Donald Trump posted a new attack ad to social on Sunday, once again exploiting Kamala Harris’ support for trans people in an effort to smear his opponent as radical and out of touch with mainstream American voters.
“KAMALA’S AGENDA IS THEY/THEM—NOT YOU!” the floundering Republican nominee screamed in the all-caps caption.
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Like a previous version of the ad, Trump recycles Harris’ pledge to enforce laws that were already on the books during the Trump administration to provide gender-affirming care to prisoners in federal and state custody, a right guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.
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The spot zeroes in on one transgender woman in custody in California, Shiloh Heavenly Quine, the first inmate in the U.S. to receive state-financed gender-affirming surgery. A female narrator misgenders Quine out of the gate, implying the gender-affirming care she received was some kind of reward Harris granted after Quine “murdered a father of three.”
“Kamala Harris pushed to use tax dollars to pay for his sex change,” the narrator intones.
While trying to use Harris’ own words against her, the former California attorney general was, in fact, only upholding the law, based on the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to provide essential healthcare to anyone in state or federal custody, including transgender inmates. Earlier this year, federal courts ruled that such care is medically necessary and needs to be included in state-funded health insurance plans.
Failing to provide inmates and detainees gender-affirming care — including the “sex-change surgeries” cited in an earlier version of the ad — is unlawful and unconstitutional.
It was also a law that Trump himself was obligated to follow.
In her contentious interview with Fox News host Bret Bair last week, Harris hit back over the convicted felon’s hypocrisy in his first ad on the issue.
“I will follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,” Harris told Baier. “Under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available to – on a medical necessity basis – to people in the federal prison system, and I think frankly that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house.”
“Twenty million dollars on that ad,” Harris added, “on an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, is really quite remote.”
The Democratic nominee was likely referring to the fact that gender-affirming procedures, particularly surgeries, are not commonly conducted on federal inmates or detainees. According to a statement from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to FactCheck.org, only two federal prisoners — out of over 2,000 transgender federal prisoners — have received any form of gender-affirming surgery.
In the new ad, the campaign slices and dices Harris’ comments from the same 2019 interview to make doing her job sound “insane,” as the narrator ominously describes.
A look at the original transcript from the sit down with Mara Keisling, then-executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund, sounds like anything but.
“I have a long-standing commitment to fighting for the rights of transgender people, for the dignity of transgender people,” Harris said. “When I was attorney general, I learned that the California Department of Corrections was standing in the way of surgery for prisoners. And when I learned about the case, I worked behind the scenes to not only make sure that a transgender woman got the services she was deserving, but also that the policy was changed so that every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desired and need.”
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