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It's interesting to see an ad that is so far removed from the actual election. It doesn't even mention any actual candidates (except the speaker of the house, who is not in a competitive election). It's just "those guys suck!" It isn't targeting Trump, or any specific Republican candidate- it's targeting Republican voters.
Like @urquan said, I feel like the ad actually targets men, not women. It seems to be saying "you don't want to be one of those weird creepy Republican guys like these people." One of the main "issues" in the ad seems to be a ban on porn which (a) isn't actually a real issue proposed by anybody and (b) seems like something that would motivate male voters much more than women.
Quoth the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership:
Is Trump actually going to try to do it? Probably not. If he does, will it actually be upheld? Almost certainly not. But it has been proposed by somebody.
Ok, yes, "somebody" has proposed it. Just not, you know, Trump, or Vance, or any official Republican platform.
Besides, from the context, it sounds like theyre mostly talking about showing trans stuff to kids? I dont think "educators and public librarians" really show a lot of porn. I know the schools have slipped but i dont think its quite that bad yet...
For some reason I haven't quite been able to fathom, a lot of conservatives consider "exposing kids to transgender ideology" and "sexualising children" to be basically the same thing. This is presumably why they're combined here. But they are clearly hostile to pornography itself as well.
While it's possible to present trans-related issues in a mature-as-in-serious rather than mature-as-in-adult or mature-as-in-Garth-Ennis sense, it's really hard to do so with enough detail to be a meaningful discussion instead of a handful of fuzzy buzzwords.
People like LoTT focus on pieces where there's explicit sex- or sex-like stuff (eg masturbation, performing oral sex on a dildo/prothesis), generally because they are more immediately uncomfortable to viewers, and less charitably in the hope they'll get censored to demonstrate how prurient such pieces are. But it's pretty common to see works that, if not quite so explicit, still delve deep into matters of sex and sexuality, even if they're aimed at early- or mid-teens audiences, or feature primary characters well under 18.
I've pointed to Venus Envy before, as one of the few insights to the trans-internal view of things in 2004-ish, but it's also a webcomic that opens with a 16-year-old's 'tuck' failure, and goes on to upskirt a (cis male) crossdresser of mumblemumble age to point out that he wasn't getting aroused. Serano's Excluded is a well-regarded feminist work in progressive circles, and it also spends a pretty sizable period of time on the "penis issue" of Michigan's Womyn Festival.
That's not a problem specific to trans stuff: I've mentioned Blue Is The Warmest Color before as a work that seems well-regarded and also starts with a 15-year-old lesbian's first sexual relationships, and I've named a few writers before who do excellent furry gay-themed works that are also difficult to discuss publicly because they also include outright porn, come from authors who've written outright porn in the same series, or just involve a lot of sex-related stuff. But despite the gay-themed literature being more fundamentally tied to attraction, it's as common in trans-focused stuff.
The counterargument is that, icky as it might be to adults, (most) teenagers run into this stuff themselves, and in other non-LGBT fiction. Media joking about awkward boners or weird sex toys exist, Catcher in the Rye has a lengthy section with a teenager trying to solicit a prostitute, Pern has its dragon-orgies (and we don't talk about the It novel). "What's the age of the main character in this coming-of-age-story" happens so much because most people don't wait til 18, and while not all of that story has to be about sex, a lot of people for a lot of cultures it is.
The counter-counterargument is that a lot of the socialcons aren't happy to expose younger teens to those works (and don't think it's healthy), either. They did protest American Pie and the entire sex comedy genre, did want steep age requirements for it, and don't particularly like the inclusion of Catcher in the Rye, either. To the extent that they don't care about Pern, it's because they weren't aware of it. They believe, with reason, that even if they try to keep their kids from exposure to this stuff, it is very likely individuals outside of their control will.
((Harder social-cons will argue that trans discussions are necessarily tied to sexual behaviors, either as an axiom or as a way to distinguish from 'simple' crossdress, where LGB works can conceivably treat romance as nothing more than kissing on the cheek (though they often don't like any of those either).))
The underlying theories are more esoteric, and I'm not sure I can give them a full explanation, but:
This is the one that I really don't get.
The irony is, as ex-trans myself I'm strongly-inclined to believe that the conservatives are right about iatrogenic GID and thus about trans-awareness among kids being a catastrophe. I think that argument is strong enough on its own without introducing sexual pearl-clutching - and I'm mostly on team "exposing kids to sex is NBD*; we did it for millennia without issues", so in fact when I'm claiming a disequivalence I'm saying trans-messaging is worse than sexualising kids outside of specific abuse cases.
*Unfortunately, it's pretty well-known by this point that trauma is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if society assumes people will be traumatised by X, they will often be traumatised by feeling abnormal over not being traumatised. The proper place to break that is with society, though.
The reason I think trans-messaging is worse, and [also, to answer your earlier question] why I think it's a way for women to sexually abuse children (mostly boys, but it affects girls too), is that it's an intentional failure to teach constructive sexual behavior for what are ultimately sexist/sexual reasons.
"Men are so evil that to remove their inherent threat to women they should either [become a reasonable approximation of a woman, sexually-speaking] castrate themselves to remove that threat or only focus their sexual energy on men" is what I believe the trans-ally's motte to be, because that is the way feminism-laundered-misandry works. Which is why it's important to start impressing those messages upon kids early- most kids think sex is just fucking gross [right up until they don't] and the youth who have discovered they want it should be selectively denied knowledge of (and discouraged from, even simply by downplaying) healthy straight sex lest they grow up seeking it instead. If you encourage gay sex (and any of the other
I Can't Believe It's Not Pussy"healthier alternatives") the hope is that you get less demand for straight sex, so women are "forced" to have it less and can get a better deal for the sex they choose to have.The obvious problem with this is that you've both broken down the pipeline to turn boys into the kinds of men the average woman will actually like, and made it so that they don't exhibit the characteristics that they want. Many women want to be the only woman in the relationship (and so do many men) to the point you might as well consider someone who doesn't half-trans anyway (a label they will not be particularly happy with for other reasons but which describes their outlooks, especially on sex and gender roles, quite accurately).
The problem with misandrist-feminist thought is that it ignores the fact that sex is frequently constructive, and everyone who has good sex will point this out, even those who were legal-fiction-raped (exhibit A: '70s-'80s band groupies). And if you want to have constructive sex the sexes need to be working correctly and how much of a big deal the average person thinks sex even is needs to be correctly calibrated (just as it was in the pre-AIDS time; and I'd argue the reason people could even feasibly call sex child-friendly at that time)- so men need space to develop as men and not constantly be told they're defective women (which is what trans ideology as a logical outgrowth of misandry-feminism is designed to do), and as a second-order consequence half-trans women need to not constantly be told they're defective men ("tomboy erasure").
And since what you should be traumatized by is itself an Overton Window thing, you can conveniently become retroactively traumatized years later, especially if that trauma is politically convenient.
I had a misandrist mother, and the dysphoria started going away shortly after I ran away from her. Trust me, you don't need to sell me on misandrist abuse being terrible.
But you're really stretching the definition of "sexual" abuse here. Sexist, yes, obviously, but you really have to squint to get to sexual.
A lack of active and/or claimed sexual intent doesn't mean it isn't sexual abuse.
Then again, I do agree that "sexual abuse" is not something that has a particularly coherent definition (since most of the time the definition is weaponized; if sex isn't special, rape is neither meaningfully nor mechanically distinct from other kinds of battery).
So I'm willing to concede it's mostly just bog-standard emotional abuse, but then, why are we permitting that on an industrial scale again?
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