Donald Trump has been making false claims about gender-affirming care at his rallies and even at the Sept. 10 debate. Trump has been claiming schools are engaged in gender affirming surgeries.
Trans issues are a flashpoint for Trump’s base, the GOP and even some Democrats and Independents, so he has ratcheted up the rhetoric in recent weeks. But a new Trump attack ad aimed at Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris goes a radical step forward by melding truth about Harris’s support for trans health care in prisons with transphobic rhetoric and imagery. Trump is promoting the ad on his website.
It’s not a wholly invented narrative. The ad shows Harris in an interview during her 2020 presidential run talking about gender-affirming care for incarcerated people. Most of Trump’s ads about Harris have focused on her time as District Attorney in San Francisco and as Attorney General of California.
Those ads repeatedly state that Harris favors criminals—usually undocumented immigrants—over white Americans. Most feature a white woman victim of a crime perpetrated by an undocumented Latino man. The ads are driving racial animus and assert that Harris cares more about criminals than white Americans.
The new anti-trans ad, which is now playing frequently in the pivotal Pennsylvania swing-state market, first aired on Sept. 20. It’s intended to drive home that same point with an added twist—that Harris is extreme and puts criminals ahead of hardworking American taxpayers. The ad, which is titled “Nonsense,” states, “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners. Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.”
What the ad doesn’t mention is that the video is from 2020 and was in response to a campaign-era questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union that same year. In an interview with the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) Action Fund during the 2020 election cycle, Harris laid out her stance on trans care. It’s not extremist; it’s following the law. Not mentioned in the ad, even in tiny print anywhere, is the fact that denying health care to inmates is unconstitutional.
Rather the ad pits Harris against “normal” Americans with a theme stated succinctly: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
In her NCTE interview Harris says, “I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.”
She stated that “Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.”
In the video that is part of the ad, Harris states that as president, she would “ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention” would get access to “all necessary surgical care.”
In her ACLU questionnaire, Harris said that as Attorney General of California, she “worked behind the scenes” to ensure that the state’s Department of Corrections changed its policy “so that every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desire and need.”
In other words, Harris would uphold the law and the Constitution.
Trump raised the gender affirming surgery point in the debate against Harris in a throwaway line in which he said that she “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison”—out of context and soon after his comments about Haitian immigrants “eating the pets” in Ohio—a point refuted by ABC News moderator David Muir.
In the new ad, Trump not only puts Harris’s comments as the focal point without differentiating between her 2020 run and now (though her stance remains unchanged), but also has images of two figures from the Biden administration who are not named in the ad. The images in the context of the ad suggest these are criminals who got the surgery due to Harris’s work.
One of those is Admiral Dr. Rachel L. Levine, who serves as the 17th Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and is the highest placed trans person in U.S. history. The other is Sam Brinton, who was the Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear division under President Joe Biden and the first out nonbinary figure in any administration. The photos used of both Levine and Britton are intended to be inflammatory.
In February 2023, Brinton was charged with grand larceny for allegedly taking Tanzanian designer’s Asya Khamsin’s luggage from Ronald Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va. It was the third such incident of luggage theft Brinton was allegedly associated with. Brinton was fired from the Biden administration after their arrest.
