Nic Laflin of The Diversity Center in Santa Cruz. "No one wants to be a cultural war," they said. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
By Wallace Baine November 17, 2024
Bigotry in election campaigning is an American tradition.
For generations, politicians have been appealing to voters’ most base instincts behind a veneer of “issues” ads. The targets of those ads have shifted over the years as overt appeals against specific demographic groups have fallen out of favor. But the strategy behind the ads has not.
In 1988, to take but one example, the campaign of Vice President George H.W. Bush created an ad featuring a grainy, menacing black-and-white photo of a Black convict named William Horton — rechristened “Willie” Horton — to suggest that Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, was responsible for Horton’s crimes.
In 2012, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination for president, aired an ad in which he proclaimed, “there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas.”
In many ways, the astonishing rise of Donald Trump is unprecedented in American history. But in incendiary appeals to the electorate’s fear and narrow-mindedness, he fits a familiar pattern. Earlier this fall, in many swing states, the Trump campaign unleashed a barrage of TV ads designed to inflame Americans’ uneasiness about one specific group: transgender people, who make up about 0.6% of the U.S. population.
Now that Trump has won a second term, what will be the consequences of those ads and the emotional responses they evoked on the lives of trans people? Millions of American women and people of color have reason to be concerned with a second Trump presidency, but he directly campaigned against only two groups: immigrants and trans/nonbinary people (“Kamala is for they/them,” intoned his most well-known ad. “Donald Trump is for you.”). The Trump campaign spent nearly $215 million on ads targeting trans people.
What does it feel like to bear the hostile scrutiny of a political party that ostensibly represents half of the American people?
“No one wants to be a cultural war,” said Santa Cruz’s Nic Laflin, who identifies as trans (and uses they/them pronouns). Laflin is in a clear position to evaluate the real threats against trans people, both as a trans person and a program specialist at The Diversity Center, Santa Cruz’s most prominent public/social touchstone for the local LGBTQ+ community. They said that The Diversity Center has already been targeted with threats in recent months, including a bomb threat stemming from a drag story hour hosted by the center.
“I tend to be in the crosshairs of these kinds of things, because I do a lot of trans programming,” said Laflin. “My background is in domestic violence and people who do harm. So I’m not usually easily rattled. I tend to be a pretty level-headed person. But those were scary.”
Widespread public animosity and even threats of violence are, of course, nothing new for the trans community. Such things have always been a fact of life for trans people. But the Trump campaign has ratcheted up the tensions in the community and disrupted the essentially lifelong efforts of many to find a lasting sense of safety and equilibrium. At the same time, many have been reluctant to talk about their fears and their encounters with transphobia.
“It takes a toll on you, for sure,” said Laflin.
Since the election, The Diversity Center has seen an uptick of engagement from people apprehensive about what happens when Trump takes office. To take one example, the center has regularly sponsored a workshop for those interested in learning how to legally change their name and/or gender. The latest such workshop attracted three times as many participants as usual, as people feel the need to prepare for challenges to their access to health care and other government services.
Santa Cruz writer and photographer Jana Marcus published a book in 2012 called “Transfigurations,” on the lives of transgender men. “I have a lot of transgender friends,” she said, “who have all left social media, canceled all their [social media] accounts and just said, ‘If you want to contact me, here’s my email.’”
“Trans people are not a monolith,” said Nic Laflin. “I think for some, they knew this was coming. They saw the writing on the wall, and they see what’s coming next. But for most of us, even if we were not surprised [by Trump’s election], it’s still really disheartening and hard to take in all that content and hear people talk about you like that.”
Leo Osborn, 22, is a transgender man originally from North Carolina who is still new to the Santa Cruz community. He began his transitioning journey about three years ago. While he’s been alarmed and disturbed at the political rhetoric aimed at the trans community in the past year, he’s learned that there’s a certain inherent wariness in the community about mainstream culture in general.
“I think maybe we’ve arrived at disillusionment sooner than some people, like Black people have had a similar experience, or immigrants. I mean, I don’t know that I felt any more protected by Kamala’s campaign. No one was really speaking up for trans people.”
What’s coming next is still anyone’s guess. Trump has already signaled that he’ll sign an executive order blocking hospitals from providing gender-affirming care and end all federal programs for transgender people. The wild card is what might happen outside Trump’s authority as president, what he tacitly gives permission for others to do. Trans people are worried about everything from family estrangements, to self-exile, to something even worse.
“I worry there will be violence,” said Osborn. “As a hopeful person, as a person who believes in justice but also love, I want to say there won’t be. But I think what will happen is that there will be a rise in that kind of hate. But I also think there will be a [corresponding] rise in a kind of community and love and protection as well.”
On Wednesday, Nov. 20, The Diversity Center will mark Trans Day of Remembrance with a vigil at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. It will be a moment not only for the local trans community to come together and comfort and inform each other, but also for cisgender allies to show their support.
“We’re not the only LGBTQ+ organization here,” said The Diversity Center’s Laflin. “But we are the oldest and the most established. So I think people do look to us in these moments, and it’s important that we remain strong.”
One casualty of the second Trump administration that LGBTQ+ people would like to see is complacency. “A lot of people in Santa Cruz,” said Laflin, “have been sort of lulled into a false sense of security. I think people are often surprised to hear about how tough it is, for example, in school for queer and trans students, that bullying is still really bad in this community, and the bathroom issue [in schools] has not been resolved. There are many, many good-hearted people here.”