Taylor Kohn is an Iowan advocate and publicist currently residing in Minnesota.
On the first day of Rob Sand’s campaign for governor, he gave an interview to WHO Radio. When the host Simon Conway asked whether trans girls should be allowed to play sports, Sand replied with a flat “no.”
The comment was poorly received by many, prompting the Des Moines Register to reach out to Sand for an interview on the subject. Sand declined, instead providing a statement doubling down on his exclusionary stance: “I’ve been clear that I support common sense policies like the law protecting fairness in women’s sports, and that this year’s law legalizing discrimination in all places of life is wrong.”
It is, of course, dishonest to say in the same breath that one opposes discrimination and that a certain type of discrimination is “common sense.”
Sand’s support of the ban is not a trivial matter. The 2022 ban on trans girls and women in sports was the first anti-trans law the Iowa GOP successfully passed through the legislature. Republicans used sports to begin their project of systematically exiling trans people from public life, and just three years later they have made Iowa the first state to strip established civil rights from a protected group of people.
The sports ban cleared the way for trans children to lose health care, trans adults to lose Medicaid coverage, and trans people to lose legal protections from discrimination, including in basic areas like housing and employment. State Representative Steven Holt explicitly used the sports ban as his public-facing justification for revoking those legal protections, claiming in a newsletter that as long as trans people’s civil rights were intact, the ban was at risk of being found illegal and overturned.
Unfortunately, Rob Sand is not the only statewide Democratic candidate whose opposition to anti-trans legislation is noticeably weakening. State Senator Zach Wahls, now a candidate for U.S. Senate, recently appeared on the same WHO Radio program as Sand and received the same question about trans girls in sports. In response, Wahls (who voted against the 2022 legislation and spoke against it during the Senate debate) fell into a lengthy explanation of puberty and fairness as he saw them.
“I mean, Simon, I’m six foot five and I weigh 250 pounds, right. I’m a big guy, so I certainly understand that myself. What I will say is that I think at the state level we should be able to, at least here in Iowa—and this is what we voted on when we had this debate a few years ago—understand that there are different sports, different kids,” he said.
He went on like this, apparently trying to appease the anti-trans host without giving the same “no” as Sand. Ultimately, Wahls came off as wishy-washy and rambling. Conway still ended the exchange by lambasting him for being on “the wrong side.”
What Wahls evidently hasn’t learned is that conservative politicians and pundits do not really care about fairness in sports. Republicans have no intention of finding a way for everyone to play and they don’t engage with proposed “solutions.” Their actual policy goals have nothing to do with sports and everything to do with driving trans people into hiding.
Anti-trans actors commonly use sports as their introductory trans issue precisely because people like Sand and Wahls are susceptible to their euphemistic debate about “fairness.” Sports bans are an effective wedge issue—a divisive issue used to peel support from a broader group in order to weaken it. Just as they have in the legislature, conservatives will quickly move onto bathroom bans, healthcare bans, and more once they have browbeaten the opposition party into supporting the sports ban.
This is plain from the way the last few years of anti-trans legislation have unfolded, and its proponents are not secretive about it. “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues,” said Terry Schilling, president of the right-wing American Principles Project, in a 2022 interview with CNN.
It is crucial, both for trans people’s safety and for the unity of the coalition behind the Democrats, to recognize this tactic for what it is and refuse to fall for it.
Too many centrist pundits have spent months declaring that abandoning trans rights is the only way Democrats can win, but they are incorrect. We have recent history showing that supporting trans rights is not political poison and that opposing them is not the key to victory. There are several Trump-voting states with Democratic governors right now, notably Kentucky and Kansas. Both Andy Beshear and Laura Kelly vetoed anti-trans bills that reached their desks, condemning them as policies that would harm children. Both faced re-election just months after their vetoes and both won.
Iowa’s neighboring state of Nebraska provided an additional example just a couple of months ago. In May, voters in the city of Omaha ousted their three-term Republican incumbent mayor in favor of a Democrat. The Republican incumbent, Jean Stothert, ran anti-trans ads leading up to the election. The Democrat, John Ewing, messaged on economic issues while rejecting Stothert’s anti-trans attacks. The Nebraska Democrats came out swinging, calling Stothert “creepy” and “focused on potties.” “Ewing will make lives better by focusing on issues that impact all of us. Jean Stothert and her allies are sending hateful mail and pushing creepy bathroom bills,” one social media post from the party read. On election day, Ewing swept Stothert away by an 11-point margin.
We can learn from these elections. Democrats must stop allowing Republicans to make trans people into a subject for debate and must not throw their rights under the bus to do so. They must reject the premise that trans people’s existence is a problem in the state of Iowa. They should support restoring and expanding trans rights so that trans people can live as safely and comfortably as anyone else. And at every opportunity they should focus on the actual problems threatening Iowa, all of which the Republican party has a heavy hand in causing and would rather not address: farm pollution, cancer rates, the OB/GYN shortage, private school vouchers, and the carbon capture pipeline, just to name a few.
When they are asked directly about trans rights, Democrats must not capitulate like Sand, and they must not compromise and plead like Wahls. Instead, they must go on offense. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz demonstrated this to great effect in the early weeks of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Walz made headlines and drew positive attention by making fun of his opponents and calling them “weird,” a strategy that made him the most popular candidate on either presidential ticket.
Walz’s line of attack resonated for a reason. There is nothing fair, normal, or “common sense” about obsessing over people’s genitals, and plenty of people are energized when a candidate acknowledges this. It is weird to accost a stranger in a bathroom. It is creepy to insist a child must have a vulva to hit a softball off a tee. Republicans are the ones forcing intimate personal matters into the public discourse, not Democrats. They are, frankly, being weird.
Former Harris aides have admitted that, uncomfortable with Walz’s adversarial approach, the Harris-Walz campaign “put him in a box” during the months leading up to the election. “He was encouraged to stop focusing on the ‘weird’ criticism,” one aide told Politico. “I think it is fair to ask whether, even if ‘weird’ wasn’t quite right, his instinct about how to approach Trump, to make him seem small, and a huckster, wasn’t closer to correct.” This decision was one of the retreats to the middle that, ultimately, cost Democrats the 2024 presidential election. But it is not too late to learn from it in 2026.
Right now, Rob Sand appears to feel little accountability to his base, campaigning like the nomination is already his. Indeed, he is the front-runner, but by maintaining his stance on this issue he will leave a weaker state and party behind. The state of Iowa as imagined by Rob Sand is a place where both major political parties are willing to play games with trans people’s safety and dignity. This is not a decision he should get to make, and it is not one the party or the base has to accept. Other candidates, party members, and everyone with a stake in Iowa must stand firm on support for civil rights and refuse to let Sand—or any Democrat—trade them away.
Additional reading:
Midnight Zero: Iowa Bans Medicaid Coverage for Trans Healthcare
Erin In The Morning: The Trans Sports Attacks Were Never About Sports
Top photo (left) is cropped from Phil Roeder’s photo of Des Moines students protesting an anti-trans law on March 11, 2022. The uncropped image is available via Wikimedia Commons. Top photo of Rob Sand (right) is by Greg Hauenstein, also available via Wikimedia Commons.