Abandoning trans people does not make the attacks stop. Sarah Trone Garriott, Democratic candidate for Iowa's third congressional district, ran anti-trans ads hoping to neutralise right-wing attacks on her campaign, and the Congressional Leadership Fund used footage from her own ad to attack her anyway. When politicians treat trans rights as a liability to shed, they lose the argument and the people they threw overboard.

What Sarah Trone Garriott actually said

The ad Trone Garriott released was not a gentle hedge. "I oppose letting men in women's locker rooms," she said, using exactly the framing the right uses to paint trans girls as predators infiltrating women's spaces. She added that "politicians have become too extreme on these issues." The calculation, presumably, was that adopting the language of anti-trans hysteria would take the issue off the table.

It did not. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a right-wing PAC, took footage from that very ad and used it against her. The attack came anyway. The trans children she described using that language got nothing from the deal except a Democratic politician lending credibility to the idea that they are a threat.

What makes this particularly painful to read is that Trone Garriott knew better. At an event in 2023, she told constituents plainly: "We need to be aware that discrimination is wrong." She described bathroom surveillance bills as creating "a really hostile environment for a lot of folks" and said schools had been navigating these situations and making it work before the legislation took that away from them. That was the true thing. She knew it was the true thing. And then she ran the ad anyway.

The political gamble that never pays off

I have watched this calculation play out more times than I can count, and it never lands the way the campaign strategists seem to hope. The logic is seductive: if you are being attacked from the right on trans issues, why not meet them halfway? Neutralise the attack, win the moderates, move on.

Except that is not what happens. What happens is that you validate the premise of the attack. You confirm that trans people are a legitimate political liability. You hand your opponents exactly the footage they need, and they use it. Seth Moulton, one of the earliest Democratic defectors on trans issues, lost his primary race by a wide margin to Senator Ed Markey, a staunch trans ally. The political reward for capitulation is not there. It was never there.

Meanwhile, Rob Sand in Iowa and Amy Acton in Ohio are running similar gambits. Acton called trans girls "boys" and endorsed restrictions on trans athletes. Sand ranted about "fairness" in women's sports. These races are still ongoing, but the pattern is familiar enough. Throwing trans people overboard does not make you safe. It just means there is one fewer person left defending them.

What is lost when a politician does this

I want to stay with the human reality of this for a moment, because it is easy for the political analysis to crowd it out. There are trans girls in Iowa. There are trans boys. There are non-binary young people trying to get through the school day, trying to use a bathroom, trying to exist without being treated as a political football. When a Democratic politician, one who once said discrimination is wrong, stands in front of a camera and says "I oppose letting men in women's locker rooms," those young people hear it. Their parents hear it. Their classmates hear it.

The message it sends is not a nuanced one. It is: you are acceptable collateral. Your safety, your dignity, your right to be seen as who you actually are, these things are less important than a polling point.

Trone Garriott still holds an endorsement from the Human Rights Campaign, issued before this particular heel turn. I hope the HRC is asking hard questions about what that endorsement means now.

Solidarity is the durable position

There is a version of this argument that is purely political, and I have made it above: capitulation does not work. The attacks come anyway, and you have given up the moral clarity that might have made the fight worth having. But beyond the strategy, trans people are not a liability to be managed. They are people. Trans girls are girls. Trans boys are boys. Non-binary people exist, fully and completely, regardless of what a campaign ad says. A politician who understood that would not need a focus group to tell them whether trans children are "a sacrifice they're willing to make." The question would not arise.

Solidarity is not just the braver position. It is the more honest one, and in the end it is the more durable one too. The politicians who stand firm, who refuse to describe trans women as men, who say plainly that discrimination is wrong and mean it in July and in October, are the ones building something that lasts. The ones who run the ad are left with footage their opponents will use against them and a community they abandoned who will remember.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender identity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.