Off the bench, into the bathrooms

“If he says he's a woman, then he's a woman.”

Back in the spring of 2015, that’s how former Senator Rick Santorum described Caitlyn Jenner, who was then receiving a wave of media attention for coming out as transgender. In 2024, the comments may seem remarkable coming from Santorum, a titan of the 2000s and 2010s social conservative movement, but they were hardly exceptional at the time.

As the 2016 GOP primary was getting underway, social conservatives were on the run: In 2012, Obama had won re-election in part by aggressively weaponizing Mitt Romney’s anti-abortion stances. In 2013, the Defense of Marriage Act was struck down. 2014 saw the Civil Rights Act reinterpreted to include transgender protections and Time Magazine declaring the “transgender tipping point.” 2015 brought Jenner to the cover of Vanity Fair and same-sex marriage to all 50 states. For both the left and the right, it was easy to think the arc of history had bent permanently.

Nearly a decade later, the landscape is radically different, as demonstrated by very recent events. On Wednesday, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace triumphed in her crusade to ban incoming Rep. Sarah McBride, soon to be Congress’s first transgender member, from using women’s restrooms and facilities. Mace’s path is in some ways the inverse of Santorum’s: She previously proclaimed herself “strongly” in support of LGBTQ rights, cosponsored a bill to establish federal LGBTQ protections, and even lamented the pandemic shutting down in-person Pride celebrations. Earnest or not, Mace’s transformation points to a broader phenomenon: For the first time in recent memory, social conservatives are ascendant within the Republican Party — and the broader culture. And nowhere is it more apparent than around transgender issues.

“This is the first cycle that voters are really exposed to [transgender-related] messaging at scale,” said Jon Schweppe, Director of Policy at the American Principles Project. “When you back up the attacks with advertising dollars, it's a totally different ball game.” For years, APP was largely alone in seeking to translate transgender issues into a political advantage for conservatives. As early as 2017, it began pouring significant resources into ad campaigns related to transgender youth participating in competitive sports. Those efforts failed to bring victory in several high-profile races — including key 2022 contests and the 2023 Kentucky gubernatorial election — creating a sense on the left that the issue was falling flat.

That consensus was upended by the 2024 campaign, in which Donald Trump effectively weaponized Kamala Harris’s support for transgender protections, including an infamous 2019 promise to provide publicly funded gender transitions to immigration detainees and prison inmates.

The success of the Trump team’s messaging, particularly with traditionally Democratic constituencies — the efficacy of one ad reportedly “stunned” campaign aides — has unnerved Democrats and vindicated figures like Schweppe, who expect the GOP to lean into transgender issues even more in the coming years. “This stuff is going to be really critical for Republicans going forward,” he said.

Even within the anti-abortion movement, which saw itself frequently shunned by Trump during the campaign, the results have been empowering. In the two and a half years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion advocates had watched even many longtime allies begin to blame them for Republicans’ electoral struggles. Now, they say, the failure of Democrats’ abortion-heavy messaging has had a stabilizing effect. “As we move farther away from Dobbs, I think we are going to start seeing the country settle down and get into more of a rhythm,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee. Tobias believes the results shift the political consensus on the issue’s potency. “I hope the narrative changes,” she said.

At the same time, social conservatives are watching the second Trump administration configure itself in ways that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, most prominently with the nomination of the staunchly pro-choice Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Health and Human Services Department. Multiple social conservative strategists and operatives acknowledged that, while a pro-choice HHS Secretary would have previously been a non-starter, they have no plans to fight Trump’s nominations. One strategist acknowledged that the GOP’s newly large tent has created some tensions but argued their colleagues “have to live within that political reality.”

The dynamic is very different on the left. In recent weeks, several Democratic members of Congress have gone public with their support for barring transgender girls and women from competitive sports. While the comments have drawn some backlash within the party, their shift has thus far been limited to sports participation. That is in keeping with how many Americans, including Democrats, think of transgender issues: polls have repeatedly found supermajorities favoring non-discrimination protections while also opposing sports participation. In 2023, for example, Gallup found that registered Democrats had become more supportive of the morality of being transgender by 5% — while also swinging 15% against sports participation. But for LGBTQ activists in particular, there’s little expectation of nuance in federal policy in the coming years.

“I have zero trust in the incoming administration,” said Gillian Branstetter, a strategist at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project, who argues the upcoming Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti will be the most crucial event in setting LGBTQ policy for the next few years. But Branstetter, too, sees the past decade as representing a rightward shift, specifically pointing to Mace’s evolution. “I have been watching the right wing grow more extreme on this issue for over a decade, really going back to 2014, 2015,” she said.

That such widely divergent voices agree on the last decade’s trajectory underscores a crucial factor in the coming years: The second Trump presidency will occur in a radically different cultural landscape than the first. A growing number of corporations are scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments. Progressive groups have lowered their policy ambitions. Columnists argue the country has reached “peak woke.” Elected Democrats are increasingly willing to criticize party activists over previously commonplace language like “Latinx” and “BIPOC.” Even pseudo-scientific indicators, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reportedly removing her pronouns from her Twitter bio, point to a snapback.

Both sides agree that the political incentives that prompted Santorum to speak of Jenner the way he once did are gone; after the 2024 election, they feel antiquated to the point of absurdity. When a new Republican Party takes power in January, the once-sidelined social conservatives will be a crucial part of the coalition. “This fight,” Tobias said, “is by no means over.”

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