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Over the weekend, Donald Trump doubled down on anti-trans lies he has told in recent weeks as his campaign has desperately looked for ways to gain an upper hand against Kamala Harris.
At a recent Moms for Liberty event, Trump made the disturbing and patently false claim that children have been sent to schools and given gender reassignment surgery without their parents’ knowledge.
This is not actually happening, of course. Afterward, CNN asked Trump’s campaign for proof and — spoiler alert — the campaign provided none. And it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that CNN found no supporting evidence, either.
But the former president was back telling this same lie, again, at a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, saying: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation?”
This wasn’t the extent of Trump’s transphobia. He also repeated a false claim that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who won a gold medal at the Paris Olympics, is a transgender woman. You may recall that Trump went on a similar tangent during another unhinged speech a few weeks back.
And this kind of anti-trans hysteria can result in real-world harm: Aside from the psychological toll these attacks take on trans people, there has been a raft of anti-trans violence in recent years.
Trump is also perpetuating right-wingers’ disturbing crusade against teachers and education officials, spreading conspiratorial rhetoric similar to what we’ve heard from the likes of JD Vance and Tucker Carlson.
And it’s a pretty damning indictment of Trump’s followers that he keeps pushing these easily debunked lies.
And it’s a pretty damning indictment of Trump’s followers that he keeps pushing these easily debunked lies. He seems to think his supporters are too dumb to know he’s lying — or so bigoted that they’re willing to let people think they’re this dumb, for the sake of pushing anti-trans propaganda.
Either way, Trump is spinning transphobic horror stories and effectively commanding his followers to act as though his deranged diatribes align with reality.