Since the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling for marriage equality, the conservative right has struggled to weaponize hatred toward Gay and Lesbian communities for political gain, like it did in previous eras. Although favorable Republican views on the morality of Gay and Lesbian people have dropped significantly these past few years, going from a peak of 56% in 2022 down to 38% in 2025, according to Gallup, overall US public support (both morally and legally) for LGB people has remained high.
And with the recent November refusal by the US Supreme Court to review Kim Davis’s bid challenging same-sex marriage, good ol’ fashioned homophobia alone seems less and less effective at scaring voters. In fact, prominent Gay operatives have been lauded for joining the MAGA movement (more on that later).
But proponents of anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation have found much more success with another political scapegoat to rally people against: the Transgender community.
And under Trump 2.0, there has been a resurgence of transphobia in the right-wing populist media ecosystem. What was once Rush Limbaugh warning against Lesbian farmer invasions has metastasized into a slew of MAGA influencers on Facebook and X claiming that “biological male” students are trying to infiltrate girls’ sports teams and locker rooms. To them, transness and gender-nonconformity are not simply natural aspects of human experience reflected in the many cultures around the world and throughout history but rather a mental illness. Sound familiar?
And despite estimates of the number of Trans girl athletes in Washington being underwhelmingly low compared to the 250,000 total who participate (not to mention Trans boy and Nonbinary athletes), self-proclaimed “protectors of women and girls” have been leading the charge for three different initiatives that would negatively impact not only Transgender people but also women and Queer people more broadly.
The winds of change have shifted, and the presence of a MAGA-style McCarthyism has already begun making inroads into our state.
Let’s Go Washington ’25
Let’s Go Washington (LGW) is a political nonprofit organization funded by millionaire hedge fund manager and conservative megadonor Brian Heywood. This year, Heywood and LGW have been collecting signatures across the state for two new initiatives: IL26-001 “Strengthen Communication Between Parents and Schools,” also called “the Parents’ Bill of Rights,” and IL26-638, “Protecting Fairness in Girls’ Sports.”
According to LGW’s website, IL26-001 seeks to allow parents access to their K-12 student’s full medical and mental health counseling records, including any information regarding sexual experiences or attractions; it also includes giving parents written notice and the option to opt students out of instruction on topics of sexuality. IL26-638 would “require policies prohibiting students it defines as ‘biologically male’ from competing with or against female students in certain interschool athletic activities that are intended for female students only,” which would be enforced by “verifying the student’s biological sex, based on reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”
These initiatives, if enacted, could pose several problems for the privacy and safety of Queer youth. If a parent or guardian has regressive and/or hostile views on LGBTQIA+ people, allowing them full unfettered access to their child’s records, if they are Queer or Trans, could pose a potential risk.
In regard to instituting strict biological-sex verification guidelines for girls’ sports, it does not address the nuance of Intersex students or provide any safe alternatives for Transgender athletes at large. The potential negative implications of these guidelines can be seen in how Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was treated at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Khelif faced several unverified allegations that she tested high for testosterone and was Intersex. Despite being backed by the International Olympic Committee, Khelif still became the target of a smear campaign led by Elon Musk and JK Rowling, who accused her of being secretly a “biological male.”
As of December 16, IL26-638 sits at 315,979 signatures, while IL26-001 has 289,571. LWG will have until January 2, 2026, to collect enough signatures to take its initiatives to the Washington legislature, where they will either be passed or put on to the November 2026 ballot (each will need to reach around 400,000 to account for any errors or duplicate signatures).
Both initiatives have received endorsements from several conservative groups, such as Gays Against Groomers, the Washington State Young Republicans, and XX-XY Athletics, an athleisure brand that advocates the immutable reality of only two chromosomal sexes (Intersex people be damned).
IL26-126 Voter ID
Led by the Washington State Republican Party, IL26-126 looks to align Washington with Trump’s executive orders and also recent federal court rulings mandating that all eligible voters, in order to register to vote, must supply a US passport, birth certificate, or naturalization paperwork. Those who do not submit a registration 30 days before an election must verify in person at the county auditor’s office, and those who do not comply within 14 days of the election will have their registration canceled. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 21 million American citizens do not have these documents currently available to them. And those who have changed their names or have differences between documents (like married women and Transgender people) are at greater risk of being affected.
In response to a video made by the SGN critiquing the initiative, the Washington State GOP said, “If WA Democrats had nothing to hide, they wouldn't fret about requiring proof of citizenship to vote.”
(Note: The SGN does not affiliate itself with any political party.)
But the ones who’ve undisputedly touted these initiatives most have been the Trump-aligned political pundits, stumping across the state for both LWG and the local GOP in rural areas to get people out to collect signatures and attend rallies at school gymnasiums.
Here’s the rundown on how they’ve each been contributing to these campaigns.
Ari Hoffman
“1 B-list ninja cosplayer” is how Ari Hoffman described SGN contributing writer Arin Waller when he filmed her as she took photos on assignment during the Charlie Kirk vigil at Westlake Center on September 10. The post received thousands of likes on Hoffman’s Instagram page, and elicited many negative comments.
Hoffman is most known for being a conservative radio talk show host on 570 KVI, broadcasting weekdays from 3 to 6 p.m. He is also West Coast editor for the right-wing publication the Post Millennial. Firmly supporting LGW and its initiatives in a recent article, Hoffman wrote about “threats from Antifa” against the 250-person LGW event in Tumwater on Dec. 12. He wrote that LGW “was notified Friday [Dec. 12] by the FBI that ‘Antifa-affiliated’ individuals and groups were calling for acts of violence and intimidation,” and that Heywood made the statement that “Antifa’s goal is to threaten and intimidate Washington citizens into silence.”
In September, Trump signed an executive order to designate “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite it being only a dispersed political movement with no formal organization behind it.
The LGW claim of a FBI tip-off, if true, would line up with the leaked Dec. 4 memo from US Attorney General Pam Bondi that instructs the FBI to crack down on what it deems “domestic terrorists,” including those that adhere to “radical gender ideology.” According to the Brennan Center for Justice, experts fear that these new attempted classifications, which have no legal footing, will only help Trump and his allies to “violate free speech rights, potentially threatening any person or group holding anyone of a broad array of disfavored views with investigation and prosecution."
Brandi Kruse
In that same article, Brandi Kruse — a former reporter with FOX-13, now a political commentator and podcaster — is also cited as sharing photos of a police presence at the LGW event. She in the past has been no stranger to criticizing LGBTQIA+ rights, as well as aligning herself politically with Trump. She is also featured prominently in a video on Let’s Go Washington’s homepage discussing IL26-638 with two high school cisgender girl athletes on her political podcast UnDivided. Together, they accused Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nick Brown, and Superintendent Chris Reykdal of putting them in danger by potentially being made to share a locker room with somebody of the “opposite sex.”
The current Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction code requirements state: “Use of locker rooms by transgender or gender-expansive students will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, with the goal of maximizing transgender or gender-expansive student social integration.” Participation of Transgender athletes is governed by the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, including guidelines for inclusion of gender-diverse youth in sports.
In another video taken by influencer and independent journalist Jonathan Choe at the Dec. 12 LGW Tumwater event, Kruse gave a speech about the perceived “threats” of “Antifa.” Addressing the crowd, she said, “The FBI had told the Tumwater Police Department we don’t have a specific actionable threat, but [there is] some very concerning online chatter from ‘Antifa-affiliated’ groups.”
Kruse made headlines in October after encouraging Trump in a meeting at the White House to target “Antifa groups” in the Pacific Northwest. “I'm not here to convince any of you [the press] that Antifa is a real thing,” she said. “Because if you have not come to that conclusion by now, you are never going to come to that conclusion, because you don't want to see it.”
Scott Presler
Despite not being local to the region, Presler, a national conservative figure, was recently part of the Washington GOP strategy to help mobilize constituents around the IL26-126 Voter ID initiative and its signature-gathering efforts. In response to the SGN video critiquing IL26-126, Presler responded with: “WA Democrats are VERY angry that we’re collecting signatures to require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.”
(Note: The SGN does not affiliate itself with any political party.)
A November Lynnwood Times profile on Presler’s tour around the state, in which he attended rallies and spoke to event-goers, described him as a “conservative firebrand who was the unstoppable force behind Donald J. Trump’s 2024 landslide victories in battleground states.”
The article shared how, during his speech in Marysville, Presler gave vocal support for the LWG initiatives, and reaffirmed to the crowd a conservative belief in traditional gender roles, despite himself being a Gay man. “And although I am pretty, I know that I’m a biological man,” he said, adding, “A man is a provider and a protector. And the ‘men’ of this state of Washington have failed women. And they’ve failed our girls. And they have failed our daughters.”
His justifications against Trans rights — ironic in that similar reasoning has continued to be used against Gay and Lesbian rights — are in line with other MAGA-aligned Gay men operatives. A New York Times article about the Gay staff of the Trump administration said there is a widely held perception that “the MAGA establishment has a lot more openly gay men than the Republican establishment that came before it,” and also that “no one can say with a straight face that MAGA is homophobic.”
These sentiments raise questions as to whether the Trump administration’s attack on DEI programs (which includes LGBTQIA+ inclusion), as well as its HIV/AIDS funding cuts, are being taken in consideration.
New McCarthyism
Stoking deep-seated fears and fostering paranoia are essential to mobilizing voters away from the very real issues that are impacting their everyday lives — whether that’s the affordability crisis, a broken healthcare system, anemic job growth, or the now frequent federal undermining of due process, civil rights, and the US Constitution by the executive branch. A handful of Transgender teenagers wanting to play soccer is not the moral crisis some have made it out to be; in fact, the very same arguments were rolled out in the decades before about Gay and Lesbian inclusion. “Save our Children” has been dusted off, and retrofitted to become “Protect Women and Girls.”
But the ultimate irony is that the past behavior of the movement’s leader, President Trump, could not be further from that sentiment. And in his second term, there has arisen an infrastructure of right-wing pundits and millionaires ready to advocate on behalf of his agenda in both red and blue states like Washington. Whether these initiatives succeed or fail in 2026, it seems that US politics has entered a new era of not questioning the emperor’s new clothes and risking being labeled a “domestic terrorist.”
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