From Fringe Issue to Enemy Image: How Trans People Became Part of the GOP’s Culture War
- Lizbeth
- 3 days ago
- 14 min read
Introduction: It Was Not Always Like This
Anyone looking at the United States today could easily believe that trans people have always been one of the Republican Party’s central enemy images. The rhetoric is harsh, often dehumanizing, and politically calculated. Trans women are portrayed as a threat to women’s spaces, trans youth as victims of a supposed ideology, schools as places of “indoctrination,” and medical associations as part of a political project.
But it was not always that simple.
In April 2012, Donald Trump, then owner of the Miss Universe Organization, even made headlines because he decided differently than his own pageant leadership had wanted. Canadian trans woman Jenna Talackova had been excluded from the Miss Universe Canada competition because she was not “naturally born female.” Trump and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen had the decision reversed. Talackova was allowed to compete, provided that she met Canada’s legal requirements for gender recognition. Only a few days later, the organization announced that trans women would generally be allowed to participate beginning in 2013. At the time, this episode was a remarkable moment, and Fox News later looked back on Trump as a temporary LGBTQ ally because of it. 1
Trump also sounded different in 2016 than he does today. On April 21, 2016, he was asked by Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today whether Caitlyn Jenner would be allowed to use the women’s restroom in Trump Tower. His answer was brief: “That is correct.” Earlier in the exchange, he had said that people should be able to use the restroom they felt was appropriate, and that the North Carolina law was creating unnecessary problems. Jenner did in fact accept the offer a few days later and filmed her visit to the women’s restroom at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Manhattan. 2
That is remarkable because the same Donald Trump later became one of the most important political amplifiers of anti-trans rhetoric. This shift was no accident. It says a great deal about how culture war politics work.
After Marriage Equality, a New Enemy Was Needed
A major turning point came in 2015. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled on June 26, 2015, in a 5 to 4 decision that marriage for same-sex couples was constitutionally protected in all U.S. states. The Fourteenth Amendment required every state to both perform marriages between same-sex couples and recognize those performed in other states. 3
For many conservative and religious-right groups, one of their central battlegrounds had now been lost. That did not mean homophobia disappeared. But the open political campaign against same-sex marriage had become harder to sustain. More and more people knew gay, lesbian, or bisexual people in their own lives. Social acceptance had grown. A culture war that had worked for decades was losing its power to mobilize.
Into that gap stepped trans people.
Trans people had become visible enough to be politically attacked, but not yet so socially established that broad parts of the population could counter these attacks with personal experience. That combination is dangerous. A small minority becomes visible, but remains abstract for many people. That makes it easier to use them as a projection surface.
Bathroom Bills as the Trial Run
The first major attempt to turn trans people into a national culture war issue centered on bathrooms. North Carolina’s House Bill 2, known as HB2, became especially infamous in 2016. The law was signed in March 2016 by then-Governor Pat McCrory and required trans people in public buildings, schools, and universities to use only the restrooms corresponding to the sex assigned at birth and listed on their birth certificates. At the same time, local anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQIA people were stripped away. The ACLU, the ACLU of North Carolina, and Lambda Legal challenged the law in Carcaño v. McCrory, arguing that it violated equal protection and privacy rights. 4
The narrative was simple, emotional, and effective. It was supposedly about protecting women and girls. In practice, however, the policy targeted trans people, especially trans women. A question of everyday participation was turned into a manufactured moral panic.
The logic itself is old. Minorities are not described as people, but as risks. Their dignity is not the focus. Instead, the focus is the fantasy that they might endanger others. That is exactly how a small group becomes a major political enemy image.
HB2 triggered enormous economic and political consequences. The NBA moved its 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte. The NCAA relocated championship events. Only in 2019 did a federal court approve a settlement that once again allowed trans people to use appropriate bathrooms in state buildings. But by then, the real political function of the bathroom bills had already been fulfilled. They had established an issue around which conservative energy could gather.
Trump: From Pragmatic Businessman to Culture War Leader
Donald Trump’s own development is especially revealing. In 2012, he could still act pragmatically at Miss Universe. In 2016, he could still say in a television interview that Caitlyn Jenner could use whichever bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower. 2
But Trump is not just an individual. He is the central point of reference for today’s GOP. Many debates within the party take their cues from him. What strengthens Trump gets taken up by others. What Trump marks as an enemy image becomes a signal to the base.
Already during his first term, his policies shifted significantly. In July 2017, Trump unexpectedly announced via Twitter a ban on military service by trans people. Reports later said that even the Pentagon had been surprised by the announcement. A modified version took effect in April 2019. President Biden rescinded the ban on January 25, 2021. 5
Then, on the very first day of his second term, January 20, 2025, Trump revoked that Biden order again, laying the groundwork for a renewed ban. 6
In the 2024 campaign, the rhetoric became even more aggressive. Trump and JD Vance made anti-trans attacks a central part of their closing message. Especially well known was the line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” These ads did not merely present trans people as a political topic. They framed them as a symbol that Democrats supposedly stood for a strange, elite minority politics instead of for “normal” Americans. 7
What is striking is that this strategy did not emerge overnight. It had been prepared over years by the American Principles Project under Terry Schilling. As early as 2019, the organization had begun testing anti-trans messaging. After the GOP’s disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms, it published an analysis titled The Failed Red Wave, arguing that the party had not exploited the issue aggressively enough. In 2024, that led to an ad campaign worth roughly 18 million dollars.
This is classic scapegoat politics. A small minority is turned into a symbol of everything supposedly going wrong. Trans people no longer stand for themselves. They become code words for “woke,” “elite,” “gender ideology,” “schools,” “loss of control,” and “decline.”
Even the post-election Democratic autopsy later credited that ad strategy with having had a significant impact on the election result. The Democratic Party is still debating how to respond. The ad line has since been reused for the 2026 midterms in several Senate races, including against Senate candidate Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia. 8
From Rhetoric to Government Policy
After Trump’s return to the White House, this rhetoric again became concrete government policy. An executive order dated January 20, 2025, carried the title Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Executive Order 14168). The title alone shows how the administration uses language as a weapon. Trans existence is not described as reality, but as “gender ideology extremism.” The order defines sex as binary and “fixed at conception,” instructs federal agencies to replace “gender” with “sex” in all materials, ends funding for gender-affirming care, and bars self-identification on federal documents. 9
Only days later, concrete measures followed. Federal agencies were instructed to remove references to “gender ideology” from websites and materials. NPR and other media documented how health and education websites were taken offline or rewritten within days. 10
On February 5, 2025, Executive Order 14201 followed under the title Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports. The title alone shows how trans women are linguistically pushed out of their gender. They are not named as women whose participation is being debated. They are marked as “men.” The order requires educational institutions receiving federal funds to interpret Title IX in such a way that trans girls and women are excluded from women’s sports, with the threat of losing funding if they do not comply. 11
That is more than a political disagreement. It is a strategy of unreality. Anyone who consistently refers to trans women as men is not simply debating rules. They are fundamentally challenging their existence as women.
Why Trans People Became So Politically Useful
Anti-trans politics work for the GOP for several reasons.
First, they are a powerful tool for generating fear. Bathrooms, locker rooms, schools, sports, and children are issues that can easily be emotionally charged. Anyone claiming to protect women and children does not have to explain very much about why the proposed measures would actually help.
Second, the issue connects different constituencies. The religious right, anti-woke activists, right-wing media, parts of conservative parent movements, and nationalist currents can all gather around a common enemy image. “Gender ideology” becomes a catch-all term for everything that is portrayed as an attack on family, religion, nation, and order.
Third, it distracts. A party with little to offer on health care, housing, wages, social inequality, or climate policy can generate enormous attention through bathrooms and pronouns. Culture war does not replace social policy, but it can bury it.
Fourth, it targets a small group. Trans people are few in number. That makes them vulnerable. A majority can debate them without listening to them. Their rights can be turned into campaign issues without many voters directly feeling what those policies mean in everyday life.
The Radicalization of the Republican Base
The party has not simply reacted to existing prejudice. It has actively intensified it.
PRRI data show that support among Republicans for laws requiring trans people to use bathrooms according to their sex assigned at birth has risen dramatically. In 2016, 44 percent of Republicans supported such laws. By 2023, that number had risen to 80 percent. Among the American public overall, support rose during the same period from 35 to 54 percent. 12
That is a massive shift in only a few years. It shows how political campaigns can reshape attitudes. If people hear again and again that trans people are dangerous, ideological, a threat to children, or an attack on women’s rights, something of that sticks.
Legislation then followed this mood and reinforced it at the same time. In 2025 alone, the ACLU tracked 575 anti-LGBTQ bills in U.S. states, the vast majority aimed at trans people. Nineteen states now have bathroom laws excluding trans people, and fifteen states define sex in law strictly through anatomy, chromosomes, or hormones at birth. None of these definitions existed before 2023. 13
And the Democrats?
The Democratic Party is not simply the mirror image of the GOP on this issue. Many Democrats have defended trans rights. The party has supported important protections, and on November 5, 2024, Sarah McBride became the first openly trans person elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. McBride won her seat in Delaware with around 58 percent against her Republican opponent John Whalen III. 14
Yet even before she was sworn in, Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution intended to bar McBride from using the women’s bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol. It was a symbolically humiliating gesture directed at the first trans member of Congress. 14
After the 2024 defeat, Democrats began arguing over how to handle trans issues. Some wanted to push back more strongly. Others saw trans issues as a political risk and wanted to avoid them.
In March 2025, Democrats in the U.S. Senate blocked a Republican bill, Senate Bill 9, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, with a united 51 to 45 filibuster. The bill would have excluded trans girls and women from women’s sports. At the same time, it became visible how defensive some of the party’s rhetoric had become. Senator John Hickenlooper, for example, voted against the bill but also emphasized that he did not think trans women should compete in women’s sports if other women objected. Senator Seth Moulton of Massachusetts said in an MSNBC interview that he did not want his daughters being overrun on the field by “formerly male athletes.” 15
That evasiveness is dangerous. If a party defends trans people only when it is convenient, it cedes the frame to the other side. Then the conversation is no longer about trans people needing civil rights, safety, medical care, and dignity. It becomes only about whether support for trans people “goes too far.”
Anyone who defends human rights only tactically defends them weakly.
The Core of the Strategy: Turning People Into “Ideology”
The most important rhetorical move is to stop treating trans people as people and instead treat them as the expression of a supposed ideology.
That may sound abstract, but it is very concrete. Anyone who speaks of “gender ideology” no longer has to speak about the trans girl who wants to go safely to school. Not about the trans man who needs correct documents. Not about the nonbinary person who wants to be treated with respect at work. Not about parents supporting their child. Not about medical standards. Not about dignity.
“Ideology” is a fog word. It makes people invisible and turns their rights into a supposed threat.
That is precisely why the term works so well in right-wing movements. It makes it possible to tie together very different issues: trans rights, feminist equality, queer education, anti-discrimination, language, universities, media, medicine, and even art. Everything becomes suspect. Everything becomes part of an invented grand plan.
Looking Toward Germany: The Mood Is Shifting Here Too
Germany is not the United States. But the patterns are becoming increasingly similar.
Here too, the Self-Determination Act was not simply debated as an administrative reform replacing a degrading legal procedure. It became a culture war issue. The Bundestag described the core of the law in quite sober terms. Since November 1, 2024, legal gender markers and first names can be changed through a declaration at the registry office, without medical certificates, without court proceedings, and with the previous Transsexuals Act of 1980 repealed. 16
Even so, the public debate kept revolving around fear-driven images. Men in women’s spaces. Supposed abuse. Children in danger. Women’s rights under threat. The parallels to American bathroom bill politics are hard to miss. Not because the laws are identical, but because the political narrative works in the same way.
The development within the CDU and CSU is especially troubling. The Union repeatedly framed the Self-Determination Act as an ideological project. Dorothee Bär, then deputy leader of the Union parliamentary group and now Federal Minister for Research, Technology, and Space in the Merz cabinet, described it in Rheinische Post as “another ideological project” that the traffic-light coalition had “rammed through without consideration.” 17
During the 2025 federal election campaign, the Union announced in its platform that it would abolish the Self-Determination Act if it won power. This also involved minors and medical questions such as puberty blockers and hormones, even though the Self-Determination Act itself does not regulate medical interventions. 18
That is an important point. Different issues are being mixed together. A legal change of name and gender marker is tied to medical treatment for adolescents, bathrooms, women’s rights, and claims of protection. The result is a vague sense of threat, even though these are distinct questions that should be discussed separately and carefully.
Queer organizations also warned in 2025 about new regulations that could effectively force people to out themselves. Netzpolitik reported on plans from the Federal Ministry of the Interior under Alexander Dobrindt, according to which former first names and gender markers would be permanently stored in population registers and transmitted to other authorities. The concern among advocacy groups is that the disclosure protections anchored in Section 13 of the Self-Determination Act would be undermined in practice because many authorities would continue to have access to old data. 19
This shows that the German debate is not happening outside this wider development. The terms are different, the party system is different, and the legal framework is different. But the mechanics are similar. A small minority is turned into the symbol of a supposed loss of social control.
CDU/CSU and the Danger of Normalization
The AfD wages an open culture war against gender diversity. That surprises no one. It becomes more dangerous when democratic conservative parties adopt parts of this rhetoric or make it more socially acceptable.
When the CDU and CSU frame the Self-Determination Act as “ideology,” they are reproducing a pattern well known from right-wing culture wars. Real people with real lives are turned into an abstract nightmare image. A matter of dignity and administrative reform becomes a story about threat.
Of course a democratic party may criticize laws. It may examine safeguards, question administrative rules, and want to improve specific regulations. But it makes a difference whether that criticism remains factual or whether it plays with the same fear narratives that have already done tremendous harm to trans people in the United States.
That difference matters.
Anyone claiming merely to voice “legitimate concerns” should also ask what images those concerns strengthen. Anyone speaking mainly of trans women as risks helps create a world in which trans women are seen as risks. Anyone speaking mainly of trans youth as victims of an ideology takes away their voice. Anyone framing self-determination as a danger makes external control respectable again.
What We Should Learn From the United States
The United States show how quickly a political climate can shift. In 2016, Trump could still say that Caitlyn Jenner should be able to use the women’s bathroom in Trump Tower. Only a few years later, anti-trans politics had become a core part of his campaign and government program.
That should alarm us.
Not because Germany will automatically take the same path. But because culture wars are highly transferable. Terms, frames, and fear narratives travel. “Gender ideology,” “protecting women,” “parental rights,” “protect the children,” “men in women’s spaces”: these formulas do not appear in multiple countries by accident. They are politically useful because they reduce complex issues to emotional shorthand.
And that is exactly why they must be challenged.
Not every critical question is transphobic. Not every uncertainty is hate. But a politics that systematically turns uncertainty into fear is dangerous. A politics that makes minorities into symbols of social decline is dangerous. A politics that makes human rights dependent on whether they are currently convenient in electoral strategy is dangerous.
Conclusion: It Begins With Language, but It Does Not End There
The demonization of trans people did not begin with a single law. It began with narratives. With the constant repetition that trans women are really men. That trans youth are victims of a trend. That schools are indoctrinating children. That doctors are acting recklessly. That parents are being manipulated. That language is coercion. That respect is ideology.
These narratives do not remain harmless. They become party platforms. Campaign ads. Laws. Bans. Everyday fear.
The history of the GOP shows how a fringe issue was turned into a central enemy image. Trump’s own story shows how quickly pragmatic acceptance can disappear when hate becomes politically useful. And the view toward Germany shows that democratic parties here are not immune to the same mechanism.
Trans people are not a culture war. They are people.
Anyone turning them into a red flag is rarely really speaking about them. They are speaking about power, control, and the question of who is allowed to exist as self-evidently part of society.
That is exactly why we must pay attention before rhetoric becomes reality.
Yours, Lizbeth
Sources
Fox News: Trump let trans beauty queen compete in Miss Universe, in a potential 2024 GOP primary liability; sowie ABC News: Donald Trump Has Words for Transgender Miss Universe Contestant; und The Hollywood Reporter: Trump Reverses Decision to Ban Transsexual Beauty Queen From Miss Universe Canada
CNN Politics: Caitlyn Jenner takes Donald Trump up on bathroom offer; ABC News: Donald Trump OK With Caitlyn Jenner Using Any Bathroom in His Tower; und NBC News: Caitlyn Jenner Takes Trump Up on His Offer, Uses Bathroom at Trump Tower
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/644/
ACLU: Carcaño, et al. v. Cooper, et al; und ACLU: North Carolina Asks Court to Keep Anti-Transgender Provisions of HB2 in Effect
American Oversight: The Trump Administration’s Transgender Military Ban; und NBC News: Biden reverses Trump's transgender military ban
Military Times: Trump revokes order allowing transgender troops to serve in military
NBC News: Transgender voters and the 2024 election; und Fox News: Trump's ‚they/them‘ ads combined culture war, economic worries to make effective pitch: expert
CNN Politics: Republicans reprise anti-transgender ‚Kamala is for they/them‘ ads for the midterms
The White House (Federal Register), Executive Order 14168: Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government
NPR: Some federal web pages still down as agencies implement order ‚defending women‘
The White House, Executive Order 14201: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports
ACLU: Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures in 2025
NBC News: Sarah McBride becomes the first out transgender person elected to Congress; und CBS Philadelphia: Delaware's Sarah McBride prepares to become first openly transgender member of Congress
CNN Politics: Senate Democrats block GOP-led bill to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports
Deutscher Bundestag: Änderungen beim Geschlechtseintrag werden einfacher
idea.de: Selbstbestimmungsgesetz: ‚Durchgepeitschtes Ideologieprojekt‘; und queer.de: Warnung vor ‚queeren Rändern‘: Dorothee Bär hält an alten Feindbildern fest
Tagesspiegel: Wahlprogramm der Union: CDU und CSU wollen Selbstbestimmungsgesetz wieder abschaffen
netzpolitik.org: Selbstbestimmungsgesetz: Dobrindt plant Zwangsouting per Verordnung
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