Republicans Underestimate the Power of the Transgender Issue at Their Peril

T wo years ago, Kristi Noem was one of the GOP’s most promising rising stars. The first-term South Dakota governor became a conservative darling in the early months of the pandemic, attracting national attention for her state’s refusal to lock down. In the ensuing twelve months, Noem snagged headline speaking slots at top-billing conservative events such as the Republican National Convention and the Conservative Political Action Conference. Her campaign war chest swelled with out-of-state money, and a federal political-action committee dubbed the “Noem Victory Fund” quietly surfaced in the early months of 2021. Conservative media hailed the new governor as a hero. “She is one of the few politicians, even among Republicans, who is unapologetically conservative,” Evita Duffy beamed in the Federalist.

Less than three months later, the same publication was running articles blasting Noem as “a worthless GOP leader who has no business calling herself a conservative.” In a matter of days, Noem’s goodwill with conservatives had evaporated. The governor’s March 2021 misstep on transgender athletes will go down as one of the most damaging unforced errors by a rising political star in recent memory: Days after tweeting that she was “excited to sign” a bill barring biological men from competing in women’s sports, she reneged, issuing a “style-and-form” veto that gutted the bill’s enforcement mechanisms. When Republicans in the state legislature refused to accept the revisions, the legislation died. In the eyes of many social conservatives, the mistake was unforgivable.

The same conservative media ecosystem that had floated her name as a top contender for a 2024 Republican presidential ticket turned on her. Conservative writers, including myself, began raising questions about Noem’s cozy relationships with powerful business interests with a vested interest in killing social-conservative legislation such as the women’s sports bill. A coalition of eleven national conservative organizations, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, signed a letter denouncing Noem’s revisions as “a feel-good statement with no real teeth.” Tucker Carlson accused Noem of “caving to the NCAA” in a testy back-and-forth with the governor on his show. In November, state representative Steve Haugaard filed for a primary challenge in the 2022 South Dakota governor’s race, slamming Noem as “beholden to special interests, from the NCAA, to big business, to corporate lobbyists.”

But at least on the issue of women’s sports, the governor seems to have learned her lesson. In December, Noem introduced new legislation aimed at restricting athletic participation based on biological sex. And last week, she debuted an advertisement touting the bill on prime-time news programs across the country: “In South Dakota, only girls play girls’ sports,” the video’s narrator intones. “Why? Because of Governor Kristi Noem’s leadership. Noem has been protecting girls’ sports for years, and never backed down.”

Not everyone’s buying the governor’s new line. South Dakota’s most recent women’s-sports legislation is actually quite strong, going above and beyond many of the similar laws passed in other states by covering both K–12 and collegiate sports, tying the definition of biological sex to an athlete’s original birth certificate, and giving parents a right to sue school districts and athletic associations that don’t comply. But whether Noem gets the credit for this achievement is another question. Days after Noem’s ad on the bill was released, a lobbyist who worked as a policy adviser in the governor’s office during the controversy over her veto fired off an op-ed in the South Dakota–based Rapid City Journal calling the video “a half-cooked attempt to distract from her caving to corporate pressure in 2021.”

Regardless of Noem’s fate, however, the governor’s concerted, several-month effort to make up for her initial miscalculation highlights the importance of the transgender issue in today’s GOP. Republicans who take a conciliatory stance toward gender ideology have faced harsh conservative backlashes at both the state and national levels in recent years. When Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed a bill banning gender-transition surgery for minors in April, he was met with the same firestorm of conservative criticism that had engulfed Noem the month before. Donald Trump released a statement blasting Hutchinson as a “lightweight RINO.” Ultimately, the Arkansas state legislature delivered a resounding rebuke of the governor’s veto, overriding it 72–25 in the House and 25–8 in the Senate.

The 22 U.S. House Republicans co-sponsoring the so-called Fairness for All Act (FFAA), which would write gender identity into federal civil-rights law, have also been the subject of intense conservative scrutiny. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles called the bill’s co-sponsors “tone-deaf and rudderless,” slamming them for “a concession to radical transgender ideology.” There may be real political consequences to these moves: The American Principles Project (APP), a social-conservative group that has been pushing anti–gender ideology bills across the country, is planning to organize and fund primary challenges to some of FFAA’s Republican champions in 2022. “We think that at a bare minimum, Republican politicians shouldn’t be allowed to get away with supporting legislation that would add gender identity in the civil-rights law,” Terry Schilling, the president of APP, told National Review. “We want to start collecting some scalps, particularly from within the Republican Party, when it comes to supporting really, really bad legislation like Fairness for All.”

“APP is specifically targeting Republicans who are bad on this to put a penalty or a punishment in place when you refuse to stand up,” Schilling said. “We want to make it a litmus test.”

All this points to a number of shifting dynamics within Republican Party politics, particularly with regard to social issues. For a time after the Bush era, the center of gravity in the GOP became less focused on the culture war. Business interests, whose priorities were often at odds with those of social conservatives, exercised an outsized influence in the party. In 2008, when Noem was serving in the South Dakota House of Representatives, the Republican presidential ticket was led by John McCain, whose famously icy relationship with the religious Right included repeated flip-flops on Roe v. Wade, a vote against the 2004 Federal Marriage Amendment, and a denunciation of Jerry Falwell as an “agent of intolerance.” In 2012, at the end of Noem’s first term in Congress, Mitt Romney won the Republican nomination with a spotty-at-best track record on abortion and gay marriage. Even social conservatives such as Mike Pence were not immune to the increasingly liberal proclivities of powerful corporations: In 2015, the then-governor of Indiana caved to significant pressure from big business by amending the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, ultimately going so far as to explicitly protect sexual orientation and gender identity in Indiana’s anti-discrimination law.

Noem, for her part, was described as a “quiet, conservative backbencher” with a “relatively modest profile” during her four terms in the House of Representatives. Her tenure in Congress was largely in line with the political center of gravity in her party. She still speaks in the language of that era of Republican politics, describing herself as “a limited-government conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan,” quoting Milton Friedman while praising free markets and job creators. But the backlash to her veto, as well as the subsequent controversy surrounding her refusal to ban private vaccine mandates in her state, point to a changing political climate to which officials like Noem are only now adapting.

Ironically, given the former president’s personal infidelities and decidedly mixed history on social issues, the Trump era ushered in a far more culture war–oriented Republican Party. Whereas anti-tax pledges or spending-cut commitments may have been litmus tests for Republican politicians in the early 2010s, such challenges as transgenderism and critical race theory are the new hot-button issues. Even some blue-state Republicans have cut their teeth in these areas: Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin made critical race theory a centerpiece of his gubernatorial bid, ran as an opponent of transgender athletes in girls’ sports, and voiced his support on the campaign trail for a teacher who refused to use gender pronouns in his classroom.

The GOP’s shift on these issues has as much to do with the Left as it does with the Right. “I think that the urgency of these issues has changed,” Schilling said. “When it’s in your face, and it’s in your children’s faces every day, and it’s being enforced by your public-school system, you can’t ignore it anymore. And I think that the conservative movement, the Republican Party, and America as a whole is recognizing that it’s really important to take actions to strengthen the culture and strengthen the family.”

Still, in both South Dakota and on the national stage, the divisions between traditional business-friendly Republicans and social conservatives persist, even as politicians like Youngkin embody a merger of their interests that others might be wise to emulate. “I think you’ll find that the Republicans who are more aligned with business see our issues as unnecessary and wish they’d go away,” Fred Deutsch, a state representative who has championed a number of pro-life and anti–gender ideology bills in the South Dakota House, told National Review.

“I mean, there is a split,” Deutsch added. “We see it in South Dakota, and we see it all across the country.”