Trans Panic? More Like Trans Apathetic

“Kamala is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.” 

The words were ubiquitous on TV screens across the nation, part of a wave of ads that acted as the spearpoint of Donald Trump’s transphobic campaigning in late 2024—which argued that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were more focused on pushing the frontiers of trans rights than just about anything else. By the end of October, there’d been some 30,000 airings of the ad, with 215 million dollars spent on anti-trans ads alone. When Trump narrowly won the race, many were quick to credit the ad and the controversies it raised with making the difference. 

It quickly became a catechism for the media and many politicos. The Times of London said the infamous line “doomed the Harris campaign.” Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called it Trump’s “most effective ad.” In the inaugural episode of his eponymous podcast, California Governor Gavin Newsom interviewed the late Charlie Kirk and agreed with him that “it was a great ad.” Juan Williams at The Hill wrote that, “after the success of Trump’s advertising, there is no longer any argument about the Republicans’ political wisdom in highlighting transgender rights to label Democrats as weak on traditional family values.” Almost a year after the election, The New Yorker’s David Remnick, interviewing Jon Stewart, observed, “The most politically effective advertisement for the Trump campaign was the one about trans people. ‘She is for them, he is for you.’ That was extremely effective—"

It became an article of faith, a creed that loomed over America’s small trans population like a pall of dread. Yet there were always cracks in the thesis. A randomised controlled trial by Ground Media at the campaign’s end found that the ad wasn’t likely to change the vote of likely voters, even if it made them marginally more transphobic. 

And then the idea shattered against the blue wave of the 2025 elections.

It is difficult to overstate the failure of the transphobic strategy. In Virginia, outgoing Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears ran a slate of ads against her opponent that were a literal Ctrl-F-Replace job against now Governor-Elect Abigail Spanberger, saying “Abigail Spanberger is for they/them!” 57% of the Virginia GOP’s ad spend was devoted to trans issues alone. 

The result was that Earle-Sears lost by 15 points in a landslide that also swept away many of her colleagues in the House of Delegates, leaving Democrats with a staggering 64-36 seat majority, and neither Spanberger’s political momentum nor her authority were in any way blunted by the ad onslaught. It was, by any reasonable measure, a cataclysmic night for the transphobes and for the argument that transphobia is kryptonite for Dems.

But it’s not enough to say that this single electoral cycle (which, by the way, mirrored several previous cycles in their resistance to single-issue transphobic campaigning) disproves the kryptonite thesis. To dispel it once and for all, we need to understand what really happened in 2024 and what transphobia actually looks like in the electorate. In short, we urgently need to understand why Gavin Newsom’s bet is desperately wrong in 2025 and will be catastrophically out of date in 2028.

The far-right promoters of transphobia insist, from every rostrum they can buy, borrow, or steal, that their bigotry is affirmatively popular. That prejudice against transgender people is not only widely shared but passionately held. With a little coaxing, they say, that passion can drive people to the polls to vote against liberals, progressives, and Democrats of every stripe. 

Speaking to NOTUS, for instance, the chief strategist of the erstwhile Earle-Sears campaign said, “This is an issue about how people view fundamental realities. And to most voters who are not white, rich, left progressives, it’s a pretty open-and-shut 80/20 issue. So in politics, when you have 80/20 issues, you run with them.”

This meme of an 80/20 issue comes up again and again, by the way. In this one CNN report, no fewer than three different politicos repeat it, with no reference to an actual poll: Gavin Newsom, Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, and Congressman Seth Moulton. 

As near as one can tell, they’re likely referring to the unpopularity of transgender inclusion in competitive sports. This is, indeed, among the least popular trans rights causes right now, but it’s notable the way that “80/20” has come to describe the whole debate on transgender rights. It isn’t just a specific policy that’s an 80/20 issue; we are an 80/20 issue.

This mythology fuels the idea that opposition to trans rights—the idea that it’s all, nebulously, ‘gone too far’—is a potent electoral elixir. Feed it to enough swing voters and never lose an election.

But the fixation on issue polling obscures a deeper truth. Someone may, if asked, give an up or down opinion on something, yes. But this tells you nothing about how passionately committed they are to that idea, or how much it motivates them to act upon it. 

If you were to ask me which NFL team I hated the most, I’d probably say the Dallas Cowboys or the New England Patriots. That said, I don’t really watch football (you cannot force me to understand what a ‘fourth down’ is and I refuse to learn). I’m a baseball girlie. I may have a vague, infrequently-thought-of, casual dislike of the Cowboys, but I also just don’t really care that much. 

If you were to instead ask me to rank which sports I was most interested in, you’d get a clearer picture of what matters to me and what actually makes me ill-advisedly sign up for particular streaming services at certain times of the year.

When we look at opinion polls about what actually motivates voters and their choices at the ballot box, trans issues are often dead last. And it’s worth noting that much of that polling makes no distinction between positive or negative views of trans rights. As a voter, I’d rate trans rights as a significant factor in my decisionmaking, but I’m obviously quite pro-my-own-rights-and-dignity. Of the 4% of Virginian voters who said school policies on trans students were front of mind, it’s likely some of them were pro-trans.

For example, likely Virginian voters actually trusted Abigail Spanberger more on trans issues than Winsome Earle-Sears, by a margin of 13 points; another poll showed “transgender issues” rating last among voter priorities. In that poll, some 27% of likely voters said trans issues were “very important” to their vote (and, again, note that support or opposition to trans rights is not specified here). This seems like a lot until you see that the economy is rated as “very important” to nearly eighty percent of the likely voters surveyed. 

Further cementing the fact that even actual voter antipathy to trans rights isn’t enough to make those voters reliably Republican, Spanberger picked up some 23% of the vote from people who expressly said support for trans rights had “gone too far.” 

In short, if asked, many Americans have a view on trans people. But most of them just don’t care enough about us to use their one precious vote to express that view.

This dynamic defines trans issues’ salience—or lack thereof—in America today. We are not, contrary to widespread belief on the most doomer corners of social media, widely hated. But neither are we beloved. Instead, the dominant mood among the cis supermajority is one of indifference towards trans people. We are an idle curiosity, a source of mild interest or mild disgust, but simply too few in number, too abstract, to constitute so much as a mote in anyone’s eye. 

The enduring salience of economic issues, by contrast, lies in the obvious fact that they are widespread and of daily concern. Regardless of gender identity, we all pay monthly bills, we frequently buy groceries, those of us who drive have to fill the tank every few days. Whether or not one diagnoses the causes of rising prices correctly, they’re much more likely to be important to ordinary voters and drive their decision-making at the polls. 

Mass indifference towards trans people has, historically, been our ally. It has provided a protective umbrella for the march of trans rights over the last two decades. After all, since public recognition of our rights and dignity harms no one, most people are not apt to notice, much less get upset. To oppose trans people’s dignity full-throatedly required ideological commitment—and, often, turning it into one’s whole personality. Most people don’t have that kind of time.

The flipside of this, of course, is the hell we’ve been living through for the last several years. If most ordinary people are too indifferent to fight the progress of trans rights, then they’ll also be too indifferent to fight against the entryism of a cadre of transphobes into government and media. Too indifferent to stand up, en masse, against a rollback of trans rights led by that hardened core of ideologues who do have the kind of time to make anti-trans hatred their whole world.

The onslaught of anti-trans media coverage in mainstream outlets like the New York Times, or anti-trans advertising by the far-right, has certainly had the effect of blunting public support for trans rights. This is depressing but should also be understood in terms of the indifference paradigm: past support was tepid, but so is present-day antipathy. 

So, what happened in 2024? 

The pundits who trumpet trans rights' electoral toxicity love to cite a study by Future Forward, a pro-Harris SuperPAC, which suggested that the “Kamala is for they/them” ad shifted the race towards Trump by 2.7 points. Citations of this study are everywhere, though nearly all of them are links to the same New York Times article published on November 7^th, 2024—including Wikipedia’s own citation of the study in its article about the infamous ad. A veritable bumper crop of blog posts, op-eds, and articles citing that study through the Times analysis emerged, all of them portraying the ad as uniquely effective. The FiveThirtyEight subreddit was almost unanimous in its praise for the ad and its purported power.

As I was researching this essay, however, it struck me as odd that all of these blogs, essays, and social media posts linked to or cited that same Times article when quoting the figure.

As it turns out, getting one’s hands on the original Future Forward study and its data is tricky, to say the least. The UK newspaper, The Independent, was unable to even get ahold of them to ask questions. The focus groups that were conducted by Future Forward are likely real, but how they arrived at the 2.7% figure remains a mystery. 

By contrast, one analysis of the 2024 election from GQR, another Democratic-aligned shop, asked voters to name the issues most important to them, found “opposing transgender surgeries and transgender kids in sport” to rank “dead last.” Just 4% said it was important to their vote, a number eerily similar to what we’d see in Virginia just a year later.  So, what’s going on here? How can we square the circle?

There are two broad points to consider here. One is that the “they/them” ad worked in a very specific way that is actually agnostic to transgender people per se. Second is that there are a lot of very powerful people who have become obsessed with trans issues in recent years, far exceeding the interest of ordinary voters. We’ll tackle each in turn.

Another frequently cited study of 2024 comes in the form of a postmortem by Blueprint, yet another Democratic-aligned firm. Their analysis tested a number of pre-written reasons to not choose Harris over Trump and found “[Harris] is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” to be one of the main reasons swing voters went for Trump.

Aside from the obvious issue here with suggestive framing, there’s the simple fact that the statement is a mad lib. You could swap out “transgender issues” in that line for almost anything vaguely plausible (climate change, Ukraine, even abortion) and likely get similar results. 

The inescapable truth of the 2024 election is that it was about the economy and inflation. With miserably poor timing at their backs, the Democrats had to run an incumbency campaign during a period of inflation that was putting the squeeze on Americans up and down the income ladder. Issue polls showed that the economy was always the top concern for voters. 

What Blueprint was testing with its study was less whether Americans were motivated by hatred of trans people as such and more whether they felt the Democrats were focused on addressing their economic needs. During hard times, incumbents will always struggle with the perception that they’re not doing enough, while their responsibility-free opponent will be able to easily cast themselves as a change agent.

Even the original formulation of the Trump ads played into this. They weren’t just anti-trans, though they were certainly vicious in their promotion of hatred; they all but stated Harris wasn’t focused on the economy, while Trump was. 

Crucially, the ads also cast Harris’ supposedly excessive focus on trans people as a form of policymaking that distracted her and other Dems from the work of managing the economy. Note what that means: it is not a blank check endorsement of policymaking on trans issues in the opposite direction. Yet that is precisely what Trump has done with his tenure, with him and his supporters arguing that the election gave them a mandate to persecute and humiliate trans people nationwide. 

They’ve become the film negative caricature of their own ads: focused on trans people (just to our detriment rather than our benefit) at the expense of economic stewardship. I do wonder if Blueprint were to run this poll again, this time about the Trump Administration, whether they’d get almost exactly the same result for “[Trump] is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”?

It all suggests that the important variable here is not trans rights, but perceived focus on the economy.

But now we come to an equally vital issue, one which practically merits an essay of its own: the fact that committed, passionately ideological transphobia is, at present, almost exclusively an obsession of political and media elites.

The seizure on the New York Times’ brief gloss of the Future Forward report was the result of wishcasting on the part of this group, many of whom have been sealing themselves up in a closed loop of extremely online life. An oubliette of their own making where trans people loom large in their demonology of the world. 

The fact is that most Americans are not on Twitter. But much of the media, a shocking number of billionaires, and most of our political class are. On such open social media platforms one is far more likely to be exposed to the bleeding edge of esoteric discourses from and about very small communities—including transgender people. If ordinary voters don’t care too much about us, it’s because they don’t interact with us regularly, recall.

But someone like David Shor, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, or Marc Andreesen is likely seeing people with trans flags in their usernames troll them and spoonerise their names on a fairly regular basis. It’s a simple matter of perception: we’re prone to overindex on those things we experience frequently. The classic bubble. 

Except, unlike the classic 1972 bubble example of “No one I know voted for Nixon,” it’s now a chattering class set who are all telling each other “Everyone I know is very concerned that trans people are going too far.” How else to explain the New York Times’ concern-trolling, moral panicking cavalcade of news stories about a group of people who make up less than one percent of the population? 

In most of the press reports and analyses of the GOP anti-trans strategy, Terry Schilling of the so-called American Principles Project appears all over the papers like an incontinent chihuahua. One of the leading exponents of the strategy, he’s there to excuse every failure and talk up the vanishingly rare successes his campaigns have enjoyed. After Election Night he aped the line being used up and down the GOP ranks, telling NOTUS, “Let’s be clear—Virginia, New Jersey and New York are solid blue territories. There were no surprises Tuesday night.”

Weeks earlier, however, he was deeply invested in the idea that he could make a dent in the Democrats with his campaigns, telling the same outlet in October that what mattered was “how many voters did [the they/them ad campaign] shift?” By even that expectation-managing standard, it was a dismal failure; Spanberger won by historic margins, and with comically long coattails. 

Yet Schilling’s passion for attacking trans people is something that represents a genuine ideological tendency within the new Republican establishment, where being gleefully anti-trans in the manner of snide YouTube commenters is de rigeur. Nancy Mace’s attacks on Congresswoman Sarah McBride, to the tune of literally hundreds of tweets, is merely an extreme example of the genre. Trump’s loud and bizarre mantra of how he’s opposed to “transgender for everyone” (ironically, invoked often in his tirades against Marjorie Taylor Greene, another performatively anti-trans heckler) is still another. For many Republicans it’s become an absolute obsession, not only in terms of support for this or that policy, but loudly demonstrative cruelty. 

For the political centre, it’s more genteel. They are the delicate and precise architects of the permission structure that is then exploited by those gleefully cruel Republican operatives. From the likes of Matt Yglesias we get vague gestures towards “strategic retreats” from “unpopular ideas.” To wit:

One prominent feminist told me that she hesitates to raise any doubts about the sports questions while trans people are under attack, but I don’t think politics really works that way. If progressives insist on hewing to a high-salience, unpopular position that trans advocacy groups concede they don’t have broadly persuasive arguments for, then school boards are going to end up dominated by bigots like Dennis Baxley and Ileana Garcia who try to craft legislation and policy that harasses and undermines LGBTQ students and teachers.

As is often the case with Yglesias’ writing, one must unpack its flatness in the manner of Ikea furniture and then painfully construct something useful out of the pieces. But note the assumptions here: the idea that antipathy to trans athletes is high-salience, for instance. It is indeed true that trans inclusion in competitive sports is broadly unpopular. But it’s not what people vote on. Time and again we’ve seen that borne out; this is literally the opposite of a high-salience issue.

The other notable tidbit here is Yglesias coyly alluding to some anonymous ‘prominent feminist’ who is secretly opposed to trans people’s inclusion in sports; a common rhetorical manoeuvre that is meant to portray a whisper network of liberals and progressives too scared by the woke mob, while courageous heterodox thinkers like Yglesias stand forth to take the arrows on their behalf. This woman probably exists, but it’s the posturing—she’s “prominent,” an important epistemic elite like him—that illustrates something meaningful about what’s going on here. These are “prominent” people chattering to one another, ratcheting up each other’s terrors, and then firehosing their confected anxieties onto the body politic like Ryan Lizza Substacking revenge porn.

This two step dance, between anxious centrists and liberals who are both extremely online and extremely concerned about trans people, and far-right Christian nationalists who despise transgender people with a frothing rage born of septic ideology and psychosexual night terrors, is a large part of what has brought us the present anti-trans backlash. Not a public that remains, broadly, indifferent to us.

This brings us, at last, to the future of the Democratic Party and the manner in which Governor Gavin Newsom is rather sweatily trying to define it. 

In late October he vetoed a rather uncontroversial bill from the California legislature that would’ve allowed trans people to get up to a year’s supply of hormones from a single prescription. It would’ve required insurers to cover it, and pharmacists to dispense it. This bill, SB 418, would also have banned anti-trans discrimination in health insurance provision.

Newsom has been on a veto spree of trans rights bills over the last two years, and between this and his eponymous podcast being used as a platform to air anti-trans views, it’s clear that he’s fully internalised the Yglesias logic of “strategic retreat” on trans rights in a play for the political centre. As noted earlier, his very first podcast saw him join the consensus that the “Kamala is for they/them” ad was uniquely effective and damaging. It is likely that, on some level, he sincerely believes this and is therefore triangulating for the sake of his political fortunes.

But as we’ve seen, this perspective is wrongheaded and misunderstands even the polling data that anti-trans advocates use to bolster their case. It may be that trans inclusion in competitive sports is an “80-20 issue” against trans people, but it hardly matters at the ballot box. It’s notable that the only major election where the victor used transphobic ads is the one the epistemic elite is indexing on, despite the fact that the same tactics failed in 2021, 2022, 2023, and now 2025. 

The reality is that transphobia is an article of faith for many of these elites, both in the political centre and on the far-right. For different reasons, and with different aspirations, perhaps, but an article of faith all the same. It is a fantasy, not a hard-nosed, data-driven reality being dispassionately followed by disinterested experts and ball-knowers.

Newsom is letting himself be led by the nose here. I do not believe he secretly hates trans people; rather, this grease-slicked weathervane of a man is much closer to that median cis voter I discussed earlier. He is indifferent towards us. For now, he sees his political fortunes burnished by playing towards transphobic sentiment. In time, he may swing in the other direction. As he so often has. 

If there was a sin in the Harris campaign, it lay in the fact that she did not tackle the ads head on by using them to reframe the narrative onto friendly territory, the way that Governors-elect Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill did. Take on the lie that supporting trans people means abandoning women and children, tie the Republicans to criminality and impunity, and double-down on your convictions.

“Authenticity” is a term so buzzy as to be annoying, but there’s a reason it remains a sought-after quality in candidates: voters respond to the appearance of conviction. Given the fact that apathy is the order of the day for most cis voters when it comes to trans politics, more of them will respect a Democrat for standing firm on trans rights, even if they may trivially disagree with certain positions. Just look at New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose support for trans rights was so full-throated he did an entire campaign video devoted to telling the stories of  Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. It’s doubtless there are many New Yorkers who might’ve “disagreed” with that, but it hardly harmed Mamdani’s campaign.

That path of conviction is open to Newsom too. But it’d require accepting what happened in 2025: the spell is broken. Liberals, Democrats, Centrists, you are free of the enchantment. There is no kryptonite, there is no secret IWIN button for conservatives, most people don’t care if you’re for they/them. Stand tall and act like it. 

Featured image is "Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger," U.S. Department of Agriculture 2021. Edited.