October 18, 2024 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
WASHINGTON – With just weeks until the election, Republican campaigns and outside groups have made transgender issues a prominent line of attack on the Wisconsin airwaves.
They’ve gone after Vice President Kamala Harris over reported support for taxpayer-funded gender transitions for immigrants and prisoners. Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde has cut ads hitting Democratic U.S Sen. Tammy Baldwin on the issue. And the attacks have made their way into Wisconsin state legislative races.
It’s a strategy that hits on cultural divisions and attempts to cast Democratic candidates as “extreme.” Republican proponents of the ads claim they show Democrats are out-of-touch with voters. But Democrats and advocacy groups have denounced the attacks as harmful to a vulnerable community and a distraction from issues that are top-of-mind for the majority of voters with under three weeks until Election Day. Some Republicans have also pushed back on the focus.
“I find the whole thing a bit tiresome, to be honest with you,” said former Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, who noted transgender people make up a small fraction of the population. “It doesn’t seem to me to be the right place to be campaigning on.”
The focus on the issue that Republicans have deployed in previous cycles has ramped up in Wisconsin in the final sprint to Nov. 5.
Former President Donald Trump and the GOP group Preserve America PAC have aired at least three ads in the state attacking Harris on transgender issues. The spots claim Harris supports taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants — a reference to a 2019 ACLU candidate questionnaire in which Harris indicated her support for providing gender transition care for people in prison and immigration detention facilities.
“As people have been hearing and not believing, but it’s true, she even endorsed free sex changes for illegal aliens in detention at taxpayer expense,” Trump told a crowd in Juneau earlier this month. “Not only is the concept bad, but it’s an unbelievably expensive procedure.”
Asked about the Trump attack during a Fox News interview this week, Harris said she would “follow the law” and referenced a New York Times report noting gender-affirming care was available in federal prisons under the Trump administration.
“Frankly that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit like throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house,” Harris said Wednesday.
In Wisconsin’s Senate race, Hovde and Republican groups have made the issue a recent and prominent line of attack on Baldwin. In one ad in which Hovde decries Democrats for deceptive advertising, he falsely accuses Baldwin of “funding a clinic that offers transgender therapy.”
Other ads from outside groups accuse Baldwin of supporting biological men to compete in women’s sports. Baldwin’s campaign has denied the claims and said the GOP attacks are “meant to panic people.”
Similar ads have attacked Democrats in at least three Wisconsin Assembly races — targeting state Reps. Jodi Emerson of Eau Claire and Steve Doyle of Onalaska, as well as LuAnn Bird, a Democrat running for a western Milwaukee County seat.
Some Republicans, including campaigns in the state, have argued the advertising is effective in casting Democrats as outside the mainstream on the issues. Hovde recently told the Journal Sentinel the focus on transgender issues appeals to “anybody in the state of Wisconsin, particularly parents.”
“Harris, Baldwin, and their Democrat associates are misaligned with the Voters on these issues which is why the ads are effective,” said Van Mobley, the former village president of Thiensville and an early Trump backer. “Trump’s ad against Harris is very true, which is why it is particularly devastating.”
Advocacy groups, though, have noted the attacks stray from the main issues facing the country and can be harmful to people who identify as transgender.
“It’s a distraction that puts communities who are already facing so much harm at greater risk,” said Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ advocacy organization.
Robinson noted efforts from Republicans to use transgender people as an attack on Democrats in past cycles, including the 2022 governor’s race, were unsuccessful — pointing to Republicans who used the rhetoric and lost. She said the return to the attacks in certain races signals Republicans are “starting to feel desperate and don’t have a real argument to offer voters about how to move them forward.”
Harris in her Fox interview similarly accused Trump of “trying to create a sense of fear in the voters” through his advertising on transgender issues. “Twenty million dollars on that ad,” Harris said. “On an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, it’s really quite remote. And again, his policy was no different.”
The focus on transgender issues from Republicans in Wisconsin, a key battleground state, has been prominent in the closely watched Senate race.
Hovde in multiple ads has focused on a $400,000 earmark Baldwin directed earlier this year to the Madison nonprofit Briarpatch Youth Services, which helps at-risk youth in the area.
The ads claim Baldwin funded “a Madison clinic offering transgender therapy without parents’ consent” — an apparent reference to a Briarpatch program that counsels LGBTQ children and in some cases offers “gender affirming clothing.” But the money from the earmark was designated “to support therapeutic and clinical counseling for youth who are experiencing homelessness,” according to the request posted to Baldwin’s website last year.
A spokesperson for Briarpatch told the Journal Sentinel that the nonprofit is not a medical clinic and provides no gender conversion therapy or hormonal treatments.
Jill Pfeiffer, the executive director of Briarpatch, called the public attacks on the group “false,” and noted fact-checkers in the state have ruled them untrue.
“The mischaracterization of our programs and services, such as falsely claiming that we are a clinic, adds stress to staff members who are already handling some of the most difficult situations facing youth, including youth homelessness,” Pfeiffer said.
Pfeiffer said the group would continue to make sure “youth facing hardships have access to voluntary resources and services” they need “regardless of political talking points.”
Other advertisements from Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC aligned with GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, and Fix Washington PAC, funded in part by Hovde’s brother, Steven Hovde, have accused Baldwin of supporting allowing transgender women to participate in girls’ sports and “allowing sex change surgeries for minor children.”
Baldwin’s campaign said Baldwin never voted to let boys into girls’ sports and noted sex change surgeries are not available to minors in Wisconsin.
“Eric Hovde is lying to the people of Wisconsin,” said Andrew Mamo, a Baldwin campaign spokesman. “Tammy Baldwin knows this is a local issue that is already being handled by parents, athletic leagues, and schools across our state. Wisconsinites do not need a federal law to do what is right and no one needs Eric Hovde inserting himself into their community or their family business.”
Still, Hovde said the “vast majority of parents are totally opposed to” having transgender girls play girls’ sports. He described himself as a “girl dad” and noted one of his daughters was a standout athlete in the Madison area in 2017. He said it would have been “completely unfair” if she had to compete “against guys in sports.”
But he also acknowledged transgender issues aren’t top-of-mind for voters. He listed his own top four issues as economic security, domestic security, international security and political division.
“It’s just another issue that people are concerned about,” Hovde said of transgender issues. “I went and met with a lot of different local community leaders, and I started hearing that being expressed regularly.”
Republicans have launched similar transgender-focused attack ads in other high-profile races across the country. In some cases, Democrats’ responses have been more public than those seen in Wisconsin.
Colin Allred, the Democrat challenging Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas, put out an ad in which he says: “Let me be clear: I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports, or any of this ridiculous stuff Ted Cruz is saying.”
And in Ohio’s contentious Senate race, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown released a 30-second ad calling claims he supports transgender girls playing girls’ sports “a complete lie.”
“The truth is in Ohio, this has already been banned, and Sherrod Brown agrees with Governor DeWine,” the ad says.
A 2023 poll from Arizona State University, Stanford University and the University of Houston showed a majority of people in Texas, Arizona and California opposed transgender people participating in girls’ sports. But other surveys have shown broad support for how transgender people choose to identify.
A New York Times survey in swing states released last month, for example, showed 54% of people in Wisconsin said “society should accept transgender people as having the gender they identify with,” compared to 36% who disagreed.
The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association said it “does not maintain a database for transgender or LGBTQ athletes.” A spokesperson for the office said there have not been any recent complaints related to transgender students participating in girls’ sports.
The WIAA requires transgender athletes to show proof of hormonal therapy, including in some cases testosterone suppression therapy, before they’re eligible to participate in competitions.
Ribble, the former Wisconsin Republican House member who is also a former high school girls’ volleyball coach, told the Journal Sentinel he thinks it would be “unsafe” to have transgender athletes compete against girls in sports. But he added that he has “a great deal of sympathy for any boy or girl or adult man or woman who finds themselves struggling with gender dysphoria.”
Ribble acknowledged that GOP messaging could be a way to appeal to base voters but said the “base is fired up already” and doubted whether it appealed to independent voters.
“Immigration, that affects everybody. Inflation, that affects everybody. There’s such stronger messaging than that,” Ribble said of Republicans’ focus on transgender issues. “It just seems weird to me.”
“If I was running for Congress,” he added, “I wouldn’t even mention it.”
Daniel Bice and Hope Karnopp of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report from Milwaukee.
Lawrence Andrea 