Harris struggles to combat Trump’s anti-trans closing argument

Brooke Migdon
Sun 27 October 2024 



Vice President Harris has struggled to combat former President Trump’s anti-transgender attacks, which are a major part of the former president’s closing argument.

The Trump campaign has flooded the airwaves with advertisements that paint Harris as extreme for her past support for trans-inclusive policies, including a response recorded on an ACLU candidate questionnaire during her 2019 presidential run that she would guarantee transgender people in prison and immigration detention have access to gender-affirming care.

The Supreme Court has held for nearly half a century that denying incarcerated people medically necessary health care is a violation of their constitutional rights, and federal prisons offered transition-related care, including surgery, under the Trump administration. The first person to receive gender-affirming surgery while in federal custody first sued for care in 2019, and a federal court granted her access in 2022.


The vice president has skirted explicit questions about transgender rights in recent interviews and has fallen short of offering a forceful rebuttal to the Trump campaign’s ads. On gender-affirming health care, Harris has said it is settled law that individuals should have access to medically necessary care, and treatment should be left to doctors and their patients.

“I’m not going to put myself in the position of a doctor,” Harris said this week in an interview with NBC’s Hallie Jackson.

Republicans see Harris’s responses as proof that the Trump campaign’s messaging is working, while some Democrats and LGBTQ advocates argue Harris’s caution on the topic is strategic.

“The Trump campaign understands that transgender care is not a top issue for voters – that’s not the point,” said one former Trump administration aide. “This is a stark reminder for the remaining undecided and low propensity voters in battleground states that Harris is no moderate.”

“Not only does this messaging fire up Trump’s base to maximize turnout on Election Day, it’s also a direct appeal to his main target in his closing arguments — young men — that a vote for Harris is a vote for a radical leftist agenda,” the source added.
Trying to define you

Transgender issues are among the least important issues driving voters to the ballot box, according to a recent Gallup poll, and Republicans’ similar focus on transgender athletes and health care in the 2022 midterms failed to render victories on election night. Most voters surveyed this month by the left-leaning polling firm Data for Progress said anti-trans ads aired this cycle are “mean-spirited” and have “gotten out of hand.”

NBC’s Jackson noted in her interview with Harris that Republicans are “trying to define you on this” issue and asked Harris for her message to LGBTQ Americans looking for a “full-throated backing” for the transgender community.

“I believe that all people should be treated with dignity and respect, period, and should not be vilified for who they are, and should not be bullied for who they are. And that is a true statement for me my entire career,” Harris said.

Asked if transgender Americans should have access to gender-affirming health care, Harris said, “I believe we should follow the law.”

Imara Jones, founder of TransLash Media, described Harris’s responses to Trump’s campaign ads as “contained” and “measured.”

“We know from modern campaigns that a key rule is that you don’t allow attacks to go unanswered for any length of time, and I think what’s interesting about this is that there hasn’t really been a response that matches the level of the attacks,” she said. “These attacks are something that the Harris campaign has had months to prepare for, and the broader Biden campaign longer than that, because this was predictable to happen.”

Harris’s relative silence is reflective of a broader issue among Democrats in communicating their support for the trans community, she said.

At this year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, for example, Republicans leaned heavily into anti-transgender rhetoric, while at the Democratic convention the following month, trans issues were mentioned by just two speakers, neither of whom is trans.

“There seems to be an overall reticence to match the scale of the attacks on the Democratic side,” Jones said.

That could be intentional, she added, and Harris, who has long supported LGBTQ rights, may be being deliberately vague in a bid to win over moderate Republicans and keep further Trump attacks at bay.

“It is a strategy to try to minimize the possible attack vectors that your opponent can make, and that the more specific policies you put out there, the more you’re giving them an opportunity to pick them apart and to find the one sentence or the one bullet point that they can use to derive and undermine what you’re trying to say and what you’re trying to do,” Jones said. “That is a strategy — whether or not that’s the right strategy, I don’t know.”
Show some strength

Others, though, think that Harris needs to show more conviction on the issue while she has been criticized by some Democrats this week for relying too heavily on her stump speech in her recent interviews.

“If she truly believes in something like transgender rights, then say it. Show some damn strength already,” one Democratic political consultant said. “Voters respect candidates with guts. At the very least, they like candidates with guts who take a position, even if they disagree with you about the position.”

In an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier last week, during which Fox played the Trump campaign ad referencing the 2019 ACLU questionnaire, Harris referred to a New York Times report that people in the federal prison system were offered gender-affirming care under the Trump administration.

“I will follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,” she said.

While Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, broadly support bodily autonomy, which includes gender-affirming care, that point is most often made in the context of reproductive rights.

Walz, the more vocal of the two on transgender rights, in a recent episode of the “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast said Trump’s closing arguments are intended “to demonize a group of people for being who they are.”

“They’re running millions of dollars of ads demonizing folks who are just trying to live their lives,” said Walz, who last year helped make Minnesota a refuge for gender-affirming care.

“Everybody wants to make sure that the presidential candidate is speaking to their issues,” said Sean Meloy, vice president of political programs at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund. “Part of this is doing research; everything is not going to be handed out on a silver platter from a speech. We’ve got an amazing candidate when it comes to her record on LGBTQ rights.”

“The fact that Republicans are attacking her for that, is pretty telling,” he said.

Some Democratic strategists suggest that Harris stay focused on her own closing message, which is largely about arguing that Trump is a threat to democracy, rather than responding to attacks from her opponent.

“The closing arguments are transgender surgeries vs. Jan. 6; how each candidate responds to the message 12 days before the election is irrelevant. Could she do better? We can all do better, but so what? Focus on the finish line,” said Ivan Zapien, former Democratic National Committee official. “People aren’t consuming the whole attack or answer, it’s all shorthand and grunts.”

Meanwhile, The Trump team views the attacks on Harris as another way to paint her as too liberal in the final stretch.

“Harris would rather raise taxes to fund gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants than extend the Trump tax cuts that put money back into the wallets of American families,” said Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly. “Kamala is for dangerously liberal spending, while President Trump is for you.”

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. 

This Is What You Really Need To Know About Trans Health Care In Prisons

Lil Kalish
Sat 26 October 2024 

Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, by claiming she supports “tax-payer unded transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” His presidential campaign’s most aired and most expensive ad stokes fears about transgender people and zeros in on Harris’ previous comments in which she signaled her support for incarcerated trans people to access gender-affirming surgeries.

Trump’s rhetoric shows no signs of going away ― even though new polling shows even many Republicans find it off-putting ― and the longer it floods the airwaves, the more it obscures the reality of what it’s like for trans people, especially those who are incarcerated, to try to receive gender-affirming care.

“There are hundreds of trans people that I work with every year who are seeking gender-affirming care,” said A.D. Lewis, an attorney at the Prison Law Office, a nonprofit law firm that focuses on constitutional protections for incarcerated people. “I think if people met and knew them, they would see how funny, witty, compassionate and caring these people are ― and that they should not be judged by one of their worst moments.”

“Unlike us, they can’t go out and get that care, can’t get a job or insurance to pay for that care,” added Lewis, who also founded the Trans Beyond Bars Project and has supported thousands of trans, nonbinary and intersex people in prisons and jails. “And some people are locked up for their entire lives, so if the government’s going to take away your liberty, can the government force you to live as a gender and sex that you’re not?”

A 1970s Supreme Court ruling found that states must provide adequate health care to incarcerated people, but it wasn’t until the 2010s that lower courts ruled these protections extended to gender-affirming treatments. Trans people in prisons are often subject to unsafe housing, verbal harassment and sexual assault, and face enormous barriers to accessing trans-inclusive medical care, let alone surgeries. In California, for example, only 20 out of 150 people who were approved for surgeries actually received them as of December 2022, according to a California Department of Corrections budget proposal.

Trump’s attack on Harris seems to refer to her tenure as attorney general of California. She was in office from 2010 to 2017, when incarcerated trans people were fighting primarily for access to gender-affirming hormones. Her office represented the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which blocked a trans woman, Michelle Norsworthy, from receiving surgery. At the time, there weren’t even structures in place for trans people to request surgery. Norsworthy later sued the state, with the help of the Transgender Law Center, and received a settlement in 2015. This suit cleared the way for the first trans woman in California to receive surgery behind bars in 2017, just as Harris was exiting office.



Unlike us, they can’t go out and get that care, can’t get a job or insurance to pay for that care.A.D. Lewis, Prison Law Office attorney

Both Trump and President Joe Biden have helped influence the Department of Justice’s provisions on the kinds of gender-affirming care offered by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A small group of incarcerated trans people did receive gender-affirming treatments while Trump was president, but he significantly rolled back the types of care trans people could access inside federal prisons. Biden has worked to expand access to gender-affirming care in federal prisons, but under both administrations, access to that care has been an uphill battle.

HuffPost spoke with Lewis about what we should make of campaign rhetoric, what the experiences are of incarcerated trans people trying to access gender-affirming care and what either presidential candidate could mean for the future of trans health care in prisons.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Trump is saying that Harris is supporting “taxpayer-funded transgender operations for illegal aliens in prison.” Can you unpack this? What does it actually look like when trans people try to access any kind of gender-affirming care ― not just surgery ― while incarcerated?

In general for people who are incarcerated in prisons, jails, detention centers and any other type of locked facility where people can’t leave, federal courts and the Supreme Court have held over and over again that if and when the government takes away your liberty, they actually have a duty of care to you to provide medically necessary care. What that looks like has changed over a number of years, but in general it means that prison officials cannot be deliberately indifferent to your medical needs. If someone has diabetes, prison officials have to ensure you get treatment for your diabetes. They can’t just deny treatment.

Dozensofmedicalassociations have determined that gender-affirming care can be medically “necessary” to treat gender dysphoria. What does that look like for trans folks behind bars? Do prison officials treat gender dysphoria and the need for gender-affirming care the same as they do for other health care needs?

It depends on which prison system or which jail system you’re in and where it is. In California, and more broadly the [U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit] that we’re in, prison officials have to provide medically necessary care based on an individualized assessment of that person’s needs. This means that prison systems can’t have blanket bans where they say we don’t do X type of care for trans people.

In California, where Kamala Harris was attorney general, this was won through a couple of different lawsuits. One was called Norsworthy v. Beard and another Quine v. Beard, both in 2015. Both were brought by the Transgender Law Center, and those cases established the right of trans people to get access to not only gender-affirming hormones but also gender-affirming surgeries based on an individualized assessment of that person’s medical needs and the medical necessity of the surgery for that individual.

Other departments of corrections will apply different standards to gender-affirming care than they will to anything else. This is a common trope we see in prisons where they’ll have a group that decides what type of care trans people get, and then trans people are put through this entire other process that no one has to go through to get care. That’s the same in California as well ― approval for gender-affirming surgeries goes through an entirely different committee than anything else. Even when people have access to gender-affirming health care inside of prisons or jails, what’s very common is that there’s a different process by which those requests for medical care are treated and evaluated really differently than any other type of request for health care.

So can you walk me step by step through the process for someone who is trans and incarcerated and wanting to start any kind of gender-affirming care?

Like many things in prison, the first thing that anyone has to do is ask for it. They have to request an appointment, get an appointment and be able to attend that appointment, which sounds simple, but it’s a lot of steps inside and any one of those steps can go wrong and be delayed. Trans people are asking first and foremost for hormones. So trans women are asking for testosterone blockers and estrogen, and trans men are asking for testosterone.

Many departments of corrections have these kinds of snapshot-in-time policies, where if you weren’t on hormones when you came in the door, you couldn’t start hormones. Now, by and large, these policies have been successfully attacked. But even now to get access to hormones if you’ve never been on them is quite a feat.

Many of the people I’ve worked with over the years, and including in California, have reported that the level of hormones they receive is much lower than the presumptive ranges that various professional associations have (i.e., the Endocrine Society, or WPATH or the American Medical Association). We also sometimes see the opposite, where prison officials don’t really understand how to administer hormones.

The type of medical care that Trump is referring to in these ads is gender-affirming surgeries. For trans people, these can look like top surgeries or genital surgeries. But in general, very, very, very few trans people inside prisons and jails are ever accessing these types of surgeries.

Trump’s focus on this incredibly small group of people is extremely concerning to me because of how few people get it. But the underlying rhetoric about surgeries is that it’s so heinous-sounding on its face to people that he doesn’t even have to say it’s bad, it’s just understood as awful and bad and ridiculous.

I think a huge part of the rhetoric is about trans people being undeserving of this right ― they’re imprisoned, so they’re undeserving. Trump’s language around surgeries in particular traffics heavily in a logic of scarcity and austerity. The implied message is so strong… because his audience so clearly already hates all three groups of people: trans people, people who lack documents and people who are inside prisons. So this is really a trifecta for many of his most fervent supporters.

Do we have a sense of how many trans folks have been able to get gender-affirming surgery behind bars?

There are around like 10,000 incarcerated trans and nonbinary people nationally, and even of that number we know that it’s an incredibly small percentage of people who have ever accessed surgical care inside of facilities. We know that Kamala Harris, and many other attorneys general, have released people rather than provide them with gender-affirming surgery. In 2015, the state of California released Michelle Norsworthy on parole rather than giving her access to gender-affirming care on the eve of her 9th Circuit case. We know that prison officials would rather release people than give them this care, so you can imagine how few people are actually getting it.

One of the things that seems to rile up Trump’s base is the “taxpayer-funded” aspect of this all.

The “taxpayer-funded surgery” rhetoric kind of exceptionalizes trans health care out of the other taxpayer-funded things that we’re doing, including incarcerating people, caging them, paying for correctional officers. This is all taxpayer-funded, but you would never say “taxpayer-funded incarceration.”

I think also for Republicans, this language is signaling to them that part of the fight around gender-affirming surgeries should be around taxpayer support, right? We can look at things like the fights around Medicare and Medicaid and all the public funding of trans health care that are going on through the Affordable Care Act. A lot of conservative states have tried to say that state funds cannot and should not be used for this type of health care. In my opinion, it’s really trying to privatize access to gender-affirming care to make sure that fewer people can get it, fewer poor people get it, and create conditions such that trans people, especially poor trans people, cannot get care.

When we peel back the layers of meaning, to me what’s undergirding it is not only this critique about prison spending, but it links up with other types of state-level attacks that we see on trans health care and the broader conservative agenda to privatize any type of social welfare and to get rid of it. At the end of the day, the federal government, as Trump would lead it, would want to minimize any possibility of trans people getting any type of health care because they would rather for trans people to not exist.

One of the groups that we’re talking about, which Trump has repeatedly pushed harmful rhetoric about, is undocumented people and people in immigration detention. Are you able to share what health care looks like for trans asylum seekers or those in detention?

Many people have to fight, just like they do in prisons, to get access to hormones. They have to request it, and submit grievances and appeal those grievances. They have to get outside supporters to help them because the threshold for getting access to gender-affirming care is quite high.

But trans people in detention are typically pending adjudication for usually a shorter amount of time — six months, maybe a year or two. In general, the medical care provided is not as intensive or as long-term as the medical care provided in prisons. In immigrant detention, someone can be removed at any time, so some of those systems are less willing to provide long-term care. What I hear from detention officials about some of these requests for surgery or gender-affirming care, separate from hormones, is that they don’t know if people are going to be here next month or year, so it’s hard to plan around such a major surgery.

What do you anticipate if Trump were to win?

If Trump is elected, he is giving the green light not only to the federal government and federal prison officials to deny any and all types of gender-affirming care to anyone inside custody, but he’s also giving the green light to every state that agrees with him. He’s sending a clear message that his administration will oppose expanding access to gender-affirming care and will also celebrate the minimization of it.

This is exactly what Project 2025 and some of the conservatives are leaning into: that there’s a lot of different ways they can make being trans harder. If you think they’re stopping with prisoners, you’re absolutely wrong. They’re coming for all of us. I think it’s incumbent upon not only all trans people and LGBTQ+ people but anyone who cares about medical self-determination and autonomy to stand arm in arm with advocates fighting to ensure that trans people can maintain access to care whether they’re youth, 

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