During Tuesday night’s debate on ABC News between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, LGBTQ+ rights were scarcely mentioned as the candidates sparred on everything from fracking to foreign policy. But transgender people in particular got one very meme-able shoutout from a sputtering Trump, who at one point proclaimed, “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison!” The remark came during a long and disconnected rant from Trump about crime, Minneapolis, oil drilling, guns, and the size of his inheritance from his father, but it immediately caught the attention of some of the best on X, who rose to the occasion with their own important commentary.
As writer and critic Hunter Harris pointed out, the line would have fit perfectly on a chyron for the fictional Fox News network on the prestige HBO drama Succession. Life does imitate art after all.
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Others took full advantage of the double meaning of the word “alien.” LGBTQET+, anyone?
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The remark from Trump was essentially metonymic for his entire debate performance. Rather than discussing policy in any cogent way, much of the official transcript reads like the most racist version of Mad Libs anyone has ever played. At one point, he yelled, to an audience of exactly two moderators a few feet away from him, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs! The people that came in. They’re eating the cats!” That exclamation only would have made sense to people who are hyper-aware of a very niche and entirely disproven far-right conspiracy theory about Haitian Americans in Ohio. Everyone else just heard a 78-year-old man shouting about people eating their own pets. At this point, Trump is just throwing various dog whistles together and seeing what sticks.
In fact, partway through the night, I started jotting down some other anti-trans comments that would have made just as much sense as “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison!” So far, I’ve got two absolute bangers: “They’re doing top surgery on stray cats in school libraries!” and “They’re giving binders to Twitch streamers in Venezuela.” But I have long since hung up my posting hat. Let’s leave it to the professionals. Below, please find our hand-curated roundup of the best memes about providing gender-affirming care to inmates which, to be clear, is an unambiguously good thing.
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