Republicans and rightwing groups just lost the most expensive state supreme court race in U.S. history in Wisconsin, endangering Republican rule in a closely divided swing state and giving Democrats a boost ahead of the 2024 elections.
Along with the likely challenges to a gerrymandered voting map that heavily favors Republicans and Wisconsin’s draconian 1849 abortion ban—both of which are expected to come before the court shortly—the new liberal majority on Wisconsin’s highest court also threatens the larger architecture of minority rule. Republicans and their allies have leaned heavily on the friendly forum of the previously conservative court to help GOP legislative leaders seize powers from Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers. The ideological shift on the court is particularly important because it was only by a narrow, one-vote margin that the justices rejected the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory in Wisconsin in the 2020 election.
Right-wingers are in the process of regrouping after their loss in Wisconsin. Some Republicans point out that conservative candidate Daniel Kelly’s hardline anti-abortion stance undermined support among women, and recommend that Republicans tack to the middle, or at least avoid advocating ever more draconian abortion restrictions in a post-Roe America.
But the larger trend across the country appears to be for the GOP to lean even harder into divisive, culture-war politics. Republicans are working to drive turnout by an angry, motivated voting base while at the same time promoting voting restrictions in an effort to keep the majority from being heard.
Shortly after the GOP lost its purchase on the Wisconsin high court, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a well-funded rightwing law firm and think tank, put out a press release highlighting a tabloid-style story about a transgender student getting undressed in the girls’ locker room at a local high school.
This is the same group that has championed the Republican side in supreme court cases on redistricting, “ballot harvesting,” and other “election fraud” claims and voter-suppression efforts. It also supported Republican efforts to fight the ability of public health officials to enact pandemic restrictions and filed lawsuits defending the GOP legislature’s power grab from the Democratic governor and attorney general.
Now that the door is closing to the state supreme court, WILL is heading in a different direction: the girls’ bathroom.
WILL “is demanding answers and action from Sun Prairie Area School District after a significant allegation involving a violation of girls’ locker room privacy at East High School (EHS),” the group’s press release states. “In early March, four freshman girls at EHS participated in a swim unit as part of their first-hour physical education class. After the class, the girls entered the shower area in the girls’ locker room with their swimsuits on, which was their common practice as they rinsed off. As they began to shower, a male student, who is eighteen years old according to multiple sources, approached them, entered the shower area and announced, ‘I’m trans, by the way.’ The male student then fully undressed and exposed his male genitalia to the four girls in the shower.”
The controversy over the girls’ locker room at Sun Prairie East High School fits a pattern of stories elevated by rightwing media outlets around the country that seek to titillate and outrage conservative voters. An update of the “gay agenda” propaganda films of the 1980s and 1990s that featured footage of Gay Pride paraders, these stories have helped drive local and state-level efforts to ban drag shows, remove LGBTQ+ books from school libraries, prevent teachers from using the preferred pronouns of trans students, and otherwise stir up trouble in order to distract and divide communities.
These stories are the perfect political vehicle for an angry minority desperate to cling to power. They have the kind of lurid, clickbait quality that captures public attention and changes the channel. Who wants to talk about voting maps and Constitutional government when there’s a story about someone flashing a penis in the girls’ showers after gym class? Such powerful distractions motivate the Republican voting base, catch fire on social media, pit communities against each other, and create a common enemy (trans kids and their defenders) for conservatives.
Never mind that pulling communities apart by pitting parents against teachers and escalating fear and loathing toward kids who already face ostracism and bullying is a toxic strategy. Divide and conquer works for Republicans—until it doesn’t.
Despite the feverish declarations about protecting the “safety” of girls in the locker room or the athletic integrity of girls’ sports, the real purpose of the recent spate of trans-bashing all over the country by the GOP is not to make life better for any students. WILL and other groups that continually attack teachers and local school officials have been pushing for years to privatize education and siphon taxpayers’ money out of local public schools and use it instead to subsidize private school tuition. The whole sideshow about trans athletes obscures the fact that there won’t be any money left for public school sports of any kind if the “school choice” lobby has its way. But that topic does not stir up nearly as much public passion as the girls’ locker room crusade.
With the Fox Newsification of American politics, we’ve become accustomed to bigotry as performance art, with rightwing populists like Tucker Carlson punching down, thrilling news audiences with transgressive attacks on women, people of color, the “woke mob,” and the biggest target for the 2024 campaign, LGBTQ+ youth.
The party of individual liberty is working on a bill to impose a universal bedtime.
At the same time, in high schools and on college campuses across the country, a younger generation of rising voters is living in an entirely different culture—one that prizes inclusion, acceptance, and care.
At a recent school board meeting in Sun Prairie, the lone student representative on the board, Eli Gillitzer, responded to the public outrage driven by national media stories about the “locker room incident,” calling WILL’s letter “embarrassingly ill-conceived and violently bigoted.” Rejecting the idea that the incident was an example of “assault,” Gillitzer asked, “What is the actual problem in this situation other than a transgender student existing?”
Gillitzer added, “This is a belief that is nothing but [a] reissue of the homophobic rhetoric that promoted policies and violence against homosexuality.” Gillitzer speaks for the steadily increasing number of young people who don’t believe that their lesbian, gay, and trans peers pose any threat at all.
For my three daughters, one of whom is still in high school and two of whom are in college, creating an accepting, positive environment for their trans classmates is a no-brainer. They are not obsessed with the bathroom politics that are driving Republican campaigns across the country. Their generation is far better equipped to deal with figuring out how young people with different gender and sexual identities can best get along than rightwing law firms, state legislatures, or grandstanding Republican candidates.
One of the great ironies of the current raft of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation all over the nation is that it is the product of a party that has declared its opposition to the “nanny state”—yet is obsessed with finding new ways to police the bedroom and the bathroom.
In addition to floating bills that punish teachers who allow students to pick their own pronouns without their parents’ permission, the Wisconsin legislature is currently working on a proposal to block social media use by teenagers after 10 p.m. The party of individual liberty is working on a bill to impose a universal bedtime.
Surely citizens would be better served if the legislature focused instead on getting PFAS out of our drinking water, adequately funding our schools, maintaining our infrastructure, setting limits on access to firearms by domestic abusers, and coming up with fair maps that respect the principle of one person, one vote.
Anti-LGBTQ+ attacks create a threatening environment for kids. But the good news is that the culture of kids themselves seems to be evolving to be more accepting and less bigoted. And if the Republican Party is moving in the opposite direction, it can only survive by suppressing the voice of the majority. Republican lawyer and political strategist Cleta Mitchell recently laid this out quite explicitly when she told donors to the Republican National Committee that the only way Republicans can win in 2024 is if they limit polling places on campuses to make it harder for students to vote.
Sooner or later, Republicans are going to have to face the majority of voters who disagree with their policies.
The end of gerrymandering in Wisconsin will mean they can’t just play to the base anymore. The result could be a politics that actually begins to focus on the common concerns that bring us together.