Attacks on Trans Rights are not a "Distraction"

Calling attacks on trans rights a distraction only facilitates the rise of Christian Nationalist fascism.

As nearly every transgender American with any sort of platform has pointed out over the last month, the GOP and Trump campaign spent over $200 million on anti-transgender attack ads during the 2024 campaign, attempting to tie Vice President Harris to support for the rights of incarcerated trans people and to the rights of transgender children to participate in sports. The Harris campaign made the tactical decision to duck this line of attack hoping that by emphasizing economic messaging and bipartisan support they would convince Americans that Harris and the Democrat party are serious about governance while Trump and the GOP are obsessed with culture war minutiae.

It didn’t work. Harris lost.

And in the aftermath, Democrat post-mortems seem to be coalescing around the conclusion that their mistake was—implausibly—standing up against the culture war issues that the GOP used against them, especially trans rights. The fact that this conclusion has no basis in actual fact since the actual Democrat strategy was to dodge engagement on the topic of trans rights doesn’t seem to be holding back a building consensus that deemphasizing trans rights is the best way forward for the party.

Now, already, the federal attacks on trans rights have begun with GOP congresswoman Nancy Mace last week insisting on, and securing from Speaker Johnson, a change in the House rules to instigate a trans bathroom ban in congress which she followed up with a proposed trans bathroom ban bill that would affect federal property generally. Then over the weekend, news dropped that Trump intends to medically discharge every transgender military member: the US Government is, in effect, signaling the onset of a new lavender scare.

In response the Democrat establishment seems to have decided to double down on a strategy of portraying GOP attacks on trans rights as a distraction. When Sarah McBride announced that she would comply with Johnson and Mace’s anti-trans segregation order she framed her announcement within a statement that she is committed to dedicate herself to economic policy work on behalf of her state constituents.

Congresswoman McBride’s Statement

In a number of TV appearances over the weekend congresswoman McBride stuck closely to this strategy and script. It is, if I may, a near flawless execution of the Democratic “trans issues are a distraction, show that we are serious about governing and the American people will see the GOP for the clown circus that it is” strategy. This response has been tremendously popular with the cisgender liberal democrats who have interviewed her and multiple cis democrat pundits have celebrated it as a model response. It has me terrified, and I am not alone¹.

The disastrous mistake that the Democrats are making here is rooted in a misunderstanding² of the way fascism works and of the role that queer, and especially trans, people play in the fascist, Christian Nationalist mind. The “call it a distraction and focus on policy” approach suggests to me that congressional democrats and democratic pundits are still operating within the paradigm of regular government. They are thinking as though they just lost an election to conservative but still generally democratic party³. But that isn’t what just happened. The modern GOP is not a conservative but still generally-democratic party, it is a Christian Nationalist fascist⁴ party.

That means a lot of things; it means that democrats are gearing up to use all the wrong strategies because their opponent is not what or who they think it is and it means all that flows from that; but more than that it means that the Democrats are treating as a “distraction” something that is actually the GOP’s actual goal. Trumpist, MAGA, and Christian Nationalist anti-trans propaganda has always been in earnest, not in its dihonest details, scapegoating disgust language, and misinformation, but in its core substance. The really do want to see “transgenderism eradicated from public life”.

To quote Jason Stanley from How Fascism Works:

The fascist leader is analogous to the patriarchal father, the “CEO” of the traditional family. The role of the father in the patriarchal family is to protect the mother and the children. Attacking trans women, and representing the feared other as a threat to the manhood of the nation, are ways of placing the very idea of manhood at the center of political attention, gradually introducing fascist ideals of hierarchy and domination by physical power to the public sphere.⁵

beyond general fascist (ur-fascism); Christian Nationalism specifically, as a patriarchal, hierarchical, misogynist, and queerphobic movement maintains a profound hatred of transgender people and an accompanying obsession with oppressing, and ostracizing trans folx. The versions of Christianity they want to see enforced by governmental dictate are uniformly anti-queer and their goals range from legal disenfranchisement of queer and trans people to public executions of queer and trans individuals.

This puts transgender people in an impossible position: the party that is about to take power is one that is motivated by a desire to see our rights revoked and our presence eradicated while the party that is ostensibly “on our side” refuses to accept that those threats are legitimate or that they could possibly be enacted despite the fact that the GOP has already begun to enact them. They are stripping away our rights and far, far to many of our allies⁶ are calling it a distraction and celebrating a trans woman for declining to fight back.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

- W.B. Yeats The Second Coming

So What Can You Do?

I was about to send this short essay out without any final conclusions or recommendation because, honestly, I have been thinking of this piece in the context of “trying to correct the paradigm” more than as a call to action, but just now this call to action from Julia Serano showed up on my Substack feed and I think it would be a good place to start. Certainly I intend to participate. I hope that you will is well. I don’t know at this point how we are going to stop fascism and protect trans rights but I do know that we aren’t going be able to do it alone.

Planned Action for LGBTQ+ & Allies in Response to Democrats Capitulating on Trans Rights

1. I do not mean to ascribe any bad motives to congresswoman McBride. Again, this is a flawless execution of what seems to be the party’s near-consensus strategy. I am more than willing to assume that Rep. McBride is executing on a strategy and my concern is that this strategy is deeply flawed, not that Congresswoman McBride has turned her back on trans people.

2. I very much hope that it is a misunderstanding and not willful ignorance or some intended compromise with fascism.

3. I find it bizarre that the Democrats who messaged forcefully in the last weeks of the 2024 campaign that Trump is a fascist seem to have decided that America has somehow not just elected a fascist to become president in 2025.

4. Christian Nationalism being the particular form of ur-fascism that has taken hold in the US.

5. Tucker Carlson’s recent “Daddy’s Home” speech is both representative of Carlson’s profoundly unhinged fascist father obsession and also so thoroughly an instantiation of this dynamic that one could be forgiven for assuming that it was a caricature or lampooning of MAGA fascism.

6. Notably John Oliver and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made a point of speaking out against these anti-trans attacks and they are certainly not alone; they do, unfortunately, seem to be in the minority.