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- [00:04]
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In the run up to last week's elections, Republicans spent millions of dollars targeting transgender rights. That's insane. Spamberger is for they them, not for us. They suggested that Democrats supported perverts wanting to go into girls sports bathrooms and locker rooms. They framed the left as encouraging gender fantasies that have no basis in reality. And if a child secretly identifies as transgender at school, she says, the parents shouldn't be. But those ad dollars did not have the desired effect.
- [00:35]
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Abigail Spamberger declared victory less than two hours after the polls closed, when early results show that significant lead over Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earl Sears.
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Today I want to talk about how all that played on Tuesday and what happened with one particular culture war issue, this firestorm over trans people, young trans people in particular. I think that what happened offers a path for politicians to stand against these kinds of tactics, but it also shows us a way to stand up for everyone. First of all, I think it's important to consider where this issue came from and why trans people are facing a tidal wave of hate right now.
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Corey Robin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College. He's an expert on McCarthyism as well as the author of the book the Reactionary Mind.
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I'll note that people have long had differing opinions on issues like abortion, but that issue itself became a national flashpoint due to political money being used to turn it into a wedge issue. In the 1970s and 1980s, DC had.
- [01:43]
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Always been a kind of gay city. It was a place where gays and lesbians could kind of exist. But with the New Deal, you have people coming from all across the country. Many of them joined the administration. And also you have, and this is a really important part of this, a lot of women coming to D.C. and starting to get positions of power in government.
- [02:04]
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It's also critical to realize that the US is currently replaying McCarthyism in espionage.
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Circles or counterespionage circles. Always finding out if somebody was gay was a really good weapon to know because you could use it as blackmail.
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We hear talk of Marxism as we.
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Get closer to McCarthy. You see hints of this in Alger Hiss. There is this notion that these guys who are commies and liberals and pinkos, they're queer.
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Colleges are censored. Professors are put on watch lists.
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So at that point, I think the statistic, if I'm remembering this correctly, is that every day a communist is being arrested or kicked out of the government, but also a gay person is being kicked out of government.
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A parallel phenomenon that unfolded alongside the red scare in McCarthyism was the lavender scare.
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This is what blew me away. McCarthy's fan mail. 25% of it was about security threats, 75% of it was about sexual depravity, what they called sexual depravity.
- [03:08]
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So we are seeing resurrections of bizarrely out of context anti communist arguments alongside rampant homophobia. Governor Greg Abbott has ordered the removal of the rainbow crosswalks and across the state, including here in Houston, arguing that they don't meet federal safety standards. The easiest way to target a vulnerable group for political gain is to use a group that has a history of being disenfranchised.
- [03:35]
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This is just a small part of a broad effort by the Trump administration to push trans people out of public life. They want to ban our health care, censor our speech, control our lives.
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Trans panics allow a deep dive into history and not just the modern conjuring we're seeing of terror over bathrooms, or even just the lavender scare.
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I'm a husband, I'm a father, for I host a talk show, I give speeches.
- [04:01]
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What's happening today also relies on deep, deep mistreatment of women across history. Gender can be used to trigger a firestorm because of the strange Puritan streak and particular kind of deep desire to control women that has been a bedrock of US culture since the beginning.
- [04:19]
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It's interesting because the fight moves now, in my opinion, to take on feminism once and for all, and that's the next great battle. It's a battle that's, of course, been waging for many years, for decades, but it takes center stage because gender ideology is a product of feminism, after all.
- [04:35]
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It'S an outgrowth of it we regularly see today. Sad sack billionaires bantering on social media about alpha maleness and fretting over white birth rates.
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America had the lowest birth rate, I believe, ever. That was last year.
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Nothing undermines the subservient worker drone hierarchies that they want to impose.
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Humanity is dying.
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More than if you suggest men and women are not always deeply and fundamentally different, with clear power differentials, or suggesting that society might not be able to arbitrarily place human beings in one category or the other. I am Judith Butler. I'm most well known for my books on gender, Gender Trouble, and Bodies that Matter. My sense is that questions about trans people can be weaponized into fear and resentment, in part because so many people don't actually know anything about this community either. All I was saying is that the sex you're assigned at birth and the gender that you are taught to be should not determine how you live your life. But in truth, we see the same kind of vilification of immigrants in the US and they make up a far larger percentage of the population than trans people do.
- [05:56]
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How Dog Whistle Politics Use race to influence your vote Historian Ian Haney Lopez breaks the code.
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So it really may just go back to historical discrimination and ways that people have been trained to hate in the past.
- [06:11]
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Dog whistle politics doesn't come out of animus at all. It doesn't come out of some desire to hurt minorities. It comes out of a desire to win votes.
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And in that sense, I want to.
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Start using the term strategic racism.
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It's racism as a strategy.
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It's cold. It's calculating. It's considered. It's the decision to achieve one's own ends here, winning votes by stirring racial animosity.
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Along with the misogyny I mentioned, a lot of people over the age of, say, 40 or so, like Gen X and boomers, more or less grew up on a steady diet of unapologetic homophobia.
- [06:49]
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President Reagan reportedly said, why not invite Gaddafi to San Francisco, he likes to dress up so much. Schultz responded, why don't we give him aids? Other officials at the meeting laughed, according to the Post.
- [07:01]
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I've talked before about propaganda and how dangerous it can be when it's applied over years in massive doses. And the religious right pushed homophobia hard for political ends in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
- [07:16]
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You said something about homos in the military. Was the gentleman referring to the many thousands and thousands of gay people who have put their lives on the line in countless wars defending this country? Was that the group of people that the gentleman was referring to? I'm talking about the military. People in the military do not support. That's not what we were talking about. You used the word homos in the military. You have insulted thousands of men and women who have put their lives talking about you and liberals like you that keep deferring to defense, gentlemen, for younger.
- [07:49]
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Listeners, it may be easy to forget that Joe Biden's gaffe, or maybe it was a perfectly timed comment.
- [07:55]
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Men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying men are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties.
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It wound up pressuring the Obama administration on the question of gay marriage ahead of the reelection campaign in 2012. And for those who aren't part of the queer community, it may also be easy to forget that Obergefell was decided only a decade ago. And I'm thankful that this week SCOTUS refused to Revisit that ruling. For the time being, the justices turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. But we've seen how endemic this is, that it's not just Trump or his direct allies, but that it's actually working its way through the entire US Government. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X quote, attorneys at the Justice Department just secured our 24th victory at the Supreme Court's emergency docket. Today's stay allows the government to require citizens to list their biological sex on their passport. Trans lives are being further constrained not just by the current administration, but by the systemization of that kind of discrimination. So now the. The federal government will be moving forward with printing passports that do not reflect who an individual is. Really harmful for the moment, but, you know, the. The fight is not over. We are still in the courts. So there's a lot of different kinds of prejudice that are at play when we consider trans people today.
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Three years before Stonewall in August 1966, trans people at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco also rioted against and of course.
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This community has always existed.
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Similar but lesser known uprisings occurred in Los Angeles at Cooper's Donuts in 1959 and at the Black Cat in 1967, and in Philadelphia at Dewey's Restaurant in 1965. There are probably many other such events yet to be uncovered, but a lot.
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Of the more visible progress is pretty recent. And it's the steps that society has actually taken on the path toward making trans lives more livable.
- [10:11]
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Iowa's now the first state to remove civil rights protections for transgender people. Governor Kim Reynolds signed that bill Friday, just one week after it was introduced in the state legislature.
- [10:22]
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Those are the steps that have been targeted by unscrupulous politicians because they see that they can use the issue for their own advantage. Max Mowitz is the executive director of the advocacy group One Iowa. Mowat says the move ends nearly two decades of state law protections for transgender Iowans like himself. Why is this happening now? I can't understand what the timing would be other than a large widespread national trend towards transphobia and hostility towards the LGBTQ community. It's more acceptable to single us out and harm us. What are they trying to undo?
- [10:59]
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We're cutting through the highest of board certified plastic surgeon Dr. Anthony Yoon.
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For now, a whole field of medicine.
- [11:06]
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Studies show that transgender people realize that they are transgender at an average age of only 8.5 years old. However, they don't disclose their feelings until about 10 years later on average.
- [11:18]
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For decades, medical researchers have looked into gender affirming care for trans people.
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One study found 56% of youth who identify as transgender have contemplated suicide, with 31% actually attempting suicide.
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The American Academy of Pediatrics has weighed on on child gender affirming care. Parents and children worked with medical professionals to determine standards of care and to figure out what led to the best outcomes for gender questioning and trans children.
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Studies show that providing puberty blockers to adolescents who identify as transgender generally leads to improved psychological functioning in the young.
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Adulthood, though transphobic actors often pose as protectors of children.
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One study looked at 433 transgender adolescents in Ontario and they found that the suicide attempt rate was 4% when having supportive parents and as high as 60% when parents weren't supportive.
- [12:16]
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In several cases, they've also tried to turn women into children and take some protective role on for women as a whole as well.
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The real basic question what is a woman?
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Can you provide a definition for the word woman?
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For all of recorded history, people have known what a woman is after bathroom.
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Usage in schools and teen sports. Anti trans measures are also now trying to undo sound medical policies evolved over decades in settings like the Olympics. Sky News understands the International Olympic Committee is moving towards a blanket ban on.
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Transgender women from women's sport.
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Civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo noted earlier this week that the International Olympic Committee is set to ban trans and intersex women from competition. This is despite the fact that for 20 years the IOC has allowed trans athletes to compete.
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The International Olympic Committee previously left it to individual sports to decide whether or not transgender women could compete in women's.
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Sport, and only one has ever competed and none have ever won a medal.
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We also understand that there's been discussions about reintroducing sex testing, something that existed in the 60s until the late 90s.
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She pointed out a study from 200025 years ago that announced an end to gender testing in Olympic competition and the support for that decision from the medical community. Now we even have actual trans politicians elected to office in the U.S. trans Congresswoman Sarah McBride from Delaware and Virginia State Senator Danica Rome are just two examples. Representative Amy Wichtendahl, the state legislature's first openly transgender member, argued, this is just the start.
- [14:04]
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Vote this bill down today because this is not the end.
- [14:08]
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I personally can't speak for the trans community and how much and what kind of representation they want from these two women, but speaking just for myself, I would say that they're in an impossible situation as far as I've been able to tell, they did not run on being trans.
- [14:24]
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I did think it was important to show that Democrats and Republicans were coming together for this peaceful transfer of power.
- [14:33]
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McBride represents Delaware in the House. She's also the first openly transgender member of Congress. They appear to have run on being basic bitch elected officials who want to do very bureaucratic jobs that I am happy not to do, McBride said in an interview with the 19th we have to reclaim the narrative and the humanity in the public's mind of trans people. The most good that I think I can do is to be a full human being, to not be siloed and reduced to only one part of who I am, as proud as I am of that part.
- [15:06]
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No executive action, no legislative action for that matter, can erase the reality of diversity across gender in our society.
- [15:14]
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Danica Rome in the Virginia legislature was famous during her campaigns for not talking about storming the ramparts of the patriarchy, but for talking about road repairs.
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We have far too many traffic lights, but we have done nothing to deal with capacity on the road itself, and we've done nothing to take out the traffic lights that stop traffic.
- [15:39]
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It is the politicians targeting trans people that want us to make the conversation about transness all the time. And it's up to those of us who aren't trans to be sure that trans people aren't the only standard bearers in their quest for civil rights.
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When people look at me, they go, yeah, she's transgender and she's a really good delegate.
- [16:03]
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Trans rights around the world has happened in my lifetime. And as so often is the case whenever civil rights are expanded, there has also been a worldwide backlash. One group getting rights for the first time can be played by bad actors as something being taken away from everyone else. Russia in 2013 instituted anti LGBTQ laws that used very vague and all encompassing language to say that promoting homosexuality is a crime.
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St. Petersburg's anti gay propaganda ban, adopted nationally and signed by President Vladimir Putin in June, was authored by Russian lawmaker.
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Vitaly Milano as if they were acting on the false presumption that Russian youth were being corrupted by perverts.
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Without a doubt, we will demand that law enforcement employees defend us, defend our children who came here with us. The law is supposed to protect minors by banning public discussion of non traditional sexual relationships.
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That framework of pretending to protect children from perversion has been widely adopted in the US on several fronts.
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It's official. Florida's controversial don't say Gay bill, as it's known by critics, signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis, even as we.
- [17:19]
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Learn, learn again and again, that leading figures in many of these organizations, the organization supposedly established to protect children, are themselves predators.
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New emails suggest Trump knew more about the sexual abuse involving underage girls than he has said.
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Hungary's Constitutional Court went so far as to rule in 2018 that the constitution as it stood, protected trans rights, only for the legislature to try to roll back those protections beginning in 2020, making it impossible for anyone going forward to change the gender they were assigned at birth.
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Right wing Prime Minister Victor Orban has passed several laws affecting the lives of Hungary's LGBTQ community over the past decade. These include banning a change of gender in personal documents, legislation that effectively halts adoption by same sex couples, and a.
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Law banning the use of materials in.
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Schools seen as promoting homosexuality and gender transition. And in March, Parliament passed a law that created a legal basis for police.
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To ban pride but perhaps nowhere has been as shocking as the shift in the uk Even in traditionally progressive circles of British intellectual women, in which trans people, especially trans women, became vilified in disturbing and widespread ways across the years, it has inexplicably turned into almost a full time job for J.K. rowling.
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Elon Musk and Harry Potter author J.K. rowling are being sued by the Olympic boxing champion Iman Khalif. Here comes after they posted online falsely claiming she was not born a woman during the Paris Games.
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Some pundits seem inclined to interpret this global shift in recent years as some kind of inherent danger in supporting trans people politically. But all it shows is that targeted propaganda villainizing trans people can have political effects.
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Kamala is for they them. President Trump is for you.
- [19:22]
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There's often an emphasis on how effective creating a villain can be in politics, and negative ads do have an effect. Less than 1% of the U.S. population identifies as transgender. But this election year, Republicans have spent a considerable AM money on ads demonizing transgender people. From October 7th to the 20th, Trump's campaign and pro Trump groups spent an estimated $95 million, and more than 41% of those ads were anti trans. I've said before that relentless propaganda has shown us how vulnerable any population can be, but the research shows that we are mistaken on what makes for some of the most effective policy frameworks.
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Good evening America. I am Alan Cumming, your traitorous host for the evening.
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All the way back in 2010, I interviewed Michael Jones, a researcher who looked into how to frame issues in politics, and asked him what he knew about the role that characters play in an effective narrative, and his answer surprised me.
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Superhero movies are only pretend, but I happen to believe that there are actual superheroes in real life who walk among us.
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Villains tend to be important in policy narratives, he said. But I found something else in my dissertation that actually shocked me. The hero really matters.
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And these superheroes are called trans people.
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The hero in each of the stories that I put out there, as the respondent grows more affectionate toward them and likes them more, the more they believe everything in the story, the more willing they are to accept policy prescriptions, the more willing they were to believe that climate change is real, the more willing they were to believe that everything they were told was true.
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Just like superheroes, trans people are born with something special and magical about them, and they often have to hide what's special and magical about them from other people.
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Nothing else performed quite as successfully as that variable.
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Like superheroes, trans people just want the world to be a safer place, and they believe we should protect each other and live our lives in peace.
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Yet despite the importance of the hero, we see politicians out there creating villains, from immigrants to black people and trans folks.
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Like superheroes, evil billionaires want to get rid of trans people for no reason whatsoever.
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Republic candidate for Virginia Governor Winsome Earl Sears, spent 57% of her ad budget scaremongering over trans issues and trying to sandbag her opponent by tying her to them, according to a recent VCU poll. Voters are most concerned about the rising cost of living and what both candidates will do to address that. Other top concerns for voters include women's reproductive rights and immigration. Meanwhile, only 4% of voters listed the issue of transgender students as their most important policy concern. Earl Sears lost by almost 15 points.
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That blue wave continued into the House.
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Of Delegates going into this election over here on the Democrat side, they had 51 seats compared to Republicans 48. There was one vacant. So it was a much slimmer majority here. As you can see, at least 10 more seats here that the Democrats have taken. A lot of ostensibly liberal pundits wanted Democrats to hide or downplay support for transgender constituents. Rahm Emanuel was recently asked by Megyn Kelly whether a man could become a woman, and he said no. Gavin Newsom recently said that he believes transgender athletes shouldn't compete in women's sports. Do you worry about an overcorrection here?
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I do believe that those statements have been overcorrections.
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Mayoral candidate Zuran Mamdani took the opposite approach. He went to the Christopher Street Pier and sat at a desk he brought along with him, presumably to suggest how he would govern as mayor. And Mamdani gave a history lesson on trans people in New York City honoring Sylvia Rivera.
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No matter what hardships she faced, Sylvia Rivera advocated for others. She and Johnson founded Star to house and feed trans kids.
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He carried a trans flag in the New York City Pride march. He did this while also offering concrete policy proposals targeted at benefiting New Yorkers as a whole. These universal proposals were not only smart politics in terms of winning votes, they also inoculated him against the perennial charge that any politician who expresses support for marginalized groups must intend to somehow be planning to work against groups with more power or those who aren't facing the same challenges. In the case of Abigail Spanberger, her campaign disappointed some voters. When she was asked directly about the anti trans ads run by her opponent, she said, I recognize the concern that families and community members might have about the safety of their own kids, about competitiveness, about fairness. But her performance at the debate with Earl Sears was fascinating. Instead of letting the matter drop with the invocation of trans panic, Spanberger pointed to what was behind that panic. She criticized Earl Sears for being against same sex marriage. My opponent has previously said that she does not think that gay couples should be allowed to marry. She has said that she that's discrimination. My opponent has also previously said that she thinks it's okay for someone to be fired from their job for being gay. That is discrimination. Berger had tied her to the larger prejudice and revealed the bigger frame behind the current Republican anti trans preoccupation. I think that being able to step back to reframe discussions and show what they're really about is key to how we go forward. But we also have to sometimes flip the table entirely by embracing every member of our community. In his victory speech, Mamdani vowed to continue support for the vilified and disenfranchised.
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Saying, here we believe in standing up for those we love. Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall, your struggle is ours too.
- [26:06]
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When pundits say that we have to throw trans people under the bus, they are saying that they don't know how to win without doing that. It may be true that they don't know how to do it, but other people do, and they're showing us the way. It's a lesson that we're slow to learn, in part because we've all been swimming in propaganda for years. They say if you miss a little, you miss a lot.
- [26:32]
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And boy, was there a lot over the past 25 years here on Fox.
- [26:37]
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Yup. And it's hard to imagine a politics that doesn't actually demand someone get punished. Republicans have shown a way to use wedge politics that can, by targeting and punishing vulnerable minorities, at least intermittently convince key groups of voters that you're standing up for them.
- [26:55]
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So tell me about this, because when it comes to the Democratic Party, it looks like a lot of brothers, a lot of black voters are leaving. Black male voters are leaving the Democratic Party. What do you think is the number one issue? Why? Too many issues to name. But I think overall the thing is like, I think the tipping point was if you look at the legal immigration.
- [27:16]
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Issue going on, the way to counter that is not to do the same thing because it's wrong and because you can only win by becoming even more cruel than the Republicans. The Democratic Party has struck on another mode here, and one that has some promise. By focusing on policies that benefit everyone and standing up very deliberately for the most marginalized groups, you can show that you are strong enough to stand up for everyone. Different factions of voters may sometimes have competing interests, but they aren't the villains. The villains are those who are already out there harming every single American, even those who don't realize it yet. In February 2025, Zoran Mamdani made his position clear and he never deviated. You need not even know a trans New Yorker to stand up for trans New Yorkers, he said. This is a trial of all of us to see who we are willing to give up. And the answer is no one.
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In a time of darkness, New York must be the light.
- [28:25]
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We just need heroes at every level. Students held signs, carried flags and called for the end to President Trump's immigration crackdown. Honestly, I did not expect this many people to show up. This started as just me and my friend organizing a walkout when we saw what happened here at Little Village last week. From everyday life to elected officials who will make it clear that we can do better than a politics of punishment and exclusion. And that's it. I think that's it. Yes, that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, please subscribe at andreapitzer. Com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.