Some national LGBTQ+ groups are turning their backs on Democrats who have adopted anti-transgender rhetoric in their campaigns this election cycle.
“You don’t have to sacrifice any member of our community to win in these races to have a message that resonates with voters,” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a briefing for reporters Monday morning.
After failing to respond to President Donald Trump’s anti-transgender ads in the 2024 presidential election, some Democrats have been addressing the issue by borrowing Republicans’ terminology, often opposing trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports. According to a September poll from The 19th and YouGov, 45% of adults say they are more likely to vote for candidates who support trans athlete bans, compared with 20% who say they’d back someone who opposes them.
In Ohio, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton told The Toledo Blade, “I do not support boys in girls’ sports.” Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) released an ad in which she says “boys should not play in girls’ sports.”
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Those two candidates, Robinson said, will not receive the Human Rights Campaign’s support ahead of November.
“You’ve got Marcy Kaptur, who not only is bad on the message, but she’s also bad on the policy,” Robinson said, referring to how Kaptur voted in support of a bill that would have required schools to ask for parental consent before allowing trans students from using their preferred pronouns and names.
“We’re spending our energy investing in the candidates that are all the way with us. So in Ohio, we’re really spending a lot of energy and effort with Sherrod Brown’s [Senate] campaign. We’re not supporting Amy Acton or Marcy Kaptur at this time,” Robinson added. “If these folks are elected, we’ll figure out how to operate on the other side.”
Robinson said that Brown, who is running against Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), has done a “great job” responding to Republicans’ anti-trans attacks.
An Human Rights Campaign survey of over 9,000 LGBTQ+ adults that the group released at the briefing found respondents “have little confidence in major political and public institutions,” and nearly 40% said they had “very little” confidence in the Democratic Party. At the same time, nearly nine in 10 said they plan to vote in November.
A 30-second ad from Brown’s campaign has voters, not Brown, explicitly saying that anti-trans messaging in the state is a distraction from economic issues because Ohio already has laws in place banning gender-affirming care for minors and prohibiting trans athletes from joining female sports teams.
“I’m not wasting my time on Marcy Kaptur,” Robinson said. “We’re spending our energy and resources on the champions that we think can be the difference makers.”
The organization has had conversations with some Democratic candidates that have made anti-trans remarks.
Texas Senate Democratic candidate James Talarico told Fox News that he opposed “trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangers safety or fairness,” and he would “absolutely” vote for a bill to ban gender-affirming surgeries for minors. Robinson said that Talarico, who the Human Rights Campaign has endorsed, apologized at a campaign event in Houston two days later.
She said he explained that his comments got clipped so his overall approach to the issue wasn’t clear, and that he believed in most cases that there are no safety or fairness issues when trans kids play sports.
“That was a caveat that he put in there, really encouraging folks to go back to local governance and rules related to sports and he felt like that wasn’t really captured,” Robinson said.
She added that Talarico clarified his position on gender-affirming care, saying “he believed that the role of politicians isn’t in the doctor’s office.”
The campaigns of Acton, Kaptur and Talarico did not respond to The Washington Sun’s requests for comment.
In April, the Human Rights Campaign announced that it planned to spend $15 million this cycle in voter outreach efforts in key races. Robinson said her group does “not endorse every Democrat,” and that the investment would be going to “folks who are with us on the issues.”
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