Transphobia is tearing us apart
Some thoughts on last week, and where we go from here.
Hi, friends. I’m not going to even start this newsletter by asking how you are, because I know that right now, that is a loaded question. I will say that I hope you are caring for yourself and your loved ones, and allowing yourself to feel your feelings. The rage, the fear, the sadness, the horror, the confusion, the defiance, the frustration, the numbness, it’s all valid. It’s all necessary.
Last week I planned to publish a NWSL-related newsletter I’ve been reporting, but returning to business as usual without addressing the election felt inappropriate, inauthentic, and, combined with a lot of things happening personally right now, downright impossible. In the rare minutes since Tuesday I’ve had time to sit down at my computer and write, my mind can’t stop fixating on the news.
Intellectually, I knew that Donald Trump might win this election and return to the White House. But I was so wrapped up in the fight to stop it that I didn’t let myself really face it. It was, and is, a gut-punch.
I wish I had wise words or a hot take or a pithy punchline to sum up how this all happened, to make perfect sense of it all, but I don’t, and anyone who is pretending to is lying. There is no one singular reason why Kamala Harris isn’t the next president of the United States.
But this is a women’s sports newsletter, and while women’s sports intersects with almost every palpable issue in this election, there’s one issue that politicians and bad-faith actors on the right have made synonymous with our community: Transphobia.
According to Ad Impact, republicans spent about $215 million on anti-trans ads on network television in this campaign. Considering that figure does not include ads on cable, streaming services, social media, or radio, the total figure is likely much, much larger. These ads increased as election day drew closer. Trump’s closing message in a (presumably) tight presidential election was about excluding trans people from women’s sports, which is infuriating because, as we’ve said time and time again, trans women are not a threat to women’s sports!
Republicans exploited this idea of “protecting women’s sports” in order to fuel hatred against and fear of transgender and nonbinary people, particularly transgender women. Let’s be clear about this: That bigotry put the lives of trans people in danger. That alone is enough of a reason to be appalled by it and to fight against it, and I am not trying to say otherwise. The trans community matters. They deserve rights. Those are complete sentences.
But Trump and his cohort specifically targeted this community because they were losing the support of women, and they were successfully able to exploit and weaponize the ignorance around transgender issues in order to turn women against one another and encourage them to vote against their best interests.
“Republican strategists said the focus on transgender women and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a key group of voters the party has hemorrhaged support from in recent years: college-educated suburban women,” the New York Times reported last month, adding that the party found anti-trans messaging helped to “curb their losses with female voters repelled by the party’s stance on abortion.”
It allowed the Republicans to paint a facade of caring about the safety of women by demonizing a marginalized community. And, for the most part, Democrats let these attacks air unchallenged.
One of the most important pieces of reporting on this issue came in just under the wire, when Casey Parks of the Washington Post spoke to a trans woman who was featured in many of these republican ads, including the now-infamous “Kamala is for they/them” ad that was inescapable in the campaign’s closing days, at least here in NC.
That woman is Gabrielle Ludwig. In the photos shown in the ads, she towers over clearly much younger women in a basketball league; the angles make her look twice as tall and wide as her opponents. The ads call her a threat to women’s sport, a menace to society.
In reality, she’s a 62-year-old grandmother who lives a quiet life in Reno, Nevada. In 2012, at the age of 51, after a career in the Navy and in pharmaceuticals, she enrolled in Mission College in Santa Clara, California, in order to learn Cisco computer systems. The women’s basketball coach noticed her height — 6’5” — and recruited her to join the team. She had already transitioned at that time, and had undergone gender reassignment surgery six weeks prior, so she was eligible. But she hadn’t played in 30 years and was out of shape, so struggled her first year on the squad. Though her second season was more successful because she committed to fitness, her community college team didn’t even make the playoffs. She graduated, started a new career, and life moved on. Nobody was hurt. Women’s sports did not go extinct. An adult in community college got an opportunity to grow and push herself through the power of sport, and her teammates and opponents all learned from her, as I’m sure she learned from them. That’s what we should want! We should be happy to tell that story!
Democrats are a million times better for the LGBTQ community than Republicans, but they’ve shown cowardice when it comes to talking about trans issues. Now, I’m terrified the party will learn the wrong lesson from this election and start abandoning trans people, when in reality all they need to do is go on the offense and educate the public on why the trans community is not a threat to anyone or anything, particularly women’s sports.
Hiding from this topic is not going to make it go away. As fans of women’s sports, we must keep calling out this bullshit, no matter how tiring it gets. Those of us who are cisgender need to be better allies to our trans friends. We must demand that our leaders tackle transphobia head on, rather than continue to let the right frame the stakes of this issue.
Because unless the left acts quickly to regain control of the narrative, transphobia is going to quite literally tear the nation apart.
I will, of course, keep revisiting this topic on Power Plays. For now, I just am sending love to everyone, especially our transgender and nonbinary readers. I hope the start of women’s college basketball season and the NWSL playoffs are bringing you some joy and distraction. On a personal note, I’m going to be off for the rest of this week for a medical procedure (everything’s fine!), but I’ll be back next week with some NWSL content. And please excuse if there are more typos than usual in this — I’m on a pre-op fast and am seeing mirages of bagels as I type. -Lindsay
Lindsay, voices like yours give me hope amid the insanity, thank you.