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For more than a decade, conservatives in the U.S. have demonized and spread misinformation about transgender people as the foundation for a base-rallying “culture war” — and thanks to the success of those tactics, the GOP is returning in full force to their long-running fight against marriage equality, as Media Matters for America (MMFA) now warns.
The right-wing media watchdog published a timeline this week laying out the shifting trajectory of the GOP’s anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda campaigns since 2015. As MMFA researcher Vesper Henry noted, 2025 will mark a full 10 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of equal marriage rights in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges, a major loss for the evangelical movement that pushed the party to attack trans people as an easier target.
“In the interim, right-wing media focused their attacks on transgender people, materializing into a yearslong culture war and now a presidential administration with an unabashed anti-trans agenda,” Henry wrote for MMFA this week. “Confident that they have put transgender people on their back foot, right-wing media are mobilizing against gay marriage once again, a fight for which they have years of practice.”
Though the Obergefell ruling brought conservatives’ push against trans rights to the fore, right-wing groups had already concluded that trans people must be stopped. In June 2015, the same month Obergefell was decided, the far-right think tank Family Research Council (FRC) published a document titled “Understanding and Responding to the Transgender Movement.” Composed by anti-gay marriage campaigners Dale O’Leary and Peter Sprigg, the document (which, among various falsehoods, pushed the inaccurate pathology of trans people as either “autogynephilic” or homosexual) argued that “biological sex” as assigned at birth is an “immutable biological reality” — a phrase that has now formed the basis for much of the second Trump administration’s attacks on trans people. They also deployed numerous anti-trans arguments that are now common on the right, including claiming that whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s trans identity “tends to reinforce concerns that such individuals are not fit for military service.” A similar contention is a major part of the administration’s proposed prohibition against trans people in the U.S. military.
North Carolina Republicans passed the first high-profile, anti-trans “bathroom bill” of the 2010s into law just nine months after the Obergefell ruling, MMFA’s analysis observed, but received significant political and cultural backlash. By 2017, however, FRC and other far-right groups had landed on trans rights as a useful wedge issue to splinter the LGBTQ+ movement as a whole. As another watchdog group, Right Wing Watch, reported at the time, speakers at FRC’s 2017 “Values Voter Summit” — attended by President Trump and then-senior counselor Kellyanne Conway — stressed that Republicans should attack trans people hard and often to “divide and conquer” LGBTQ+ communities.
“For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far,” Virginian anti-LGBTQ+ activist Meg Kilgannon told attendees. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.” Kilgannon went on to applaud anti-trans feminists who already allied themselves with religious conservatives in the “Hands Across the Aisle Coalition,” joking that she “had no idea we agreed on so much.”
In the ensuing years, many mainstream U.S. media outlets including the New York Times legitimized opposition with a “both sides” approach to trans rights, offering trans-antagonistic pundits ample room to spread “junk science” while also failing to disclose when sources were actually anti-trans activists. That trend has continued into the 2020s, but was perhaps most infamously illustrated in a 2018 story by writer Jesse Singal in The Atlantic, which even outed and misgendered its cover model. (Somehow, Singal is still writing on trans topics; in a guest essay for the New York Times this week, Singal cautiously protested Trump’s war on trans youth, but maintained that he is a “critic of American youth gender medicine” and falsely characterized research into medical transitioning as “slipshod.”)
Republicans have been so emboldened by the success of their anti-trans propaganda that they are increasingly returning to same-sex marriage as a political issue. Although support for marriage equality is high across the U.S. electorate, Republicans in states including Idaho and South Dakota have pushed for bills over the past few years that would outlaw same-sex marriage if Obergefell is overturned. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas questioned the legitimacy of the Obergefell ruling themselves while helping overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, raising concerns that it, too, could soon fall.
In the aftermath of Trump’s second ascendancy to the Oval Office this January, legislators in at least five states have introduced measures asking the Supreme Court to officially overturn Obergefell. As MMFA’s analysis noted, Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver — a Republican who introduced his state’s bill to condemn and overturn Obergefell — claimed earlier this year that same-sex marriage should be “illegal again,” defending his stance as “not remotely controversial, nor extreme.”
Schriver’s position is actually quite extreme, as public polling on the issue indicates, and should be controversial. Unfortunately, for the Republican Party, it’s business as usual — just the way conservatives planned it out over a decade ago.
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