The Only People with a “Trans Agenda” Are the Republicans & Conservatives. They Are Perversely Obsessed With Us.

Heather Cox Richardson recently said something that cuts straight through the noise. She noted that when Republicans lose ground on the issues that normally carry them, the economy, immigration, national security, they reach for something else. And right now, she said, they are “running hard against transgender Americans again.” 

Her words are worth repeating: “This is a tool.”

When the political ground begins to crumble under them, they reach for culture wars. When their policies are unpopular, they need someone to blame. And when they cannot explain their decisions, they distract.

Trans people are the distraction.

Richardson quoted Texas legislator James Talarico describing how the media keeps asking him about demonizing his “brothers and sisters” instead of talking about housing, healthcare, or real public policy. That observation should trouble anyone paying attention. Because it reveals the mechanism. The issue is not transgender people themselves. The issue is that transgender people are being used.

Over and over again.

As Richardson explained, Republicans have lost ground on immigration. They have lost ground on the economy. They are losing ground on national security. So what do Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson do? They “roll out transgender people again.”

Again.

Think about that for a moment. Out of all the issues facing the United States, war, healthcare, infrastructure, education, economic inequality, climate disasters, they want voters focused on a tiny minority of people who are simply trying to live their lives.

That is not governance. That is scapegoating.

And it is revealing.

Because the truth is this: trans people do not have an agenda. We are not organizing our lives around controlling other people, dismantling institutions, or reshaping democracy. Most of us are busy doing something far more radical in the eyes of our critics, we are trying to live ordinary lives.

The obsession lies elsewhere.

As Richardson said plainly, the political question underneath all of this is simple: “Are people equal in America, or are they not?”

That is the real debate. Not bathrooms. Not sports. Not the latest invented outrage of the week. The question is whether equality under the law actually means something.

And the increasingly desperate return to trans scapegoating suggests something else as well. It suggests that the people pushing these attacks know they are losing the larger argument. When you cannot defend your economic policies, when your foreign policy looks chaotic, when voters are angry about the direction of the country, you reach for the easiest target.

You manufacture a moral panic.

But here is the irony. The louder the attacks become, the more obvious the strategy becomes. When a political movement cannot talk about healthcare, jobs, or democracy without pivoting back to transgender people, it says far more about their politics than it does about us.

They accuse us of having an agenda.

But the truth is painfully clear.

The only people with a “trans agenda” are the Republicans and, in Canada, the Conservatives.

And they are perversely obsessed with us.