This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler of The 19th.
Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has reached the point where accusing Democratic candidates of being transgender is not only commonplace, but encouraged by the president of the United States — including into the eleventh hour of the midterms.
President Donald Trump has taken to calling Annie Andrews, the Democratic Senate nominee in South Carolina, a “trannie,” which is a derogatory slur for transgender people, usually women. He used it in a Truth Social post this month, accusing Andrews of being “in favor of Transgender for Everyone.” He used the slur to describe her several times at a recent rally in South Carolina.
Andrews isn’t the only one. This spring, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller declared that Senate candidate James Talarico is transgender, amid baseless speculation among conservatives that the Texas Democrat lacks testosterone. Vice President JD Vance also suggested at a rally this month that Talarico is gay, via a no-homo disclaimer about his own love for a man in the crowd.
Andrews is not transgender, and neither is Talarico (who also isn’t gay). But that doesn’t seem to matter. What does matter is that these Democrats have a chance, however slim, of being elected in deep-red states. Talarico and Andrews are running surprisingly competitive races against Trump-backed candidates in a midterm cycle that may see Democrats sweep states across the country or even take the Senate.
And in response, top White House officials have apparently decided that calling them gay or trans is a viable political strategy. As Republicans pour millions into anti-trans attack ads, their strategy on the campaign trail is becoming increasingly personal.
Wielding transphobia to browbeat political opponents is a decades-long tradition. And sometimes, it had consequences — including for titans like Walter Winchell, a newspaper columnist, radio commentator and pioneer of tabloid journalism who shaped media culture into what it is today: politically charged, fast-paced and full of pundits.
In the four weeks leading up to the 1956 presidential election, one of Winchell’s radio sponsors received complaints from listeners offended by Winchell’s attacks on Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee running against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Facing boycotts, the pharmaceutical company asked the radio network to get Winchell to stop. Instead, he escalated things.
“A vote for Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen,” Winchell wrote in his nationally syndicated column on election night.
Jorgensen was well-known to Winchell’s audience: She was the most famous transgender woman in the world. She was an international celebrity known as the “ex-GI” who became a “blonde beauty,” the first widely known person to go through a gender transition. When the biggest voice in media compared her to a presidential candidate, he drove another nail into the coffin of his career. His Sunday night radio show was subsequently canceled.
The point of that barb was to challenge Stevenson’s masculinity, said Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union. In the press, Stevenson was often portrayed as more effeminate than Eisenhower, a five-star Army general.
“We thought [the] Democratic nominee last night was his usual cute, fruity-voiced self,” the New York Daily News wrote in 1952, the first year Stevenson ran for president against Eisenhower.
The song remains the same. Republicans have spent months questioning Texas Democrat James Talarico’s masculinity. This spring, Fox News host Jesse Watters described him as “effeminate,” “pre-pubescent” and a “gay vegan,” while questioning how he could be 37 and not married. (Talarico has a long-term girlfriend).
In his last moments on the campaign trail on behalf of Republican candidates, Trump has doubled down on this rhetoric.
“Darline’s running against a radical-left lunatic named Tranny Annie Andrews, who would be the most extreme and crazy left-wing politician ever elected in this state,” Trump said to cheers during an October 21 rally in South Carolina. Darline Graham, sister to the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, is Andrews’ opponent.
During an October 27 rally in Texas, while stumping for Talarico’s opponent, state attorney general Ken Paxton, Trump said of the Democrat that “no politician in history has been more obsessed with turning your young boys and girls transgender.”
Trump didn’t call Talarico gay or trans — although he did mock the candidate for knowing drag queens and mimed him struggling to eat meat by gesturing at his own mouth, slurping loudly and exclaiming, “I love the meat, ahhh! I love it, look!”
Political transphobia is often used as a way to validate a certain kind of manhood, Branstetter said — one that comes at the expense of other people. And the public’s appetite for that has only grown.
“For the president’s base, they’ve built themselves a media ecosystem that constantly talks about trans people,” she said. “Part of that is loving a scapegoat and taking pleasure in demeaning somebody else.”
That ecosystem is thriving. Republicans have poured $280 million into anti-trans ads across the country this election cycle, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the country’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group. And those ads are being used to influence key races. AdImpact, which tracks ad spending, found that transgender minors are a key topic in Republican broadcast airings targeting the Texas Senate race. And in GOP ads in the race for North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, one of the country’s most expensive House races, transgender sports are a primary focus.
We didn’t get here overnight. During the last midterms in 2022, HRC tracked $50 million in ads targeting LGBTQ+ people. That year was a turning point: Republicans embraced anti-trans rhetoric like never before. In one notable instance, the GOP candidate for Nevada attorney general, Sigal Chattah, tweeted that America needs fewer “trannies.” When a local news station asked her to respond to criticism over the slur, she said she was just taking cues from society.
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“The word ‘tranny’ is used in Hollywood, it’s part of the American culture. This isn’t a word that is taboo. It’s still being used,” Chattah said. “If the use of that word is offensive to a group, absolutely I would apologize to that group, but at the same time, I think in the grand scheme of things, the change needs to come on a much bigger scale.”
Chattah lost her 2022 race for Nevada attorney general. But the use of that slur in politics has only continued to grow.
South Carolina Republican Tim Scott has also started referring to Andrews as “tranny Annie.” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who recently lost her bid for South Carolina governor, repeatedly used it during her time in Congress, perhaps most famously at a House Oversight committee hearing on government spending. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth regularly uses the slur. He recently declared that there will be “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” in the U.S. military.
The slur is both an outdated artifact and a simple attempt to stir outrage by using a naughty word, Branstetter said. It’s meant to demean trans people while also creating a spectacle.
“When I hear the word ‘tranny,’ what I’m thinking of is bawdy 1990s, 2000s jokes or daytime TV,” Branstetter said. “It’s an affinity for an older era, when you could demean trans people and expect not to hear from them about it.”
The party has continued to invest heavily in political transphobia. That peaked in 2024, when Trump’s campaign at one point spent $19 million on two television ads targeting trans rights. Within weeks, those ads were aired over 50,000 times.
Overall in 2024, per AdImpact, $215 million was spent on anti-trans ads during the presidential race, culminating in the now-famous “Kamala is for they/them” ad commissioned by the Trump campaign.
To Alison Gash, professor and chair of political science at the University of Oregon, the rise of anti-trans rhetoric is tied to the rise of Christian conservatism. Activists found political stardom in the 1980s by rallying behind ballot measures banning same-sex marriage and abortion.
“The Christian conservative branch of the Republican Party realized they had the perfect culture war companion to their focus on anti-abortion politics: denigrating gays and lesbians. They took this as far as they could,” Gash said.
Anti-gay efforts, including opposition to marriage equality, helped catalyze the Christian conservative movement, she said. Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, was a setback — but it wasn’t the end. Transgender people were gaining rights in schools, sports, and bathrooms. Republicans saw a political opportunity in that, Gash said.
“Conservatives realized they could make the same ‘protect children’ argument in the context of trans rights as they had with gay and lesbian rights,” she said. As the money grew, the rhetoric became more extreme and more personal.
But this ultra-personal rhetoric isn’t new — it’s just gained a wider audience.
Years after Jorgensen was name-dropped in the media during the 1956 presidential race, she found herself pulled into another political turf war.
In October 1970, a month before the midterms, Vice President Spiro Agnew, known as something of an attack dog for President Richard Nixon, called Sen. Charles Goodell of New York the “Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party.”
Goodell, who Agnew often called a “radical liberal,” brushed off the comparison to Jorgensen. So did his wife, Jean.
“I think Charles’ record — five sons — is enough to show the stupidity of such a remark,” Jean Goodell told the press.
The New York senator ultimately lost his reelection bid. And Jorgensen never got an apology from the vice president, who doubled down by calling her a publicity seeker. But she was made a public figure against her will: Jorgensen was outed as a trans woman by the press years before Winchell’s attack. And now her name had become a favored insult of the vice president.
In this moment, Branstetter sees another example of how political transphobia boils down to insecurities about masculinity. Goodell, a critic of the Nixon administration, was being singled out as a traitor to his party — and his gender.
“What he was saying was that he had switched sides, right? And in switching sides, he had emasculated himself,” she said. “In part, I think it is an attempt to smear an opponent with the stain of trans people’s existence.”
