Republican PAC Attacks Trump Over Gender-Affirming Care
Ad from anti-Trump Republican PAC seeks to defend Kamala Harris by pointing out Trump's hypocrisy and accusing the former president of "gaslighting" voters.
The Lincoln Project, a political action committee for anti-Trump Republicans, released an ad to counter former President Donald Trump’s anti-transgender attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the past few weeks, the Trump campaign has leaned heavily into anti-transgender messaging in an attempt to cast Harris as out-of-step with Americans on social issues.
Many of the ads attack Harris over her support of gender-affirming care for incarcerated individuals, a stance she adopted in 2019 when she was running for the Democratic nomination for president.
“Kamala’s for they/them,” a narrator says in one of the ads. “President Trump is for you.”
In a newer ad, the Trump campaign zeroes in on one transgender prisoner in custody in California, Shiloh Heavenly Quine, the first inmate in the United States to receive state-financed gender-affirming surgery.
The ad, which misgenders Quine as a man, implies she received the surgery as a reward after having “murdered a father of three.”
As Harris has previously noted, in a televised interview during which she was attacked by Fox mouthpiece Brett Baier, the Trump administration itself had adopted a similar policy of allowing transgender inmates to access gender-affirming care when such care was deemed “medically necessary.”
Harris added that, as president, she would “follow the law” and allow such a policy to continue.
The Lincoln Project has now come to Harris’s defense, cutting a new ad that lambastes Trump for his hypocrisy.
“Have you seen this ad?” a narrator intones as a brief snapshot of Trump’s attack against Harris is shown. “Donald Trump is spending millions attacking Kamala Harris on a desperate lie.”
The ad shows headlines proving that the Trump administration allowed inmates to receive gender-affirming medical treatments.
“Taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens is a Trump administration policy,” the narrator says. “He’s attacking Kamala Harris for his own record, and he thinks you’re too dumb to get it.
“He’s gaslighting America, because Trump is for he/him. Kamala is for us.”
The counter-attack ad comes as Republicans across the country have seized on transgender issues, including trans participation in sports and gender-affirming care, as wedge issues, which they believe will help Republican candidates by galvanizing social conservatives to show up at the polls in support of their candidates, including Trump.
Harris’s record on transgender health care from her time as California’s attorney general is actually mixed. She initially defended the state against a lawsuit filed by Quine, the inmate highlighted in the Trump ad, who demanded to be moved to a women’s facility and provided with medical care, including gender-affirming surgery.
The state eventually settled the lawsuit in 2015, paving the way for Quine’s surgery, but only after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court judge’s decision in a separate case throwing out a second trans inmate’s lawsuit seeking gender-affirming care. The appeals court, in that case, found that inmate Mia Rosati had stated a plausible claim that her Eighth Amendment rights had been violated by being denied gender-affirming surgery.
Four years later, the 9th Circuit would eventually rule affirmatively that the state of Idaho should foot the bill for the cost of gender-affirming treatments for a third inmate, Adree Edmo, on the grounds that the denial of surgical care did indeed violate Edmo’s Eighth Amendment rights. Idaho appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which allowed the 9th Circuit’s decision to stand.
Earlier this year, a second federal appeals court — this time the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — ruled that insurance exclusions denying coverage for gender-affirming treatments are unconstitutional and that such care needs to be included in state-funded insurance plans.
Watch the Lincoln Project’s political ad below:
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