A new pro-Democrat ad skewering the Republican obsession with trans people is making waves across the internet.
The 30-second ad from the Progress Action Fund (PAF) depicts a white-haired man in a suit sitting inside a bathroom stall. A young girl trying to use the bathroom then opens the stall door and screams upon seeing him.
“I’m your Republican Congressman,” he tells her in a raspy voice. “Now that we’re in charge, I’m checking to make sure there’s no trans people in the wrong bathroom.”
The girl responds, “Bathrooms are private. Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“I won the last election, and this is my priority,” the Congressman replies. And in perhaps the most powerful moment, the ad ends with a close-up of the generic Republican’s face as he creepily says, “Now let’s make sure you’re really a girl.”
The ad will air on television in both Texas and Ohio as part of a broader $1 million ad buy. Many are praising it as a masterclass in responding to anti-trans attacks, as it calls out not only how ridiculous it is that Republicans are focused on trans people instead of actual problems facing the country, but also how inappropriate and invasive the party’s anti-trans policies are – for both cis and trans people alike.
The girl in the video may or may not be trans, yet she is still subject to this old man wanting to “confirm” she has the “proper” body parts to be considered a girl by his party.
Joe Jacobson, a former Obama Administration intern and PAF’s executive director, told the Hill the ad is meant to highlight exactly those two messages.
“Americans want their elected officials to lower gas prices and end the war in Iran, not follow them into the f**ing restroom,” Jacobson said. “Republicans are creepy as hell. Democrats need to grow a spine and call Republicans out for their creepy fetish of monitoring children’s bathrooms.”
PAF reported that randomized controlled testing showed the ad could move swing voters a whopping 8 points toward Democrats. Erin in the Morning writer S. Baum called it “a welcome antidote to the GOP’s fearmongering about trans people,” especially as some Democrats flounder in their responses to anti-trans attacks.
Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews of South Carolina, for example, recently released a political ad saying that she neither supports “biological men playing women’s sports” nor “gender surgery for minors.” Her ad was intended to deflect political attacks from her opponent, Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC), but it made Andrews one of a growing number of Democratic candidates who have repeated transphobic right-wing framing on trans issues.
Trans people and trans-allied commenters have criticized the ad, noting that Andrews’s crude reference to trans athletes as “men in women’s sports” is similar to other Democratic politicians who have repeated the line to fend off similar right-wing political attacks.
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, last Monday cautioned Democratic candidates from repeating such lines, saying, “You’re doing too much and getting too little… You don’t have to sacrifice any member of our community to win in these races, to have a message that resonates with voters.”
But some Democrats, like former Senator and current Democratic Senate candidate for Ohio Sherrod Brown, have received praise for their response to anti-trans attacks.
Instead of trying to defend or explain his views on trans rights, Brown released an ad last month slamming Republicans for focusing on trans people at all, when there are so many bigger challenges facing the state.
The 30-second ad, on which Brown reportedly spent more than $200,000, features a series of voters asking why the GOP is so obsessed with trans people.