Republicans Have Spent Years Trying to Disenfranchise Trans Americans. Now, Anti-Trans Democrats Are Helping Them.

Some anti-trans Democrats don’t think our voices matter, and like Republicans, they will govern us accordingly. Our continued inclusion in the American political system hinges upon their defeat.

Clockwise from the top left: Ken Paxton, Ron DeSantis, Jeff Landry, Josh Turek, Marcy Kaptur, Laura Kelly, Amy Acton, Henry Cuellar, Mark Gordon, and Kevin Stitt. Both Democrats and Republicans have worked to silence the voices of trans people this cycle.

In 1968, Louisiana passed a law allowing trans people to update their birth certificates. According to historical records, the law—which made Louisiana the 4th state to allow such changes—was introduced and passed because a trans woman had asked them to. Indeed, that was all it took for the legislature to act. And the final vote tally? 87-8 in the state House and 38-0 in the state Senate.

It may be hard to imagine a conservative state willingly doing anything to help trans people now, let alone after we ask them to, but until relatively recently, that was pretty much the norm. In 2009, Nebraska dropped its surgery requirement for driver’s licenses after it was asked to. In 2013, Idaho did the same. And in 2015, the GOP-held West Virginia Senate successfully pushed the equally red state House into removing the surgery requirement for driver’s licenses as well.

When the term ‘disenfranchisement’ is used, it often refers to the suppression or removal of voting rights. Although historical methods like poll taxes and literacy tests have been done away with, this literal form of disenfranchisement still occurs. Even now, some states—including Mississippi, Tennessee, and Florida—ban people who have been convicted of felonies from voting once they are released. Meanwhile, other states like Texas make it harder for people to vote by limiting voter registration, closing polling locations, and restricting mail-in voting.

Federally, Republicans have heavily pushed the SAVE America Act, a voter ID bill that, as Transitics has reported in the past, would make it much more difficult for many trans people to vote because of the barriers we face in obtaining accurate identification. Although the bill failed to pass, some trans people have nevertheless complained of facing extreme difficulties when voting this cycle.

But fundamentally, the right to vote exists to give every American a voice, however small, in our government, and efforts to remove or suppress that right serve the sole purpose of suppressing those voices. In that sense, disenfranchisement doesn’t just stop at voting rights—it includes any efforts to silence unwanted voices and systematically write them out of the political system.

For years, Republicans have been working tirelessly to do just that: write trans people out of the political system entirely. To that end, many GOP-led states have restricted the rights of their trans residents without informing them beforehand or giving them a chance to fight back. In some cases, it may take months or even years for trans people and the media to even notice that these restrictions are present. It’s worth noting that these policies are often implemented and/or approved by state governors and attorneys general, both of whom are typically elected officials.

In April, for example, Transitics was the first to report that Wyoming had quietly removed the ability for trans people to change their gender marker on their driver’s license. As if that wasn’t bad enough, documents obtained by Transitics a few months later eventually revealed that the ban had been implemented on May 2nd, 2025—11 months before anyone caught on. And it isn’t just Wyoming: by Transitics’ count, 20 other states have recently implemented at least one (though often more than one) anti-trans policy without either telling the trans people they affect or allowing the public to provide any sort of input. On the other hand, 11 states have also implemented pro-trans policies without notice; paradoxically, 5 of the states with quiet anti-trans policies—including Wyoming, which enacted a still-unnoticed ban on conversion therapy back in 2021—can also be found on this list. Here’s a map:

Although most of these states are controlled by Republicans, a few notably aren’t. As Transitics reported earlier this month, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Virginia all quietly cut Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care for minors in response to federal pressure, with New Jersey eventually following suit in recent days. Meanwhile, Kansas, which is governed by term-limited Democrat Laura Kelly, cut Medicaid coverage of care for all trans adults—despite state law only calling for a ban on coverage for minors—in October 2025. And worse, the state went out of its way to declare gender-affirming care as ‘experimental’ to get around specific federal coverage requirements for people between the ages of 18 and 20; other states that have implemented similar bans, like Ohio, have not taken this extreme step.

But regardless of who enacts them, the outcome of these policies is exactly the same: trans people are disenfranchised, our voices silenced and our rights taken away without the consent of the governed (and also without giving the governed an opportunity to consent in the first place). Furthermore, they indicate that politicians increasingly believe trans Americans are few enough in numbers that we don’t have to be listened to at all. That’s exceedingly dangerous.

Of course, Republicans already know this, and through their vehemently anti-trans platform, have essentially abandoned any possibility of competing for trans people’s votes. Even the Log Cabin Republicans—which has long been considered the LGBT wing of the GOP—gave up on this idea earlier this year, dropping the ‘T’ and officially declaring itself an organization for LGB Republicans only.

Now, some Democrats running for office this cycle are taking the hint. By Erin Reeds’s count, 31 Democrats have leaned into anti-trans messaging at some point in their current campaigns. While most have only ceded ground on trans people’s participation in sports, a few have gone further. Iowa Senate hopeful Josh Turek, for example, has publicly opposed “taxpayers paying for sex changes,” a statement that carries with it the implication that gender-affirming care isn’t healthcare. Meanwhile, Ohio House Democrat Marcy Kaptur ran ads declaring that she “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of schools.” Another, South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews responded to Trump calling her an anti-trans slur by branding trans women ‘biological men.’ Finally, Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, ditched a meeting with local LGBTQ+ advocates a few days after she promised to “enforce and uphold” the state’s existing anti-trans laws. After she faced intraparty blowback, the Ohio Democratic Party responded by silencing her critics with impunity.

Republicans’ attempts to systematically disenfranchise trans people show us that when a party believes that it does not have to compete for the votes of a group, it does not involve that group in the political system it controls. The message that Democrats like Amy Acton, Josh Turek, Marcy Kaptur, and Annie Andrews, as well as others like Kathy Castor, Vicente Gonzalez, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Sarah Trone Garriott, are sending us could not be more clear: they do not believe that they have to compete for our votes.

That tells us everything we need to know about how they will govern us.

Of course, not all Democrats have followed suit. Even many in competitive races, Democrats like Sam Forstag in Montana, Troy Jackson in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, David Crowley in Wisconsin, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, JoAnna Mendoza in Arizona, Christina Bohannan in Iowa, and Cait Conley in New York have refused to join the GOP’s anti-trans crusade, while others like James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa in Texas and Adam Hamilton and Cindy Holscher in Kansas have been somewhat ambivalent this cycle but have nevertheless been very supportive of trans people in the past.

Thus, in a handful of races across the country, trans people are being given a false choice between two candidates who do not think their votes or their voices matter. But in the races where Democrats have held the line, trans people have the opportunity to send a message to those who haven’t. And when it comes to the worst offenders, we must take advantage of that opportunity.

Simply put, we as trans people are not fighting for the future or the direction of the Democratic Party or for our place within that party. Rather, this election season, we are fighting for our continued inclusion in the American political system, to remind those in our government that our votes—our voices—matter and that we deserve to be heard.

This Tuesday, our disenfranchisement is on the ballot. It’s our responsibility to use our voices accordingly and do our best to ensure that this November will not be the last time that our voices matter.

Our rights depend on it.