Vice President Kamala Harris did not reverse or recant her position on providing gender-affirming health care for trans people who are incarcerated during a high-profile interview Wednesday with Fox News, decrying instead her opponent’s outsize focus on transgender people.
An interview Harris gave on the subject in 2019 has been the centerpiece of millions of dollars worth of advertisements from the campaign of former President Donald Trump.
Fox anchor Bret Baier pressed Harris if she would still support providing this health care to incarcerated trans people as president.
“I will follow the law,” Harris said, noting that Trump also allowed incarcerated trans people to receive gender-affirming care during his presidency, as The New York Times reported earlier on Wednesday.
Trump administration officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons provided gender-affirming care, namely hormone replacement therapy and other non-surgical treatments, to several hundred incarcerated people during his administration. Those officials wrote in a 2018 budget memo that federal law requires the government to pay for an incarcerated person to have surgery if that surgery is seen as medically necessary, and this includes gender-affirming surgery, though no gender-affirming procedures were actually performed on prisoners until 2022.
When pressed again by Baier, Harris drew attention to the Trump campaign’s enormous spending on ads that fearmonger about transgender people, who according to some surveys make up as little as 0.5% of the population of the United States.
“[Donald Trump] spent $20 million on these ads trying to create a sense of fear among these voters because he actually has no plan in this election that is about focusing on the needs of the American people,” Harris said. “$20 million on that ad — on an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, is really quite remote.”
One analysis from Ad Impact showed that Trump and the GOP have spent more than $65 million on television ads about transgender issues in states with competitive races. The Trump campaign’s most-aired ad stokes fears about Harris’ support of federal prisoners being able to access adequate health care, including gender-affirming care. The ad’s slogan reads, “Kamala is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.”
Courts have decided that under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment, states are required to provide adequate health care to incarcerated people, and this includes various gender-related treatments. In reality, transgender people in prison face enormous barriers to actually accessing gender-affirming care.
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Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has been front and center during this election cycle, though this kind of messaging did not garner big wins for conservatives in the 2022 midterms.