It is hard to get an accurate estimate of the size of the transgender community but there is no doubt that it is small, perhaps around 1% of the population. Because of their small size, they are politically powerless. So it was astonishing, and sickening, to see them being used to scare people, as if they represented a major danger to the social fabric. Republicans seemed to think that demonizing them was a winning electoral strategy, attacking them at campaign rallies and spending vast amounts on ads against them.

So it was indeed encouraging that the campaign did not work and transgender candidates even won elections.

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday, Republicans spent an estimated $183m on ads about transgender issues. Elon Musk poured millions into political groups that attacked trans rights, intensely targeting Democrat James Talarico’s Senate run in Texas. Trump, who successfully leveraged the culture war issue in 2024, stumped on it again, calling gender affirming care “mutilization” (meaning “mutilation”). Conservative candidates actively campaigned on the platform, calling their liberal opponents supporters of an overly woke agenda.
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But Texas and Kansas – along with the US Senate and House – flipped blue. Alabama elected its first transgender lawmaker, Allison Montgomery, an incoming state representative, despite her Republican challenger’s incendiary comments about her identity. Five other states – Georgia, Washington, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida – elected trans and non-binary candidates at the state level for the first time.

This article profiles some of those new legislators.

The blue wave took the midterms by storm on a national level, and it also saw trans and nonbinary candidates winning state and local elections across the country, giving trans people more say over their own rights at a time when they’re politically threatened daily.

While Congress is set to have the most openly LGBTQ+ people serving in its history in 2027, elections for state legislatures and other local offices also saw big wins for LGBTQ+ candidates. “In a historic rebuke, voters didn’t just reject LGBTQ+ hate; they have elected a historic number of LGBTQ+ elected officials,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said of the election results. “The message from LGBTQ+ voters could not be any clearer: Our rights are not up for debate, our community will not be a political punching bag, and we are not going anywhere.”

Sadly, even some winning Democratic candidates adopted anti-trans rhetoric.

It wasn’t just Republicans. Indeed, some Democratic candidates parroted anti-trans messaging and won their midterms races. Josh Turek, the incoming Iowa senator, released an ad saying he was against “males competing in female sports” and “taxpayers paying for sex changes.” (Turek said he released the ad to respond to false claims put forth by his Republican challenger.) In Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, the incumbent representative, flaunted that she voted “with Republicans” to keep “transgender ideologies out of schools”. Kathy Castor, in Florida’s 14th congressional district, also said she did not believe “biological males” should take part in girls’ sports.

Adam Hamilton is a pastor of a megachurch in Kansas who created a major upset by winning that state’s US senate seat for the Democrats. His background might have suggested that he would not be supportive of transgender rights but in fact he made a powerful statement in support.

A few weeks before becoming the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Kansas in nearly a century, the Methodist megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton went viral for one of the more emphatic defenses of transgender people in an election cycle dominated by attacks on our dignity and equality. “I don’t understand everything there is to know about transgender people,” Hamilton told a Kansas City local television station. “What I can say is this: I don’t think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them. I look at people, and I understand one thing really clearly when it comes to transgender, and that is Jesus told me I was to love my neighbors.” In an MS NOW interview published the day before election day, he doubled down on these comments.

“I love trans people. I mean, I just want people to know I’m going to care for them, and I stand for them, and for everyone else,” he said. “I think my greatest concern is how some — I’ll just say my opponent and the president and others — have taken a small group of people, turned them into a campaign issue, and are harming people who are already bullied and picked on. And I don’t think that’s OK.”

Turek and Kaptur should take heed of Hamilton’s words. Their views on transgender issues are reactionary and they need to change.