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.
I have often felt that loudest, most vitriolic of the bigots are actually hiding something about themselves. In this case, we have a senator seemingly defending pedophiles and rapists while using us as his big political boogey man. I am thrilled that the detransition advocate's claims have all been proven to be false. Unfortunately, that won't prevent the bigots from continuing to use the statements. Just look at Riley Gaines.
It’s funny I’m reading this right now, after this episode of Star Trek DS9 from the first season I’m watching while folding some laundry. I hadn’t watched this show since…hell, since I was teenager. In the episode there’s a murder in a holosuite and Odo is blamed because the Bajoran majority on the space station is seriously mistrusting of a shapeshifter. It wasn’t odo. But the personal attacks on him for being a shapeshifter, the mob justice that assumed his guilt…that feels very, very fucking familiar to me as a parent of trans kid trying navigate this new world we’ve found ourselves in.
The difference between this show’s fictional universe and our reality, beyond the obvious, is that the system of the federation stood beside Odo, and protected him from the mob justice with reassurances of their faith in him and their willingness to maintain a real investigation into the murder.
If politicians would just be honest with the piles of science, research, and lived experiences the trans advocacy network has brought to them and defend trans folks publicly, the zeitgeist of mob justice against the “boogeyman” of trans existence could be curtailed over time.
Instead, we are seeing too many Dems doing what a number of the Texas dems did in 2023 and caving to the public pressure of the mob rather than following the facts of reality that tell the true story.