Trump Ad Attacks Harris for Support of Trans Health Care in Prisons
The Trump campaign is running a vicious attack ad against the Democratic nominee, focusing on transgender surgeries.
The Trump presidential campaign has doubled down on its anti-transgender rhetoric, running an attack ad against Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris for her support of allowing incarcerated transgender individuals to receive gender-affirming care, including surgeries.
The ad, titled “Nonsense,” features clips of Harris speaking about her record as California’s attorney general with Mara Keisling, former executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Harris discusses whether transgender inmates would be allowed to receive treatments for gender dysphoria that their doctors had classified as “medically necessary.”
“Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” a narrator intones. “Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.”
The ad also splices together pictures of Harris alongside former Biden administration official Sam Brinton and Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine — both of whom have been attacked by the political Right for being nonbinary or transgender (well before Brinton’s legal woes) — and features video of a drag queen posing with Harris for a photo
“Kamala’s for they/them,” the narrator continues. “President Trump is for you.”
The ad builds on a line of attack that former President Donald Trump deployed against Harris in their televised September 10 debate, based on a 2019 ACLU questionnaire in which she supported allowing transgender inmates to access medically necessary gender-affirming care.
“It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition,” Harris wrote. “That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates…. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.”
In the debate, Trump asserted that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” The charge, which seemed pre-rehearsed, was one of those election-year references that only speaks to Beltway insiders and the political consultant class, but flies over the head of most voters.
Because the casual voter would not likely know that Trump was referring to the ACLU questionnaire, especially when presented without context or a proper, detailed setup, the line came across to the average debate watcher as a non sequitur.
The failure of this attack line enraged right-wing media and advocacy groups, especially after New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg issued a real-time “fact check” of the debate claim on the newspaper’s website. Stolberg said the claim “needs context,” before noting that the Harris campaign has said that her 2019 ACLU questionnaire responses are “not what she is proposing or running on.”
The Heritage Foundation — the architects of the anti-LGBTQ Project 2025 — accused Stolberg of issuing a “partisan ‘fact check,'” screeching, “[Trump’s claim] needs no context. We released documents showing her new policy already allows for it.”
CatholicVote, a right-wing political advocacy group that purports to speak for all Catholics despite its clear partisan leanings, has launched a new ad campaign accusing Harris of supporting taxpayer funding for gender confirmation surgeries on transgender minors. The ads will run in the swing states of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and specifically target Catholics and voters with children.
“Sound weird? Disgusting? It is. And you’re paying for it,” a female narrator says in the ad. “Kamala Harris supports these taxpayer-funded sex change operations. A vote for Harris. A vote for medical experiments on kids.”
Even Congress has gotten in on the transgender-bashing. Shortly after the presidential debate U.S. Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) introduced a bill whose sole intention appears to be to use the issue of gender-affirming care for incarcerated individuals as an election wedge-issue to harm Democrats and specifically the Harris presidential campaign by casting them as “extreme” and out-of-step with Americans.
Steube’s bill — the “Stopping Transgender Operation Payments and Wacky Expenses for Illegal Residents and Detainees Act,” or the STOP WEIRD Act — would prohibit taxpayer dollars from being used to cover the cost of gender-affirming care for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers.
“This is a bill Congress shouldn’t have to write, but my legislation is now necessary because the sitting VP and Democrat nominee for president, Kamala Harris, has pledged to use taxpayer dollars to fund sex change surgeries for illegal immigrants,” Steube said in a statement.
Many transgender individuals have been incensed by attempts to cast their medical concerns and their desire to live as their authentic selves as “weird” or undeserving of consideration.
Following the debate, when the Times declared that Trump’s “transgender operations” comment was “the wildest sounding attack line that was basically true,” Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s Deputy Director for Transgender Justice, pushed back on social media.
“Health care for transgender people is only ‘wild’ when you think of (and treat us) as a joke,” Strangio wrote in an Instagram post cussing out the Times. “This is not some throwaway point, some ‘attack line.’ People in government custody die awaiting health care.
“Saying you will provide health care to detained people is a constitutional floor,” he added. “People held in cages by the government — whether civilly or criminally detained — have a right to health care. Being flip about it is cruel. Mocking it is even worse. And this just builds upon the ongoing investment in positing trans people and our bodies as grotesque.”
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