WATCH GRID: "For they/them"

27-24

Do you live outside a swing state?

If so, here’s what’s going on inside them. We’ve been hearing and reading these words every few seconds for the last two or three months:

“Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.”

From August through early October, national Republicans spent “more than $65 million” on a handful of ads centered around transphobia, according to an NYT analysis at the time, though because most of these attacks have so thoroughly conflated trans people with non-binary people and drag queens and anyone in hair dye that isn’t blonde, I’d just call most of these attacks queerphobic.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that $ number doubles by Election Day. They’ve already ramped up to such a degree, I feel like it’s been a while since I heard a Trump ad that wasn’t about bigotry, though there’s one that assigns itself the free-association challenge of doing xenophobia both transphobically and in a crime-panicking way, creating “the turducken of hate-baiting.”

That “$65 million” number includes ads by not just Trump’s campaign, but also by various associated PACs and other campaigns, including local bombardment in Ohio and the even more vicious shit that Trump is posting to his social-media sandbox.

In Texas, Ted Cruz’s Democrat challenger, Colin Allred, is facing so many of these attacks that national viewers have seen them during Texas Longhorns games this past month, including one delirious rant that paints itself into a rhetorical corner and accidentally claims the American military’s child soldiers are receiving sex changes, which has gotta be a Metal Gear subplot.

Reporters have noted that conservatives are especially targeting these ads at viewers of football games, and especially college football, a sport whose largely red-/purple-state viewers Trump cannot afford to lose. As a thorough CFB watcher in one of the most CFB-addicted states, and as a resident of the market that has been hit harder by political advertising than any other (except Phoenix), I feel like I hear these ads when I sleep.

(Not in a the message is sinking in way. At this point, it’s like that thing where you repeat a word so many times that it starts to lose meaning, followed by it becoming generally funny that we are animals who can construct such complex sounds with our mouths.)

In previous elections, transphobia has not been a winning issue for Republicans — it’s been the opposite, in fact. But when Democrat voters see veritably random poll fluctuations and conclude Trump has suddenly obtained a mystical force known as “momentum,” it’s easy for us to assume the world’s all-time biggest bet on this specific form of hatred¹ is finally accomplishing the thing Republicans had always wanted it to accomplish.

Maybe these ads backfire, as Trump ignoring the economy distracts the electorate from its natural desire to use an election as a magic Somebody Somehow Put The Gas Prices Back Where They Were When I Was In High School button. That’d sure add evidence to the case that bigotry hurts even the bigot himself. Or maybe these ads install just enough malice in the exact Pennsylvania voter who happens to decide everything. Hate works, for a season.

Regardless, in times like these, AKA all times ever, there has only ever been one well, and now we are going back yet again to a version of what’s in it:

“Whatever you do to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do to me.”

A month ago, despite the prevalence of these ads at the time, I assumed the fascists’ Random Punching Bag Generator had mostly settled on immigrants this time around. But while “mass deportation” camps are still the Republicans’ final solution for every problem, their primary closing argument along the way is nothing more than pitting the current in-group against the 1% of people who are trans.

The only response is the same response as ever. The mission has been the mission for several thousand years and counting. To repeat that previous post:

Every time we elevate the lowest-ranking people, we improve the future for everyone else as well, and it’s a whole lot easier to invest in elevating those people if we accept that we don’t inherently deserve anything better than what those people have, that we have never been different from anyone in any meaningful way.

As society changes its goldfish mind on whether trans children or Palestinian children or Haitian children are the bigger danger, the gospel has always been consistent. The gospel is solidarity, and solidarity is the gospel.

Whatever we do to one of the most marginalized of our siblings, we do to everyone.

There is no feasible movement that can improve society for “they/them” while also thereby making anything worse for anyone else.

In fact, once we all realize “they/them” is part of “we” and always has been, everything will get better for all of “we” in at least one tangible way: Instead of commercials about bigotry, we will receive inspiration by way of additional commercials about Cheez-It pep talks.

So you’re damn right.

If “they/them” is not included in “we,” then there is no “we,” but just a collection of in-groups ready to throw each other into the path of empire whenever it manages to isolate a new target.

For they/them.

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Business: Sunday, November 24 at 5 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, I’ll be at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church for a free (RSVP here) book event. We’ll do a Q&A, panel, signings, and whatever, then go to the bar to happily not watch the Jaguars, who are off that week. (I said “bar,” which should clue you in on what kind of Baptists we’re talking about, AKA the kind I would invite you to hang out with.)

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1. When people ask why I chose to donate the first $50,000 of my book’s profits to the Trevor Project, a charity devoted to protecting LGBTQ youth, I can offer a long answer. But the 2024 Republican campaign is my new short answer.