Have We Just Witnessed the High Water Mark of the Anti Trans Movement?

Despite several blue state anti trans referendums passing, I think we just saw the apex of electoral transphobia. Let me explain why.

Between 2000 and 2012, 33 states held referendums to ban gay marriage. Twenty eight of those ballot questions were contested between 2004 and 2006. The tactic of using gay marriage referendums to drive conservative turnout for larger races really became a central Republican tactic during the re-election of the unpopular GOP president George W. Bush.

They repeated it two years later during his second midterm election by running 8 gay marriage ban ballot questions. Only one state defeated the referendum that year (Arizona) when Republicans were trounced in Bush's second term midterms by historic margins.

I was thinking of those gay marriage questions this week as I watched Democrats run up an historic victory in the midterms, even while five different anti-trans ballot questions passed in four states in the same election. Arizona, Nebraska, Colorado, and Washington all approved ballot measures to ban trans girls from girls sports and voters in Colorado also approved a measure to ban "trans surgeries" on minors on Tuesday.

The sentiment among trans people online was understandably more muted and reserved than other folks in the traditional lefty coalition because of these results.

Overall, I think Tuesday was mostly a positive night in the fight for trans rights. Several state governments flipped from Republican supermajorities to Democratic, many saw GOP supermajorities broken for the first time in decades. Others, like Texas, saw conservative governors run out of office.

At the very least, trans people in those states will get a temporary reprieve from the endless onslaught that saw over 1200 anti-trans bills debated in red state houses over the last couple years. In Wisconsin and North Carolina Democrats managed to seize control of the both houses of the state legislature away from Republicans who had heavily gerrymandered both chambers in the GOP's favor.

In those two states specifically, there is finally a legislative pathway back to equal trans rights in the long term.

But beyond the individual legislative victories for the largely pro-trans party in the US, I think something much, much bigger happened Tuesday night on behalf of trans people in this country.

I think the electoral transphobia fever finally started to break throughout the country.

After polling went south on ICE's immigration crackdowns this year, anti-trans bigotry was practically the only thing this iteration of the Republican party had to offer voters at the midterm voting booth. They leaned into it.

Republican candidates and Super PAC poured billions of dollars into a near constant thrum of anti-trans ads across the country. Every GOP ad firm tried to recreate the Trump "[Democrat] is for they/them" ad that so many were captivated with two years previously. Backed by an endless debate stream on Fox News, and artificial virality on Facebook and Twitter, Republicans thought they had a winning issue with voters.

Instead proved how out of touch the entire GOP was with the people. Now they've been run out of office by historic margins.

The fact of the matter is that trans issues are always going to be a low salience issue. Voters might approve of the GOP position on sports, or on youth trans care (polls are less clear on this issue) but it largely doesn't matter in the lives of most Americans. Give them a ballot issue and they might vote against trans people, but they would never cast a ballot for a candidate who cares more about persecuting trans people than they do bringing down the price of gas and groceries.

That's just how politics works, and conservatives badly miscalculated this year. The sting from this election loss will last and going forward, any time a consultant or candidate suggests the campaign leans so heavily on anti-trans hate, someone in the room will recount the slaughter of 2026.

That's not to say the fight for trans rights is over, just that I expect things to get a little easier from here on out, just as it went for gay marriage after 2006.

Since 2008, there have only been 6 total gay marriage ban referendums, with the last one taking place in 2012. Four years later, the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land, just 8 years after the last serious GOP ballot measure electoral push. Once scaremongering over gay marriage stopped working to elect Republicans stopped working, they mostly abandoned the tactic.

After Tuesday, a lot of people took a look at the sports ban passing in bright blue Washington, declaring it a dead issue. But I suggest we look at a different state for a different perspective.

In Missouri, Question 3 asked voters to pass an amendment to the state constitution banning abortion and gender affirming care for trans youth. It failed by 11 points in the deep red state. This is a deep red state that has already banned gender affirming care for youth and trans athletes, but a coalition of abortion rights advocates and LGBTQ advocates worked hard to get out the vote against the measure and easily defeated it. It was the only anti-trans ballot measure to fail on Tuesday.

If you can't get ruby red Missouri to vote to ban gender affirming care for youth, it is not that viable of an issue nationally.

I think the lessons we can learn from this election is that there is a real difference amongst the general public between the sports issue and the rest of our rights right now. But hopefully with fewer conservative electoral resources devoted towards anti-trans hate, we can hopefully start moving the needle in the other direction.

We have weathered the storm, now the work begins to rebuild. The LGBTQ rights movement has done it before, and we will do it again, because we exist and we deserve equality.

Keep the faith, we can do it.

Thank you all for reading! If you haven't yet, try to catch a stream of mine. We've been having a ton of fun breaking down the political news of the day.