San Francisco Frontiers - Republicans find transgender issues a powerful political weapon in midterm campaigning

Only a tiny fraction of Americans are transgender.

But controversy over the minority's rights, especially the presence of a handful of transgender athletes in women's sports, has proved political dynamite in Trump's hands before -- and, he says, will again.

Denouncing transgender athletes is "one of our great soundbites of all time," he recently told a rally.

"I like to wait about a week before the election" before raising it, he said, claiming that he was "petrified" that Democrats would suddenly drop their support for transgender people.

- 'For they/them' -

Polling tends to favor Republican positions on several key transgender issues, which provoke intense emotions and fuel heated debate online and on partisan television.

It was two years ago, locked in a bitter presidential race with Kamala Harris, that Trump's campaign released a devastatingly effective television ad depicting his Democratic opponent as promoting taxpayer-funded sex changes in prisons.

The narrator famously concludes that "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you."

Many experts credit the ad with helping turn the tide in some of the tightest electoral battlegrounds.

"It was brutal, it was devastating," said Gavin Newsom, California's Democratic governor and an outspoken Trump opponent. "It was a great ad."

- 'Appease and please everybody' -

For much of the 2010s and into the 2020s, Democrats heavily embraced social justice issues, rallying supporters and scoring major wins on matters like legalizing gay marriage nationwide.

But on transgender issues, Democrats hit a wall of opposition.

Years of campaigning on the issues did little to shift the American public while leaving a smorgasbord of problematic soundbites for Republican ad makers to exploit.

The nonpartisan Pew Research Center found in 2025 that 73 percent of American adults were uncomfortable with transgender athletes playing on sports teams that don't match their birth sex. Sixty-six percent favored a law or policy requiring trans athletes to compete on teams that matched their birth sex.

Kurt Bardella, a former Republican staffer who now advises Democrats, told AFP: "I think that Democrats fell into the classic mistake of just being afraid of their own shadow."

"In trying to appease and please everybody, they actually alienated the majority of Americans," he added.

Democrats "lose sight of how many people they actually offend with some of this stuff," Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist, told AFP.

"If you look at the polling on the issue it's pretty broadly in Republicans' favor and a reason that they've been as aggressive as they have on this," Heye added.

- Reopening the playbook -

As campaigning hits full steam ahead of November's polls, Republicans are reigniting the issue.

Axios reported that Elon Musk's "America PAC" has begun an ad blitz attacking Democrats over their unpopular transgender positions in an effort to drive Republican voter turnout.

"Tired of grown men dunking on female athletes?" the narrator of one ad asks as what appears to be a drag queen slams a basketball through a hoop. "James Talarico voted to let biological men play women's sports. Not fair. Not safe. Not Texas."

Talarico, a Democrat locked in a tight race to represent Texas in the US Senate, voted in 2021 and 2023 as a state lawmaker against restrictions requiring transgender athletes to compete according to their sex at birth.

Like many other Democrats competing this election cycle, he now says he opposes "trans athletes playing in girls' sports if it endangers safety or fairness."

The reemergence of the issue frustrates Democratic strategist Bardella.

After all, estimates put the number of American adults who identify as transgender at a mere one percent.

"It's also the height of how idiotic this timeline is that we're allowing an issue that affects such a minute group of people -- that is statistically insignificant, frankly -- to hijack this amount of the conversation," he said.

W.Carter--SFF