Mara Keisling is an American transgender rights advocate and senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute. She was the founder and executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, the nation’s leading social justice advocacy organization for transgender people.
I don’t normally recommend political advice from Ronald Reagan, especially on LGBTQ issues, but he had an excellent rule for managing intra-party conflict: “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and ally, not a 20% traitor.”
Some Democrats, including my friends and allies in the trans rights community, may have forgotten that rule. But this election season, we need to remember it, because the stakes are very high. Trump is trashing the economy, engaging in another pointless, forever war, flaunting flagrant corruption, and launching vicious assaults on immigrant communities.
The trans movement, a cause that I have spent decades helping lead, has also seen significant setbacks under his presidency. Meanwhile, his Republican allies in Congress and around the country have considered or passed numerous laws that strip our rights and make us even more vulnerable.
The only way to stop them is to take power back. To do that, we need to vote. In America’s two-party system, this means engaging in a binary choice: Democrat or Republican.
I share many trans activists’ wishes that every Democratic candidate agreed with us on every issue, but unfortunately that’s just not the case. The alternative is the Republican, and we must vote for the candidate who is closest to our views across a wide range of subjects. This includes LGBTQ policies, but also healthcare, immigration, and welfare—all issues that are deeply impacted by the party that is in power.
Let’s take the Ohio gubernatorial race as an example. It’s a race between Dr. Amy Acton (D) and Vivek Ramaswamy (R).
Dr. Acton, who was appointed to run the state health department by Republican Governor Mike DeWine, is not a particularly progressive Democrat by recent standards. She doesn’t just disagree with me on certain issues; she has actively campaigned on those disagreements, most notably on trans participation in sports.
While I am not against rules and regulations on trans sports participation, her rhetoric has been too sweeping and not respectful to vulnerable members of Ohio’s trans community. I understand the importance of keeping within public opinion on trans issues and have written about how candidates can do this. But in my opinion, Acton went farther than she needed to. In June, she said, “I do not support boys playing in girls sports.” Would I say the same thing? No, of course I wouldn’t.
Still, as Reagan said, she is an 80% ally, not a 20% traitor, and I know she would be significantly better on the issues I care about than Mr. Ramaswamy—who is bad on LGBTQ rights and pretty much everything else.
He has called LGBTQ people predators, telling us to “leave … kids alone,” and has several times referred to trans people as “a cult.” When he co-led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he canceled more than 1,400 active government grants that used keywords like “homosexual,” gay,” “transgender,” and “LGBTQ.”
To me, the choice for the trans rights community and people who support us is clear: We should want Amy Acton to win and Ramaswamy to lose. Her positions on trans people may be careless, but she still believes we should have equal rights under the law. That’s a far better starting point than someone who would act to legally erase us from existence. If I lived in Ohio, I would vote for Acton.
What other choice would I have? I could refuse to vote. Or, I could vote for the Libertarian candidate, who is actually more aligned with my views on LGBTQ issues, but who has zero chance of being elected. I also disagree with him fundamentally on the role of government in improving people’s lives.
I’m not the only one with this calculus. Two trans elected officials in Ohio have expressed concern about Acton’s positions and language on trans people, but are still planning to vote for her. After Dr. Acton made her unfortunate statement about trans people in June, Equality Ohio, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, didn’t change their rating of Acton from A to F. They changed it immediately to “Pending” and then later to a B. They have rated Ramaswamy as an F because they know he would be uncontrollably bad.
Marcy Kaptur is definitely a harder case, but the same logic applies to voting for her. The swing-district Ohio representative has actively touted her vote to “keep transgender ideology out of our schools.” Again, I strongly disagree with the legislation she voted for and her characterization of it, but her opponent holds a worse rating. And elections are binary. If she’s part of a Democratic majority, that same legislation won’t be brought to a vote.
I have been doing this work for nearly three decades. When I started, everyone was against us. But I have seen how much can change, and I understand how important it is to have political leaders who, at least, mostly agree with you, rather than leaders who don’t believe you should exist.
This is a decision-making calculus trans activists and others will increasingly have to make as Democrats expand their tent and compete in red and purple parts of the country, where our cause is even less popular. No matter where we live, our general election vote will be binary. We can’t waste it. Even if that candidate disagrees with us on 20% of her issues, we should still call her an ally.
This is fundamentally why we need ranked-choice voting. This vote-blue-no-matter-who thing is incentivizing politicians to betray their constituents at a basic level. They should have to earn our votes. RCV would make third parties and independents more viable. Why should anyone vote for a candidate that wants to strip away their rights? This system is deeply insulting.
It does not fix that problem and you often get people you don't want ... RCV does not do what many think it does.
Go look what it did in NYC two cycles ago