Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist covering LGBTQ issues and reproductive health policy. She was the first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history. You can follow her on Twitter @transscribe.

For most of my life as a trans woman, trans people and our issues have been a source of derision. I vividly remember everybody’s favorite liberal, Jon Stewart, making a crude joke on the Daily Show after Dennis Kucinich suggested he would be willing to appoint a trans Supreme Court justice during Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign. Conservatives have often attacked trans people, but even progressives have only recently begun taking our issues seriously. And when they do, supportive politicians have rarely strayed from highly visible fights like bathroom access or the ban on military service by trans people when speaking on trans issues.

So when, during the first debate of the 2020 presidential campaign, Julián Castro responded to a question about abortion by saying that all women, including transgender females, deserve access to a full range of reproductive health care options, it should have been a momentous occasion for a trans community that’s long existed in the shadows.


There was just one small problem. Castro fumbled his answer. “Trans females,” as Castro said, refers to trans women who were assigned male at birth. That’s a demographic that doesn’t need access to abortion care. Trans men and nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth, on the other hand, do need that reproductive health care access. Labeling them as female is considered misgendering. It’s a basic mistake.

The ensuing general reaction from the trans community was, mostly, “you tried.” I just rolled my eyes and appreciated that an attempt at inclusion was made. (Many conservatives, on the other hand, reacted with hyperbole and outright mockery, accusing Castro of clueless pandering.) Still, a tweet from Castro further muddied the waters. In it, he said that “all women,” including the trans community, deserve reproductive health access. The tweet misgenders every trans man and many nonbinary people—who would not consider themselves “women”—who need those services.

If you aren’t trans, this discussion about language may seem unfamiliar or not all that important. But it’s crucial to acknowledging our existence and worth, and more important for politicians, for winning trans votes. We’re looking for candidates who know that trans women are women and trans men are men and nonbinary people are nonbinary, and we all have our own political needs, as Castro seemed to want to acknowledge, even if he didn’t get it right. Trans people in the United States have good reason to be on edge. The Trump administration has repeatedly launched attacks on trans rights, including the military ban and a rollback on health care protections and homeless shelter access. The progress we made during the Obama years feels not just tenuous but like it’s already slipped away.

Trans issues have long existed on the margins of politics, as Kucinich’s pledge from more than 15 years ago demonstrates. But Trump’s attacks on the community have finally caught the attention of the larger progressive electorate. In response, prominent Democrats have begun—often reluctantly in my view—integrating pro-trans stances into speeches and policy proposals. But missteps are being made that make many of these overtures come off as empty panders.

The trans voting population isn’t large enough to swing an election or contribute significantly to a campaign’s bottom line. As a trans person, it’s easy for me to forget that these candidates aren’t competing for my vote as much as they’re trying to appeal to the woke progressives who have recently taken up the cause on behalf of the trans community.

This is the fundamental problem for trans people with electoral politics. Incoherent promises might play well with the progressive base, but I’ve yet to hear a candidate effectively speak out about trans issues beyond calling out Trump’s trans military ban. Selling campaign Pride merchandise is one thing, but offering material plans to roll back Trump’s attacks on our community would be so much more compelling. Under this administration, my community has lost educational protections, protections in homeless shelters and the ability to serve in the military. Additionally, if we lose at the Supreme Court this fall, we stand to lose employment protections, and if a recently proposed administration rule is finalized, health care protections.

To his credit, Castro was the only candidate in the debates to mention the reproductive health needs of trans Americans, while the rest of the candidates defaulted to referring to abortion and birth control access as “women’s issues,” erasing pregnant-capable trans people entirely. This stuff may be new to a lot of candidates, but it’s not hard to get right. Trans-inclusive reproductive health language has become a mainstay of pro-choice advocacy. Planned Parenthood and others have mostly adopted terms like “pregnant people” or “people with uteruses” to describe patients who need reproductive health care over the past several years in an effort to be inclusive of pregnant-capable trans people who don’t identify as women.

It’s easy to forget in this early campaign stage that we’re electing not just a president, but a whole administration consisting of thousands of administrators. Is it really too much to ask that candidates and their staffs know the difference between trans women and trans men? In fairness to Castro, he eventually clarified that it’s trans men and pregnant-capable nonbinary people who need abortion and reproductive care.

Besides Castro, among the 2020 Democrats, Kirsten Gillibrand has led on using trans-inclusive language while speaking to reproductive health issues. As possibly the most vocal trans ally in the field, Gillibrand is also lead sponsor of a Senate bill that would overturn the trans military ban. She also became the first presidential candidate to call for a third gender option on federal IDs like passports. Gillibrand's LGBTQ rights plan, which was released on June 1, originally proposed requiring health insurance to cover hormone replacement therapy for trans people. This would have been a significant step back from the policy of the Obama administration, which required any insurance company receiving federal money, which includes all Affordable Care Act exchange plans, to cover hormones and gender-affirming surgery alike. Later that month, the campaign plan's language was changed to say the senator would ensure insurance companies "do not single out and exclude treatments for transgender patients.” This more expansive language is intended to include surgery. Gillibrand’s campaign says it made the change after hearing from the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund.

These are details that are critical to trans voters, and they are being missed by campaigns. For the average progressive with a passing knowledge of the trans community, any mention of trans issues is often seen as a positive. But inadequate proposals and language mistakes simply remind me how little my community really matters to Democrats.

Just as bad, none of the debate moderators asked specific questions about LGBTQ issues over the course of two nights, a puzzling exclusion given that every member of Congress on the stage supports the Equality Act, a bill which passed the House in May and would grant federal civil rights to LGBTQ people for the first time in U.S. history. The only mention of trans issues other than Castro’s came from Cory Booker, who pointed to the epidemic of violence against trans women of color.

Booker’s comments echoed those of Joe Biden from several weeks ago, who referred to that violence at a Human Rights Campaign event before saying that the fastest way to end that violence was to end the Trump administration. It’s frankly absurd to believe that trans women of color will stop being murdered if Biden is elected president. Biden’s campaign is fond of reminding voters of his connection to the Obama era, but trans women were murdered at similar rates under that presidency, too.

Biden’s sentiment, which is shared by many on the political left, is that all we need to do is vote Trump out of office and everything will go back to normal. But trans women getting murdered is a regular occurrence and happened regularly before Trump. None of these candidates have shown me that they understand the peril facing the trans community. It’s foolish to think that electing a certain candidate will automatically fix everything.

I’ll never forget the Women’s March signs saying “we’d be at brunch” if Hillary Clinton had been elected. Trans women of color would have died under a Clinton administration, too. If Trump is defeated next year, I’m afraid that many progressives will pat themselves on the back for a job well done and head out for mimosas. But Trump has set trans rights back at least a decade, and the trans community needs a president, and a Democratic Party, committed to us.