Across the United States, the number of anti-trans bills have ballooned. 2023 saw a huge increase in book bans around LGBTQ+ content. Five states have passed “Don’t Say Gay” laws. Anti-trans rhetoric has become a common talking point for Republican talking heads and campaigning politicians. Meanwhile, the 2024 Democratic National Convention featured no trans speakers, the Harris/Walz policy platform only touches briefly on LGBTQ+ rights, and the September presidential debate saw only a single mention of trans issues (with that being an attack from former president Trump). That’s not great, and it’s easy for us to feel ignored and as if nobody is in our corner in this race. However, vice-president Kamala Harris’ silence on LGBTQ+ issues going into the 2024 presidential election might not be the problem it could at first appear to be.

It is hard to wake up every morning and hear the latest attack on our rights and freedoms to live our lives as trans people in the United States. To hear the latest campaign speech as anti-trans rhetoric takes over platforms up and down the ticket. From school boards races to Donald Trump’s consistent targeting of transgender people, it’s ubiquitous. And yet, time and again we’ve seen that this tactic hasn’t been working.

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When Moms for Liberty backed anti-trans candidates for school boards, they lost. Last year in the Kentucky governor race, Terry Schilling ran $2.2 million worth of attack ads against his opponent, Andy Beshear, focusing on his vetoing of anti-trans bills, and Beshear still easily won his re-election campaign. And the President of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) noted in 2023 that “we are watching their plan to scapegoat and demonize our community actively fail.” While it’s painful for those of us who hear the rhetoric and have some public sentiment swayed against us, on the political level the Republican anti-trans platform is managing to implode without the need for opponents to push back extensively.

Trump’s latest trans claims illustrate this perfectly. During an interview at the annual Moms for Liberty summit, Trump claimed that kids were coming back from school with gender-affirming surgeries (not the words he used, but you get the point) and that parents were being shocked and horrified across the country. He doubled down on that a week later at a campaign rally talking about these “brutal operations” happening in schools. And we saw another version of this during the September debate when he claimed that immigrants in prisons were being given “transgender surgeries” (a claim that goes back to Harris’ 2019 response to an ACLU questionnaire where she stated that it was “important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition.”) It only takes a miniscule amount of critical thinking to know that all of these claims are fantasies. Even the Moms for Liberty cofounder who interviewed Trump, Tiffany Justice, acknowledged that his claims were just lies: “Are kids getting surgery in school? No they’re not.”

Like the racist claim that immigrants are “eating the pets,” these claims are completely baseless, and trying to push back against them and fact check dignifies the comments in a way that they don’t deserve. When Trump made his claim about trans surgeries in prisons, Kamala Harris didn’t address the comments in her response. She didn’t need to point out it was ludicrous, and it would have been taking his bait to waste her time debunking him—that’s what real-time fact checks are for. Her incredulous looks at his comments were all that were really needed.

As with so much of politics, it’s a balancing act. On the one hand, telling Trump and his base that the demonization of trans people is nonsense would be ideal. But doing so would give Trump and his campaign ammunition and sound bites that they can twist against the Harris/Walz ticket. It’s depressing to see the Democrats playing it safe when it comes to our rights, but in such a crucial race with so much at stake, it’s understandable.

To be clear, that doesn’t make the Harris’ campaigns avoidance of trans topics okay. It just means it’s not something we need to panic about too much. There’s a larger issue that’s challenging our community: the lack of space for positive discussion. The DNC should have had a trans speaker and there should have been attention paid to the attack on trans rights. The Harris/Walz policy platform should contain direct plans to protect trans kids and adults and their access to healthcare, bathrooms, and sports beyond a promise to finally pass the Equality Act. But there also should have been a question about LGBTQ+ rights during the debate. After two 2024 presidential debates, there’s been no question on trans people or the wider LGBTQ+ community, despite it being such a major talking point for one of the candidates.

That being said, debates are relatively short and it’s important to target the issues affecting most swing voters. It seems unlikely that those strongly for or against trans rights are undecided voters in this race. And while there’s a minority push in legislatures for anti-trans bills, the average voter doesn’t support those to begin with. In 2023, HRC found that “only 17% of Americans and only 29% of Republicans” want restrictions on gender-affirming care. The overwhelming majority of US voters would prefer politicians to either protect LGBTQ+ rights or to simply not worry about trans issues at all. To put that in context, the Pew Research Center found in 2024 that 36% of United States adults polled think that abortion should be “illegal in all or most cases.” Twice as many people are looking to restrict abortion access than are worried about limiting trans rights. So, in a world where Roe V. Wade has been overturned, it makes a depressing sort of sense that trans issues aren’t the major talking point in the presidential debates.

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We want to see a presidential candidate who is championing us all the way through the election and beyond, and it’s demoralizing to not get to see that this year. The silver lining to this is that Harris did at least signal the direction her administration would take on trans rights when she chose Tim Walz as her running mate. In March 2023, Walz signed an executive order in Minnesota to protect the access to gender-affirming healthcare, stating at the time:

We want every Minnesotan to grow up feeling safe, valued, protected, celebrated, and free to exist as their authentic versions of themselves […] Protecting and supporting access to gender-affirming health care is essential to being a welcoming and supportive state.

Tim Walz

Harris hasn’t included trans access to healthcare and other basic rights in her policy platform on her campaign website. But in selecting Tim Walz she has shown her support through her actions. We can only hope that if they get to the White House, Walz will push for similar federal protections and that they will finally address the topic of trans freedoms out in the open.

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