Top Left: Josh Turek, Top Right: Kathy Castor, Bottom Left: Marcy Kaptur, Bottom Right: Henry Cuellar

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On Saturday, Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Iowa, released an ad in which he looked into the camera and said that he’s “against taxpayers paying for sex changes.” Read as federal policy, this is a Hyde Amendment for transgender people—no Medicaid, Medicare, or ACA subsidies. It would be horrific. The policy is more extreme than even some Republican policies in red states. To say it would be devastating to transgender people, who often depend on ACA plans or government-funded plans to obtain their care, would be an understatement. And Turek has made this stance the closing message of his 2026 campaign.

I would not vote for Josh Turek. I would not vote for Marcy Kaptur, who bragged in an ad that she “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools.” I would not vote for Kathy Castor, who, when asked if she supported “biological men” in women’s sports, laughed and gleefully said no, even as the other Democrats on her panel rejected the premise. I would not vote for Henry Cuellar, who has voted in favor of nearly every anti-trans bill to come before him in Congress. And if one of the worst anti-transgender Democrats is on your ballot this election cycle, you should not either.

Before I make my case, I want to be clear about what I am asking, because the people who respond to this piece will not be. I am not asking any of my readers to vote Republican. I am not asking anyone to stay home and sit the election out. I am not asking my readers to abandon the Democratic Party, which I want to win in a wave election this year. And I am not asking anyone to abstain from every Democratic politician who has ever taken a single poor or uneducated stance toward transgender people. What I am asking is that transgender people, and the people who care about us, find the line they would draw on any other fundamental human rights issue, and draw it here: do not give the worst anti-transgender Democrats your vote. Leave that line blank, vote for every other candidate, and make sure the story of 2026 is not that the Democratic Party has to accept anti-transgender policy in order to win.

There is a major problem in the Democratic Party right now. After the 2024 elections, a certain kind of “centrist” consultant class emerged that sought to blame Harris’ loss on transgender people. We saw it in the initial wave of Democrats who tried on anti-trans policies, and we saw it in the memos and candidate messaging guidelines put out immediately after, encouraging Democrats to throw transgender people under the bus, as if our lives were worth negotiating away. Pollsters and strategists followed, with some implementing those recommendations in the races we are all watching now. Democratic Party leaders and future presidential hopefuls are watching too. On Nov. 4, they will take every race in the country, find the story of what it means for the Democratic Party to compete in swing districts, and write the memo that decides how the next Congress will govern and what the 2028 presidential election will look like. If Turek wins in Iowa after running on a trans care funding ban, if Kaptur holds her district in Ohio after “transgender ideology” enters the Democratic vocabulary, the story will be that transphobia works in the Democratic Party. The template will be expanded, and anti-transgender sentiment will grow like a cancer in the only party that has stood up for transgender people.

Imagine an alternative world, though: a world where Abdul El-Sayed wins in Michigan after telling voters that “the decision about what healthcare is necessary ought to be held between a patient” and their doctor. A world in which Sam Forstag, running in Montana’s relatively conservative 1st Congressional District, wins after saying of Republicans’ anti-trans attacks that they are a distraction, “they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets,” and that we should “let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions.” Imagine a world where the Democrats who pulled back on their anti-transgender advertising, like Sherrod Brown, win, and where the many Democrats running in swing districts who never ran an anti-trans ad or took up an anti-trans policy position carry their races in a year when hundreds of millions of dollars are spent against them targeting a vulnerable community. And then imagine that Turek and Kaptur do not get to join them. The story of that election writes itself.

What I want our community, and the Democratic Party, to avoid is the fate of transgender people under Labour in the United Kingdom. I am not talking about the particulars of the British system of government, but rather the attitude the party has embraced, and what it has done with that power. We already know what happens when left-leaning people hold their noses and vote for transphobic candidates who otherwise hold the “correct” party designation. In 2024, those people voted in Labour and ended over a decade of Conservative rule, and then Labour enacted some of the most severe anti-transgender policies in any Western democracy. And while American government is built differently, and that will slow such a process here, it will not stop it. There’s no promise that a Democratic president elected in 2028 will undo Trump’s sports order or the pressure that pushed the NCAA and IOC to ban trans athletes. There’s no guarantee that a future Democratic Party, learning the lessons of next week’s elections, will maintain federal funding of gender-affirming care. There’s no promise that positions once confined to the Republican Party will not slowly become Democratic ones. And by the time it has happened, it will be too late to fight it or vote against it. The only moment a community, and those who care about us, can impose a cost for abandoning it is before that abandonment can spread. That moment is this election.

Some will argue, as they always do, that the alternative to even the most anti-transgender Democrat is worse. In any individual election, that is true: the Republican almost always has worse policies toward transgender people than the Democrat. But as I wrote a year ago, that is not the only calculation transgender people have to make, because elections come with lessons. If a Democrat who ran against us wins, the capitulation will be credited by strategists with enormous pull within the party. If they lose, nobody can claim they lost for standing with us, because they did not. Right now, transgender people have one major thing going for us: one of the two major parties still passes protective legislation and has not joined the litany of anti-trans policies escalating in the Republican Party. If that fragile dichotomy collapses, and Democrats decide that trans people can be sacrificed for political gain, the result is not a lesser evil, in which the candidates willing to throw us under the bus win but are not as bad as the Republicans would have been. The result is a political consensus across both parties that our rights are meaningless, and that outcome could be even worse. In a country where we have lost the one major party willing to fight for us, it could take a generation to claw back even the most basic of our rights.

Some will argue that we should fight back only in the primaries, or that we should elect the worst anti-transgender Democrats and try to “push them to be better after the election.” This is folly. For one, the majority of these Democrats took their anti-trans turn after the primary. More importantly, though, elected officials who run on transphobia will treat their win as a mandate for it. A candidate who campaigns on taking away our healthcare out of fear of anti-transgender advertisements is not suddenly going to vote for our healthcare: the ads will only be worse the following cycle, in a non-wave year. And good luck pushing a single candidate to be better when an entire state party, like the Ohio Democratic Party, has literally banned criticism of candidates’ anti-trans positions by members of the party’s Pride and Progressive caucuses. One of the things these groups cannot take away, though, is your vote. A vote that can be withheld is a vote that must be bargained with. This is the leverage we have over the worst anti-transgender Democrats.

Some will argue that this problem is overblown—that the vast majority of Democrats are pro-transgender. The point is well taken, and it’s exactly why this ask is limited and coming now rather than in two years. When I began reporting on anti-trans legislation, it was nearly unheard of for a Democrat running for congress or governor to embrace anti-trans policy. The few who did at the state level were fiercely primaried. Now, I maintain a list of 32 high profile anti-trans Democrats that grows every day. There are several dozen more in state legislatures that I have not had the time to fully vet and catalog. The lesson that the democratic Party will learn about how to compete in swing districts and close races across America is being written right now, and it will be written regardless of whether the many pro-trans Democrats agree with it. So let me take this objection at its word: if anti-trans sentiment is limited, then my ask is limited to match it—a few names out of thousands left blank to keep the sentiment from infecting the party.

So here is what I am asking you, my reader, to do. Find your line. You have one; everyone has one. You wouldn’t vote for a Democrat who ran ads calling for a ban on abortion or for bringing back the Defense of Marriage Act. You wouldn’t vote for one who sought to roll back the Civil Rights Act and laughed at the people it would hurt. Draw that line here, and leave the worst of these Democrats blank: Turek, Kaptur and a handful of others from my list of 32 anti-trans Democrats. I am not asking you to abstain on all 32. Most of them earned their place on that list with a vote or a statement, and some have improved since their inclusion on that list. The line I am asking you to draw is at only the worst among them, the ones who ran ads against us, promised to take away our healthcare, or laughed when asked about our kids. Then vote for all of the other Democrats on your ballot. And when the consultants sit down on Nov. 4 to write the memo of this election, make sure the only story they can tell is a true one: the anti-transgender ads failed, the Democrats who abandoned transgender people gained nothing for it, and the largest Democratic majority in years will proceed without the worst anti-trans cowards joining it.

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