WATCH: Ad Attacks Senator Over Trans Athlete Vote
A Republican super PAC is attacking U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff for refusing to support a bill to enshrine a transgender sports ban into law.
The Republican Senate Leadership Fund is spending over a million dollars to air an ad attacking Sen. Jon Osssoff (D-Ga.) over the issue of transgender participation in sports.
The conservative super PAC’s ad highlights the senator’s opposition to the “Fair and Safe Athletic Opportunities Act,” a congressional bill seeking to enshrine into law a ban that would prohibit transgender athletes from competing on female-designated sports teams.
The bill sought to amend Title IX, a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in government-funded schools, to explicitly prohibit schools from allowing transgender women and girls to compete as females.
It defined sex as fixed at birth and based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth. The bill would not have solely applied to school-sponsored sports teams, but to non-school little league teams, physical education classes, and intramural college sports teams.
It gained a majority vote in the Republican-led Senate but failed to gain support from enough Democrats to meet the 60-vote threshold needed to move it forward.
Ossoff’s office alleged that the bill would likely be enforced by requiring athletes wishing to compete on women’s and girls’ sports teams to submit to invasive physical examinations, including of their genitals, to verify that they are female.
Democrats referred to the bill as the “Child Predator Empowerment Act” and argued that it fails to address larger problems affecting women athletes, including sexism and unequal funding.
The ad is slated to run during Atlanta Braves baseball game broadcasts. (It already ran during the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball Final Four games.)
It features a basketball player who resembles Ossoff playing against a group of female athletes, hitting a basketball out of a cisgender female player’s hands, blocking shots, pushing down a female athlete, scoring a three-pointer and a slam dunk while hanging from the rim, and screaming and laughing at his competitors. It accuses Ossoff of “running point for the radical left.”
A female narrator intones, “Man-t0-man defense isn’t woke enough for Ossoff. He’s playing for they/them…. Tell Senator Ossoff, ‘Stop dunking on defenseless girls.'”
“American parents don’t need federal bureaucrats confirming our children’s genitalia,” Ossoff campaign spokesperson Ellie Dougherty told Axios in response to the ad. “Athletic associations and local school districts can ensure fair, safe competition in childhood athletics.”
The attack comes as Republicans seek to pad their margins in the U.S. Senate by knocking off vulnerable Democratic senators, putting Ossoff — who represents Republican-leaning Georgia — squarely in their crosshairs.
Ossoff, knowing he is vulnerable, has raised over $11 million in first-quarter fundraising, the highest amount ever generated by an incumbent in a non-election year, reports The Hill.
Republicans across the country have attacked Democrats over their perceived closeness to the transgender community, believing they have found a wedge issue that plays to their benefit among voters who oppose allowing transgender females to compete as women.
Last year, Republicans, including President Trump, spent about $215 million on anti-transgender ads that attacked Democrats over transgender participation in sports and supporting taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for incarcerated people.
It is believed that one particular ad slamming Kamala Harris over the latter issue resonated with voters so much that it successfully portrayed Harris and Democrats as out of step with Americans, leading to Republican victories up and down the ticket.
Two Democratic candidates — U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Texas and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio — released ads desperately denouncing the presence of transgender competitors in women’s sports, but were unable to distance themselves from the national party’s brand.
Other Democrats have sought to distance themselves from transgender rights, with U.S. Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) opposing transgender participation in women’s sports.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in likely anticipation of a possible White House run, has also shifted rightward, echoing Republican criticisms of Democrats’ positions on social issues.
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