Republicans are pushing culture war attacks on LGBTQ+ people because they have no clue how to govern

Read the original article published in LGBTQ Nation.

Cultural fights are easier to win than economic ones.

Here’s a question worth asking: why is the GOP so fixated on transgender people?

Not just in the abstract but right now. The Republican Party, once the party of tax cuts and deregulation, has shifted much of its energy toward defining the boundaries of gender. Donald Trump’s latest executive order restricting trans rights—the most sweeping federal action on this issue to date—is just the latest step in a relentless, well-funded effort to make trans identity the political fight of the decade.

This is not because America has become a trans nation. According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, approximately 1.6 million people (ages 13 and older) identify as transgender in the United States—that’s 0.6% of the population. Nor is it because trans people pose a new, emergent threat. A 2011 poll by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 91% of Americans were already aware of the term “transgender,” and 89% believed trans people should have equal rights.

Yet somehow, over a decade later, we are in a political climate where trans rights are treated as an existential crisis.

How did we get here?

The Politics of Moral Panic

There is a familiar pattern to how moral panics take hold. Step one: A social change gains visibility. Step two: That change is framed as a profound disruption to the natural order. Step three: The fear of that disruption is weaponized into a policy agenda.

This has happened before. In the 1990s and early 2000s, same-sex marriage was cast as a civilization-ending redefinition of family. In the 1980s, Reagan-era politicians conjured the image of “welfare queens” to justify gutting social programs. The “War on Terror” turned a small group of extremists into the justification for mass surveillance, racial profiling, and indefinite war.

Now, the same playbook is being used against trans people.

Conservatives argue that trans identities are too new, too radical, too disruptive. But the presence of trans people is not new—only the political utility of attacking them is.

The Contradictions of the “Parental Rights” Movement

A foundational principle of American conservatism is that government should stay out of personal decisions. That’s why, when it comes to issues like gun ownership or vaccine mandates, Republicans often argue that the government should defer to parents, doctors, and individuals themselves.

But this logic disappears when it comes to trans youth. Suddenly, government intervention isn’t just welcome—it’s mandatory. Trump’s order overrides the ability of parents to seek medical care for their own children, stripping them of a choice that they, alongside doctors and psychologists, are best positioned to make.

This contradiction exposes the real function of these policies. This was never about protecting children or families. It’s about control—specifically, controlling identity through the power of the state.

The Larger Project: Governing Through Culture War

There’s a bigger story here, and it’s one that keeps repeating itself: cultural fights are easier to win than economic ones.

The modern Republican Party has largely abandoned the policy ambitions of its Reagan-era predecessors. Tax cuts and deregulation remain key priorities, but beyond that, what does the GOP stand for? Its healthcare plans don’t materialize. Its economic programs don’t address wage stagnation. Its climate policy is, functionally, denialism.

Instead, the party’s most energetic governance happens in the cultural arena: banning books, reshaping school curricula, and dictating which bathrooms people can use. This is not incidental. When a political movement no longer offers solutions to material problems, it must shift its focus to social order and identity.

Trans rights serve as a convenient front in this broader project. The attacks on trans identity function as a kind of proxy war for anxieties about social change—about technology, gender roles, racial shifts, and the fading dominance of traditional hierarchies. Trans identity becomes the fulcrum through which these anxieties are expressed, even though trans people are not the cause of those disruptions.

A Test of Power, Not Policy

What’s most telling about this fight is that it is not about fixing a broken system. There is no overwhelming social demand for these restrictions—no mass movement calling for the federal government to erase trans people from recognition. In fact, many of the people who support these policies are untouched by them.

What Trump’s executive order represents, then, is not governance but a test of how far identity-based politics can go.

If the state can redefine gender, it can define personhood. If it can strip rights from a group that is already marginalized, it can set a precedent for further erasures. If it can mandate conformity to rigid, state-sanctioned categories, it can constrain who we are allowed to be, in ways that go far beyond the issue of trans identity itself.

And that should alarm anyone who cares about the trajectory of American democracy.

The Real Threat Is Not Trans People—It’s the Politics of Erasure

So here’s where we land: This is not just an attack on trans rights. It is a dress rehearsal for a broader expansion of state power over personal identity.

We should ask ourselves: What happens when this political strategy runs out of trans people to attack? Who becomes the next target? And if the state is allowed to dictate who is legally real, what happens when it turns that power toward you?

The battle over trans rights is not really about trans people. It is about who gets to define reality—and whose existence is up for debate.

Because once a government starts governing through erasure, it rarely stops with just one group.

Cody Hays is a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School, researching media psychology, public understanding of science, and digital misinformation, with a focus on ideological worldviews; they are a Graduate Research Fellow in the MIDaS and Views and Values Labs, Executive Editor of the Journal of Public Interest Communications, and a nonprofit communications strategist with over a decade of experience in combating disinformation and mobilizing action.