If polling on abortion rights holds true, Michigan’s Proposal Three should win handily. The ballot measure would enshrine reproductive freedoms, in a state with strong public support for abortion rights.
But that’s not what Michigan voters hear about the proposal when they watch TV. There, millions of dollars worth of advertising show tearful children and ominous dripping syringes. “If Proposal Three passes, minors as young as 10 or 11 will be able to receive this prescription [for hormone blockers] without the consent of their parents, or their parents even knowing,” a voiceover warns on one such ad. “They call it ‘reproductive freedom.’ We call it extreme.”
Proposal Three does not include language about gender-affirming care. But as LGBTQ rights come under fire, opportunists on the right have grafted transphobic talking points onto fights for reproductive freedoms. The attacks are misleading—and part of a broader assault on bodily autonomy, advocates say.
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“We see that, around the country, voters overwhelming support reproductive justice initiatives and support providing safe and legal abortion care,” Amritha Venkataraman, Michigan director for the Human Rights Campaign, told The Daily Beast.
She’s right, research shows. Recent polling from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Pew Research Center found a 16-point net support for abortion rights in Michigan, with most Michiganders stating that they supported legal abortion in most cases.
“So they have to find a different angle to try and rile up that extremist base,” Venkataraman said.
That angle, increasingly, appears to be LGBTQ rights, particularly the rights of children and young people to receive gender-affirming care, use the correct bathrooms, and play on sports teams that correspond with their gender. A barrage of legislation has banned how schools can discuss LGBTQ issues (see: Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law), and threatened to remove transgender children from their families in Texas. Proposed legislation in Michigan and Idaho could sentence parents to life in prison for providing gender-affirming care to their children.
Republican strategists are betting on anti-trans bigotry as a broadside against Democratic candidates on Election Day. America First Legal, a group founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, is currently flooding swing states with advertisements that describe gender-affirming care as “radical gender experiments on children” that is “destroying their lives.” The ads are “the worst I’ve seen,” NAACP president Derrick Johnson told Politico.
It’s no coincidence that the often-overlapping fields of abortion rights and LGBT rights are both under siege, said Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project.
“Both reproductive rights and the freedom of queer people are pathways outside of a strict gender binary,” Branstetter told The Daily Beast. She pointed to organizations like the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom, which has crafted bills curtailing LGBTQ and reproductive freedoms.
“The end result of the policies they seek is leaving people with as little say in their life path as possible,” she said. “That includes if, when, and how, you start a family, as well as how you present yourself, who you love, and in particular, the very existence of transgender people in public life.”
In Michigan, dubious campaign ads have melded transgender and abortion rights into an issue.
Michigan is one of few states voting directly on abortion rights this election. The state has an anti-abortion law from 1931, which several state judges have ruled unenforceable. But with the overturn of Roe v. Wade this year, lawmakers fear the ban could become active again. Proposal Three will encode reproductive rights (including abortion, contraception, sterilization, and prenatal care) into the state’s constitution.
“Sterilization” includes safe and common birth control methods like vasectomies and tubal ligation. But advertisements, including a single $2.5 million TV ad buy in September, suggest that they’ll be invoked to secretly sterilize kids in the name of trans rights.
Citizens To Support MI Women And Children, the political action committee behind the ads, did not return a request for comment about their ads, and the fact that the proposition does not reference gender-affirming care. The group’s spokesperson told the Detroit Free Press that minors might use the bill to receive sterilization as part of a gender transition.
“A constitutional right to ‘sterilization’ surely includes a right to be sterilized to align one’s sex and gender identity,” the spokesperson said. “The majority of voters do not support a 12-year-old girl’s right to sterilization without her parent’s notice or consent. But that is the implication of giving this right to every ‘individual,’ no matter their age.”
The Citizens To Support MI Women And Children ads end in a warning about Proposal Three opening “Pandora’s box,” alongside a creepy clip of green smoke trickling from a treasure chest. Other lower-budget ads have also circulated on the internet. In one such case, a Michigan PAC asked a popular anti-trans Twitter account to help promote an ad that slams Proposal Three as “child abuse” that “protect[s] crazy activists if they want to take your child to be butchered.” (The PAC does not appear to have purchased TV airtime for the ad; instead, one of the PAC’s largest expenditures, per public filings, was $1,359 at the almost certainly misspelled “Poppa John’s Pizza.”)
The anti-trans incursion on reproductive freedom won’t stop at abortion rights. Conservative groups have also cast their eyes on birth control measures like IUDs and hormonal birth control pills. Those attacks share language with campaigns against gender-affirming care, and often come from outlets that smear transgender people as unnatural.
Evie magazine, a relatively new conservative women’s publication, is a frequent critic of hormonal birth control, with headlines about “major dangers” of the pill, and implicit warnings that it will make women fat. Much of the anti-birth control writing is couched in language about supposedly natural femininity. Evie’s 2022 theme in print is “return to nature” with a cover story about “The Anti-Pill Revolution: Why Women Are Saying Goodbye to Hormonal Birth Control.” Evie’s founders run 28, a period-tracking app that encourages people to ditch hormonal birth control. The company is backed by conservative megadonor Peter Thiel’s company Thiel Capital.
The magazine is also consistently anti-trans. A recent analysis by Media Matters found a 333 percent year-on-year increase in anti-LGBTQ content on the Evie site, with many articles specifically bashing transgender rights.
Branstetter, who recently sat in on an Arkansas court case on gender-affirming care, said she saw parallels between panicky descriptions of birth control as unnatural, and transgender treatment. All health care—from surgeries to aspirin—carries risks, she noted.
“What I saw sitting in that federal courtroom in Little Rock were lawyers on behalf of the state of Arkansas grasping at any possible risk that could possibly come in regards to hormone replacement therapy,” Branstetter said. “Putting that forward is justification for banning it and holding these forms of medical care up to a standard that few forms of medical care could ever pass.”
Those forms of medical care include birth control, which may include side effects, which people weigh against their desire to control if and when they become pregnant. Branstetter said the campaign to cast hormonal birth control as dangerous could prop up efforts to limit or ban it outright.
Campaigns against reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights are tightly intertwined. While anti-trans arguments are currently running cover for anti-abortion campaigns, the reverse is often true. Bill like the “Youth Health Protection Act,” an ADF-authored effort to block trans-affirming care, “can be traced back to the now-ubiquitous laws requiring minors to obtain parental consent before terminating a pregnancy, which ADF also strongly supports,” Slate reported last year.
In Michigan, where Proposal Three goes up for a vote on Tuesday, reproductive rights advocates have reason for optimism. Polling in mid-October found that 52 percent of Michiganders planned to vote in favor of the proposal, while 38 percent planned to vote against and 10 percent were undecided.
The popular support might explain the sideways attack from an anti-trans platform, Venkataraman, the Michigan HRC director said.
“I think it’s because they know they’re losing,” she said.
