Why the Right Loves Dictators and Hates Transgender Children
The headline may be overstated, but not by much
To be sure, not everyone on the right adores despots. Nor do they all abhor transgender people. Though it is getting harder these days not to come to that conclusion. In response to a survey by the Public Policy Research Institute, which asked if the United States needs a leader who would break the rules to fix the nation’s direction, nearly half of Republicans agreed. To that end, 74% of Republicans in a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll said they would be okay with Donald Trump being a dictator on his first day in office, despite his call to terminate the Constitution.
Meanwhile, GOP state legislators proposed 600 anti-trans bills in 2023, breaking their previous record for the fourth consecutive year and prompting the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign to declare a national state of emergency. So far in 2024, more than 500 such bills have already been introduced. And dictator-for-a-day Trump has pledged to sign an executive order that would basically gut health care services for trans children and derail LGBTQ+ workplace protections.
Today’s Republican party is a far (right) cry from its predecessors. Increasingly comprised of national conservatives, as they prefer to be called, they are not the “corporatist, secular, neoliberal establishment that bears the standard of Thatcherism and Reaganism,” argues Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation. Abandoning libertarian and economistic thinking, they seek instead to replace the current political elite with what Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen considers “a better aristocracy brought about by a muscular populism.”
In truth, these kinds of sentiments are not all that new, as members of the right have flirted with authoritarianism before. Prior to World War II, Milford W. Howard, an Alabama congressman, and editor of the reactionary newspaper The Awakening, professed his “faith in Benito Mussolini, Italy’s great premier, and Fascism, the child of his marvelous brain, as the highest expression of a pragmatic philosophy of government.” Conservative author Irving Babbitt imagined a time “when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini.” Another admirer, publisher William Randolph Hearst, commissioned Mussolini and Adolph Hitler to write for his newspapers.
After the war, when Il Duce and the Fuhrer had fallen out of favor, conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. lauded Spain’s Francisco Franco as “an authentic national hero,” and extolled Chile’s Augusto Pinochet as a “bona fide leader who knew how to exercise power.” More recently, Tucker Carlson has fawned over Russia’s Vladimir Putin, minimizing the latter’s expansive and oppressive aggression. In response, Russian state media has showered Carlson with praise and singled him out as “the one American we wouldn’t want to kill.”
Hungarian Ghoulash
The appeal of tyrants to those on the right is the illusion of stability amid change and uncertainty. They believe — or at least want to believe — these strongmen will preserve their status and socioeconomic advantages, and defend against interlopers, brutally whenever necessary. But a new type of autocrat is emerging. Someone who has traded the uniform for a well-tailored suit, and who cannily feigns governing benevolently. The personification of whom is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Having built his illiberal state behind a façade of democratic principles, Orbán has tilted Hungary’s political playing field to his benefit through extreme gerrymandering, rewriting campaign finance rules to favor his party, appointing cronies to courts and election agencies, and establishing a supermajority that chokes off competition. All of which are tactics in the Republican party playbook. Mimicking Orbán’s practice of replacing civil servants with loyalists, the Heritage Foundation has launched Project 2025, a plan, according to its director Paul Dans, for Donald Trump to purge thousands government workers by “systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.”
Like many of his American disciples, Orbán also believes Western society faces an imminent downfall from the decay of traditional family values. Accordingly, he has prohibited the teaching of gender studies in Hungarian universities and banned transgender people from legally identifying as anything other than their biological sex at birth. It is a template for the likes of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his ilk. Last year, DeSantis signed the nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning, among other things, classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation by school personnel. A subsequent court settlement has defanged some of its most harmful impacts by allowing students and teachers to openly talk about these subjects. But six other states still enforce such policies.
They are among 24 states that have limited youth access to gender affirming care (GAC) by imposing professional and legal penalties on health practitioners. Yet none have gone as far as Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott ordered that parents who provide GAC for their kids be investigated for child abuse, and urged their fellow citizens to rat them out. A state appeals court has since upheld two injunctions freezing enforcement, but the chilling effect remains.
Easy Targets
“The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” After being defeated on the matter same-sex marriage and having won a victory with respect to abortion that has cost them considerably at the polls, Republicans went looking for another incendiary concern that would fire up its base. “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative advocacy group American Principles Project, told the New York Times in April 2023. “And we threw everything at the wall.” What stuck was transphobia.
For authoritarians, religious fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, science deniers, and bigots in general, transgender individuals are low hanging fruit. Although the number of people 13+ who identify as transgender has risen over the past decade, it is estimated they only comprise about 1.6 million. This doesn’t include young children who are difficult to quantify, or scores of others who, for various reasons, choose to remain private.
Transgender men and women also challenge conventional concepts of sex and gender. The two words were commonly considered synonymous until the 1960s when psychological researchers began studying how children sometimes developed identities separate from their biological sex. At the time, however, care meant complying with societal standards of gender conformity. Since then, the medical community has gradually moved away from the outdated idea that gender is binary to an appreciation that it actually exists along a diverse spectrum.
Nonetheless, according to a 2022 Washington Post-KFF poll, a majority (57%) of Americans don’t believe it’s possible to be a different gender than what is assigned at birth. This concurs with a Pew Research Center survey which found the same opinion among 60% of those queried. Many simply don’t understand the distinctions, but many others are threatened by them.
All of which means the transgender community is an easy foil for those scapegoating their way to power. But rather than overtly discriminate, legislators are cloaking their bias in Orwellian terms. Arizona, Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina have introduced so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” laws that legally define persons based solely on their reproductive systems. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach — the anti-trans heir apparent to Ron DeSantis — has championed the duplicitous notion of “parents’ rights” by demanding that state school districts inform him about their policies regarding transgender students, and report any employees who use different names or pronouns to refer to students when with their parents than what they use in the classroom.
The good news is that most of these ordinances have failed to gain significant traction. According to a 2023 Washington Post/KFF poll, a large majority of the public support anti-discrimination protections for trans individuals; while a smaller majority oppose trans women participating in women’s sports (although there is not yet any real science to back this belief). A March 2023 survey by PBS/NPR/Marist National Poll found that more than half of Americans say they are against criminalizing gender affirming care for minors. Analysis of the 2022 midterms by the Democratic think tank Third Way determined that Republican candidates who focused on anti-trans issues under performed those who targeted concerns like inflation, immigration, and crime.
Intolerant Power
The bad news is Republicans don’t necessarily need the approval of a majority of Americans to achieve their agendas. Minority rule is a neologism for the process which enables a subgroup of the population to enact laws governing an entire nation. Twice in 20 years two presidents of the United States — George W. Bush and Donald Trump — took office after getting fewer votes than their opponents and then appointed five of six current right-wing Supreme Court justices. The least populated state, Wyoming, has as much political clout in the Senate as does California, the most populous state. Given current population trends, within 15 years 70% of Americans will likely be represented by just 30 senators, and 30% will elect the other seventy.
With minority rule, the trick is to find the perfect minority. For Republicans, it is the religious right. About 14% of U.S. citizens identify as white Evangelical Protestants. Albeit their numbers are shrinking, they have outsized political power, voting in much higher numbers than their proportion of the population. They also have a more positive view of Donald Trump than any other denomination, with roughly 80% going for him in both 2016 and 2020.
Many evangelicals consider themselves adherents of Christian Nationalism, “a political ideology and a cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities,“ says Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. They believe “real Americans are Christians and not just any kind of Christian but Christians who hold a particular set of fundamentalist religious beliefs that often align with certain conservative political positions.” Among these anti-trans policies, for which there is seemingly no line Republicans won’t cross to garner votes.
Comparisons to Nazi Germany are often facile and fallacious. But sometimes they ring true. When the National Socialist German Workers’ Party came to power in 1933, they condemned the “homosexual lifestyle” as a threat to family values and social stability, banning LGBTQ+ organizations, suppressing their media, outlawing transgender medical research, and imprisoning and/or killing thousands of homosexual men. Ominous echoes of that fanaticism can be heard today among voices on the far right. In his Forward to Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, Heritage’s Kevin Roberts writes that pornography is “manifested in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” He goes on to advocate that “people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” Sadly, he is hardly alone. Michael Knowles, a popular podcaster at the right-wing web site The Daily Wire has said “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life,” then claimed you “can’t genocide transgender people because they are not a legitimate category of being.”
Granted Republican lawmakers don’t officially sanction the deaths of trans people, the pain they have inflicted has been profound. A 2023 poll by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit group focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth, found a direct correlation between anti-trans bills and the negative impact on the mental health of transgender and nonbinary minors. In states that have restricted the rights of transgender students and prohibited teachers from talking about gender and sexuality, the number hate crimes in schools have quadrupled. According to the latest FBI Hate Crimes Statistics, there was a 37% rise in gender-related offenses.
What is more, leading medical organizations including the American Medical Association, American College of Physicians, American Psychiatric Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics have endorsed health care for transgender youth. For good reasons. Access to gender-affirming surgery lowers rates of depression and decreases suicidal thinking. Receiving hormone treatments results in greater satisfaction for people who transition during their youth, and the vast majority those who do remain within their chosen gender. Yet these and other services are increasingly denied in many red states under the pretext of parental rights and preventing child abuse.
Despite these hardships, the transgender community is remarkably resilient. Nearly all (94%) of the more than 90,000 respondents to the largest survey ever of trans people, by the National Center for Transgender Equality, said they are more satisfied with their lives after they transitioned. An even a larger percentage (98%) of trans individuals who receive hormone treatments are content with how they are doing. And 97% who have undergone some form of surgery feel much the same way.
It can be debated whether those on the right honestly believe everything they say and do with respect to the transgender community. But there is no question as to their willingness to exploit marginalized members of society to gain and maintain power. There is also no doubt the battles against dictators and in defense of transgender rights, especially for children, are one in the same.
