Did trans help Trump to victory?

MAGA hats off to Trump, he’s certainly a politician with chutzpah. He is a man born into a level of privilege that would make a Saudi princeling blush. And yet he managed to seem more relatable, more a ‘man of the people’, than his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. This was most pithily summed up in his genius campaign slogan: ‘Harris is for they / them. President Trump is for you.’

The Trump victory is not so much a sign of his political nous as of the pitiful failure of his opposition. The Democrats had clearly banked on women’s support, yanking on the abortion chain to pull them into line at every opportunity. But it now seems that Roe vs Wade barely figured as a point of interest in the exit polls. Only around 11 per cent of Americans saw abortion as a top priority – slightly higher than climate change. Of course, it was always going to be difficult for the Democrats to fight for reproductive rights when they can’t even say with certainty what a woman is. And this is where their problem lies.

While it would be too simplistic to say it was ‘trans wot lost it’, concerns about ideological indoctrination in schools, attacks on free speech and sex-change surgeries for minors certainly played a part in the Democrats’ defeat. After all, of all the left’s major talking points, from Gaza to climate change, the trans issue stands out as the easiest for the right to knock down. This is because, to understand what CO2 does to the atmosphere, it helps to have a degree or two in the field. But to understand that a man can’t change into a woman, one only needs to be compos mentis. And why would anyone vote for a politician who is prepared to lie about sex, something so basic even dogs understand it?

Trump got this intuitively. According to NPR, the Republicans spent $17million on ads highlighting the Democrats’ support for trans rights – including Harris’s backing of ‘taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens’. In February, Trump announced a plan to ‘to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth’. This included, in his words, ‘a new Executive Order instructing every federal agency to cease all programmes that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age’.

As part of the same package of measures, Trump also promised to support parents who don’t affirm their children in cross-sex identities, to help detransitioners sue the surgeons who scarred them for life and to prohibit ‘men from participating in women’s sports’. He added that ‘no serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender’.

The minority of parents who parade their trans kids for social-media clout have spent the days since Trump’s victory wailing into their phones. But policies preventing what to any sane observer is a grotesque medical experiment on kids were always going to be popular.

As Trump was promising to stand by parents, Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice-president, was turning Minnesota into a ‘trans refuge’. This includes a monstrous law allowing for ‘trans children’ to be taken from their family homes if they are not sufficiently ‘affirmed’ in their nonsense identities. At the same time, trans-activist officials within the Biden administration, like assistant secretary for health Rachel Levine, advocated for removing lower age limits for so-called gender-affirming surgeries. Similarly concerning was Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, declining to define what a woman is when asked in 2022, claiming ‘I’m not a biologist’.

As for sport, last year the Department of Education proposed regulations establishing that it would count as sex discrimination if colleges or schools decide to ‘categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are’.

It’s hardly surprising this trans platform didn’t sit well with most parents, or indeed with anyone with a working moral compass. Not least because, as we recently learnt, at least 14,000 children have received some kind of ‘gender-affirming’ treatment in the US over the past five years – with 5,747 undergoing sex-change surgeries. The Democrats, under whose auspices this has been allowed to happen, must not be allowed to forget this.

Most voters in the US, as elsewhere in the world, probably don’t know much about trade policies or international relations. But it’s hard not to notice when your child comes back from school using a different name and pronouns. Or when a letter from social services arrives telling you to affirm their identity, or else.

Ultimately, the insanity of trans ideology – and the Democrats’ fealty to it – has achieved the impossible: it made Donald Trump look like the sensible choice.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.