Republican lawmakers, including the president, went all-in on anti-transgender rhetoric on the first night of the party’s first-ever midterm convention — dubbed “Trumpapolooza” by some critics.
President Donald Trump closed out day one of the event at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, with a characteristically rambling, nearly two-hour address in which he claimed to be hesitant to bring up trans issues two months before the November 3 midterm elections, but was doing so because he is “petrified” that Democrats will change their position.
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“I thought after we won in a landslide in the last election, they would change up,” the president said.
Trump also described Republicans’ calls to ban transgender women and girls from women’s and girls’ sports as “one of our great sound bites of all time.”
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He claimed that attacking transgender athletes’ rights is “a 99 to 1” issue, “and I have no idea who the one is.”
However, a 2025 Gallup poll found that only 69% of U.S. adults believe that trans athletes should be limited to competing on teams that align with the sex they were assigned at birth.
It also remains unclear precisely how effective the Trump campaign’s anti-trans ads in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign were in turning out Republican voters. Research from the conservative American Principles Project indicates such ads made voters more likely to vote for Trump in 2024, PBS reported. But polling has also suggested that voters’ main concerns were inflation and economic issues.
That remains true in 2026. A recent GLAAD survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults found that 44% of registered voters said “Increasing Costs or Inflation” is their number one concern, compared with just 8% who said transgender issues were.
A recent Fox News poll also found that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans on trans issues. The poll, which was conducted by phone from April 17 to 20, found that 56% of respondents think Democrats would do a better job handling trans issues than Republicans; only 43% felt the opposite way — a 13% difference. The poll also found that less than 1% of respondents consider “wokeness” and transgender issues as the most important issues facing the country.
But this information did not stop Republicans in Dallas Thursday night from lobbing blatantly anti-trans attacks at Democrats competing in this year’s midterms — most notably Texas state Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico.
During his speech, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent, accused Talarico of claiming that there are “six genders” and of being “obsessed with transitions.”
“He wants to transition your kids,” Paxton told the crowd on Thursday.
Talarico recently walked back the 2021 comments Paxton was referencing, telling Fox News this week that he “missed the mark” when he said there were “six sexes.”
“What I mean is that there are two sexes and then there’s a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities,” he said, likely referring to intersex people. In the same interview, Talarico said he opposes “trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangers safety or fairness.” He was also asked about another 2021 comment he made in which he said that “God is nonbinary.”
“I was being provocative with that statement,” Talarico said. “What I was trying to say is that you can’t use human categories to define God, and that’s not controversial, theologically.”
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) also brought up Talarico’s 2021 comments Thursday in a widely ridiculed speech that journalist Aaron Rupar compared to “an SNL cold open” sketch.
“He claims there are six genders,” Scott said, misquoting Talarico as Paxton did. “He believes God is nonbinary. He thinks God needs special woke pronouns.”
Scott later pivoted to Georgia, where he blasted Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) for wanting “to let boys play girls in sports.”
In a statement responding to Republicans’ anti-trans rhetoric, Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson told the Advocate, “The MAGA politicians on stage in Dallas have driven up costs, decimated health care access, supported discriminatory policies, and propped up a system of political corruption and profiteering that leaves hardworking Americans behind. So it’s no surprise they’re relying on fear, division, and anti-LGBTQ+ attacks to try to distract from their own failures. It won’t work. HRC and 74 million Equality Voters will make sure of it in November.”
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