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NC, other swing states bombarded with Trump commercials about Harris and gender transition surgeries

Former president Donald Trump is criticizing Kamala Harris over her support of providing health care to allow inmates, including migrants in federal detention, to transition to a different gender.
Trump campaign
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Former President Donald Trump is criticizing Kamala Harris over her support of providing health care to allow inmates, including migrants in federal detention, to transition to a different gender.

If you spend your weekends watching football, you've certainly seen the commercials — again and again.

The pro-Trump ad states that “Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners.”

It quotes her discussing her position at a forum.

It then states: “Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.”

Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, Republicans have been trying to tie her to the more liberal positions she took when running for president five years ago. The Trump campaign appears to have settled, for now, on the transgender commercials, which have been running repeatedly in North Carolina, especially during football games on Saturday and Sunday.

The New York Times reports that since August, Republicans have spent more than $65 million in a dozen states on the topic, according to data from AdImpact. They're focused in swing states like North Carolina and states with close down-ballot races.

There are two commercials in heavy rotation in Charlotte — the city where the "bathroom bill" fight over transgender restroom access originated in 2015, making it one of the earliest such controversies — are about Harris and transgender health care. Both are paid for by the Trump campaign.

The issue started during the Trump/Harris debate last month.

“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” Trump said. “This is a radical left liberal.”

Trump’s comment came in the middle of a long rant about Harris’ politics, and at first, some in the media, like Time magazine, incorrectly labeled that statement as misinformation.

But he was describing her position running in the 2020 Democratic primary.

In 2019, then-Sen. Harris answered a survey from the American Civil Liberties Union about transgender health care. It asked: Would she use her executive authority as president to ensure that inmates — including those in prison and immigration detention — would have access to “comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care?”

She said yes.

When asked by WFAE about whether Harris's position has changed, the Harris campaign pointed to a previous statement by spokesperson Michael Tyler, who was asked about it on Fox News.

“That questionnaire, this is not what she is proposing, it’s not what she is running on,” he said. “You want to talk about immigration and border security — she’s been very clear about how she has governed and how she intends to govern if she is president of the United States.”

A long backstory

The controversy extends back to roughly a decade.

When Harris was California's attorney general, the state was sued by inmates who wanted gender-changing surgery. California had initially denied the requests, and Harris supported the state.

California then agreed to settle the lawsuit in 2015, and, according to the New York Times, became “the first state with a policy of providing sex reassignment surgery for some prison inmates, adopting a set of specific guidelines on what services it will provide to transgender prisoners, state officials and advocates for transgender people said.”

One of the Trump ads features the case of convicted murderer Shiloh Quine, who was formerly known as Rodney Quine. As part of the settlement, he received taxpayer-funded gender transition surgery.

The California lawsuit was part of a nationwide movement for correctional institutions to treat transgender health care as they would any other medical need.

But the current Trump commercials do more than highlight Harris’ position. It shows images of former energy department official Sam Brinton, who is non-binary, wearing a red dress.

There is a photo of Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender person confirmed by the Senate to a federal position. And a photo of Harris next to a drag performer, Pattie Gonia.

Those people aren’t federal prisoners receiving gender-transition health care. The images are meant to instill fear or mockery, or perhaps both.

But the ads haven’t received significant pushback from the Harris campaign, Democratic groups or the media.

Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s leading LGBT organizations, said she’s not surprised by the commercials. She said the “LGBTQ community has been under attack for the last several years.”

WFAE asked whether she’s surprised there hasn’t been more outrage from progressives over the commercials. She declined to answer that specifically, but said “These attacks lose time and time again.”

She said the GOP tried to use transgender issues last year, including in the Kentucky governor’s race, which Democrat Andy Beshear won.

“There was not one where they were successful,” Robinson said. “In Ohio, they tried to use it and attach it to the abortion rights ballot and lost. In Virginia, they used these attacks and now we have more LGBTQ representatives than ever before.”

The Trump campaign referred questions about the ad to the North Carolina Republican Party.

Spokesperson Matt Mercer said the commercials are in heavy rotation because they are effective.

“Voters don’t know who Kamala Harris is to a large extent,” he said. “And these things that she campaigned on when she ran for president in 2020 — voters need to know these are her true positions when she ran during the primary.”

Polls show North Carolina is a toss-up, with early, in-person voting starting on October 17.

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Steve Harrison is WFAE's politics and government reporter. Prior to joining WFAE, Steve worked at the Charlotte Observer, where he started on the business desk, then covered politics extensively as the Observer’s lead city government reporter. Steve also spent 10 years with the Miami Herald. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Sporting News and Sports Illustrated.