Content warning: discussions of transphobia
Most folks won’t see the next slew of campaign ads until next year. However, as the country gears up for midterm elections, I’ve had the distinct (dis)pleasure of seeing campaign ads for months. I live in Virginia, and the way our election cycles are set up, we have offices to fill every year.
This year, we’re voting for various delegates and, most prominently, a new governor. And so, my wife and I have been inundated with campaign ad after campaign ad. They have been inflammatory, overly dramatic, and some, I suspect, even full of downright lies–all while we were just trying to watch a cooking show in peace.
The ads attacking the Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger are especially heinous. One of the main talking points of Republican candidate Winsome Earl-Sears’ anti-Spanberger ads is Spanberger’s support of transgender people.
Before their debate a few weeks ago, Earl-Sears’ team released an ad stating that Spanberger is “for they/them, not for us.” After Earl-Sears’ disastrous performance in their debate, however, her team released a new ad that more dramatically attacked Spanberger’s support of trans rights.
The ad framed Spanberger’s support of trans rights as her wanting to “force little girls to share locker rooms with boys.” As those words were spoken, the screen turned into a locker room, with the scene filtered in red.
Slowly, pictures of elementary-aged cisgender school girls screaming in terror appeared on the screen. The last image was of a middle-school-age cisgender boy, arms crossed, smug smile on his face, while the images of the screaming girls stayed on screen. I don’t care what political party you align with; that ad is disgusting.
As I’ve sat with this particular ad, I’ve been grieved. Obviously, the lie-filled propaganda about trans people is frustrating. However, there’s another layer to this specific ad that I’m not sure Earl-Sears’ team considered.
By framing trans rights as a way through which cisgender boys can harass cisgender girls, Earl-Spears’ team and her supporters are admitting something devastating. They aren’t raising their boys to view women with respect, and this ad shows that, at least on some level, they know it.
Maybe not consciously, but they know it subconsciously. If you can successfully use cisgender boys as a political pawn to strike fear into the hearts of your supporters, then you know you are failing these boys by raising them to be men that women need to fear.
This ad provides the perfect case study of how oppressive systems hurt everyone —even those who attempt to leverage them to advance their own selfish interests. Transphobia hurts cisgender people because it forces them into performance categories that are damaging to their souls, and in this case, forces young boys to believe that they’re predisposed to predatory behavior.
Racism hurts people who were socialized as white because it artificially inflates our ego and gives us permission to hate. You can’t harm the image of God in another without also fracturing the image of God in yourself; that’s what it means to be one body of Christ.
Perhaps that is why the Apostle Paul encouraged the early church in Galatia to do away with man-made categories like Jew and Greek, free and enslaved, male and female, and to instead focus on our shared human identity—all of us working to be God’s hands and feet in the world.
I’m afraid these political ads are only a taste of the national dialogue we’ll see during the midterm elections next year. As we brace for that election season, find ways to stay grounded in reality. Stay connected to real, breathing people and not the gross caricatures these ads will fabricate again and again to scare you into a vote.
Additionally, find ways to combat the lie-filled propaganda by speaking truth to power. When everyday people quote these ads, ask them, “Why do you think our young boys are naturally predatory? How can we set our boys up to be men who respect women?”
Turn the dialogue around and make them reckon with the fallacies for themselves.
If the truth will set us free, then we not only need to be seekers of truth, but speakers of it. When these campaign cycles force-feed us lies, spit them out and speak the truth to their faces. It isn’t going to get any easier, so let’s start now before midterms are in full swing.
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A bivocational pastor, writer and spiritual director based in Williamsburg, Virginia, she currently works as a Spiritual Director at Reclamation Theology. Cawthon-Freels is the author of Reclamation: A Queer Pastor’s Guide to Finding Spiritual Growth in the Passages Used to Harm Us (Nurturing Faith Books), and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
