Honestly?
They had lost the war against homosexuality and figured they had a shot against the trans community.
They're winning some key battles now but they'll eventually lose this war too.
the American Principles Project, a national conservative think tank that campaigns against abortion, same sex marriage, and trans rights. Heading into the 2020 election, APP’s executive director Terry Schilling told
the Times that APP was faced with a challenge: Conservative groups that campaigned against social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights had been shying away from electoral politics in the past few years. APP’s polling showed that the anti-trans “bathroom bills” had failed to be the wedge issue that they’d hoped in 2016, and they were losing political ground. APP was determined to turn that around. “What we’re doing is trying to show Republicans that they could win on these issues,” Shilling said.
They pivoted to a new strategy, first testing it out in the 2019 Kentucky governor’s race — a “pilot program” for the 2020 election. Rather than focusing on the purported threat of “biological men in bathrooms,” they turned to trans kids in school sports. It makes the case stronger, APP founder Frank Cannon told the
Times, because it focused on “the idea that you are taking something away from people” — that their daughters could be losing their spot on the team, their wins, their scholarships, to someone assigned male at birth.
“This is an old playbook,” says Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign. Conservatives have consistently played on fears of lost opportunities and vulnerable children: After integration, conservatives stoked fears that black people would usurp white athletes; in the 1970s, Miami’s “Save Our Children” campaign effectively changed public opinion on gay people by casting them as a moral threat to kids. Just take out “gay” or “people of color” and replace it with “trans,” David says, “and it’s the same arguments they’re using now.”
APP’s candidate didn’t win the governor’s race, but their polling found that he did pick up
nearly 13,000 new votes. And that was proof enough that it could work in the Trump campaign. When APP took the strategy national, they kept the “trans kids” angle, but expanded it, debuting
three ads in Michigan about trans student athletes, and two that accused Joe Biden of endorsing “gender change treatments in minors.” It may not have turned the election for Trump, but the campaign stuck, and state-level politicians have jumped on the wedge issue for 2021
From
https://www.rollingstone.com/politi...ns-medical-bans-impact-on-trans-kids-1158853/
This is the real reason why. R voters are eaily manipulated because they have been trained to be reactionary by right wing media. I might start a thread sometime in which I document all the stages this test bedding of antitrans proganada comes from. I have minutes from APP meetings (and other "think tanks") starting in 2014 in which they talk about how to use antitrans rhetoric as a wedge issue because antimuslim and anti same-sex marriage issues are running out of steam.