U.S. voters think Democrats, not Republicans, are best equipped to “handle transgender rights,” according to the latest polling from YouGov and The Economist.

Of the 1,500 respondents, 52% said Democrats would be better at addressing trans rights; 23% said they thought Republicans would be better; 14% saw “no difference,” and 11% were unsure.

Democrats ranked higher on this front among college-educated voters, young voters (age 18-29), women, and Black and Hispanic voters. Meanwhile, Democrats were a slightly less popular choice—but still the overwhelming plurality—to take on the task among white voters, men, and those without a college degree.

These polls are the latest sign in a wave of reckoning for the Republican Party. Antagonizing transgender Americans, it seems, cannot alone win elections.

Just last month, polling from The 19th found voters were increasingly fed up with how much Republicans (and Democrats, for that matter) talk about trans kids. Furthermore, it found that bans on gender-affirming care were relatively unpopular. Even among Republicans, the survey found that 42% of respondents opposed banning gender affirming care for youth.

It’s no surprise that Republican strategists are waking up to this and warning candidates to pivot to kitchen-table issues.

A recent strategy memo from the conservative advocacy group, the American Principles Project, said that focusing on trans issues alone “may not be sufficient.”

“Republicans must also make the case to families on what they plan to do to help improve their economic standing,” it said.

This is not to trivialize the still very real, very dire rightward shift in American politics that has come to dominate the narrative around trans people. That same memo from the APP said that “recent message testing we have conducted in several key swing states suggest that [Democrats] remain vulnerable on culture-war issues, particularly in their support for transgender ideology and so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) policies.”

Another YouGov/Pablo Torre Finds Out/Bulwark poll from the last month found that the majority of Americans “strongly oppose” trans-inclusive sports policies that allow athletes to compete on a team that matches their gender identity instead of their sex assigned at birth. But that same survey found that more people thought athletic organizations, not the government, should be responsible for setting those policies.

However, in October, three more major polls exhibited more of the same. Navigator Research, AP-NORC and ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos found that voters trust Democrats on trans issues. But even more than that—most said they just don’t care. It ranked dead last on their list of priorities, with cost of living, the economy, and health care being the priority. And half of Americans said policies about trans people were “unimportant” or inconsequential to how they plan to cast their vote.

That’s also why Tyler Hack, executive director of the Christopher Street Project—which works to elect trans-allied candidates to office—said the recent YouGov poll was unsurprising.

“Republicans are betting big on their anti-trans obsession, and it’s not paying off,” Hack told Erin in the Morning. “This poll reinforces what we’ve known all along: standing up for trans people is both the right thing to do and a fight Democrats can win. Let’s bring it home.”

New court filings obtained by Erin in the Morning reveal the harrowing lengths one trans teenager went to trying to keep his longstanding health care after his provider, Essentia Health in Minnesota, suddenly dropped trans youth patients like him.

Now, he’s suing the regional health care system that lawyers say capitulated to anti-trans threats from the Trump regime—a move that potentially violated state equal rights laws. The advocacy group Gender Justice partnered with Robins Kaplan LLP to file a lawsuit on his behalf. The complaint is attached in full at the bottom of this piece.

“State laws, like the Minnesota Human Rights Act, can and do continue to protect trans youth from discrimination, regardless of federal attacks on the trans community,” Greta Wiessner, senior staff attorney at Gender Justice, told Erin in the Morning via email. Gender Justice is the public interest firm representing the Doe family alongside Robins Kaplan LLP.

This puts the Doe family squarely at the center of a national battle over the rights and future of transgender youth. They are part of a small but notable cohort of families in similarly dire straits: families in so-called “safe” or “blue” states who still saw their child’s health care ripped away because health care institutions capitulated despite state laws that should, in theory, protect health care access for transgender and cisgender children equally.

Doe had been expressing his identity as early as preschool—that’s when he told his family he was a boy. He asked for a short haircut and began dressing in boys’ clothing. But the onset of puberty also brought heightened gender dysphoria. At age 10, he attempted suicide, court filings say, but the puberty blockers and subsequent hormone replacement therapy that he received at Essentia Health saved Doe’s life. He went from a shy, suicidal preteen into a flourishing student who loved to perform in theatre and choir.

But in early 2026, Essentia patients began to see the writing on the wall. Hospital administrators reportedly began telling providers, in secret, that they would be winding down gender-affirming care for trans youth.

Like many of the dozens upon dozens of hospitals and health care clinics across the country that sunset youth gender care in an attempt to stave off the Trump regime’s wrath, Essentia’s care rollback was reportedly clumsy, ill-communicated, and terror-inducing for families.

“Nobody should receive a major health care access update ‘through the grapevine,’” a statement from Gender Justice said. “Essentia’s failure to communicate with families wasn’t just cruel. It put patients at increased risk by creating confusion and giving families a limited timeline within which to find alternative providers.”

When Doe himself learned his care might be cut off, he was terrified. “Mom, I’ll die,” he reportedly said.

Put simply by Doe’s mother: “This has caused much suffering for our family.”

The Doe family’s lawsuit charges Essentia violated the Minnesota Human Rights Act based on gender identity and disability discrimination. They are seeking a permanent injunction on the care stoppage plus monetary damages.

Erin in the Morning reached out to Essentia Health for comment, but did not immediately hear back.

Since Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office, countless hospitals and gender-affirming care institutions have suddenly stopped providing such care—often with minimal notice, and in many instances, in states with strict anti-discrimination laws. In theory, these laws should prohibit hospitals from capitulating to Trumpian threats and ceasing care for trans youth.

In practice, many hospitals and clinics are doing just that with little to no repercussions. Parents and activist groups are calling on their respective AGs, including Attorney General Rob Bonta of California and Letitia James of New York, to enforce state laws. New York’s Letitia James ordered NYU Langone to resume care but hasn’t gone to court; only Bonta has sued. His office took on Rady Children’s for ending gender-affirming care in violation of the conditions attached to its merger with Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

Other creative legal maneuvers have been deployed, too. In California, activist lawyers were able to successfully stop the release of identifying patient records at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles by filing a lawsuit against the government on behalf of six affected families. Additionally, families sued Children’s Hospital Colorado and filed civil rights complaints against two Connecticut hospitals.

“Transgender youth deserve to live freely, safely and authentically, with access to the care that allows them to thrive,” said Megan Peterson, executive director at Gender Justice. “Across America, their rights are under attack, and too many institutions are choosing to abandon them rather than protect them. We will not.”

The full complaint can be read below.

Doe V Essentia Health Official Complaint

547KB ∙ PDF file

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Election night is coming, and the results on Nov. 3 could be enormously consequential for transgender people across the United States. As the federal government has become openly hostile toward trans and queer people and Republican-controlled statehouses continue to pass a slew of anti-trans legislation, Democrats appear poised to make significant gains, perhaps even approaching a wave election. Races from the state legislative level all the way up to control of Congress will draw heavy attention from anyone hoping for Democratic victories, and transgender people are likely to be among those most affected by the results.

Every year at Erin In The Morning, we watch the elections closely. We report on the results as they come in on election night (subscribe and watch for our live chat if you have not already), and in the days that follow, we untangle what they mean. Before election night, we also put out guides so that you know which races will matter most for whatever narrative emerges about transgender people the day after.

So here are the races we are watching on election night:

The U.S. Senate

Democratic control of the Senate is important for transgender people for so many reasons. Democrats in the driver’s seat in the Senate means a second chamber that can help keep anti-transgender riders out of must-pass legislation, and should Democrats choose to limit the Trump administration’s ability to target transgender people through such bills, control of the Senate would be enormously consequential. The Senate is also responsible for confirming any Supreme Court justices, and Democratic control of the chamber insulates us from further backsliding there. Likewise, many of these races have seen heavy ad spending around transgender people, sometimes with even the Democrat pushing anti-transgender ads, and whether those candidates win or lose will become part of the narrative moving forward. Here are the most important Senate races we are watching that have featured transgender issues:

• Michigan: Abdul El-Sayed (D) vs. Mike Rogers (R). This race is probably one of the most important races in the country for transgender people. Should El-Sayed win, it will show that a Democrat running on unequivocal support for transgender people in a relatively purple state can win. A win by El-Sayed dampens any narrative that transgender people must be thrown under the bus for a Democratic victory.

• Minnesota: Peggy Flanagan (D) vs. Michele Tafoya (R). This is a clean test of whether or not a Democrat needs to embrace anti-transgender policy to win a contested election. Flanagan wore a “protect trans kids” T-shirt to Walz’s signing of an executive order protecting gender-affirming care. Tafoya has been vehemently anti-transgender.

• Maine: Susan Collins (R) vs. Troy Jackson (D). This race has been one of the focal races for Elon Musk’s America PAC, which has poured $100 million into races across the country, many of which feature ads targeting transgender people. Troy Jackson has, to our knowledge, not indicated he supports any anti-trans positions, and AOC defended transgender people at an event with him in the closing weeks of the election cycle.

• Iowa: Josh Turek (D) vs. Ashley Hinson (R). This race features one of the most anti-transgender Democratic candidates in the United States, Josh Turek, against Ashley Hinson, a Republican who herself is vehemently anti-transgender. A win by Josh Turek would likely be interpreted by the consultant class as a sign that Democrats running in red states should embrace anti-trans policy. Due to Turek’s extreme ad targeting transgender people, EITM endorsed leaving his race blank. Regardless, this race will be incredibly important to watch on election night.

• Texas: Ken Paxton (R) vs. James Talarico (D). This race is probably going to be the most interesting race to watch on election night. Talarico has been incredibly pro-transgender in his history and voting record, but in September, he equivocated on transgender sports participation and embraced medical restrictions on transgender youth care in the case of surgical care. He later stepped back and said he opposed a statewide sports ban. Meanwhile, Ken Paxton is one of the most vehemently anti-transgender individuals in the United States. This race will have enormous impacts on transgender people regardless of who wins.

• Ohio: Sherrod Brown (D) vs. Jon Husted (R). This is a huge race. Sherrod Brown flirted with anti-transgender advertising in the past, but when data began to come out that such ads do not work and after receiving criticism, he reversed course. Instead, he switched to rebutting anti-transgender ads by pointing out Husted’s connection to the Epstein files. A Brown win would teach that embracing anti-trans policy is not necessary to win in Ohio.

• Alaska: Mary Peltola (D) vs. Dan Sullivan (R). This race featured an ad from anti-trans Democrat Mary Peltola saying she opposed “men in girls’ bathrooms,” running against Republican Dan Sullivan. Peltola winning will likely be used as a signal that Democrats should run on anti-trans policy in red states. Sullivan winning would be one less Democrat in the Senate.

• South Carolina: Annie Andrews (D) vs. Darline Graham (R). This race has huge implications for transgender people. While Andrews winning in South Carolina would be a major pickup for Democrats, Annie Andrews has been the recipient of anti-transgender slurs and advertising. Not to be outdone, Andrews released her own anti-trans ad, calling transgender women “biological men” and stating she would not reverse restrictions made in South Carolina targeting trans youth. Meanwhile, Darline Graham is the sister of the late Lindsey Graham, was appointed to his seat after his death and has enormous Trump support.

• Other races worth watching: Georgia: Jon Ossoff (D) vs. Mike Collins (R); Kansas: Adam Hamilton (D) vs. Roger Marshall (R); Mississippi: Scott Colom (D) vs. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R); Nebraska: Dan Osborn (I) vs. Pete Ricketts (R); New Hampshire: Chris Pappas (D) vs. John E. Sununu (R); and North Carolina: Roy Cooper (D) vs. Michael Whatley (R).

The U.S. House

Control of the U.S. House is almost as important as control of the Senate. House members serve shorter, two-year terms, but they maintain a large amount of power in passing legislation and what ends up in appropriations bills. Many of the worst anti-transgender bills and hearings originated in the U.S. House in the last two years. This year’s slate of candidates includes some who were unafraid of supporting trans and queer people in their campaigns, as well as some who went the opposite direction, deciding it was better to compromise on our rights for political gain. A large part of the story of the 2026 midterms will depend on who wins these House races. Here is what we’re watching:

• MT-01: Sam Forstag (D) vs. Aaron Flint (R). This is going to be an incredible pickup opportunity to watch. Forstag is a slight underdog because he is running in a district that leans conservative, but he has run a strong race. A smokejumper with popular appeal, he is running against Aaron Flint, a right-wing radio talk show host who has made anti-trans ads a major part of his campaign against Forstag. When asked about his position on trans issues in a debate, though, Forstag did not throw trans people under the bus. He instead answered, “let’s let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions, and let’s keep politics the heck out of it.” He also identified the issue as a distraction by Republicans while they “pick our pockets.”

• AZ-06: JoAnna Mendoza (D) vs. Juan Ciscomani (R). This is a big pickup opportunity for Democrats in Arizona. Ciscomani has run multiple anti-trans ads accusing Mendoza of letting “biological males” into women’s locker rooms, and was a cosponsor of the national sports ban and voted for the felony youth care ban, neither of which became law. Mendoza on the other hand was endorsed by the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund and actively opposes sports and bathroom bans. A Mendoza win would mean a Democrat who openly opposes anti-trans bans and refuses to capitulate can win in a contested Arizona district.

• IA-01: Christina Bohannan (D) vs. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R). Unlike other Democratic candidates in Iowa, Bohannan did not throw transgender people under the bus in her answer to the anti-trans ads run against her. Instead, she ran an ad that focused on her experience as a high school athlete and responded to claims of “unfairness in sports” with the “unfairness” of Miller-Meeks siding with the drug companies. It’ll be a big test to compare the results of her method of response with those of the other anti-trans Dems in Iowa.

• PA-08: Paige Cognetti (D) vs. Rob Bresnahan (R). This is a true toss-up race and great pickup opportunity for Democrats. Cognetti has been the target of a vicious series of anti-transgender ads, including an ad of her raising a Pride flag beside a local drag performer. There have been plenty of opportunities for Cognetti to throw transgender people under the bus, and she has declined to do so every time she was asked. It will be a test of whether anti-transgender politics from the Republican Party works in a very purple Pennsylvania district that has a history of voting for Trump.

• NY-17: Cait Conley (D) vs. Mike Lawler (R). Conley, an LGBTQ+ Victory Fund-endorsed combat veteran and lesbian woman, has not thrown transgender people under the bus. She is running for a Democratic pickup seat against Lawler and has been the recipient of anti-transgender ads. Her win in a toss-up district would be huge.

• OH-09: Marcy Kaptur (D) vs. Derek Merrin (R). This is the single most important House race for those tracking anti-transgender Democrats. Kaptur has run one of the most viciously anti-transgender campaigns, answering anti-trans attack ads against her with her own ad stating that she “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools” and calling transgender girls boys. This led to Equality Ohio downgrading her rating to a D. Meanwhile, the Ohio Democratic Party censored its own Pride and Progressive caucuses from even criticizing her on the ads. If Kaptur wins this race, consultants will likely point to her anti-trans politics, rightly or wrongly, as contributing to her victory. If she loses, then one of the biggest capitulations will have failed in 2026.

• IA-03: Sarah Trone Garriott (D) vs. Zach Nunn (R). Sarah Trone Garriott was one of the first Democrats this cycle to come up with an anti-transgender ad, declaring “I oppose letting men in women’s locker rooms.” Meanwhile, she has been the recipient of millions of dollars in anti-trans ads against her. The race is Lean D, so if she loses this race, it would be a genuine surprise. If she wins, anti-trans political consultants in the Democratic Party will likely give some credit to her anti-trans ad blitz.

• NC-01: Don Davis (D) vs. Laurie Buckhout (R). Don Davis, Democratic incumbent, voted “present” on the sports ban in Congress and was one of three Dems to vote for MTG’s felony youth care ban. His opponent’s allies are still running ads saying he “allowed taxpayer-funded sex-change operations,” so his capitulation has bought him nothing. This is a true toss-up district and it will bear watching whether his decisions result in him keeping his seat or losing it to a Republican.

• SC-01: Nancy Lacore (D) vs. Jenny Costa Honeycutt (R). This will be a major race to watch because it was the race which received the DCCC’s first anti-transgender ad, in which a Republican mayor vouches for Lacore because she will “protect girls’ sports.” Her campaign confirmed she opposes trans girls in girls’ sports and might support federal legislation. Will the DCCC get a return on its anti-trans investment?

• FL-14: Kathy Castor (D) vs. Mike Beltran (R). Kathy Castor, a Democratic incumbent, made news for an especially cruel answer to a constituent question as to whether or not trans women should be able to play women’s sports. She responded, “The answer is no” while gleefully laughing. She still received ads saying she supported trans people in girls’ sports, so it bought her nothing.

• Other races with trans implications: CO-08: Manny Rutinel (D) vs. Gabe Evans (R); IN-05: J.D. Ford (D) vs. Victoria Spartz (R); MO-02: Fred Wellman (D) vs. Ann Wagner (R); NC-11: Jamie Ager (D) vs. Jennifer Balkcom (R); NE-02: Denise Powell (D) vs. Brinker Harding (R); NM-02: Gabe Vasquez (D) vs. Greg Cunningham (R); NV-01: Dina Titus (D) vs. Carrie Buck (R); NV-03: Susie Lee (D) vs. Marty O’Donnell (R); NY-03: Tom Suozzi (D) vs. Michael LiPetri (R); NY-04: Laura Gillen (D) vs. Jeanine Driscoll (R); NY-21: Blake Gendebien (D) vs. Anthony Constantino (R); PA-01: Bob Harvie (D) vs. Brian Fitzpatrick (R); PA-10: Janelle Stelson (D) vs. Scott Perry (R); TX-23: Katy Padilla Stout (D) vs. Brandon Herrera (R); TX-28: Henry Cuellar (D) vs. Tano Tijerina (R); TX-34: Vicente Gonzalez (D) vs. Eric Flores (R); VA-01: Shannon Taylor (D) vs. Rob Wittman (R); VA-02: Elaine Luria (D) vs. Jen Kiggans (R); VA-07: Eugene Vindman (D) vs. Douglas Ollivant (R); WA-03: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D) vs. John Braun (R); WI-03: Rebecca Cooke (D) vs. Derrick Van Orden (R); and many, many more.

Governorships And Statewide Offices

Governorships are extremely important. They hold veto power, they must be negotiated with, and they actually are the ones who implement the laws passed by state legislatures. A good governor can be an impediment to bad legislation targeting transgender people. A bad one can fiercely enforce everything with extreme zeal. Likewise, other offices such as attorney general and school superintendent can have enormous impacts. Here are the races we are most watching:

• Michigan: Jocelyn Benson (D) vs. John James (R). James is a congressman who voted for the national sports ban, felony youth care ban and PROTECT Kids Act, and he’s running on a “parental bill of rights” that would ban trans girls from girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams. Meanwhile, Benson as secretary of state created Michigan’s first nonbinary X marker for driver’s licenses. She has not thrown transgender people under the bus, and a win in Michigan would be big for a state that has become more supportive in recent years.

• Wisconsin: David Crowley (D) vs. Tom Tiffany (R). Tiffany has run on an anti-transgender platform, declaring that he would sign legislation banning “men from women’s sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms.” Crowley stated that he is “not going to limit our LGBTQ community from what they currently have.” The winner will take Evers’ old spot, and Evers was incredibly supportive of transgender people. Crowley winning statewide in a purple state like Wisconsin on this platform would be incredible for transgender people.

• Arizona: Katie Hobbs (D) vs. Andy Biggs (R). Hobbs has spent her entire first term vetoing anti-trans proposals from the Arizona Legislature. This June, she vetoed a ban on puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth. Meanwhile, Biggs calls trans kids “children infected by the woke mind virus.” Hobbs winning is very important and would be a clear example of a Democrat winning in a state that voted for Trump without abandoning trans people.

• Georgia: Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) vs. Rick Jackson (R). Jackson has called transgender care for trans youth “mutilation” and has promised that trans youth care providers would be put in jail. He has run anti-trans ads and attacked Bottoms over trans athletes. Bottoms on the other hand could flip Georgia blue without running a single anti-transgender ad and without embracing anti-trans policy. That lesson would be huge moving forward, and a Democratic governor of Georgia would go a long way toward protecting trans people.

• Ohio: Amy Acton (D) vs. Vivek Ramaswamy (R). Transgender people likely have complicated feelings about this race. Acton has thrown transgender people under the bus and promised to enforce the state’s sports ban, and called trans girls “boys.” Ramaswamy has been one of the most vehemently anti-transgender people in the modern anti-trans panic. Party infrastructure has cracked down on transgender and queer dissent in Ohio, blacklisting many activists due to their criticism of Acton. For all of these reasons, the race will be important to watch.

• Iowa: Rob Sand (D) vs. Zach Lahn (R). Rob Sand backs Iowa’s sports ban and says so often. “I just think girls’ sports are for girls and boys’ sports are for boys,” he says. He does oppose the stripping of gender identity from Iowa’s Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, Zach Lahn hit Sand on allowing “a book on transgenderism” in elementary schools. This race will be important to watch to see if centrist Democratic consultants will credit his anti-trans turn with helping him win in Iowa, a state filled with anti-trans Democratic candidates.

• Texas: Gina Hinojosa (D) vs. Greg Abbott (R). Abbott’s campaign doctored a photo and put a trans flag behind Hinojosa, calling her “Gender Bender Gina.” Meanwhile, Hinojosa waved a trans pride flag on the Texas House floor after Democrats stalled a sports ban. Abbott has been one of the worst anti-trans governors of any state. A Hinojosa win would be huge for trans Texans. I will note that Hinojosa got some flak for putting out an ad saying her pronouns are “Mom, Texan, and soon to be: Governor.”

• Arizona Attorney General: Kris Mayes (D) vs. Warren Petersen (R). Mayes refused to defend Arizona’s 2022 sports ban in court and called it unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Petersen has run anti-transgender ads against her calling her radical on the issue. This is an important race to watch in a state Trump carried.

• Kansas Attorney General: Chris Mann (D) vs. Kris Kobach (R). Kobach has been one of the most fiercely anti-trans attorneys general in the country. He was responsible for reverting Kansans’ driver’s licenses and has pushed anti-trans policy throughout government. If Mann wins, it could deal a major blow to the enforcement of anti-trans policy in the state.

• Georgia Attorney General: Tanya Miller (D) vs. Brian Strickland (R). Strickland was a co-sponsor of the Riley Gaines Act, and has run ads attacking Miller for voting against the transgender sports ban. Miller on the other hand has asked why her colleagues “have become obsessed with what is happening in transgender citizens’ pants.” A Miller win would be a major victory in Georgia.

• California Superintendent of Public Instruction: Richard Barrera vs. Sonja Shaw. Sonja Shaw has been an enormous anti-trans presence in California, and got gaveled down for yelling “Do you think it’s okay for boys to play against our girls in sports?” She has vowed to end the CIF’s policy (which is already anti-trans) to entirely ban trans athletes from competition. Meanwhile, her opponent, Barrera, is endorsed by Equality California.

• Other races: Alabama governor: Doug Jones (D) vs. Tommy Tuberville (R); California governor: Xavier Becerra (D) vs. Steve Hilton (R); Colorado governor: Phil Weiser (D) vs. Victor Marx (R); Florida attorney general: Jose Javier Rodriguez (D) vs. James Uthmeier (R); Florida governor: David Jolly (D) vs. Byron Donalds (R); Indiana secretary of state: Beau Bayh (D) vs. Max Engling (R) vs. Greg Ballard (Lincoln); Kansas Governor: Cindy Holscher (D) vs. Ty Masterson (R); Michigan State Board of Education: Judith Pritchett (D) and Tiffany Tilley (D) vs. Bree Moeggenberg (R) and Terence Collins (R); New Hampshire governor: Cinde Warmington (D) vs. Kelly Ayotte (R); Pennsylvania governor: Josh Shapiro (D) vs. Stacy Garrity (R); and Texas lieutenant governor: Vikki Goodwin (D) vs. Dan Patrick (R).

State Legislative chambers

Almost every anti-trans law in the United States was passed by a state legislature, and almost every protective law was too. Because of this, state legislatures can prevent further anti-trans legislation or could even be used to roll back old laws. Here are the state legislative chambers most important to trans people this next cycle:

• Michigan House and Senate: Michigan Republicans are itching to pass anti-transgender legislation. The Republican-controlled House passed a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth this year, but of course, it cannot make it past the Democratic-controlled Senate. A Democratic trifecta could go a long way to helping pass protective legislation. Republican control would be disastrous.

• Minnesota House and Senate: This last session, the House was tied 67-67, and every seat in both chambers is up. Minnesota has been the site of enormously protective pro-transgender legislation in recent years. If Democrats can hold the Senate and retake the House, it will be a major victory for trans people in the state.

• Pennsylvania House and Senate: Republicans have controlled the Pennsylvania Senate since 1994, and this year, Democrats could grab it. If they do, they may gain a trifecta in the state, meaning that Pennsylvania may finally pass the protective legislation required for it to be listed as blue on my trans risk assessment map.

• Arizona House and Senate: Democrats have not held a chamber in Arizona in decades. If they could get control of one chamber, it would stymie anti-trans bills that continue to pass out of the legislature. If they get control of both, we could be staring at a Democratic trifecta in Arizona, which may lead to protective legislation for transgender people.

• Wisconsin Senate and Assembly: This year, Wisconsin has a true shot at a Democratic trifecta. If they achieve it, then we could see truly protective legislation for transgender people in the state. Anti-trans ads are pouring into races across the state, and the governorship is also up for grabs, making this state one of the most important states for transgender people.

• North Carolina Senate and House: This is primarily a supermajority fight, as Republicans hold the Senate with exactly the number of votes a veto override takes and the House one short. The state has a Democratic governor in Josh Stein, but his veto of anti-trans legislation was overridden by the legislature last year, as Roy Cooper’s were before him. Big wins for Democrats would go a long way to making Stein’s vetoes of such bills stick.

• New Hampshire House and Senate: New Hampshire has been the site of many anti-transgender bills, including a gender-affirming care ban for trans youth. Some bills, such as bathroom bans, have been vetoed by Ayotte, the Republican governor of the state. Democrats taking one or both chambers would go a long way to preventing us from depending on Ayotte to continue vetoing such bills.

• Georgia House: This is a major legislative chamber to watch. If Georgia’s House goes blue, then many anti-trans bills that neighboring states have passed targeting adults would be dead in the water. Democrats walked out of the state House last year over anti-trans bills. Anti-trans ads abound, and this race will be one of the most important.

• Other chambers to watch: Alaska House and Senate (bipartisan coalition fights); Florida House and Senate (Republican supermajorities); Iowa House and Senate (Republican supermajorities); Kansas House (break the Republican supermajority); Maine House and Senate; Missouri House and Senate (Republican supermajorities); Montana House (control or margins); Nevada Senate and Assembly (supermajority fight); Ohio House and Senate (Republican supermajorities); South Carolina House (Republican supermajority); Texas House and Senate (reduce Republican majorities); and Vermont House and Senate (Democratic supermajority).

Ballot Measures

• Washington Initiative 638: This would ban transgender girls in girls’ sports and require sex verification, which could lead to mandatory genital inspections. This initiative is led by Brian Heywood, a wealthy benefactor of anti-transgender policies in the state. If it passes, it will be the first anti-trans law to pass via popular vote in a blue state.

• Washington Initiative 1: This would bring back the “parents’ bill of rights.” It would also repeal the protection-measures that the legislature added in 2025 for trans students and could bring back forced outing.

• Colorado Proposition 134: This is a transgender sports ban for K-12 and college teams.

• Colorado Proposition 135: This would ban gender-affirming surgery for trans youth, including top surgery. If this passes, it would be the first restriction on trans youth care in a blue state, and notably, Colorado is a state that has passed refuge protection for trans people.

• Arizona Proposition 318: This is a sports ban and locker room ban for transgender students in schools throughout the state, from kindergarten through college. This would be a significant regression of rights in Arizona if it passes.

• Vermont Proposal 4: This would enshrine equal protection for sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression into the state constitution.

• Missouri Amendment 3: This would repeal the abortion rights amendment in the state and would also write a ban on blockers, hormones and surgery for trans youth into the constitution. It is an attempt to ban abortion using anti-trans hate in the state.

New Transgender Candidates

• Washington LD-37: Jaelynn Scott (D) vs. Evon McCorkle (I). Scott, executive director of the Lavender Rights Project, is likely to become Washington’s first openly trans legislator and the first out Black trans woman elected to any state legislature in the United States.

• Alabama HD-25: Allison Montgomery (D) vs. Phillip Rigsby (R). A toss-up race in Alabama, where Montgomery, a transgender Democrat, is running against Rigsby, the Republican incumbent, weeks after state Republican leaders called her one of “two men who have mental disorders” for being transgender.

• Georgia HD-90: Bentley Hudgins (D) vs. Samantha Boston (R). Hudgins is HRC’s Georgia state director and the favorite for this seat. If they win, they will become Georgia’s first-ever nonbinary person elected to the Legislature.

• Michigan HD-2: Joanna Whaley (D) vs. Ronald Kokinda (R). Whaley, a conversion therapy survivor, would be the first openly trans member of the Michigan House. Her Democratic primary opponent tried to remove her from the ballot for her name change, and her Republican general election opponent deadnames her.

• Maryland House of Delegates District 4 (three seats): Alleria Stanley (D), with Jerry Donald (D) and Andrew Duck (D), vs. Jesse Pippy (R), April Fleming Miller (R) and Jason Keckler (R). Stanley is a retired Army combat veteran and would be Maryland’s first out transgender legislator.

• Wisconsin AD-76: Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford (D) vs. Nina Chat (R). If Martinez-Rutherford wins, she will be the first transgender member of the Wisconsin Legislature. She is running in a D+80 seat.

• Colorado HD-23: Alexis Hoffkling (D) vs. Ross Metler (L). Hoffkling is a family doctor at Denver Health. She is a transgender woman running in a seat with no Republican on the ballot and is certain to win. She would be the second transgender woman to win a legislative seat in Colorado, after Brianna Titone.

• New York AD-65: Illapa Sairitupac (D) vs. Helen Qiu (R). Sairitupac, a social worker and nonbinary candidate, would be one of New York’s first two out nonbinary legislators.

• New York AD-66: David Siffert (D), unopposed. Siffert, a nonbinary attorney whose platform promises a private right of action for anyone denied gender-affirming care at a New York health care institution, is also poised to become one of the state’s first two out nonbinary legislators.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has a lot to celebrate after winning a historic fourth term against Flávio Bolsonaro, the far-right son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whose supporters stormed government buildings in January 2023 in protest of Lula’s earlier victory. The elder Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup—he is now serving that sentence under house arrest—and is barred from running for office until 2060.

Lula’s win Sunday marks a break from the far-right tilt of other recent elections in the region. It means Donald Trump’s influence via the Bolsonaros is considerably defanged. And it means Brazil’s highest office won’t become yet another blunt object with which to antagonize transgender people.

Erika Hilton, a Brazilian lawmaker who is also trans, was standing right by Lula’s side on the night of his victory. In a now-viral video she posted to Instagram, the two can be seen in a crowd of cheering people as Brazil’s president kisses her on the cheek and Hilton shouts (roughly translated into English), “That’s my president! I never doubted you.”

It would be remiss not to emphasize that the gesture is much more common between friends in Latin American cultures than it is in the United States. But it is still a striking visual: Perhaps without trying, Lula sent a powerful message. He embraced Hilton while many politicians, especially in the U.S. and including Democrats, refuse to touch trans issues (let alone trans people).

Hilton’s own star power cannot be overstated, either. She was reelected earlier this month to represent the state of São Paulo with more than 1.5 million votes, the most any woman has ever received in a race for the chamber. In 2023, she oversaw the united front of lawmakers dedicated to stopping a same-sex civil unions ban. Her advocacy crosses borders, too. Last year, she took on the Trump regime after officials ignored her Brazilian ID to declare her “male” on a U.S. travel visa.

“This election marked a turning point for trans rights in Brazil and Latin America,” said Victória Dandara, a lawyer and trans rights scholar originally from Brazil. She’s also a policy and legal fellow at the Council for Global Equality.

For one thing, she lauded Lula for defeating Bolsonaro’s proposed form of government entrenched with “anti-gender” policies, including an anti-trans athlete ban.

When Lula was down in the first round, he didn’t try to court voters by appealing to the anti-trans electorate. Instead, his campaign won by focusing on mobilizing voters who had otherwise abstained. He signed a number of eleventh-hour economic reform bills. Finally, young people helped carry him over the finish line.

“It has a symbolic component,” Dandara added over email. She called it a rejection of “the authoritarian fascist option aligned with Trump and the international trend taking over the region (such as De La Espriella’s government in Colombia, Fujimori’s in Peru, Kast’s in Chile, and Milei’s in Argentina).”

“Brazil taught the world a lesson in collective organizing and democratic resiliency,” she said.

The New Republic’s Perry Bacon, a seasoned political correspondent, went a step further. He called Lula’s victory “something of a roadmap for those trying to fight authoritarians around the world.”

Electing another Bolsonaro, Bacon writes, would have been “essentially an exoneration of his coup attempt”—the elder Bolsonaro refused to concede his 2022 loss, and his allies attacked halls of governance in an attempt to stop the transfer of power.

According to Brazil’s National Association of Travestis and Transsexuals (ANTRA), there were other major landmarks for the trans community in this election, too. The group counted 116 trans and “travesti” candidates running for office across Brazil—the most since ANTRA began tracking candidacies in 2014, and up from 79 in 2022.

Lula’s victory makes him the first Brazilian president to be elected to four terms, and the first candidate since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 to win the presidency after finishing second in the first round.

As for the video of Hilton—Dandara saw that, too.

“It’s fair to say that the whole LGBTQI+ community from Brazil, and maybe Latin America, felt kissed and seen in that gesture,” she said.

On Saturday, Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Iowa, released an ad in which he looked into the camera and said that he’s “against taxpayers paying for sex changes.” Read as federal policy, this is a Hyde Amendment for transgender people—no Medicaid, Medicare, or ACA subsidies. It would be horrific. The policy is more extreme than even some Republican policies in red states. To say it would be devastating to transgender people, who often depend on ACA plans or government-funded plans to obtain their care, would be an understatement. And Turek has made this stance the closing message of his 2026 campaign.

I would not vote for Josh Turek. I would not vote for Marcy Kaptur, who bragged in an ad that she “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools.” I would not vote for Kathy Castor, who, when asked if she supported “biological men” in women’s sports, laughed and gleefully said no, even as the other Democrats on her panel rejected the premise. I would not vote for Henry Cuellar, who has voted in favor of nearly every anti-trans bill to come before him in Congress. And if one of the worst anti-transgender Democrats is on your ballot this election cycle, you should not either.

Before I make my case, I want to be clear about what I am asking, because the people who respond to this piece will not be. I am not asking any of my readers to vote Republican. I am not asking anyone to stay home and sit the election out. I am not asking my readers to abandon the Democratic Party, which I want to win in a wave election this year. And I am not asking anyone to abstain from every Democratic politician who has ever taken a single poor or uneducated stance toward transgender people. What I am asking is that transgender people, and the people who care about us, find the line they would draw on any other fundamental human rights issue, and draw it here: do not give the worst anti-transgender Democrats your vote. Leave that line blank, vote for every other candidate, and make sure the story of 2026 is not that the Democratic Party has to accept anti-transgender policy in order to win.

There is a major problem in the Democratic Party right now. After the 2024 elections, a certain kind of “centrist” consultant class emerged that sought to blame Harris’ loss on transgender people. We saw it in the initial wave of Democrats who tried on anti-trans policies, and we saw it in the memos and candidate messaging guidelines put out immediately after, encouraging Democrats to throw transgender people under the bus, as if our lives were worth negotiating away. Pollsters and strategists followed, with some implementing those recommendations in the races we are all watching now. Democratic Party leaders and future presidential hopefuls are watching too. On Nov. 4, they will take every race in the country, find the story of what it means for the Democratic Party to compete in swing districts, and write the memo that decides how the next Congress will govern and what the 2028 presidential election will look like. If Turek wins in Iowa after running on a trans care funding ban, if Kaptur holds her district in Ohio after “transgender ideology” enters the Democratic vocabulary, the story will be that transphobia works in the Democratic Party. The template will be expanded, and anti-transgender sentiment will grow like a cancer in the only party that has stood up for transgender people.

Imagine an alternative world, though: a world where Abdul El-Sayed wins in Michigan after telling voters that “the decision about what healthcare is necessary ought to be held between a patient” and their doctor. A world in which Sam Forstag, running in Montana’s relatively conservative 1st Congressional District, wins after saying of Republicans’ anti-trans attacks that they are a distraction, “they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets,” and that we should “let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions.” Imagine a world where the Democrats who pulled back on their anti-transgender advertising, like Sherrod Brown, win, and where the many Democrats running in swing districts who never ran an anti-trans ad or took up an anti-trans policy position carry their races in a year when hundreds of millions of dollars are spent against them targeting a vulnerable community. And then imagine that Turek and Kaptur do not get to join them. The story of that election writes itself.

What I want our community, and the Democratic Party, to avoid is the fate of transgender people under Labour in the United Kingdom. I am not talking about the particulars of the British system of government, but rather the attitude the party has embraced, and what it has done with that power. We already know what happens when left-leaning people hold their noses and vote for transphobic candidates who otherwise hold the “correct” party designation. In 2024, those people voted in Labour and ended over a decade of Conservative rule, and then Labour enacted some of the most severe anti-transgender policies in any Western democracy. And while American government is built differently, and that will slow such a process here, it will not stop it. There’s no promise that a Democratic president elected in 2028 will undo Trump’s sports order or the pressure that pushed the NCAA and IOC to ban trans athletes. There’s no guarantee that a future Democratic Party, learning the lessons of next week’s elections, will maintain federal funding of gender-affirming care. There’s no promise that positions once confined to the Republican Party will not slowly become Democratic ones. And by the time it has happened, it will be too late to fight it or vote against it. The only moment a community, and those who care about us, can impose a cost for abandoning it is before that abandonment can spread. That moment is this election.

Some will argue, as they always do, that the alternative to even the most anti-transgender Democrat is worse. In any individual election, that is true: the Republican almost always has worse policies toward transgender people than the Democrat. But as I wrote a year ago, that is not the only calculation transgender people have to make, because elections come with lessons. If a Democrat who ran against us wins, the capitulation will be credited by strategists with enormous pull within the party. If they lose, nobody can claim they lost for standing with us, because they did not. Right now, transgender people have one major thing going for us: one of the two major parties still passes protective legislation and has not joined the litany of anti-trans policies escalating in the Republican Party. If that fragile dichotomy collapses, and Democrats decide that trans people can be sacrificed for political gain, the result is not a lesser evil, in which the candidates willing to throw us under the bus win but are not as bad as the Republicans would have been. The result is a political consensus across both parties that our rights are meaningless, and that outcome could be even worse. In a country where we have lost the one major party willing to fight for us, it could take a generation to claw back even the most basic of our rights.

Some will argue that we should fight back only in the primaries, or that we should elect the worst anti-transgender Democrats and try to “push them to be better after the election.” This is folly. For one, the majority of these Democrats took their anti-trans turn after the primary. More importantly, though, elected officials who run on transphobia will treat their win as a mandate for it. A candidate who campaigns on taking away our healthcare out of fear of anti-transgender advertisements is not suddenly going to vote for our healthcare: the ads will only be worse the following cycle, in a non-wave year. And good luck pushing a single candidate to be better when an entire state party, like the Ohio Democratic Party, has literally banned criticism of candidates’ anti-trans positions by members of the party’s Pride and Progressive caucuses. One of the things these groups cannot take away, though, is your vote. A vote that can be withheld is a vote that must be bargained with. This is the leverage we have over the worst anti-transgender Democrats.

Some will argue that this problem is overblown—that the vast majority of Democrats are pro-transgender. The point is well taken, and it’s exactly why this ask is limited and coming now rather than in two years. When I began reporting on anti-trans legislation, it was nearly unheard of for a Democrat running for congress or governor to embrace anti-trans policy. The few who did at the state level were fiercely primaried. Now, I maintain a list of 32 high profile anti-trans Democrats that grows every day. There are several dozen more in state legislatures that I have not had the time to fully vet and catalog. The lesson that the democratic Party will learn about how to compete in swing districts and close races across America is being written right now, and it will be written regardless of whether the many pro-trans Democrats agree with it. So let me take this objection at its word: if anti-trans sentiment is limited, then my ask is limited to match it—a few names out of thousands left blank to keep the sentiment from infecting the party.

So here is what I am asking you, my reader, to do. Find your line. You have one; everyone has one. You wouldn’t vote for a Democrat who ran ads calling for a ban on abortion or for bringing back the Defense of Marriage Act. You wouldn’t vote for one who sought to roll back the Civil Rights Act and laughed at the people it would hurt. Draw that line here, and leave the worst of these Democrats blank: Turek, Kaptur and a handful of others from my list of 32 anti-trans Democrats. I am not asking you to abstain on all 32. Most of them earned their place on that list with a vote or a statement, and some have improved since their inclusion on that list. The line I am asking you to draw is at only the worst among them, the ones who ran ads against us, promised to take away our healthcare, or laughed when asked about our kids. Then vote for all of the other Democrats on your ballot. And when the consultants sit down on Nov. 4 to write the memo of this election, make sure the only story they can tell is a true one: the anti-transgender ads failed, the Democrats who abandoned transgender people gained nothing for it, and the largest Democratic majority in years will proceed without the worst anti-trans cowards joining it.

On Saturday, Oct. 24, Josh Turek, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, released a new ad targeting transgender people—perhaps the worst anti-transgender ad of the entire election cycle to come from a Democrat. The ad begins with Turek talking about his disability and the importance of not discriminating, before immediately turning to adopt discriminatory policies toward transgender people. One such policy is a sports ban, a position sadly becoming increasingly common among high-profile Democrats in competitive races, and one that alone would have made this yet another newsworthy anti-trans ad. But Turek then goes further, advocating for a new policy: a proposal to ban federally funded gender-affirming care in the United States, one that would impact a substantial number of transgender people and make their care difficult to impossible to receive.

“As a kid in a wheelchair, I faced my share of bullying. It’s why I believe that no Iowan should face discrimination,” Turek begins in the ad, before turning to embrace discrimination: “As a Paralympian, I also know it’s important to have rules. It’s why I oppose males competing in female sports, something that is already illegal in Iowa. I’m against taxpayers paying for sex changes too. Anyone tells you any different is lying.” The ad then ends by declaring it’s time to “stop the nonsense from both extremes and start to focus on lowering costs for Iowans.” Notably, the “from both extremes” clip flashes to Rep. Becca Balint, the first woman and first openly gay person to represent Vermont in Congress, questioning Attorney General Pam Bondi on Epstein survivors.

You can watch the full ad here:

The ad is the latest in a slew of anti-transgender ads from high-profile Democratic candidates, and Iowa has been particularly remarkable for the way many of its Democrats have embraced and run on policies targeting transgender people. First, Sarah Trone Garriott, the Democratic nominee in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, ran an ad stating, “I oppose letting men in women’s locker rooms.” Meanwhile, Rob Sand, the party’s nominee for governor, said that he didn’t want “biological boys” in girls’ sports, and said that people “get mad if you use this word or that word.” He refused to walk those comments back when confronted at a rally. Turek, though, has been one of the most extreme anti-transgender Democratic candidates in the country, and his latest ad is perhaps the most extreme ever released by a Democrat, with the possible exception of Marcy Kaptur’s ad in Ohio calling transgender people an “ideology.”

The policy he is describing amounts to a “transgender Hyde Amendment,” an extreme policy pushed by Republicans targeting trans care. Such an amendment would restrict all federal funding for gender-affirming care, which could hit a surprising number of places: research, federal hospitals, Medicaid, Medicare, VA care and federally subsidized ACA plans would all be impacted, leaving substantial numbers of transgender people unable to afford their care. Though Trump has successfully restricted some Medicaid funding for transgender youth through draconian executive orders, he has not done so for transgender adults. Turek’s policy in the ad, however, does not even limit itself to transgender youth but targets all care, making it even harsher.

Outrage over the ad was swift, with many transgender people and organizations calling out the harm it causes. “Turek’s stance is cruel, electorally misguided, and out of step with his own party. Most swing-seat Democrats have stood with us, but keeping the trans community’s trust requires Democrats—and, at a minimum, LGBTQ+ organizations—to call this bullshit out,” said Tyler Hack, executive director of the Christopher Street Project, an organization focused on electing pro-transgender candidates to public office.

“This ad will not pick up a single new voter,” posted famed transgender author Julia Serano on Bluesky, “As I discuss in my most recent essay … candidates like Turek are actively working to divide the current anti-MAGA coalition. If you’re worried about trans ppl protesting or not voting, don’t blame us, BLAME TUREK et al FOR BEING DIVISIVE!”

One poster even noted that they were able to request a refund of their donation through ActBlue (you can find instructions on how to request a refund of your own donation to Turek’s campaign here).

As the final days leading up to the election come to a close, candidates across the country are choosing what message they want to end with. While some Democrats, such as Sherrod Brown, have pulled back on their anti-trans ads, and others, such as Sam Forstag in Montana and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, have openly refused to throw transgender people under the bus, Turek is making his closing message about anti-transgender hate. In an election that hinges on the price of groceries and health care, it remains to be seen whether his puzzling choice will pay off or doom his campaign.

The Democratic incumbent for Florida’s 14th Congressional District, Rep. Kathy Castor, was all smiles last week as she threw transgender Americans under the bus.

At a candidate forum at the Tampa Tiger Bay Club—a nonpartisan organization that hosts political programming such as this—the group’s Republican treasurer, Art Wood, took aim at trans people with the very first question of the event.

“What is your position on men, biological men, in women’s sports?” he asked, invoking a common pejorative used to describe transgender women and girls. “Are you for it or against it?”

“The answer is no,” Castor said, grinning and laughing. She did not elaborate.

The lone Republican at the dais, Castor’s opponent and former State Rep. Mike Beltran, also decried equal rights for transgender athletes.

Two other Democrats joined the District 14 candidates on stage. Robert People, an Army veteran, is running against GOP incumbent Rep. Laurel Lee in the 15th district, and former Hillsborough County Commissioner Kimberly Overman is challenging the 12th district’s Rep. Gus Bilirakis.

“I’m not sure we’re going to be going through the whole gender test to determine who is going to be in sports,” Overman said. “I think there’s an opportunity to make sure people are able to compete fairly,” she continued, and emphasized the importance of making sure “everybody can actually compete with dignity.”

People concurred. “I’m with my fellow candidate Kimberly Overman, here,” he said, adding there are vanishingly few transgender women competing in sports. “What we don’t want to do, as far as being members of Congress, is put so much more of an emphasis on something that is not an issue when there’s so many more issues that we do need to address [...] Let’s not pretend people are losing sleep over this.”

It should be noted that Overman and People are in a much different boat than Castor. Polling strongly indicates that both of those races will be easy wins for the Republicans currently representing their districts. Castor occupies a reliably blue seat turned “toss-up” after redistricting. She’s also no stranger to a rightward drift, having been one of eight Democrats to vote for a GOP measure condemning “socialism in all its forms” that was packaged with the SAVE America Act, and one of 13 to back a GOP voter ID bill in July.

But Castor’s latest foray into anti-trans talking points also betrays a troubling strategy by Republicans: With gerrymandering, they don’t even need to win a blue seat. They can dilute the electorate and scare Democratic incumbents into taking a hard right turn on key issues, and equal rights for trans people is seen as an easy first domino to fall.

Castor is the latest incumbent Democrat to be added to Erin in the Morning’s small but troubling “Guide To Anti-Trans Democrats,” which has over 30 names from 17 states as of this writing. It also includes lawmakers who voted for the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act” to strip funding from schools that support transgender people (Rep. Cleo Fields of Louisiana, Rep. Laura Gillen of New York, Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, and Rep. Eugene Vindman of Virginia), as well as James Talarico, a Texas Senate candidate who voiced support for nationwide bans on surgical care for trans minors, and Iowa gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand, who has voiced opposition to equal rights and inclusion for transgender athletes.

You can see the full list tracked by Erin in the Morning here.

This election cycle has been difficult for transgender Americans. Democratic candidate after Democratic candidate has come out in support of some level of anti-transgender policy. Some, like Iowa Senate nominee Josh Turek, have said they would back a ban on federal funding for transgender care. Others, like Ohio gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton, have called transgender girls “boys,” with the Ohio Democratic Party going so far as to censor its own Pride and Progressive Caucuses. And on Wednesday, what appears to be the first anti-trans ad ever released by the DCCC, the campaign arm of House Democrats, began airing in South Carolina. It was in this environment that a transgender student stood up Thursday night to ask Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a question at a More Perfect University town hall in Portland, Maine. The trans student asked how AOC felt about Democrats who have abandoned trans people and called them a “losing issue.” Her answer was a direct rebuke. They are “wrong,” she said, and she was “shameful and sorry” that there are politicians who “scare so easily after an election” and “jump on this side or that side of the line at a moment’s notice,” before mounting a full defense of transgender people.

“Hi, I am a transgender student at the University of Southern Maine, and a lot, I and a lot of, you know, trans people in America feel that we have been abandoned by the Democratic Party, by, that we are a losing issue, that it’s not worth defending us. What do you say to that?” asked a student at the event.

“They’re wrong. They’re wrong. And first and foremost, I want to just let you know how shameful and sorry I am that there are people out there that are, that scare so easily after an election. And I think it’s what people hate most about politics, which is politicians who will jump on this side or that side of the line at a moment’s notice,” Ocasio-Cortez responded, before continuing to call out the effect of compromising on transgender rights: “What is so important for everyone to understand is that the moment you compromise the rights of a trans person in America, you compromise the rights of every citizen in America.”

She then went on to fully defend transgender people, calling the attacks on trans people an attempt to demolish Title IX: “So this administration, in focusing and trying to gin up hatred against trans Americans, the Trump administration, while everyone was focused on that, quietly defunded the civil rights division of enforcement in the administration on Title IX. And so understand that when they attack trans girls in sports, they’re also attacking all women’s ability to stand up against their abusers, their rapists, and their assaulters on campuses across America. And that’s why I think it’s very important for all of us to understand and to feel and to know that our fight is united. It really is united.”

See the full exchange here:

The event was held Thursday night and featured Ocasio-Cortez alongside Troy Jackson, Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee running against Susan Collins. For just over an hour, the two took questions from students on everything from AI to student debt to ICE and Israel. Jackson himself has not released anti-transgender advertising as some Democrats have done, though Maine has been at the center of fierce anti-transgender campaigning, such as an attempt this year to get a sports ban onto the November ballot that was quashed in court.

The student’s question comes as candidates and political arms of the Democratic Party have slowly but steadily begun to embrace anti-transgender policy positions and advertising. Josh Turek, running for U.S. Senate in Iowa, for instance, has said he would back a federal ban on funding for gender-affirming care. Marcy Kaptur in Ohio boasted in her own ad that she “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools.” And this week, the DCCC, the official campaign arm of House Democrats, began airing what appears to be its first-ever anti-transgender ad, in which a Republican lists reasons why he is supporting South Carolina Democrat Nancy Lacore, among them that she will “protect girls’ sports,” something Lacore’s campaign manager confirmed refers to barring transgender girls from girls’ sports. Increasingly, transgender people are feeling abandoned by the party and wondering if their votes are valued.

Not every Democrat has taken this bait, however—most have simply stayed quiet, and some have pushed back forcefully. For instance, when Sam Forstag, the Democrat running in Montana’s relatively conservative 1st Congressional District, was asked about transgender sports, he refused to throw trans people under the bus. Instead, he said that Republicans were using the issue to distract voters while they “pick our pockets,” and that the government should stay out of sports leagues. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said that “the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of health care you should have” when asked on Fox News about care for trans youth. And the Progress Action Fund is running an ad in Ohio and Texas in which a would-be Republican lawmaker lurks in a bathroom stall to verify the sex of a little girl. Now, Ocasio-Cortez, one of the party’s most popular figures, has put the rest of the Democratic Party on notice that it is wrong to abandon trans people. With Election Day nearing, it remains to be seen if the party listens.

This week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official campaign arm of House Democrats, has begun running an ad in South Carolina for Nancy Lacore, the Democratic nominee in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District. The ad appears to be the first instance of the high-level Democratic organization running an ad targeting transgender people. The 30-second spot, titled “SC-01: That’s Nancy,” went up on YouTube Oct. 19 and began airing yesterday in Charleston and Savannah as “part of the committee’s coordinated spending in key battleground districts.” It features Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie, “a lifelong Republican supporting a Democrat for Congress.” Specifically, it highlights Lacore’s support for a transgender sports ban, with Haynie stating she would “protect girls’ sports,” a statement that a campaign representative confirmed refers to barring transgender girls from girls’ sports.

The ad opens with Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie stating, “I’m Mayor Will Haynie. I’m a lifelong Republican supporting a Democrat for Congress.” He then explains why: “Partisan politics won’t solve our problems. We need leaders who put service first. That’s Nancy Lacore. Nancy will represent us. She’ll be a watchdog for our tax dollars and stand up to both parties to lower costs, secure our border, and protect girls’ sports. Nancy knows what makes the Lowcountry special.” Nancy Lacore then closes with, “I’m Nancy Lacore. I’m proud to have Mayor Haynie’s support, and I approve this message.” Meanwhile, “Paid for by DCCC and Nancy Lacore for Congress” runs at the bottom of the screen.

You can see the ad here:

Though saying she will “protect girls’ sports” has no inherent anti-transgender meaning, in the current political climate it often refers to banning transgender athletes—primarily transgender girls—from competing. And indeed, when asked by the Post and Courier about the ad, her campaign manager, Kaylie Haberstroh, confirmed that Lacore does not support transgender girls playing in girls’ sports leagues and would potentially support legislation in Congress against it. “She wants to acknowledge those concerns that she’s heard, because it is a big issue for voters right now,” Haberstroh said. This makes Lacore the latest in a slew of Democrats running in 2026 to stake out an anti-transgender position and run ads on it.

What’s more alarming for transgender people, however, is that the DCCC is behind the ad. Whereas a candidate’s political ad is the candidate’s choice, an ad paid for by the DCCC is the Democratic Party’s choice. That makes this ad the first known instance of the party itself choosing anti-transgender messaging to win an election, a notable development for those watching for signs that explicitly anti-transgender positions, once rare in the Democratic Party, might be gaining steam across the party as a whole.

This escalation comes as more and more evidence emerges that anti-transgender ads are ineffective, suggesting that embracing anti-transgender messaging is a policy choice rather than a political calculation designed to win an election. This month, multiple polls have shown that voters rank transgender issues among the issues they care about least when voting for a candidate. Those who do rank the issues highly are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, and more Americans trust Democrats than Republicans to handle transgender issues. Meanwhile, Republicans and their allies, including the American Principles Project and former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, have warned that anti-transgender messaging alone may not be enough this cycle, or that it simply isn’t resonating. Still, an increasing number of Democrats are choosing to support anti-transgender positions, and now the DCCC itself has done so.

The Lacore ad, run in coordination with the DCCC, is just the latest anti-transgender ad in South Carolina. Earlier this month, Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews was called a pejorative word for transgender people by Trump, despite being cisgender. Rather than stand on her record of supportive statements toward transgender people, she made a 180-degree turn, releasing an ad of her own calling transgender women “biological men.” Several other Democratic candidates have also adopted such messaging, tracked by EITM here.

See the DCCC press release supporting this ad here.

Anti-transgender ads have flooded TV in Republican states this election season, and they are almost impossible to miss. The goal is to trigger a transphobic reaction from everyday voters and get them to vote against the Democratic candidate in whatever race the ads run in, a goal the ads are failing to achieve this year. But while the ads may be struggling to move voters, conservatives are noticing an unintended side effect of saturating the airwaves with ads targeting transgender people: they are also reaching the children of conservative parents. Now, parents on r/Conservative, a popular conservative forum on Reddit, are lamenting that the ads are teaching their kids that transgender people exist, with one fearing that conservatives are “talking the very things we don’t want into existence.”

“I’m in Texas, and it seems like every commercial break has 4–6 political ads, most of them attacking James Talarico,” the post starts, before lamenting, “My kids didn’t even know what transgender meant until these ads started airing. Now they’re hearing about it constantly, and not because they went looking for it. The anti-Talarico ads seem to talk about these issues more than anyone else does. It irritates me especially when I don’t want to explain what they’re talking about to my children.”

The poster then goes on to explain that they are worried the ads might make their children trans, stating, “Constantly talking about the things we oppose is actually giving them more attention than they would otherwise receive. Again I get the angle, keep these people away from influential positions within our government and advertising it. But we’re practically talking the very things we don’t want into existence.”

See the full post here:

The volume that the parent describes here is real. AdImpact has placed total ad spending in the Texas Senate race at $442 million as of early October, and a large portion of those ads have targeted transgender people. Meanwhile, America PAC, Elon Musk’s super PAC, has pledged $100 million in ads, and much of that money has likewise gone to ads targeting trans people. Trans people have reported seeing the ads in airports, at sporting events and while just spending time with their families—it is no surprise that cisgender people and their children are likewise seeing the ads when they would rather not.

The extreme focus on transgender people stands in stark contrast to what voters actually care about or find salient in their day-to-day lives. Recent polls show that even when voters can pick up to five top issues, transgender issues do not make the cut, ranking dead last. And Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they care about such issues. Saturating the airwaves with such ads appears to serve only to irritate voters, and now conservatives are even wondering if the ads are introducing the topic to their own children.

For a political party that has made fearmongering over kids learning about trans people in schools a major component of its mission, from banning books to forbidding gay-straight alliances, the move to saturate the airwaves with transgender topics may be seen as puzzling and hypocritical. The ads may indeed be the first introduction many children in conservative families receive to the idea that transgender people exist, and some of these kids are likely to one day realize they are trans themselves. Unfortunately, these ads also serve to ingrain hostility towards transgender people. In states where trans people already struggle to get by, the impact of such abuse may last far beyond election day, no matter who is elected.

New Zealand’s leading authority on transgender health care is celebrating a sweeping victory after successfully challenging the country’s puberty blocker ban for trans youth, the Court ruled today.

The Court ruled it is incumbent on the Health Minister and Cabinet to decide what regulations should be implemented to govern the safe use of puberty blockers, but that the way they had done so was unlawful.

“We’re incredibly relieved that the Court has come to this finding,” said Jennifer Shields, president of the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA), in a press release.

“Moves to restrict transgender people’s right to access healthcare are rooted in disinformation and have massively significant impacts on the health and wellbeing of transgender people,” she continued. “I’m pleased that the Court agreed that this ban was an act of unjustified discrimination.”

The saga began in November 2024, when New Zealand health officials published a brief casting doubt on the efficacy of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria. A year later, they moved to ban the issuance of new puberty blocker prescriptions when used to alleviate gender dysphoria in trans youth.

Initially, the ban allowed exceptions for clinical trials or for those at risk of imminent harm, although patients currently taking puberty blockers were exempt.

However, following pressure from conservative “anti-woke” activists, the policy struck those carve-outs. This means the ban was even more absolute than the fallout from the Cass Review in the United Kingdom.

That document, too, was heavily cited and debated throughout New Zealand’s proceedings; it is a highly contentious, politically charged document rebuked by leading experts in the field of gender-affirming care. (“The Ministry also considered the Cass Review in its Evidence Brief and concluded it did not warrant a prohibition on new prescriptions.”)

“Decisions about this healthcare are best made by patients and their doctors,” PATHA Vice-President Dr. Elizabeth McElrea said. “This judgement means that as clinicians we can continue to prescribe GnRH agonists in line with best practice and without fear of retribution for doing the right thing.”

PATHA sued to stop the provision before it could take full effect. The High Court sided with PATHA, ruling the ban was “unjustified and disproportionate discrimination” on the basis of a medical condition. It declined to weigh in on whether it constituted discrimination based on sex.

The Court also found that the government failed to adequately incorporate public input because it never consulted those most directly impacted by the ban: transgender youth.

Perhaps the most notable facet of the ruling, however, was the internal democratic and scientific processes it relied upon, and how starkly that contrasts with these same discussions happening in places like the United States and the United Kingdom. For example, even New Zealand’s Minister of Health—who pulled the trigger on the ban—“accepts transgender identities are real, that transgender people are part of the natural diversity of human existence, and that being trans is not pathological or a mental illness,” legal documents read.

Finally, the Court refused to fuel the manufactured crisis around these interventions, declaring: “[T]here can be no doubt that it has the short-term benefit of preventing the distress caused to gender dysphoric/incongruent youth experiencing permanent changes to their body that do not align with their gender identity.”

While conservative forces continue to erode the landscape of gender-affirming care, the New Zealand ruling is no small feat for the countless families who have been anxious in wait as this legal battle made its way through the courts.

“Such an act of discrimination is something no young person should have to experience,” said Avery Zavoda, PATHA’s Secretary. “It’s now a matter of law that restricting trans young people’s access to puberty blockers is discriminatory.”

A little girl walks into a bathroom and screams. Sitting there, scowling inside the stall, is the man who might be your next representative.

“I’m your Republican congressman,” the man says. “Now that we’re in charge, I’m checking to make sure there’s no trans people in the wrong bathroom.”

She protests; he insists. “I won the last election, and this is my priority. Now, let’s make sure you’re really a girl.”

This is the premise of the latest ad by the Progress Action Fund (PAF), a left-wing PAC running ads to “disrupt the right-wing media bubble,” as its website says.

The ad is incisive, unsettling, and to the point. It’s exactly the kind of thing this PAC is known for.

Joe Jacobson, PAF’s executive director, wants to see the left wage a meaningful counternarrative to Republicans’ anti-trans hate. “There was no counter in 2024, and that was devastating for Democrats,” he told Erin in the Morning. “Rather than just sidestepping the issue, we need to have a counter, and the testing shows our counter is effective.”

According to independent randomized controlled testing, the “Republicans in Your Bathroom” ad can move swing voters 8 points toward Democrats, as per a press release from PAF. The group is also the creative force behind viral, in-your-face attack ads against Republicans, like “Republicans In Your Bedroom” and “Republicans Blowing Your Taxes.”

“Republicans In Your Bathroom” will primarily run in Texas and Ohio, two key battleground states in this midterm election. The ads are expected to reach 50 million Americans.

It’s a welcome antidote to the GOP’s fearmongering about trans people. This includes an Ohio ad by the Senate Leadership Fund, which featured a Texas woman who falsely claimed she underwent gender-affirming surgery as a minor, without parental consent. There was also an attack ad against James Talarico that emphasized he’s “too weak” for Texas as a trans flag waved in the background. And Iowa’s Sarah Trone Garriott was the target of an ad campaign that lambasted her for supposedly supporting trans-inclusive sports teams.

It’s no surprise, then, that Elon Musk’s PAC spent over $100 million on ads this cycle, with a heavy focus on trans issues. Nor is it a shock to learn that in 2024, Republicans spent almost $215 million on network TV ads attacking the transgender community.

Unfortunately, some Democrats in high-profile races appear to cede ground to this hateful rhetoric. Trone Garriott, for example, released an ad in response to allegations that she supported the trans community by declaring that she opposes “men in women’s locker rooms,” which is a pejorative often used to describe transgender women and girls.

But Jacobson’s response? “Republicans are creepy as hell,” he said in a statement. “Democrats need to grow a spine and call Republicans out for their creepy fetish of monitoring children’s bathrooms.”

In the first few weeks of October, three national pollsters asked three different questions about transgender issues, and all three landed in the same place from different angles: the anti-transgender ads this year may be backfiring on Republican strategists. Navigator Research, AP-NORC and ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos polls collectively found that voters trust Democrats on transgender issues and rank those issues as not very important to their vote, and that Republican and independent voters were less likely than Democrats to prioritize them. When the polls are contrasted with the massive amount of ad spend on transgender issues, there are signs, first seen in the Virginia gubernatorial election last year, that the high concentration of ads may turn voters off and could fuel, rather than suppress, a Democratic wave election in 2026.

The first poll to come out was the Navigator Research poll. In this poll, voters were asked to list up to five top issues, giving it a stronger signal than prior polls that only required voters to list their top issue. Even when voters were asked to list five, transgender issues ranked dead last among all 20 issues on the list. And Democratic voters were the most likely group to rank transgender issues a top issue, meaning many of those who did are likely voting to protect transgender rights, not to restrict those rights. Prior polls from Gallup have found similar results, although this poll is most notable due to its top-five format.

Then, another poll came out: AP-NORC asked Americans on a per-issue basis how important each issue was to their own vote. Whereas most issues asked about were considered “one of the most important,” such as the economy and the war with Iran, only 11% of respondents named transgender issues one of the most important to their vote. Furthermore, 51% of respondents said that transgender issues were “not an important issue” at all, the only issue to score higher than the teens on that question. And as we know from prior polling, Democrats are much more likely to answer that transgender issues are important to them.

Lastly, an ABC/Post/Ipsos poll has been released that outright asks Americans which party they trust to do a better job on transgender issues. Of those asked, 38% of Americans say they trust Democrats on transgender issues when compared to 29% who say they trust Republicans, a 9-point Democratic edge. Notably, Americans trust Democrats on a whole host of issues that the survey asks about, ranging from health care to the economy. Only on crime do respondents trust Republicans more than Democrats, a poor sign for the Republican Party in the lead-up to the 2026 elections.

These results are heavily contrasted by the money being spent on anti-transgender ads. According to AdImpact data, more than $100 million has been spent since Aug. 1 on more than 200 ads that use the phrase “sex change.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s America PAC has committed $100 million to a midterm push heavy on anti-transgender ads aimed at Democrats. EITM has received reports of mailers in several races ranging from state legislative to congressional campaigns that such data has no way of capturing, and many political pundits have pointed out that the anti-trans ad focus seems to be a defining issue in the 2026 midterms.

Republicans are starting to sound the alarm that the anti-trans ads are not working. The American Principles Project, one of the progenitors of anti-transgender ads, has admitted that such ads “may not be sufficient” on their own this election cycle for Republicans to win the midterms. And former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, said last week that the ads are just “not resonating” with Texas voters. Now, these polls confirm the fears of Republican strategists about the effectiveness of the ads.

If all of this sounds familiar to EITM readers, it is because similar dynamics played out around the same time in 2025 in Virginia’s gubernatorial and House of Delegates elections. Voters, when asked who would better handle transgender issues, named Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor, over Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican. Despite this, Earle-Sears kept pouring more and more money into anti-trans ads, with such ads making up a whopping 57% of Republican ad spending in the race. Even though polls showed a closer race, Spanberger took the contest by 15 points and Democrats scored a 64 seat historic majority in the House of Delegates. Not only did anti-transgender ads not work, but the sheer volume of them may have turned off voters who ultimately trusted Democrats over Republicans to handle such issues.

Could we see similar results in the 2026 elections? The signs are there. Polling shows Democrats running ahead, and forecasters favor them to win both the House and the Senate this year, while races in states normally far out of reach for Democrats appear to be floating into their grasp. Republicans, meanwhile, keep pouring money into targeting transgender people, perhaps unable to run on much else, even as their own strategists warn it may not be enough. This could be the year the gambit fails on a national scale. Voters will deliver their verdict on Election Day, Nov. 3.

Texas Republicans’ former House Speaker, Dade Phelan, has become the latest conservative to read the writing on the wall: Transphobia is not a winning election strategy in 2026.

“We’re just not paying attention to the issues that matter,” Phelan told Texas Monthly last week.

“We’re still running transgender ads. It’s just not resonating. $100 million in ads, $125 million in ads, and nothing’s moved the needle here in Texas in a month in the Senate race.”

The Houston Chronicle’s Gwen Howerton followed up that Q&A with an article of her own, with a headline declaring: “Texas Republican says party’s anti-trans ads are a bust.”

“While Texas voters and voters nationwide have expressed more conservative beliefs on transgender sports inclusion, transgender issues regularly rank at the bottom of voter concerns compared to the economy and the cost of living,” Howerton noted.

Phelan’s remarks come amidst a growing trend. Republicans and Democrats alike are noticing “diminishing returns,” as The Palm Beach Post’s John Pacenti put it, when it comes to investments in transphobic scare ads.

“The 8 to 10 percent of voters in the middle who are going to decide this election, when they hear stuff about boys in girls’ sports, they don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Phelan said. “This never happened in their communities, and they’ve been hearing about it for so many years, and so many other people have been accused of it.”

Phelan isn’t the only one noticing this trend. The American Principles Project, a right-wing think tank largely responsible for the wave of anti-trans sports bans, warned conservative candidates against using trans people as a crutch to prop up their campaign strategy.

“While Democrats may be on the offensive, recent message testing we have conducted in several key swing states suggest that they remain vulnerable on culture-war issues, particularly in their support for transgender ideology and so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) policies,” a September memo by the APP reads. “Still, pressing the advantage on these issues alone, while important, may not be sufficient.”

The record-setting deluge of anti-trans propaganda may be the defining aspect of this election. On the Democratic side, Ohio’s Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who is running for re-election, decried “transgender ideology” in a campaign ad which, after reporting from Erin in the Morning, was denounced by the Equality PAC. South Carolina’s Senate candidate, Annie Andrews, released an ad calling trans women “biological men,” which is a transphobic dog whistle. Similarly, Iowa’s Sarah Trone Garriott’s ad cleared the air around allegations that she was a trans ally by announcing she was against “men in women’s locker rooms.”

On the Republican side, Elon Musk pumped megadonor dollars into anti-trans messaging, solidifying his position as the top donor for Ken Paxton’s Texas Senate run. Right-wing transphobia is not terribly novel, but notably, those very same Democrats found themselves embroiled in the GOP’s attacks anyway. The President called Annie Andrews an anti-trans slur; Trone Garriott’s anti-trans ad was met with even more transphobia from the right. Erin in the Morning is actively tracking nearly two dozen Democrats who have adopted anti-trans stances or deployed transphobic rhetoric.

“What Republicans are talking about is just not what the swing voter is really interested in,” said Phelan. Concerns like the price of gas and groceries, rising debt, and health care bills have been swept aside. In their place, Republicans have manufactured the crisis about transgender people, but as the GOP is finding out, this can only get them so far.

Few states have featured Democrats taking an anti-transgender turn more than Iowa. Major candidates there, including Senate candidate Josh Turek, gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand and IA-03 candidate Sarah Trone Garriott, have all staked out some of the most anti-trans positions of any Democrats running in the midterms, each responding to ads against them. That is why Christina Bohannan’s response is notable: in a state where major candidates have all been following virtually the same playbook, she has bucked it. In an ad running this week across Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, Bohannan highlights her own high school track career and shifts the topic from fairness in sports to what she calls the real unfairness: Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks siding with drug companies against capping insulin prices and the unfairness in the current tax bracket in Iowa. It is the first ad this cycle from an Iowa Democrat answering anti-trans attacks against her that does not involve borrowing Republican messaging and making her own anti-trans ad.

“I’m Christina Bohannan. As the only one in this race who ran track in high school, it matters to me that girls’ sports are fair. That’s why Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ false smear campaign is downright pathetic. What Miller-Meeks is doing in Washington, siding with the drug companies, taking their money and sticking it to Iowans, that’s what’s really unfair. I’m Christina Bohannan and I approve this message because I’ll cut middle-class taxes, shake up Washington and always put Iowa first,” Bohannan says in the television ad.

See the ad here:

Bohannan’s ad comes in response to attacks against her from her opponent, Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Miller-Meeks has flooded the district with anti-transgender mailers, stating that Bohannan “wants your tax dollars to fund sex-change surgery” and “When Iowa voted to protect girls’ sports, Christina Bohannan voted NO.” Miller-Meeks has also focused on an unearthed video of Bohannan saying a trans sports ban in Iowa would make the state look like “a backwater” to the rest of the nation, something Miller-Meeks has tried to jump on by accusing Bohannan of calling Iowa a “backwater” over its trans athlete ban.

The race is expected to be one of many that are highly competitive this year. It is a rematch of a previous election, where Bohannan came up 798 votes short against Miller-Meeks in 2024 and where similar anti-transgender attacks were run against her. This year, however, Bohannan appears to be surging ahead in several indicators. Polls show Bohannan up, and the race was originally rated a toss-up, but now election prediction outlets see it as leaning Democratic. Republican officials have in turn privately described the district as “too difficult to win.” Given the competitiveness of this race, it is notable that Bohannan is not throwing transgender people under the bus in a similar way to other Iowa Democrats in the state.

Other Iowa Democrats have taken a markedly different approach. Sarah Trone Garriott, candidate for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, called transgender women “men” in a recent ad and said she opposes them in women’s locker rooms, saying politicians have become “too extreme on these issues.” Rob Sand, candidate for governor of Iowa, said he opposed “biological boys” in girls’ sports and mocked people who objected to the language used, stating that critics “get mad if you use this word or that word” to talk about transgender people. And Josh Turek, candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, even said that he supported a national federal funding ban on gender-affirming care.

While those Democrats have decided that their transgender constituents are no longer worth protecting, Christina Bohannan’s approach may be closer to what is becoming the prevailing wisdom even among those running these ads. In a recent memo, the American Principles Project, one of the biggest funders of anti-trans attack ads, warned that targeting trans people “may not be sufficient” for Republicans to win in 2026, an assessment shared by former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, who said this week that his party is “still running transgender ads. It’s just not resonating.” And more Democrats are beginning to take Bohannan’s approach rather than the anti-trans one. In a debate this week, Montana’s Sam Forstag called his opponent’s attacks “fear-mongering” meant “to distract” voters while Republicans “pick our pockets,” and in Ohio, Sherrod Brown has answered anti-trans attack ads by turning them back on his opponent rather than adopting their talking points. Transgender voters will be watching closely to learn what lessons the results hold.

Ana Mota is a senior at South Grand Prairie High School, which sits in the suburbs between Dallas and Fort Worth. She felt excited when she was cast as the lead, Seymour, in her school’s upcoming production of “Little Shop of Horrors,” which is about an anthropomorphic plant that kills and eats people. The problem: Seymour is traditionally a man’s role, and Mota lives in Texas.

Days after the cast list was announced, school officials stepped in and demanded Mota be removed from the role, citing Texas SB12. They claimed, falsely, that Mota playing a male character opposite a female love interest would violate state and federal law surrounding LGBTQ+ content. Instead, they would give her role to a boy and force her to share the role of Audrey, his love interest.

She refused, and so the district cancelled the show the next day.

“On Tuesday October 6th, I was informed that I will no longer be allowed to portray this role due to a decision made by the district and its legal team concerning Senate Bill 12,” Mota wrote in an Instagram post earlier this week. It has over 10,000 likes as of this writing.

“The district was afraid they were teetering on the line of the laws stated in SB12 and decided to take extreme caution, removing me from the role,” Mota wrote. “In turn, they violated Title 9, I was excluded from participation in an education program receiving Federal financial assistance because I am a female.”

Mota said in the statement that the school cited SB 12 (2023), an anti-drag law which has been struck down twice already, but a spokesperson for the district told Erin in the Morning that it was because of SB 12 (2025), an entirely separate law despite the overlap in name over the years. The latter bill is a “Don’t Say LGBTQ” law, and the ACLU called it “one of the most extreme education bans in the country.”

Mota did not respond to a request for comment from Erin in the Morning.

The Grand Prairie ISD said it was simply trying to comply with state and federal law. However, there is no federal law that bans drag performances, nor any law that restricts LGBT content in classrooms, and it seems any key anti-LGBT provisions of state laws have been halted by a preliminary injunction in other districts.

“Recently, a casting decision was made to place a female student in the role of a male character in the school musical,” a spokesperson told Erin in the Morning in a statement. “In the musical, a romantic relationship develops between the two main characters.”

“When District leadership learned of this issue and in consideration of themes in the musical involving an abusive relationship, a decision was made to pull that production and find something more appropriate,” it continued. “This decision was made in light of the District’s ongoing effort to ensure its programs remain consistent with Senate Bill 12 and all applicable law.” They further clarified they were referencing SB 12 (2025), which was the “Don’t Say LGBTQ” law, as opposed to the 2023 drag ban.

The arts have been especially under attack due to conservatives’ militant enforcement of the gender binary, both on and off the stage. Picture books about penguins and unicorns, rainbow stickers, and Shakespearean theatre have also been targeted by anti-trans animus.

“I do not want a new musical; I want the part I auditioned for, in the musical I expected to do my senior year,” her post continued. “I do not believe it is a fair compromise to take everyone’s parts away instead of just giving what is rightfully mine back.”

Transgender people are facing a constant barrage of anti-transgender ads from Republicans this election cycle. Meanwhile, dozens of Democratic candidates have determined that the best way to answer them is to throw transgender people under the bus. Marcy Kaptur in Ohio ran an ad touting her vote to keep “transgender ideology” out of schools, and in Iowa, Josh Turek declared he would support a federal funding ban on gender-affirming care. The argument made by those at Searchlight, one of the major anti-trans Democratic organizations, is that this is necessary, that refusing to throw transgender people under the bus will cost you an election. Now, Democratic candidate Sam Forstag in Montana’s 1st Congressional District is bucking that trend. In a debate with his opponent, vehemently anti-transgender talk radio host Aaron Flint, he was asked directly about transgender rights, and he answered that the government “has no business” in these decisions, and that voters should “keep politics the heck out of it.”

“Aaron, the U.S. Supreme Court has said that discrimination against transgender people is discrimination based on sex in the workplace, but it has not definitively established transgender status as a protected class under the 14th Amendment. Do you consider gender identity a protective classification under the 14th Amendment and why?” asked NonStop Local anchor Bradley Warren, to which Aaron Flint responded with an answer about not “touching children” and “chopping off body parts.”

Then, it came time for Forstag’s answer, a moment that has seen other Dems take anti-transgender stances. Forstag, however, did not take that approach, and instead embraced keeping the government out of transgender people’s lives, giving a very Montana-aware political answer that did not throw transgender people under the bus:

“Well, I’ll tell you, lies and anger. They don’t solve these problems. To your question, Bradley. Everybody in Montana deserves to live the life with dignity that is protected in our state Constitution in Article 2. That is what I will fight for as your next congressperson… Government has no business sticking its nose into our personal lives, whether that’s a gun safe, whether that’s a doctor’s office. I don’t want a politician anywhere near it. So, well, let’s leave sports to the leagues that actually run them. Let’s let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions, and let’s keep politics the heck out of it. Because what I see with that kind of anger and rhetoric is a lot of singing and dancing, and they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets. I won’t stand for that,” Forstag responded.

The exchange continued, with Flint saying that Forstag wanted to “create special rights for men who think they are women,” to which Forstag responded by pointing out how Flint’s attacks were just meant to distract voters from Flint’s support of data centers and AI companies, stating, “Yeah, there was not a lick of truth to anything that Aaron just said. What I want to do is actually make sure that parents are able to make decisions for their own kids, that patients are able to make their own private personal decisions. Because parents know what’s best for their kids. The sports leagues know how to best run those leagues. And this fear-mongering from Aaron is to distract from the fact that he does not have any solutions to make working people’s lives better because Aaron’s not going to be working to make our lives better. Aaron’s going to be working to, well, serve those AI companies.”

See the full exchange here (Timestamp at 49 minutes):

Forstag’s answers are notable. There is perhaps no more competitive race in the country than Montana’s 1st Congressional District. It is a district Trump took by 11 points in 2024 and a district that Democrats have attempted to pick up twice before, only to come up short. Forstag’s candidacy, though, is seen as strong, with the Cook Political Report moving the race from Likely Republican to Lean Republican in late September and public polls showing a dead heat. His history as a smokejumper putting out wildfires is particularly salient during a year that has seen extensive smoke and fires in the Pacific Northwest. And despite running in a competitive district, Forstag has done little to downplay or hide his progressive roots, even going so far as to campaign alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Missoula, Montana, during his primary. Even with this competitiveness, he refused to throw transgender people under the bus.

Representative Zooey Zephyr, a transgender state legislator that lives in Forstag’s district, commended his answer on bluesky, stating “Let's go, Sam Forstag! That's how you stand up for trans people on the national stage. If congressional candidates in western Montana—one of the most competitive House races in the entire country—can stand up for trans folks in every aspect of our lives, democrats everywhere should take note.”

Editor’s note: Erin Reed, the writer of this story, lives in Montana’s first congressional district and is happily married to Representative Zooey Zephyr.

Transgender candidates are running in races across the United States. This is certainly true in Alabama, where two transgender women are running for seats in the state Legislature, including in one relatively competitive district. Meanwhile, the Republican Party in Alabama, perhaps incensed by transgender people daring to run in their state and serve alongside them, has been the source of increasingly hostile remarks toward them. For example, Sen. Tommy Tuberville called being transgender “a mental disease” in a floor speech last month. Now, the head of the entire Republican Party in Alabama has remarked on the two Democratic transgender candidates, calling them “men who have mental disorders” in the lead-up to the election at an event for Eastern Shore Republican Women.

“We’ve got two men who have mental disorders who like to dress like women, who think they are females on the ballot this general election. One’s in Madison County, one’s in Baldwin County. That is a mental disorder, ladies and gentlemen,” said Scott Stadthagen, Republican Party Chairman of Alabama, according to reporting from AL.com, a major news publisher out of the state.

He later continued to talk about banning drag in public, stating, “If a man wants to dress like a woman in the privacy of his home, Roll Tide. War Eagle. Whatever you want to do, go knock yourself out, alright. But when you want to do it in front of a kid and minors in a sexual, explicit manner, I’ve got a problem with that.”

The candidates in question are Terri Osborne, a geologist who is running for House District 96, and Allison Montgomery, a software engineer running for House District 25, both transgender women. Allison Montgomery’s race is particularly competitive: Trump only carried her district by about 5.3% in 2024, meaning there is a decent shot this year that Alabama elects the first transgender woman representative in the state’s history. Meanwhile, Osborne’s got a much steeper hill to climb with a district that leans extremely Republican. Her opponent, Danielle Duggar, works for an anti-vaccine group and has similarly issued anti-trans statements during her campaign.

Duggar was likewise present at the Eastern Shore Republican Women event, and she hurled her own degrading remarks toward her transgender opponent. “I have a Democratic opponent. My Democratic opponent, I think it’s safe to say since |she| says it, is transgender and |her| views are quite radical. So, |she| identifies as a woman, and |she| wants that type of ideology taught in schools. |She| wants to make sure that kids know they have a choice, I guess, in their gender, and this is not what we want representing us in Montgomery,” said Duggar, misgendering her opponent repeatedly.

Montgomery responded to Stadthagen’s comments on Facebook, calling them “just plain prejudice.” She turned the remarks into an indictment of rising gas prices and the healthcare system, noting that Republicans would rather talk about her gender identity than more pressing issues in the state: “They brought up my womanhood because they have failed at governing. Ask yourselves: if I hadn’t transitioned, would gas be cheaper? Would your utilities be cheaper? Would groceries be more affordable? Would your medical debt go away? Would your rent stop getting higher? No; so it’s just plain weird that Stadthagen and other State House Republicans are so obsessed with me,” she posted.

See her full post here:

Stadthagen’s remarks are a sign of increasingly radical views of transgender people in the Republican Party. When the anti-trans panic started several years ago, most of the Republican hostility was focused on sports and transgender youth. In states like Alabama, it has since escalated to calling an entire class of LGBTQ+ people mentally ill and to advocating for policies that would severely harm all transgender people. Just last month, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama, gave a 20-minute floor speech in front of a sign reading “Transgenderism is a mental disease” and called for bringing back “mental institutions as a normal part of our society.” Should the transgender candidates in the state win their races, it is in this environment that they will have to work to make change.

Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat running against Republican Sen. Jon Husted, released an ad this week that serves as a masterclass in defusing anti-trans political attacks—without ceding ground to transphobic rhetoric in the process.

The tactic: Call out the right’s lies and deception. Then, call out their hypocrisy. No misgendering, fear-mongering, or feeding into anti-trans stereotypes was necessary to reframe the conversation around “protecting children”—a common right-wing battle cry and dog whistle—to focus on actual issues of protecting kids from predators. In this case, that meant calling out Brown’s opponent’s ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Brown’s campaign focuses on a recent round of ads produced by the Senate Leadership Fund. In them, Soren Aldaco, a right-wing “detransitioner” activist, solemnly tells the camera: “Sherrod Brown supports sex changes for minors—irreversible surgery on kids like me.”

In another recent ad, she laments how her transition included “surgery without my parents’ consent.”

“I was a kid,” Aldaco says.

However, as reporters who fact-checked the ads pointed out, Aldaco didn’t undergo gender-affirming surgery in Ohio. She was treated in Texas. Moreover, she was a legal adult when she sought that kind of care.

That’s where Brown steps in. His latest ads call Aldaco’s testimony “a complete lie.” Then, seamlessly, they turn the focus back to the real issues.

“Records show not only is this woman actually from Texas. She didn’t have any surgery as a minor,” the ad says. “But Jon Husted? He protected men who abused young girls by voting in the Senate to block the release of the Epstein files. Maybe that’s because Husted took over $116,000 from associates of Jeffrey Epstein—10 times more than any other senator. Jon Husted should be ashamed.”

The strategy is—hopefully—a sign that Democrats who had previously deployed anti-trans tropes in their ads are finally changing their tune. Sherrod Brown is one of around two dozen Democrats nationwide that Erin in the Morning has previously reported on for using transphobic rhetoric or supporting transphobic policies as a lawmaker.

Ohio has been especially problematic in this regard. Brown’s own campaign released an ad about “transgender biological men” who “participate in women’s sports.” Referring to transgender women as “biological men” is a common pejorative.

Also in Ohio: Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor, expressed support for anti-trans sports bans, called transgender girls “boys,” and then skipped the meeting with trans Ohioans that her campaign had set up to mitigate the fallout. Another Ohio Democrat, the incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur, also came under fire for railing against “transgender ideology” in a campaign ad, and for voting to defund schools that refuse to discriminate against transgender children.

Most recently, multiple members of the Ohio Democrats’ Pride Caucus resigned to protest anti-trans rhetoric within the party and the subsequent stifling of internal dissent. In the aftermath, the Equality PAC—which is the political fundraising arm of Congress’s LGBTQ caucus—condemned Kaptur and said it “is absolutely not supporting her campaign at this time.”

Brown’s newest ad could serve as inspiration for other Democrats facing conservative attack ads invoking the boogeyman of transgender children. Rather than feeding into the anti-trans hysteria, candidates can take a principled stance and shine a light on how Republican-led violence harms us all.

Paris Lee was shot six times and killed by Samuel Ward Jr.; this is an indisputable fact. Ward was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in May 2025. He claimed it was self-defense, but the jury didn’t buy it.

This week, however, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals reversed his conviction. A three-judge panel declared that the jury was under the impression Lee was cisgender; that in not disclosing the victim’s status as a trans woman, the trial judge “misled” the jury; and that Ward was entitled to a new trial where he could use this fact to bolster his claim of self-defense.

This story was first reported by independent journalist Jamie Satterfield. Other outlets and LGBTQ organizations also reported on Lee’s death at the time, with some referring to her as Kitty Monroe, which was her name on social media.

“After a short deliberation, a Shelby County jury found Samuel Ward guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of Paris Lee, concluding a case that revealed inconsistencies between the defendant’s claims and the physical evidence presented in court,” a May 2025 press release from the Shelby County District Attorney reads. “Ward claimed self-defense throughout the trial, but the jury rejected his narrative and found him guilty.”

The appellate judges did not contest any of the evidence. Rather, they took issue with one facet of the trial in particular: The original court had disallowed the defense from disclosing Lee’s sex assigned at birth to the jury, finding that it would cause an undue prejudice against the victim.

Ward’s defense appealed, and a panel of judges was tasked with answering several procedural questions: Did Ward have a right to use his victim’s sex assigned at birth as part of his defense? Moreover, did the trial judge dilute Ward’s right to defend himself by striking references to Lee’s assigned sex from the record?

“A deadly weapon is a deadly weapon is a deadly weapon,” the judge explained at trial. “Whether that person has a vagina or a penis has no bearing on the deadliness of a firearm.”

But the panel disagreed. They found that prohibiting the disclosure of Lee’s transgender status was prohibiting potentially exculpatory evidence for Ward.

“The State conceded that if the proof showed the victim’s assigned sex was the reason for the altercation between Defendant and the victim, it would be relevant to the adequate provocation element of voluntary manslaughter,” court documents read. “However, the State argued, the proof at trial would establish that the victim ‘was a large woman’ who was armed with a [firearm] and, therefore, the victim’s assigned sex was not relevant to the issue of self-defense.”

Conversely, Ward’s lawyers argued that Lee’s status as a trans woman impacted “how much fear” Ward felt, and therefore, how justifiable his actions were in the moment that he killed her.

What’s more: During trial, Ward waived his right to testify. He refused to take the stand unless he was allowed to call Lee’s gender into question, explicitly stating that he thought he would be judged more harshly by jurors for killing a presumed-cisgender woman than a transgender one.

The defense also argued that, while a jury may hold prejudice against Lee as a trans woman, Ward would face equal amounts of discrimination on the basis of his decision to sleep with transgender women.

According to the press release from the DA, the killing occurred after Ward went to Lee’s home, and a verbal altercation ensued. Lee asked Ward to leave, and he reportedly refused. Ward then claims that Lee pointed a gun at him.

In Ward’s telling, this caused him to fall backward down a staircase, with Lee still standing at the top. At the bottom of the stairs, he said he drew his gun and fired upward at Lee.

Ward shot Lee six times. Police found only one bullet casing from Lee’s gun; if she fired her weapon at all, she only did so once. Ward was wholly uninjured.

Physical evidence and expert testimony from the medical examiner “contradicted Ward’s version of events,” the press release continues. “The trajectories of the gunshot wounds did not align with the defendant’s statement. Additionally, Ward had no visible injuries, undermining his claim of self-defense.”

After killing Lee, Ward “left the scene and drove approximately 30 minutes to his home before calling 911—leaving Lee to die at the foot of her staircase,” the DA’s office concluded.

Even before killing Lee, Ward was a known entity to trans women in the area, according to Kayla Gore, who is the executive director of My Sistah’s House—a Memphis-based organization that supports Black and Brown trans people fleeing violence. Gore said Ward largely pursued relationships with transgender women.

After Lee’s death, Gore said she received countless calls about the case and spoke extensively to Lee’s loved ones. The crime left everyone terrified in its wake.

“What concerns me as a community organizer is what happens when a courtroom treats a Black trans woman’s identity as a material explanation like for someone’s fears,” Gore told Erin in the Morning. “They want that as evidence presented to the jury or the judge as a deciding factor on whether or not this was self-defense. It sends a message far beyond the courtroom.”

That message, she said, is that trans women can be harmed and killed with impunity—especially Black trans women, who are more likely than almost any other demographic to be the victims of hate crimes and domestic violence, while being the least likely to have resources available to them in the aftermath.

“I understand what the appellate court was addressing with the defendant’s right to present a defense,” Gore continued, “but there is a profound difference between saying evidence may be relevant to a legal defense, and saying that a transgender woman’s identity somehow makes her inherently more threatening.”

The case is a bitter reminder of the ways LGBTQ people have had their identities weaponized by the courts in the past, most notoriously through a legal defense tactic known as gay or trans “panic.”

According to the LGBTQ+ Bar Association, the trans “panic” defense is a legal strategy wherein someone charged with violent crimes uses their victim’s real or perceived gender identity to reduce or evade criminal liability, in tandem with other legal lines of defense—such as claiming provocation or an insanity plea.

“The LGBTQ+ ‘panic’ defense is usually employed to bolster a self-defense claim when the victim’s behavior does not meet the threat of serious bodily harm standard or when the defendant used greater force than reasonably necessary to avoid danger,” the LGBTQ+ Bar’s primer on the topic says. “This strategy requires the defendant to argue that their victim’s LGBTQ+ identity made them a greater threat than a heterosexual and/or cisgender person.”

This argument can be hugely consequential during a trial because self-defense claims rely on evaluating a defendant’s perceived risk of harm. This determines how justifiable deadly force might be.

So in Lee’s case, the argument stands to be that she was more dangerous than a cisgender woman, or that Ward otherwise had more reason to fear her because she was trans.

“We live in a society where Black trans women are stereotyped as dangerous, deceptive, threatening,” Gore said. She called the case’s remand “a slap in the face of all survivors.”

Moreover, according to Satterfield—the local journalist who broke the story—it is “the first such ruling of its kind in Tennessee’s legal history.”

The LGBT panic defense is banned in 20 states, but Tennessee is not one of them.

If you are a trans person of color fleeing domestic violence in need of affirming and inclusive resources, you can reach out to My Sistah’s House to be referred to a number of providers nationwide. You can also reach out to Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860, the LGBT National Hotline at (888) 843-4564, or the LGBT National Youth Talkline (serving youth through age 25) at (800) 246-7743.