On Friday, PolitiFact posted a story headlined “Why Republicans are focusing on transgender issues in competitive 2026 campaigns.” The headline could have been “Republicans are using misleading anti-transgender rhetoric.” That was their argument.
Caleb McCullough began:
A recent Kansas ad targeting Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor, shows him standing in front of footage of dancing drag queens and says he “preaches the gospel of woke.”
The ad, one of many using anti-transgender rhetoric to attack Democrats in competitive midterm elections, misleadingly stitches together clips to make the case that Hamilton is out of touch with voters on social issues. When the ad quotes Hamilton saying, “How we define gender… we have a whole array of sexualities,” it is combining separate sentences he said in an interview to create a quote he never said.
PolitiFact linked to the transcript of this interview online. There was some eyebrow-raising stuff about God: "I know this is not as simple as 'God said it. I believe it. That settles it.'" Later, he added: "you find yourself saying, 'okay, I have to recognize the Bible wasn't dictated by God.'" Apparently God is "learning and evolving" with the Christian church.
Democrats want to have it both ways -- selling the moral authority of the pastor, without anyone digging into the content of their preaching. Here's Hamilton's remarks in more context, where he's clearly suggesting a gospel of wokeness, which Politifact insists isn't "out of touch" with Kansas:
HAMILTON: How do we look at God's children who are gay and lesbian? How do we think about human sexuality? And so there's that central conversation that started with gay and lesbian people, then it moved to transgender, which is a little more confusing for people. And then we have a whole array of sexualities and orientations and gender questions that most of us weren't thinking about a few years ago....
I was talking with a group of, I won't name the denomination, but a more conservative denomination, recently some of their some in their denomination and they're like, you know, "We're just 10 years behind you as Methodists with the conversations. We're having the conversations. We're gonna be where you are in 10 years." And, you know, "We're preparing ourselves for that and trying to figure out what does this look like." And you know, the Episcopalians were 10 or 15 years before the United Methodists were. So there's that -- the fact that it is a conversation in every church at some level. And then there are the other conversations about how do we understand transgender and then what do we think of, you know, how we define gender. [CLEARS THROAT] Excuse me. And then we're thinking about things like polyamory and then, so it really, there are pieces of it where I feel like we're afraid... You know, we're, well, I'm going to stop there.
McCullough tried to make Hamilton sound like a moderate, and somehow not woke: "He expressed clear support for same-sex marriage and challenged more conservative Christian views. But he didn’t outline specific transgender policy positions and said the church shouldn’t make decisions based on public opinion." He lamented the trend:
The Kansas ad mimics others across the country. In Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas, ads targeting Democrats over transgender athletes’ sports participation and gender affirming medical care for minors have become commonplace. The ads often omit context about a candidate’s votes or statements to make a sweeping policy attack.
The truth-defying term "gender affirming" appeared four times. The "independent fact-checkers" get very alarmed when Republican ads work on transgender issues, and they seek out experts to talk about how the voters need to get over their "anxiety" about "change."
Gender policy issues can also represent broader voter anxiety about rapid cultural change, experts said.
“There’s a general cultural milieu on the right that the world as they know it doesn’t exist anymore, and I think trans people offer an anchor to put a lot of those anxieties on,” said TJ Billard, a Northwestern University communications studies professor and executive director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies.
Billard's current research project has a title: "Cisinformed: Disinformation and the Media War on Transgender Rights."
