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Pamela Paul

By Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

Perhaps as a threat of what’s to come, on Friday, supporters of President-elect Donald Trump recirculated a video statement on X that he made last year on transgender issues. In it, he pledges to stop federal backing for programs that support the concept of gender transition at any age and to ban gender-affirming care for minors. Any hospital that performs gender surgery on young people would be ejected from Medicare and Medicaid. He would cut federal funds to schools that tell children “they could be trapped in the wrong body,” and get a law that bars “men from participating in women’s sports.”

And it wasn’t just one video — Trump made his intentions clear throughout the campaign, and he won handily.

During the closing weeks of the election, Republican campaigns spent over $65 million on ads ridiculing, among several candidates, Kamala Harris for supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” and “illegal aliens,” all ending with variations on the tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

At campaign events Trump attacked the idea of letting transgender girls and women play on female sports teams, and implied that children were having gender surgery in classrooms.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin, “and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation?”

Why did Trump and his allies devote so much attention and resources to something that seemingly affects a small number of people compared with top voter concerns like immigration, the economy, crime, abortion and democracy? Maybe because it worked. According to Harris’s leading super PAC, viewers shifted 2.7 percentage points toward Trump after watching one of these ads.

Clearly it helped paint Harris as a radical leftist, out of step with most of America. But as those of us who opposed Trump lick our wounds and take stock, it’s worth considering why these ads and rally cries resonated.

It is not because most Americans are bigots or haters or anti-L.G.B.T.Q. people. But many voters, including liberals and Democrats, disagree with positions Harris and the Democratic Party have taken on transgender issues. Polls show that most voters, while largely supportive of existing legal........

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