“Donald Trump has spent the past several days calling the CNN host Anderson Cooper by a woman’s name, as he devotes much of the final stretch of a close presidential campaign to increasingly unfiltered displays of grievance and bigotry,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Trump routinely refers to people he doesn’t like by disparaging nicknames, but his references to Mr. Cooper seemed intended specifically to disparage Mr. Cooper’s sexuality in a campaign in which the former president, his campaign and allied groups have spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-transgender ads.”
“Mr. Cooper is gay; he is not transgender. But anti-transgender messaging — which has increasingly animated Republicans and conservative activists over the past few years, particularly in relation to gender-affirming care for transgender teenagers and to trans girls’ and women’s participation in sports — has often extended to LGBTQ people generally.”
