Republicans think that their anti-trans crusade will help them win in the fall

The past year has seen Republicans on a tear to introduce anti-trans legislation at every possible opportunity. The ACLU is currently tracking a record 387 bills in state legislatures. Only 13 states don’t have measures pending (yet), while some states, like Missouri, Iowa, and New Hampshire, have more than 15 bills in the works.

Not to be outdone, Republicans in Congress are tripping over themselves to burnish their anti-trans credentials. Last fall, Republicans added riders to the defense spending bill that would have targeted paying for trans health care, passing the bans along party lines. The measure was stripped out of the final bill.

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The sheer hatred of LGBTQ+ people in general and trans people in particular always motivates the right-wing, but there’s another reason why Republicans are so gung ho to introduce anti-trans legislation this year. They see it as helping them this coming November.

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“It’s important for Republicans to establish a pattern about their perspective,” Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, told The Hill

There’s some reason for the right to think they can capitalize on their anti-trans crusade. Polling shows Americans have a mix of attitudes about trans issues. A Washington Post-KFF poll last year found that about half of Americans still believe that a person’s gender is determined by their sex at birth.

On the other hand, voters aren’t that keen on anti-trans restrictions. A majority oppose legislation banning public institutions, including schools, from having programs that mention trans people or books in libraries that include them.

Despite this murky picture, Republicans have been pursuing an anti-trans electoral strategy for more than a year. Even in the early presidential candidate debates, the non-Trump candidates made a point of bashing trans people.

The presumptive nominee has been attacking trans people for a while. As president, he compiled a reprehensible record, capped by the ban on trans military personnel. Building on that, he has promised to ban health care for trans youth or even for adults. He even threatened to cut federal funding to schools that help transgender students.

Clearly, the GOP thinks this is a great way to motivate its base, much as its anti-marriage crusade helped turn out voters in the early 2000s. But the right-wing may also think that anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes may help them peel off part of the Democrats’ base: Black, Asian, and Hispanic men.

Republicans are famously losing the battle for suburban women, but Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) thinks that’s okay. “This is the blue-collar realignment of the Republican Party, and what I can tell you is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement,” Gaetz has said.

Black, Asian, and Hispanic men tend to be to the right of white men on trans issues and more willing to support anti-trans measures. Republicans are hoping that they can find common ground in the kind of toxic masculinity that Trump radiates. It’s what Atlantic writer Adam Serwer describes as “a diverse coalition of people who band together in their shared contempt for others: a Rainbow Coalition of Haters.”

The big flaw in this theory is its track record. So far, almost every time Republicans try to run on anti-trans issues, they fall flat on their face. It happened in 2022, when the MAGA candidates largely failed, and it happened again last year.

The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So what have Republicans done? Doubled down on their anti-trans attacks and nominated Trump. This time, they think they will win.

In the meantime, they will make sure that the trans community will suffer as much as possible for their vain hopes.

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