Former President Trump and Republican congressional candidates have blanketed the nation with campaign ads critical of transgender rights, painting their Democratic opponents as radical for supporting trans-inclusive policies.

“Crazy liberal Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” says one pro-Trump television ad that aired this month in battleground states.

“No men in girls' sports,” reads another, paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC with ties to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Splashed across those and other ads are the faces of transgender women, girls and drag performers, often without their prior knowledge or consent.

Gabrielle Ludwig, a 63-year-old biomedical equipment technician, is one of those women.

Photographs and footage of Ludwig taken in the early 2010s, when she was a student at Mission College in Santa Clara, Calif., appear in at least nine Senate Leadership Fund ads targeting Democratic Sens. Bob Casey (Pa.), Jon Tester (Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio).

The ads, which show Ludwig playing on the community college’s women’s basketball team, criticize the three Democrats for opposing an amendment to a 2021 COVID-19 relief bill that would have stripped federal funds from states, school districts and universities that allow transgender women and girls to compete on female sports teams.

Another photo of Ludwig, who played for two seasons at Mission College between 2012 and 2014, appears in a campaign ad for Trump. The camera zooms in on Ludwig, then in her mid-50s, in uniform on the basketball court, before widening to show her college-aged teammates.

The ads call Ludwig and other transgender women “biological men,” a term that conflates sex with gender and is used by individuals critical of trans rights to suggest that trans people are not who they say they are. The ads weigh heavily on Ludwig, who has not played basketball competitively in a decade.

“I haven’t been able to sleep,” she said in an interview. “I don’t want my family affected. I have granddaughters, daughters who are in college. I only did this because I love to play basketball. That’s all it ever was.”

Unwanted political attention

Ludwig did not know her image appeared in the Senate Leadership Fund ads before The Hill contacted her. Her daughter told her about the Trump ad, she said.

Ludwig made national headlines in 2012 when she stepped onto a basketball court for the first time as an out trans woman more than twice the age of most of her teammates. Media coverage of Ludwig’s return to the court — she played on the men’s team at Nassau County Community College in New York for one season in 1980 — was largely positive, but the attention came at a price.

At basketball games, spectators verbally harassed her. She was briefly assigned police protection after receiving an anonymous threat. Two ESPN radio hosts called her an “it.”

Ludwig left the team when she graduated in 2014. Years later, she lives a quiet life in Nevada with her family. She discovered an interest in amateur rocketry and joined a group of fellow aeronautics enthusiasts to fly rockets in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert earlier this year.

The ads, she said, have thrust her back into an unwanted spotlight. Comments left on her Facebook page disparage and threaten her, and a fear that she is being watched sets in when she leaves the house. Her employer is........

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