As political debates intensify against the backdrop of the 2026 midterm elections, many advocates feel the stakes could not be higher. Transgender communities have begun experiencing yet another round of ugly campaign ads meant to activate voters’ fears, resentments, and suspicions. It is a coordinated rollback of civil rights, with transgender people positioned as the testing ground. Worsening this harmful situation even more, many funders are abandoning transgender communities when they need support most.

Anti-trans messaging isn’t just a side note—it is a core political strategy. During the 2024 election cycle, political candidates and special interest groups poured more than $215 million into anti-trans ads. The scale alone should raise a question for any serious democracy funder: Why spend nearly a quarter-billion dollars targeting just 1 percent of the population?

This tactic is scapegoating, the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook. The same strategy has moved from campaign ads into governance—through state legislatures and, increasingly, federal agencies. Across the country, lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills that block trans people from receiving basic healthcare, education, legal recognition, and the right to exist publicly, and funders abandoning transgender communities only worsens this harmful situation.

Last week, one of the most sweeping anti-trans laws in the nation went into effect in Kansas, immediately invalidating the driver’s licenses, state IDs, and birth certificates of thousands of residents who had legally changed their gender markers, stripping them of valid identification overnight, with no warning and no recourse. These legislative attacks are now reinforced by the Trump administration’s executive orders and weaponization of federal funding that narrow federally recognized gender identity and constrain access to healthcare.

Not long before, the Supreme Court added to this troubling wave by blocking California’s policy protecting transgender students’ privacy at school, ruling that parents’ religious beliefs entitle them to be informed of a child’s gender identity, even where disclosure risks abuse or self-harm.

We are in trouble if we dismiss this as just another “culture war debate.” We must ask ourselves who benefits from controlling our bodies and infringing upon very personal medical decisions? If this can happen to transgender people, and if reproductive rights are already curtailed, what and who might this draconian level of control extend to next? It echoes dark periods in our history when moral panic produced real harm—from the criminalization of queer life and the government’s deadly indifference during the HIV/AIDS crisis to contemporary assaults on reproductive freedom. Each time, silence and complacency took a brutal toll on human lives and eroded democratic norms.

Read the full article about funders abandoning transgender communities by Julia Reticker-Flynn and Zev Lowe at Nonprofit Quarterly.