Last month, Erin in the Morning’s reporting called attention to a fundraising email from the Equality PAC promoting Democrats who either voted for, or otherwise expressed support of, anti-trans policies. Now, the political-fundraising arm for Congress’s LGBTQ Caucus is issuing a full-throated condemnation of political messaging that throws trans people under the bus, which they reiterated in a recent article published by Axios.
One of the worst anti-trans offenders on the Democratic side this cycle might be Ohio’s Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who aired an ad where she proudly declared that she “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools.”
Axios reported that high-profile Democrats are now rebuking this kind of hateful language. “The ads were deeply offensive to the Equality Caucus and the broader LGBTQ community that we represent,” Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat who co-chairs the Equality PAC, told the news outlet. “The Equality Caucus is not going to stand by passively and allow anyone to scapegoat the trans community. It is a red line for us.”
The PAC further sent Erin in the Morning a similar statement for this piece. “As we have previously stated, we recognize that no Member will agree with us on every vote, and that disagreement is a normal and necessary part of the legislative process,” that statement reads. “But we have been very clear that there is a bright red line: we will not accept candidates or Members using Republican rhetoric that actively harms, scapegoats, or targets members of our community as a campaign strategy. In this case, the Congresswoman crossed that line.”
“By adopting anti-trans rhetoric directly from the Republican playbook and using it in campaign advertising designed to reach thousands of voters, her campaign went well beyond a disagreement over policy or an individual vote,” it continued. “It represented an active decision to use rhetoric that targets a vulnerable community for personal political gain. No other House Democrat currently campaigning has gone to this extent. Had another done so, we would have been compelled to undertake the same serious reevaluation of our support.”
Equality PAC “is absolutely not supporting her campaign at this time,” the group said in a separate statement to Axios, calling Kaptur’s language “unacceptable.” Kaptur’s colleagues in the House also privately reached out to her office to denounce the ad, Axios reported.
In December, before Kaptur’s notorious ad circulated, the Equality PAC contributed $1,500 to the Kaptur campaign. Over the summer, it also donated $2,500 to Sarah Trone Garriott, another Democrat who has since used transphobic rhetoric in ads and who is running for Congress in Iowa. However, these are relatively meager amounts in the broader landscape of campaign spending. A PAC can give any given candidate in a federal race a maximum of $5,000 per election.
In a district like Kaptur’s, which favored President Trump by 11 percentage points in the 2024 election, some strategists interviewed by Axios argued that supporting candidates like her is a necessary tradeoff.
But not everyone agrees with this logic. Tyler Hack, executive director of the Christopher Street Project, which was founded to support candidates dedicated to preserving equal rights for transgender people, condemned such maneuvers justified by “political convenience.”
“Treating transgender people’s basic rights as an ‘80/20 issue’ to be bargained away is exactly the kind of cowardly politics that has failed Democrats again and again,” she said when asked about these strategists’ claims. “Our message consistently outperforms the retreat-and-concede approach some of these groups are selling.”
She warned that these same Democrats, backed by an increasingly far-removed consultant class, may very well accelerate the rightward lurch that is targeting other civil rights too, including reproductive liberty or marriage equality. “You cannot legitimize the politics of rights retrenchment when it targets someone else and then cry foul when the same politics reaches you,” she said.
That Axios article comes at a pivotal moment in Ohio politics. It came the same day Arienne Childrey, perhaps the state’s most high-profile transgender politician, announced her resignation from the Pride Caucus, as did Ciara Keeton after just days in the position. Both cited the rising tide of anti-trans sentiment and the Ohio Democrats’ reported censorship of internal dissent. In addition to Kaptur’s “transgender ideology” ad, Ohio’s Democratic nominee for governor, Amy Acton, came under fire for calling transgender girls “boys.”
“We are in an era where the GOP has so thoroughly weaponized trans lives that even some formerly self-professing allies within our own party have fallen prey to the rhetoric,” Childrey wrote in her resignation letter. “Looking at the national trend towards Democratic anti-trans triangulation, as well as our own internal conversations, it is clear to me that this shift is much more than a simple coincidence. We have to speak up—loudly, strongly, and unapologetically—or I fear what our 2028 choices may look like.”
When are the Dems going to learn that running to the right is not an effective strategy? No one is going to vote for Republican lite when they can have the real thing.
I'll take whatever good news I can get at this point but where the F was this statement three months ago? Or six? The midterms are in a month and now they come out against anti-trans rhetoric? Now?