Why Calling Anti-Trans Hate a “Distraction” Is So Troubling

Over the past decade, open bigotry against immigrants, trans people, Muslims, and vulnerable communities of all kinds—has moved even more firmly to the center of US politics. At the same time, many people trying to combat the forces churning up this hate have settled on a familiar line: that the attacks on these groups are a political “distraction” from the “kitchen-table” issues facing Americans. It’s become such a common refrain that a recent poll indicated a majority of US adults endorse it. And it’s a line being used over and over again by Democratic candidates throughout this year’s midterms.

It’s easy to see why this framing has taken hold. By painting inflammatory positions as desperate attempts to evade discussion, proponents hope to disarm them. The conventional wisdom is that somewhere in the imagination of the average voter, there are core issues that really matter—usually to do with the cost of living. These, they contest, should be the rightful focus of political debate.

But embedded in this taxonomy of “distractions” and “core issues” is a series of assumptions about whose opinion matters in an election, and more importantly, whose rights are worth fighting for. Many of us in the groups being most commonly targeted by the far right are left to wonder if this dogmatic pursuit of the least controversial platform is less a strategy than a cultivated apathy—or, worse, whether our ostensible allies ever cared for us at all if it is so easy to cast us aside.

I have lost count of how many times I’ve left work over the past five years only to realize one push notification later that I had more rights in the morning than I did in the afternoon. The week after Trump’s passport executive order, I kept forgetting to breathe. While social media swirled with speculation about what this was meant to distract the public away from, visions of a grim future unspooled in my head. When it feels like your world is ending and the most people can be bothered to say about it is that something actually important must be happening somewhere else, the clear message is that what is happening to you is a second-tier issue—that you don’t really count.

The distraction discourse also doesn’t account for what happens when politicians supposedly on the “good” side embrace bigotry themselves. Is the response to, say, the recent decision by South Carolina Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews to release an anti-trans ad to dismiss it as a distraction—or to ignore it entirely? This wasn’t just a rhetorical shift. This was an otherwise progressive politician being dragged into the realm of authoritarian prejudice—the kind of choice that has potentially life-altering consequences for those of us who live here under the bus. Shouldn’t that matter?

On a practical level, the distraction strategy has also failed Democrats repeatedly. In 2024, strategists convinced Democrats to court the center exclusively. Despite retroactive claims to the contrary, no overtures to pro-trans policy were made by the Harris campaign. Her answer on the question of protecting gender-affirming care was middling. Her foreign policy on Palestine was hawkish. Rather than attack xenophobia at its roots, she bragged that her policy on immigration in many ways would be harsher than Trump’s. None of us need to be reminded that she lost that election decisively. Those she was cynically attempting to court were mostly unpersuaded, while those of us whose lives were determined by concessions made in pursuit of the biggest possible tent were edged out of what we’re told is our only political home.

Yet, in the aftermath, those who had crafted this approach claimed inexplicably that the opposite had happened—that Harris had lost because she had pandered too much to the left. Today, while Democrats pivot past an imaginary center towards the right, Republicans continue their pursuit of minority groups undaunted. If it is a distraction for Democratic politicians, it appears to be a permanent cornerstone for the GOP.

Moreover, claims to “distraction” fail to understand how reactionary politics work. Cultural issues, broadly speaking, are used to glue together value systems in the service of creating a larger, unified voting base. Project 2025 was particularly terrifying because, however small and insignificant each of those individual positions may have appeared on their own, together they created a cohesive framework governing every aspect of life. Xenophobia, gender policing, and the criminalization of reproductive freedoms are animating principles of fascism. They give life to it.

Today’s campaigns are light on facts and heavy on emotional appeals. It matters that both of Trump’s terms were won by appealing to emotions while Democratic candidates focused on pragmatics. Emotional appeals are so central to the conservative platform that more money has been poured into anti-trans advertising than any other issue, and those expenditures show no signs of slowing down. They believe they’ve struck gold, in part because they do so in the absence of much opposition.

The fact that these ads do not appear to be moving the immediate political needle—Republicans are significantly underperforming in advance of next month’s elections, after all—doesn’t negate the impact they have had, particularly when it comes to enforcing near-total silence or, worse, active complicity from Democrats toward the attacks on trans people. As Democrats continue to fold on trans rights, they have allowed far-right actors to cement anti-trans and anti-immigrant animus into national policy.

Research suggests that rather than appear more reasonable, parties who cave on contested territory only convince the general public that their opposition to those parties was correct. There is no ground the party can cede that will satiate fascism, and a party that espouses equality but fails to defend it is morally hollow.

While it’s true that bombast historically has been the refuge of desperate politicians, many of them went on to reshape the world in their own brutal but otherwise perfunctory images. History’s villains clearly show it is possible to galvanize large swaths of the public through hate in order to seize and maintain power.

When Trump first declared that he would “secure the border” in 2015 by erecting an enormous wall across the entire southern US border, this too was labeled a distraction even well into 2019—an unserious proposal to mask the absence of cogent policy. Democrats had already shown themselves to be quite committed to border warfare, with former President Obama having escalated deportations during his two terms far above his predecessor. But building a wall was exactly what Trump ultimately did. As migrants drown trying to survive concertina wire and gunfire from newly erected border fortifications, we must concede that this was not merely a performance. Trump’s anti-immigrant policies have metastasized. Eight years after his initial promise to build that wall, Trump’s running mate made the astonishing claim that Middle America was besieged with immigrants eating the pets of their neighbors. That man is now vice president.

A plurality of voters do not draw such a careful division between pragmatic policies and those rooted in emotional appeal. The attention violent crime is given vastly outweighs the impact it has on the average voter. The most violent crimes—those involving high-capacity firearms—remain fundamentally unaddressed. Meanwhile, thinly veiled anti-Black racism couched in “law and order” rhetoric has pushed US policy ever rightward for 40 years.

Even if we accept that at one point the issues in question had once been chosen to “distract”, they became intimately woven into core policies of the GOP. They are part and parcel of every minute of Fox News. There is historical precedent. When abortion, homophobia, and anti-feminism were centralized as pillars of the conservative platform during the “Moral Majority” in 1979, it may not have been a driving force behind American politics quite yet. But soon it was, and it laid the ground for the modern far right to germinate and take root.

These issues weren’t used to draw attention away from the policy failures the party had championed. They were instead used to make these more enticing, to appeal to a broader audience and signal the new direction of conservative policy. They harnessed the anger of conservatives towards the anti-war movement, the rise of feminism, and the gathering successes of the civil rights movement, and directed this energy toward institutional capture. Policing bodies, and specifically reproduction, was a brass ring to hold out to those who felt they had otherwise lost control of their lives. As church-aligned politicians embraced anti-abortion policies to build voter power, these policies began to impact how those voters saw not only the ballot but the church itself. A feedback loop was created, reshaping the modern conservative movement less toward small government, more toward the promise of a bulwark against Gomorrah.

At the point at which every major university has had its curriculum reconfigured to comport with the approved national history, where major landmarks have been taken down, renamed or otherwise defaced to obscure painful facets of our history, where gender policing has been enshrined by executive order down to middle school soccer games, is it still distraction or does it yet count as policy? Facing these policies head-on, not as a passing phase but an entrenchment of authoritarianism, is an existential imperative. Marginalized communities whose lives are increasingly imperiled by this entrenchment cannot wait. While it will be a very long time before any of us can breathe deeply again, a bold and affirmative defense of human rights is necessary for our survival.