The right’s attack on trans rights is a useful dodge for its anti-abortion stand

Ever since the six right-wing justices on the Supreme Court ignored five decades of precedent to strike down Roe v. Wade, Republicans have been on the defensive. They have long called for the end of a woman’s right to choose, but once they had it, they found their wish was accompanied by severe electoral consequences.

Every time a ballot initiative protecting abortion rights turns up on the ballot, it wins handily, even in deep red states like Kansas. The predicted GOP tsunami in the 2022 midterms fizzled, in large part because of the backlash to the Supreme Court ruling earlier that year.

Related:

Abortion & trans rights are safe in Virginia as Democrats take control of the legislature

Voters across the country have repeatedly shown that Democrats win when reproductive rights are on the ballot.

So, if you are a MAGA candidate and you’re looking for a way to seize the conversation again, what can you do? As it turns out, you can resort to the tried-and-true: attack transgender people.

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In one of the stranger twists of this election year, Republicans have been trying to make abortion into an issue about runaway transgender rights. They hope it will be a distraction from the losing issue of abortion. Trans rights aren’t nearly as popular as abortion rights, so they are trying to change the debate.

Earlier this month, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told a “Cultural Impact Conference” at a Baptist church that the Missouri ballot measure to protect abortion rights was really about health care for trans youth.

“This is about an effort to come into our schools behind your backs without your knowledge, to tell our kids that there’s something wrong with them and to give them drugs that will sterilize them for life, to push them toward procedures that will fundamentally change their bodies irrevocably for life,” Hawley lied. “And there will be nothing we can do about it.” This is a riff on Donald Trump’s equally deranged rant that schools are performing surgery on trans youth.

Hawley was repeating a lie that opponents of a pro-choice ballot measure in Ohio last year tried to use. Anti-abortion activists insisted that the ballot measure would also allow trans youth to get health care without parental consent. (It wouldn’t.) “Advocating for abortion goes hand-in-hand with advocation for gender-affirming care,” an ad opposing the measure insisted.

Similar ads ran in Wisconsin and Michigan. In every case, the argument wasn’t just a lie. It was also a flop. The ballot measures passed overwhelmingly in all three states last year.

Given how easy it is to show that the two issues aren’t directly connected, it may seem weird that Republicans keep linking them. One explanation is pretty simple: candidates have learned that the abortion bans are very unpopular, so they try not to talk about them at all. (They keep failing.)

The other explanation is more complicated. In fact, for the right wing, abortion rights and the rights of trans youth are very closely linked. They depend upon restrictions of bodily autonomy. Simply put, the right doesn’t believe that people have the right to make their own decisions about their body. For youth, they believe that parents have the absolute right to control a child’s decisions, to the point of ignoring what is best for the child. They don’t mind parents stopping trans youth from getting the health care they need. The right decides, and everyone else abides.

If you look at the criminal penalties attached to restrictions on abortion and trans health care, you can see the similarities. In both cases, stopping health care isn’t enough. Providers have to be punished if they provide it.

Project 2025, the handbook the right developed for a second Trump administration, lumps reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender equality as equal evils.

“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets,” the document states. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation.” 

In a sense, conservatives are correct that all these the issues are linked, not just in their fevered imagination. Reproductive rights and trans rights (indeed, all LGBTQ+ rights) rest on the same legal grounds. It’s not by accident that Justice Clarence Thomas suggested after the repeal of Roe that marriage equality should be next. The concept of a right to privacy, the right to make personal decisions about one’s one body, is anathema to the right.

The right, particularly the religious right, is not made up of single-issue voters. They aren’t just targetting abortion. They are looking to reconfigure society so that it resembles a kind of retro Christian paradise. Trans youth are emblematic of the type of modern society they want to eliminate. Abortion is another. To them, it’s all part of the same problem.

Of course, to outsiders, it looks like a desperate attempt to change the conversation away from abortion. And in a way it is.

But if the issue is really about policing sexuality and gender roles, it’s all part of the same conversation. Trans youth are just shorthand for everything that’s they think is wrong with the country. The fact that they are harming children never enters their minds. They believe that they know best. We just have to hope that the majority of voters know better.

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