Come for the hate, stay for the baloney: Sarah Sanders’ anti-trans TV ad offends on many levels

In the days of Jim Crow, racists made fun of African Americans by putting on blackface and having a minstrel show.

In the days of Sarah Sanders, Republicans make fun of transgender people by putting a bearded man in a women’s sports outfit and pretending he’s trying to join a women’s college team.

Surely we would all condemn the former caricature as vile, bigoted and un-Christian. And we should all condemn the latter, for the same reasons.

Gov. Sanders has gone up with a truly repellent reelection campaign ad in which she not only offers a false caricature that demeans transgender Arkansans, but also takes credit for doing things she didn’t actually do.

If you haven’t seen it, here you go:

The ad begins with a bearded man trying to join a college women’s sports team; to bring home the dirty old man stereotype, he’s chubby and older than his would-be teammates. Subtle this ad is not.

Sanders then makes two claims: First, that she refused to “comply” when the Biden administration ordered Arkansas to allow trans athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports. And second, that she “won the fight to keep men out of women’s sports” in Arkansas.

Both of these claims are, to use the technical term, baloney.

This ad advances an astonishingly ignorant stereotype. A trans girl or woman who is receiving gender-affirming care does not sport a beard. This is a trope that marginalizes them as menacing cisgender men who are trying to seek some kind of unspecified advantage by intruding into spaces with women born biologically female.

To believe this nonsense, you have to swallow the notion that a teenage boy or college-age man would pretend to be female to, what? Win a blue ribbon in a track meet?

Preposterous, but useful if your aim is to marginalize people less powerful than you to gain political advantage.

Sanders’ exaggerations in this ad would also do Pinocchio proud. For one thing, the 2024 Title IX revisions issued by the Biden administration did not order states to allow trans girls and women to compete in sports. Athletics wasn’t mentioned. An earlier draft proposal that would have limited the ability of school districts to issue blanket bans on trans athletes was withdrawn.

Thus, Sanders is boasting that she refused to comply with an order that didn’t exist. That  doesn’t exactly make her a bold slayer of dragons.

Similarly, her claim that she “won the fight to keep men out of women’s sports” in Arkansas also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. A state law passed in 2021 – nearly two years before she took office – already outlawed participation in sports by trans girls and women. She had nothing to do with it.

Also, there has been no documented instance of trans women or girls participating in sports in Arkansas; it’s such a non-issue that the Arkansas Activities Association doesn’t even track it. You can bet your bottom dollar that if Sanders knew of any instance of this actually happening, she would scream about it from the rooftops; Riley Gaines would be on the first plane to Little Rock.

So, in addition to defying an order that wasn’t an order, Sanders didn’t solve a problem that wasn’t actually a problem. Unlike problems that are actually problems, like, say, Arkansas having the nation’s worst food insecurity.

But this ad was never about facts or what Sanders did or didn’t protect – it was about appealing to the worst instincts of voters in her Republican base by using transgender Arkansans as a punching bag.

Republicans, to their eternal shame, have decided that demonizing trans people is in their political interest. And they get away with it because Democrats are so terrified of this issue that they refuse to push back, as evidenced by the fact that Arkansas Democrats and their nominee for governor, Fred Love, have not stepped forward to forcefully denounce this ad.

Sanders didn’t need to use such a hateful caricature to advance her specious claims about protecting girls’ and women’s sports. But she made a deliberate decision to embrace a despicable trope, in what appears to be a feeble attempt at humor.

Except hate isn’t funny, especially to the people on the receiving end of it.

After watching her performance in office over the last four years, and her years working for Donald Trump, none of us should expect Sanders to take the high road. After all, she could find a way to politicize a weather forecast. But this ad reaches new depths.

Trans girls and trans women are trying to live their lives and their truth in the face of overt, persistent hostility. They are not seeking advantage, but equality and dignity. I stand in awe of their courage in the face of the evil they endure.

A sitting governor of an American state going out her way to demean them makes their lives harder, to no purpose, and it is particularly gratuitous in a race that she’s already almost sure to win. Why does our governor feel the need to be this mean?

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is quoted as saying, “In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you.” Someone who makes such an ostentatious display of her Christianity might do well to remember those words before she punches down on people less powerful than her.

Rich Shumate, from Little Rock, is a journalism professor and political commentator. His weekly musings can be found at Shumate News Forum on YouTube.