As Democrats look inward following Vice President Kamala Harris’s electoral defeat, the party must not abandon transgender people or cede the fight to expand rights and protections for the community, National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund President Kierra Johnson told the Washington Blade.

President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign, and those run by other Republican candidates, spent tens of millions on anti-trans ads leading up to the election, a messaging strategy that has been credited with energizing the conservative base and ultimately defeating Democrats like U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who ran for Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) U.S. Senate seat.

Others doubt whether the issue had much, if any, impact on the elections, especially the presidential race — arguing that the results are better explained by headwinds like the post-pandemic disadvantage faced by incumbent leaders around the world, or by the realignment of the American electorate that decisively sent Trump back to the White House.

When she was at Howard University on Wednesday to watch Harris deliver her concession speech, Johnson said she was asked twice whether “the alignment around trans rights was a part of the problem” or whether Harris was doomed by her campaign’s failure to distance the vice president from President Joe Biden. Her response: “God, no.”

Broadly, she said, “it’s pointless to be in this space of, ‘what could the Harris campaign have done differently’ when we’re operating in this context” where authoritarianism and fascism have taken hold while sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-immigrant bigotry, and other forms of prejudice are now expressed so openly.

Plus, Johnson added, the vice president “had, what, 107 days of a campaign? And she got that close — that’s pretty damn amazing.”

Challenging the theory that the anti-trans advertising was effective, she said, is (1) the success of so many LGBTQ candidates like Delaware State Sen. Sarah McBride, who made history with her election to become the first transgender member of Congress, and (2) the fact that Trump and his allies did not just leverage anti-trans messaging in their campaigns, but also leaned into other forms of bigotry, from fear mongering about immigrant communities to racist attacks focused on Harris’s biracial identity.

NBC News reported on Friday that hundreds of LGBTQ candidates were elected to public office across the U.S., and many races have not yet been called. According to the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, the number of known LGBTQ people who ran this year, 1,017, marks a 1.1 percent increase from 2020, with more non-cisgender candidates running than ever before.

About 80 percent have been successful. Several, like McBride, have made history. For instance, Hawaii, Iowa, and Missouri will welcome the first transgender representatives to their state legislatures, Kim Coco Iwamoto, Aime Wichtendahl, and Wick Thomas.

“When I see this many trans people who were voted by the people into elected office, some who were reelected into office, I’m hard pressed to believe that that was the winning strategy,” Johnson said, pointing to wins by other trans candidates in Minnesota, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Illinois.

“The Trump campaign had a lot of bigotry, throughout the first campaign, continuing on till now, that was anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-queer, anti-trans,” she said, adding, “There’s an appetite for that kind of racist, bigoted way of doing and being. They did a whole lot of that. And, yeah, I think it spoke to a particular part of their base — and I don’t think that that was about us, what we did or didn’t do right.”

Dividing the Democratic coalition is a losing strategy

“It’s really easy for us to point our fingers at conservatives, right-of-center [folks] or Trumpers or Tea Partiers,” she said. “But it’s harder for us to admit and talk about racism” and other forms of discrimination and prejudice “that is existent and perpetuated in left, leftist parties and left communities and organizations that are doing social justice work.”

“When I hear people who identify as Democrats saying we need to distance ourselves from trans people and perpetuating this notion that that’s why we lost,” Johnson said, “that is transphobia among leftist political people” and evidence of the need to root out and combat it.

“We’ve got to start building our strategies with our whole community intact,” she said. “Not how we’re going to do this without trans people. Not how we’re going to do this without, you know, evangelical Black people. Not how we’re going to do this without people in the Midwest and the Rust Belt or the Bible Belt. Not how we’re going to do this without immigrants.”

Each of those approaches would alienate critical parts of the Democratic base, Johnson said.

Beyond the work of electing pro-equality candidates, she said the movement and the Democratic Party must “affirm the humanity of all of us and build strategies that put the most vulnerable at the center,” which “means we have to question how things have always been done” along with the systems that were not originally designed to accommodate the full diversity of people they serve.

“Part of it is about representation,” Johnson said, “the presence of non-binary, trans, queer people in the work, in ads, in media. But it’s also a power analysis” that involves, or requires, talking “about trans people not as a separate community of people, but part of the different communities we are in.”

For example, trans people are experiencing the struggle for affordable housing as much as anyone else, she said. “Regardless of the work that we’re doing — prison reform, voting rights, housing access — put our people at the center, trans people at the center, as yet another voice that is a part of that whole.”

The success of LGB and queer and trans candidates last week, and the protections for LGBTQ people and women’s reproductive freedoms in ballot measures that passed in states like New York, were important, Johnson said.

At the same time, “what I want people to understand,” she said, “is we’ve got to move beyond identity politics and representation and really think about how we are building power. So with these wins, how are we leveraging them for gained power in our communities? We’ve got to be working overtime to come up with the pathways and strategies to leverage that power toward progress for our whole community.”

LGBTQ movement ready for incoming administration

When asked to share a message for the LGBTQ community in the wake of the election, Johnson said “we’ve got to create space and time to feel and heal,” but “we also have to find our organizations, our community partners, our friend groups that we can actually dig in with to get the work done.”

“You have every reason to be mad, sad, confused, frustrated,” she said, “but do not be helpless.”

Johnson added, “Our communities have been resilient through decades, centuries. And that perspective is important. While we are in hard times, our ancestors and foreparents created a lot of progress, and now we’re called to do the same. We have a responsibility to do the same.”

“A lot of our peers didn’t make it to be freedom fighters,” she said, but “we have. Let’s step into that power.”

While LGBTQ advocacy groups, including the Task Force, are expected to lose their seats at the table once the Trump-Vance administration takes over in January, Johnson told the Blade, “That’s all good, because the power is actually in the people anyway.”

“Access to the White House, influence in the White House, is important,” she said, but “that’s never been the end-all-be-all. We know that power is built from the grassroots up, and so that just gives us more time to organize and strategize with our people on the ground.”

“Bring it,” Johnson added. “We’ve got powerful, powerful voices. Folks who are in Texas and in Michigan and Ohio, that that are ready. They’re ready to dig in, to keep this fight going — and to fight smarter, and in a broader, bigger coalition.”

“While we couldn’t have predicted exactly where we were going to be today, the Task Force and other organizations in the LGBTQ movement have been doing scenario planning for months,” she said, “so we’re not caught with our pants down. We’ve run scenarios, and we are already moving to implement different strategies in the communities that we’re working in.”

Johnson highlighted the Task Force’s flagship “Creating Change” conference in Las Vegas from Jan. 22 to 26, where the organization will be “bringing together legal minds to actually do, basically, office hours on-site,” allowing attendees the opportunity to consult attorneys with questions about their rights and protections under the next administration.

“It’s not about advocacy,” she said. “It’s about taking care of our people. I think you’re going to see more of that — in addition to the policy and advocacy work, more is going to be done to actually hold and support and protect our people.”