Weaponizing Identity

The Cynical & Immoral Politics of Anti-Transgender Campaigning

Transgender Flag

Transgender Awareness Week runs from November 13 to 19. You probably didn’t know this since no government officials are rushing to recognize this event, and media companies are not participating in planned activities. It has, however, been an ongoing effort by groups like GLAAD and the TREVOR Project over the years to try to educate the public and rehumanize transgender people to a population that has been subjected to a dishonest misinformation campaign.

This is a good time to review something that has occurred in the political arena, which is both sad and cynical. In the last decade, the MAGA Movement has turned transgender people into a recurring symbol and target in its culture-war and cancel-culture playbook.

Anti-transgender hysteria has replaced the anti-abortion hype.

What began as scattered debates over bathrooms and pronouns has evolved into a coordinated, well-funded national strategy: a deliberate campaign to frame transgender existence as a threat to children, families, and faith, and to use that framing to mobilize conservative voters.

The fact that these messages were untrue didn’t matter and wasn’t the point. The point was that it could mobilize voters.

A Calculated Ploy

The evidence is now overwhelming that anti-transgender messages were not merely coincidental talking points but a calculated electoral ploy, crafted and tested by Republican strategists, funded by billionaire donors, and deployed across faith-oriented and sports-oriented media markets.

The human cost of that strategy, however, has been immense: it has heightened public hostility toward an already marginalized and vulnerable community and legitimized policies that further endanger transgender people’s safety and well-being.

The 2020s saw a dramatic expansion of anti-transgender rhetoric in American politics. Researchers and journalists have documented a surge in campaign spending tied to themes such as “protecting girls’ sports,” “parental rights,” and “religious freedom.” These seemingly benign slogans served as coded words for fear-based appeals about transgender youth and gender-affirming health care.

According to analyses of Federal Election Commission filings and ad-tracking data, Republican-aligned groups poured tens of millions of dollars into anti-trans messaging between 2022 and 2024.

The Primary Architects

One of the chief architects of this strategy is the American Principles Project PAC (APP), led by activist Terry Schilling and funded heavily by the billionaire Uihlein family. This group alone reported spending roughly $16 million on such ads across six states in the 2022 cycle.

The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the super-PAC aligned with Mitch McConnell, invested at least $15 million in Ohio and other battlegrounds on anti-trans spots attacking Democrats like Sherrod Brown. The mission of SLF isn’t to attack transgender people, but to “protect the Republican majority.” If that requires attacking transgender people, then so be it. No principles are necessary.

State-level entities such as Preserving Utah Values PAC, which was partly financed by Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, replicated the formula locally, according to a 2024 Salt Lake Tribune report. The PAC has sent out text message campaigns targeting Democratic candidates for their positions supporting transgender rights.

Not A Moral Crusade

These efforts were not spontaneous moral crusades; they were market-tested political products. APP hired the data analytics firm Evolving Strategies to test which phrases — “protect girls’ sports,” “stop gender ideology,” “save our kids” — most effectively shifted voter sentiment. The firm’s findings were integrated into television, radio, and digital ads, whose placements were optimized for reach among socially conservative audiences, especially evangelical Christians.

What resulted was a messaging pipeline that connected think-tank pollsters, dark-money donors, and campaign consultants into a single, repeatable template: turn transgender identity into a wedge issue to energize the Republican base.

The ads themselves were strikingly similar. In Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds’s 2022 reelection spot opened with the line, “Here in Iowa, we know right from wrong — boys from girls.” The thirty-second clip aired heavily in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids during evening newscasts and church-going time slots, an unmistakable cue to faith-based voters.

In Texas, Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign accused opponent Colin Allred of “voting to allow boys in girls’ sports,” with imagery of teenage athletes and locker rooms; those ads ran during local football broadcasts in the Dallas and Houston media markets in 2024, according to the Houston Chronicle.

In Georgia, national super-PACs purchased multimillion-dollar ad blocks during Braves games and the Masters Tournament to warn that Democrats would “let men compete in women’s sports.” And on conservative talk radio in the Pittsburgh area, America First Legal financed commercials claiming Democrats supported “gender surgeries for children” — an outright falsehood, but one crafted to provoke moral outrage.

The Religious Message

Across these examples, the narrative structure was the same: equate transgender inclusion with danger, innocence with femininity, and opposition with virtue. Religious messages such as protecting “God-given” gender, defending “our daughters,” preserving “traditional values,” made the message emotionally resonant for conservative Christians. They took the bait.

It was not a policy debate but an identity theater, leveraging visceral fear to motivate turnout.

The pattern suggests it was not an organic groundswell but a centralized, disciplined message. Donor networks financed the production and placement of ads; national strategists supplied the scripts; local candidates provided faces and ballot lines. The campaign functioned like a franchised brand of moral-religious outrage.

Nowhere was this strategy more visible than in outreach to conservative Christian voters, a demographic long critical to Republican turnout. Ads and stump speeches frequently framed trans rights as an assault on religious liberty: pastors were told they might be “forced to perform gender transitions,” Christian schools might “lose funding for upholding God’s design,” and parents needed to “protect their children from gender ideology.” These were all deliberate lies.

GOP candidates echoed these lines at events such as the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, promising to “defend God’s truth about gender.” Media buys clustered in evangelical strongholds — Des Moines, Dallas–Fort Worth, and southern Ohio — and on programming with high Christian viewership, from college football to morning talk shows on Salem Radio. The alliance between church networks, conservative media, and political messaging made religion not just a context but a delivery mechanism for anti-trans politics.

The Christian right has proven time and again that they are susceptible to slick marketing campaigns that push all the correct religious-cultural hot buttons. Most of the time, religious conservatives will not fact-check the hyped or false allegations or try to discover the truth about transgender people. Religious conservatives are groomed and conditioned to accept the message from an “authority” within their religious-cultural bubble. They have proven to be an easy group to manipulate.

Electoral returns and moral costs

As a tactical matter, the anti-transgender theater produced mixed electoral returns. Analysts noted it helped solidify Republican bases in culturally conservative states but did not reliably sway independents.

In 2022, several candidates who leaned heavily on anti-LBGTQ themes — notably Blake Masters in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — lost decisively. Yet the strategy persisted into 2024 and 2025 because it proved effective at mobilizing core voters even when it failed to win majorities. In the logic of polarization, keeping one’s base outraged can be as valuable as persuading the middle.

The deeper consequences, however, are social and moral rather than electoral. The Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project each reported sharp increases in online harassment and threats against trans youth following waves of anti-trans political ads.

Scholars tracking hate-crime data found spikes in anti-trans incidents in counties saturated with such messaging. Mental-health providers documented rising anxiety, depression, and self-harm among trans adolescents exposed to continual public vilification.

When political advertising equates an entire identity with predation or perversion, it does more than influence votes; it licenses cruelty and hatred. The rhetorical scaffolding of “protecting children” becomes justification for policies that strip transgender children of medical care, public accommodation, or even parental custody.

As we saw here in Iowa, the MAGAfied state legislature even went to the extreme of removing civil rights protections to transgender people in the state. It was the first time any state has ever removed civil rights protections. Governor Reynolds happily and proudly signed it into law.

The language of dehumanization

What makes the current campaign particularly corrosive is its reliance on dehumanizing metaphors. Ads rarely feature trans people as individuals or real people; they appear instead as faceless threats, “predatory men in women’s locker rooms,” “boys taking girls’ trophies.” This imagery erases personhood and complexity, framing transgender existence as an aberration against which society must defend itself.

Political theorist Susan Sontag once warned that metaphors of contagion transform moral panic into social permission for exclusion. The anti-transgender ads of the 2020s operate precisely that way: they identify transgender people as contamination of the social order and thereby justify punishment. They become the perfect scapegoat just as Jews, gypsies, gay people, and physically handicapped people were in Nazi Germany.

It is clearly a tactic of fascist style governments.

Pure Cynicism

The cynicism lies in the gap between sincerity and strategy. Many of the donors and consultants driving these campaigns are not religious traditionalists; they are political realists who discovered that cultural grievance reliably activates small-dollar donors and religious voter enthusiasm. They may not even really believe the messages and ads they support. It is a crass politicization of a group of people.

In this calculus, transgender people become expendable symbols, not citizens. The result is an inversion of democratic ethics: instead of seeking votes by addressing shared needs, candidates seek them by manufacturing and manipulating moral panic around the least powerful groups.

This tactic echoes earlier moments in American history when marginalized groups were scapegoated for political gain. In the mid-20th century, Joseph McCarthy weaponized homosexuality as proof of disloyalty during the “Lavender Scare.” In the 1980s, the Moral Majority fused evangelical identity with opposition to abortion and gay rights to fuel Reagan-era conservatism.

Each episode used moral and religious rhetoric to mask power politics. The current anti-transgender campaign continues that tradition, substituting “gender ideology” for “communism” or “decadence.” Still, the underlying logic is the same: conjure up a cultural enemy to consolidate authority and get your voters out.

Anti-transgender political advertising represents one of the starkest and darkest examples of strategic dehumanization in modern American politics. The coordination among super-PACs like the American Principles Project, donors such as the Uihleins, and strategists within the Trump-aligned GOP reveals a strategy conceived not from moral conviction but from political arithmetic. It leverages fear to win votes, regardless of the social wreckage it leaves behind.

For transgender Americans — already facing disproportionate rates of homelessness, unemployment, and violence — the relentless portrayal of their identities as political poison has magnified vulnerability into peril.

In a healthy functioning democracy, political persuasion should appeal to reason and shared interest, not to the vilification of minorities. The anti-trans campaigns of the 2020s illustrate how far that principle has eroded. What is sold to voters as “protecting children” is, in truth, a marketing strategy built on stealing other people’s humanity. Its success at the ballot box may be temporary; its damage to the nation’s moral fabric will linger much longer.

My advice…go out and find a transgender awareness event to attend this week…meet real transgender people. Learn and understand the truth.

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