Splashed across those and other ads are the faces of transgender women, girls and drag performers, often without their prior knowledge or consent. The Hill’s Brooke Migdon spent the past month talking to them.
Political speech, which includes campaign ads, receives the greatest protection under the First Amendment. The Federal Trade Commission, tasked with protecting consumers from false advertising, can do little to intervene in political advertising that misleads audiences or includes false information — even where minors are involved.
One Trump ad features images of Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services and the first openly transgender federal official to win Senate confirmation, and Sam Brinton, a former Biden administration official who is nonbinary.
Campaign ads from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) include a photo of two teenage girls who compete in track and field events at neighboring high schools in Oregon. Neither of the girls pictured is transgender, though Cruz’s ads suggest at least one of them is. The girls' parents did not give Cruz’s campaign permission to use the photo, the representative said.
Gabrielle Ludwig is a biomedical equipment technician in her early 60s and a transgender woman. Photographs and footage of her taken in the early 2010s, when she was a student at Mission College in Santa Clara, Calif., appear in at least nine Senate Leadership Fund ads targeting Democratic incumbent Sens. Bob Casey (Pa.), Jon Tester (Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio).
Another photo of Ludwig, who played basketball for two seasons at Mission College between 2012 and 2014, appears in a campaign ad for Trump.
The ads call Ludwig and other transgender women “biological men,” a term that conflates sex with gender and is used by individuals critical of trans rights to suggest that trans people are not who they say they are.
Ludwig made national headlines in 2012 when she stepped onto a basketball court for the first time as an out trans woman more than twice the age of most of her teammates. The ads show her in uniform on the basketball court.
A second Trump ad criticizing the military under President Biden shows footage of Joshua Kelley, a Navy sailor and drag performer who drew GOP outrage last year when they were selected for a pilot program to increase military recruitment through social media outreach.
The drag performer and environmental activist Pattie Gonia, whose real name is Wyn Wiley and who appears in another Trump ad highlighting Vice President Harris’s support for transgender Americans, said the Trump campaign did not have permission to use her name or likeness.
She and her team are “reviewing our legal options,” she said in an Instagram post this month.
