issue had been “extremely important” or “very important.”
An immediate post-election study commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, had similar findings. It found that only 4 percent of voters listed “opposing transgender surgeries and transgender kids in sports” as one of their reasons for choosing a candidate. That was roughly equivalent to the 5 percent who said that “advancing rights for LGBTQ+ people” had been one of their top issues.
Notably, when asked directly which candidate best represented their views on transgender people, Harris led Trump, 52 percent to 40 percent.
It is possible, however, that while opposing trans rights does not specifically motivate people to vote Republican, the party’s expansive transphobic campaign reinforces the party’s long-standing efforts to substitute cultural populism for economic populism and thereby distract the public from Republicans’ unpopular views on issues that Americans view as more important.
One possible explanation for that disconnect comes from a post-election survey by Blueprint, a Democratic-leaning polling organization. Given a list of reasons for not voting for Harris, the most popular choice (within the margin of error) among swing voters was the claim that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
For some swing voters, transgender rights seem to matter less as a particular issue and more as a synecdoche of their view of the Democratic Party as an institution run by a clique of highly educated people who don’t want them to have a place in society. This conception of the Blueprint finding is perfectly consonant with the fact that other studies find that specific Republican ad campaigns seem to have little or no impact.
As the pollsters and pundits have continued debating the impact of trans issues in 2024, Republicans have doubled down on transphobia in this year’s campaigns. Besides running ads featuring the familiar “they/them” line, party candidates and their allies have been making deliberately fake AI-generated videos of Democratic candidates. Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico has been a frequent target of deceptive ads, including one depicting him wearing a dress and another as a creepy ice cream van operator staring at children. The Republican reality distortion field has become literal.
Other right-wing operatives appear to have taken the deception to possibly criminal levels in the Lone Star State where unknown individuals have mailed thousands of Texas households brochures containing inflammatory instructions about how transgender minors can become emancipated from their parents using information supposedly taken from the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT). The postal campaign set off a social media firestorm with numerous reactionary commentators and activists decrying the supposed outrage, even as TENT denounced the pamphlets as malicious fakes.
It’s not known as of this writing who sent the brochures, but a number of indications are pointing to various Republican firms. A Texas district attorney has opened an official investigation into the matter and TENT has gone to court to compel the direct mail operations that sent the brochures.
The pamphlet campaign recalls several earlier efforts by far-right posters on the website 4chan to create fake images from fictional LGBTQ advocacy organizations. In 2017, the forum users manufactured a hoax campaign to fool people into believing that sexual minority rights groups wanted to begin advocating for child molesters. A few years later, another 4chan initiative resulted in reactionary bloggers getting tricked by a supposed “Trans Rights Campaign” digital flier about cisgender heterosexual men dating trans women.
A 2023 hoax about a fake “Trans Day of Vengeance” was much more successful, although like the previous efforts, it only managed to ensnare right-wing media outlets including Breitbart, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and the New York Post.
For their part, Democratic candidates have taken a split approach to Republican transphobia. Some have effectively adopted portions of the Republican position, apparently hoping to deprive their opponents of a political advantage. Talarico has said that he opposes trans athletes in female sports “if it risks safety or fairness.” In Ohio, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur released an advertisement touting her support for Republican efforts to censor gender instruction in schools and opposing trans girls’ participation in girls’ sports. Iowa congressional candidate Sarah Trone Garriott likewise has said she opposes trans women using women’s locker rooms.
The knuckling-under approach will not work, and HRC president Kelley Robinson made the case well in a September blog post:
The hate-filled clickbait will run through November. Why? Because a gallon of gas costs $4.30. MAGA allies will cut more and more ads to distract Americans from rising costs, rising inflation, and an endless war. They have zero solutions for people, and millions of dollars for attacks. […]
Turning on a vulnerable community is not a winning political strategy — and it’s exactly what Trump, [Elon] Musk, and MAGA want. It legitimizes their side and weakens ours. And it harms transgender people.
Other Democrats have taken more active approach first by noting that transphobia is nothing more than a distraction from Trump’s failed policies and then explaining the pro-trans position.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has been particularly eloquent, blending in his Christian faith into his responses to anti-trans forces:
“We should always stand up for our convictions, and we should always push back against discrimination,” he said in an interview with The Advocate, an LGBTQ-interest magazine. “I don’t like bullies, and so I’m always going to push back.”
“I believe all children are children of God,” he continued. “It says, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ not ‘love your neighbor, unless.’”
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed put transgender rights into a larger context during an interview with Pride Source, a Michigan-based LGBTQ publication:
There’s a reason that if I’m asked, I always say that I support trans rights because I believe in all rights. I want folks to see their own rights in the plight of a trans person who’s being discriminated against.
The real question here isn’t about whether or not we can discriminate against one group or another. The real question is whether or not we want a government that can discriminate against anybody at all. A government that is told that it’s allowed to discriminate against some people and not others will eventually discriminate against any and all people for whatever reasons it chooses. We are all in the fight for an America whose government does not discriminate against any of us.
I say that as somebody who puts my face on the ground many times a day praying in the way that I pray as a Muslim. Not everybody has to understand why I do that, but I damn well expect that they’re going to stand up for my right to do it. And similarly, you might not understand somebody else — but you work for their rights. We cannot build the relationships and love and community we need when government is weaponizing against any of us.
That larger context is critical because it enables Democrats and trans rights supporters to flip the narrative that the Blueprint study found by showing that standing up for one group is standing up for everyone else.
But that dynamic works in the opposite direction as well. Martin Niemöller famously observed how authoritarians never stop at depriving just one group of their rights. In our own time this is very apparent. Trump and other reactionaries have succeeded at constraining personal liberties of trans people and sex workers in many ways, but they will not stop there. They frequently talk about their desire to roll back marriage equality, eliminate federal anti-discrimination agencies, ban birth control medication, eliminate women’s right to vote, and even prohibit men from voting unless they own property.
That litany above is only a small piece of what the radical right wants. It’s an extreme agenda that’s a threat to all Americans. But the only way to stop it is to keep moving forward. Standing up for others isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s smart politics. I am freed by your liberation, and you are by mine.