There is an old political trick that is as predictable as it is ugly: when you cannot give people something to hope for, give them someone to fear.
And once again, transgender Americans have been selected for the job.
Recent reporting from LGBTQ Nation highlights the growing Republican effort to use anti-transgender ballot initiatives, campaign advertising, and inflammatory rhetoric to motivate conservative voters heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
Let us be very clear about what is happening.
This is not primarily a public policy debate.
It is a political strategy.
Transgender people are being turned into campaign material.
Across the country, political advertising is focusing heavily on transgender athletes and gender-affirming healthcare for young people. Anti-trans ballot initiatives are appearing in Arizona, Washington, Missouri, and Colorado.
Meanwhile, polling cited by LGBTQ Nation found something rather inconvenient for this supposed national emergency: transgender issues barely register among voters’ most important concerns.
In one Fox News poll, the number of respondents identifying transgender issues or “wokeness” as their top concern rounded to zero percent.
Zero.
Meanwhile, Americans are worried about things like affordability, the economy, corruption, healthcare, housing, and whether their paycheck will actually make it to the end of the month.
Apparently, however, fixing those problems is considerably harder than frightening people about a transgender teenager playing volleyball.
So here we are.
Human Beings Are Not Ballot Candy
Political strategists have a phrase for ballot initiatives designed to excite a particular voting bloc: “ballot candy.”
The phrase itself should disturb us.
Because the “candy” being offered to voters in 2026 is the dignity, healthcare, safety, and civil rights of actual human beings.
Transgender people are not campaign props.
Transgender children are not political talking points.
Transgender athletes are not threats manufactured for thirty-second television advertisements.
They are our children, siblings, coworkers, neighbors, students, veterans, teachers, clergy, healthcare workers, friends, and family members.
They are New Mexicans.
And their humanity does not become negotiable because somebody’s internal polling says fear might increase turnout.
We Have Seen This Before
None of this is particularly new.
Twenty years ago, same-sex marriage bans were placed on ballots around the country in part because strategists believed they could mobilize conservative voters.
Before that, politicians weaponized gay teachers.
Before that, interracial marriage.
Before that, desegregation.
Before that, immigration.
The characters change.
The political machinery does not.
Find a minority population.
Describe them as dangerous.
Tell voters their children need protection from them.
Invent an emergency.
Then present discrimination as the solution.
History eventually looks back at these campaigns and asks how supposedly decent people allowed themselves to participate.
We would prefer to save everyone the suspense.
New Mexico Must Refuse the Bait
Here in New Mexico, we have a particular responsibility.
We cannot look at anti-transgender campaigns elsewhere and congratulate ourselves for being better.
Human rights require maintenance.
The Human Rights Alliance believes that defending transgender and Gender Expansive people means doing considerably more than putting a Pride flag in the window every June.
It means speaking when their rights become politically inconvenient.
It means defending transgender young people when they are portrayed as problems rather than children.
It means protecting families’ ability to make healthcare decisions with qualified medical professionals rather than politicians.
It means defending educators who create schools where LGBTQIA2S students can learn without fear.
And it means recognizing something even larger:
When politicians discover that attacking one marginalized community works, they rarely stop with that community.
Today’s transgender healthcare ban becomes tomorrow’s attack on marriage equality.
Today’s restrictions on transgender students become tomorrow’s restrictions on gay teachers.
Today’s policing of transgender bodies becomes tomorrow’s policing of women’s bodies, intersex bodies, disabled bodies, immigrant bodies, and anyone else who fails somebody’s preferred definition of “normal.”
Civil rights are interconnected because human dignity is interconnected.
Do Not Accept Their Premise
There is another lesson here for those of us engaged in advocacy.
We must stop allowing anti-transgender politicians to determine the terms of the conversation.
When someone says transgender children are the greatest threat facing America, we do not have to spend the next twenty minutes proving that transgender children are harmless.
We can ask a different question:
Why are you talking about them instead of talking about what Americans actually need?
Where is your affordable housing plan?
Where is your healthcare plan?
How are you lowering grocery prices?
What are you doing about struggling rural communities?
What are you doing about homelessness?
What are you doing about gun violence?
What are you doing about schools, infrastructure, wages, veterans, seniors, and families?
And if the answer to all of those questions somehow involves a transgender teenager’s medical records or athletic uniform, perhaps the problem is not the teenager.
Our Marching Orders
The Human Rights Alliance calls upon New Mexicans to refuse participation in manufactured moral panic.
Challenge anti-transgender misinformation when you hear it.
Support transgender and Gender Expansive young people and their families.
Demand that candidates discuss the issues actually affecting their constituents rather than manufacturing enemies among vulnerable populations.
Support organizations defending LGBTQIA2S civil rights.
Pay attention to school boards, county commissions, the Legislature, Congress, and the courts.
Register.
Organize.
Speak.
And vote.
But above all, refuse the scapegoat.
Because elections come and go.
Political consultants move on to the next campaign.
Television advertisements disappear.
But the people targeted by those advertisements must continue living in the communities where politicians taught their neighbors to fear them.
That damage is real.
At the Human Rights Alliance, we will continue standing with transgender, nonbinary, intersex, Two-Spirit, and Gender Expansive people across New Mexico, not because polling tells us it is popular, but because human rights are not determined by polling.
Our transgender neighbors are not distractions.
They are not wedge issues.
They are not campaign strategies.
They are people.
And their dignity is not on the ballot.
Michael Angelo D’Arrigo
President, Board of Directors
Human Rights Alliance