In the 2024 election, Republican messaging that marginalized transgender Americans and attacked Democrats got widespread attention.
Opinion is divided among political analysts about whether anti-trans messaging contributed to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s narrow loss — about 29,000 votes in Wisconsin and about a 1.5% margin nationwide — or was irrelevant.
A 2023 Marquette University Law School poll found that a majority of respondents favored protecting trans people against workplace discrimination, but 70% also believed athletes should be required to play sports on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth.
But whether or not the strategy helped seal Donald Trump’s victory two years ago, Republican candidates in Wisconsin have been leaning into messaging that targets transgender and nonbinary people.
Sen. Melissa Ratcliff (D-Cottage Grove), whose adult son is transgender, sees little reason to “rehash” the 2024 election. “I think it’s always important to make sure that we are advocating for our trans community and for kids and speaking out against hate,” she said. “I think the bigger concern is why a party feels the need to attack our trans kids and use that as an issue to rile up part of their base ultimately.”
Transgender individuals account for less than 1% of the adult Wisconsin population, about 36,000 people, and 3.3% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, fewer than 13,000 people — or 180 per county. The Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles Law School calculated those estimates based on survey data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collected between 2021 and 2023.
The Republican majority in the state Legislature has passed bills that would bar gender-affirming care for young people and ban kids from playing on sports teams that didn’t match the gender they were assigned at birth or their biological sex. Gov. Tony Evers has repeatedly vetoed those measures.
“We’ve seen this in the Legislature, that by somehow going after children and bullying them is something that they see as a winning issue,” Ratcliff said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And that grown adults think it’s OK to bully kids is just gross.”
Meanwhile, with Trump’s inauguration to a second term, federal policy has turned against transgender people and also against a more expansive understanding of gender.
During the Wisconsin Republican convention in Wisconsin Dells on May 16, speakers attacked the transgender population, particularly youth, sounding the alarm about the possibility of trans girls playing high school sports, mocking the use of inclusive language and promoting the policing of bathrooms.
Republican nominee for governor Tom Tiffany opened his speech by asking the delegates, “Are you ready for a governor that’s going to protect girls’ sports?”
Sen. Ron Johnson inveighed against “Biological males competing against our little girls in sports. Biological males invading their locker rooms, their showers, their bathrooms.” He as well as former Gov. Scott Walker falsely claimed that minors identified as transgender can be subjected to surgical procedures.
And a May 19 press release by Republican press secretary Zach Bannon falsely claimed that more than 90 lawmakers were “emphasizing their support of sex-change surgeries for minors” in an open letter to two leading Wisconsin hospital systems.
The false claim was repeated three times in the press release, which attacked Democrats in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District who are running in the party’s primary to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden.
The letter called on the healthcare providers, Children’s Wisconsin in Wauwatosa and UW Health in Madison, to resume gender-affirming care for minors, which both suspended early this year following threats to federal medical dollars from the Trump administration.
That form of care does not include surgery, however. A Children’s Wisconsin spokesperson said medical treatment prior to the suspension of care involved medication, and that Children’s still provides mental health and behavioral care.
“UW Health does not offer gender-affirming surgery to minors,” said Sara Benzel, a spokesperson for the Madison-based system.
Abigail Swetz, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said that for the youngest children who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria — a deep-seated sense that their gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex — the first step is extensive counseling with a therapist.
Gender-affirming care “is also age-appropriate, and this is the part that I think people miss all the time,” Swetz said in a recent interview. “There are no medical interventions until puberty for gender-affirming care.”
Interventions at puberty can involve medication but not surgery, Swetz said. Those can include hormone treatment to delay puberty and to redirect the body’s development.
“But that is all age-appropriate, and highly individualized, just like all good medical care is with the doctor,” Swetz said. “And always with full consent of parents and guardians. When we are talking about gender-affirming care for trans youth, that’s what we’re talking about. Not what the other side would like to pretend.”
Bannon did not respond to a Wisconsin Examiner email message seeking an explanation for the false statements in his press release.
A federal judge in April blocked the Trump administration from cutting off federal funds to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care. The judge’s order said the Department of Health and Human Services lacked the authority to override professional standards of care or to deny funding to healthcare providers following those standards.
Since then some health providers in other states, including Children’s Minnesota hospital, have resumed providing gender-affirming care for minors.
Both UW Health and Children’s Wisconsin said they sympathized with patients who had been undergoing that care and their families, but that they believe they would remain in legal jeopardy if they resume care involving medication.
Ratcliff said that as someone whose family has gone through the experience of addressing the needs of a transgender child, it was important to her “to make sure that all trans kids and the trans community know that there are people in the Capitol that care about our trans community, that see them, that are fighting for them, and that we can push back again and fight back against all the hateful rhetoric toward our trans community.”
She said she believes Republicans are ramping up attacks on trans people as a deflection from the economic squeeze voters are feeling.
“We know that everyday costs are going up and they aren’t putting forward policies that actually help everyday lives of Americans or Wisconsinites,” Ratcliff said. “My child being trans is not causing these prices to go up. My child’s healthcare is not causing any difference in people’s lives except for my child’s life.”
