Rachel Maddow warns of ‘profound, dangerous, life-threatening harm’ behind GOP’s anti-trans politics

Rachel Maddow called the Republican campaign against transgender athletes “repulsive,” warning that its dangers extend well beyond Election Day, both for the people it targets and for a country being encouraged to turn against them.In a Friday appearance on Pablo Torre Finds Out, the MS NOW host challenged the idea that Republican defeats amounted to a decisive rejection of anti-trans politics. Even amid Democratic victories, she noted, voters had approved measures restricting transgender people’s rights.For LGBTQ+ Americans, her assessment drew a consequential distinction between defeating candidates who campaign on hostility toward a minority and defeating the hostility itself.“The trans athletes thing, I mean, there’s a lot of actual very serious elements of it,” Maddow told Torre. “And number one is just seeing this national, insistent, now years-long political project to scapegoat and vilify and try to direct violence and hate towards a tiny disfavored minority, which is trans people.”That is something that has profound, profound impact on some of our fellow Americans.”Related: Rachel Maddow says Trump killed the Justice Department. Now she wants his attorney general impeachedRepublican losses do not erase the harmTorre raised the issue as a question about electoral strategy. How had opposition to trans athletes, long presented as an advantage for Republicans, failed to deliver victories for candidates campaigning on it?Politicians had elevated an issue far removed from most Americans’ daily lives into a governing priority, she argued, calling the strategy “a sign of profound political weakness.” But the political tactic’s failures offered little reassurance to the people living with its consequences.“I think the hard thing and the responsible thing is to keep both of those things in mind, the profound unseriousness of this as a political tactic and the profound dangerous life-threatening harm this is causing to real Americans who ar