A right-wing, Tea Party organization called “True the Vote” is training their volunteer poll watchers to target transgender voters. True the Vote’s training manual features a transphobic image that claims transgender people are fraudulent voters and should be denied the right to vote.
NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling said, “It is disgraceful that True the Vote would try to thug anyone into not voting. True the Vote’s true agenda is a shameful attempt to scare trans people away from participating in our democracy.”
Until this point, the concerted effort by right-wing, tea party groups to restrict voting rights with new Voter ID laws only inadvertently affected transgender voters. Only days away from Election Day, the discovery of True the Vote’s training manual marks a shift by right-wing groups to explicitly target transgender people and deny them a right to vote.
“Trans people are resilient,” said Keisling. “For trans people, voting is not just a right and a responsibility, for us it is also an important part of how we are winning our equality. Scare tactics like this won’t keep us from that.”
NCTE urges all transgender and gender non-conforming voters, regardless of their party affiliation or political beliefs, to ignore True The Vote’s shameful and unamerican attacks, and vote this Election Day.
In case you are challenged, be prepared by bringing NCTE’s “Voting While Trans Checklist” with you when you vote. The Checklist includes a message from NCTE to poll workers clarifying possible questions they may have about your identification. If a poll worker or poll watcher attempts to deny you a ballot, call the National Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) immediately.
Additionally, watch and share our public service announcement for what poll workers can do to ensure that transgender people are not denied the right to vote. Learn more at http://www.votingwhiletrans.org.
National Center for Transgender Equality's Blog 
[…] right-wing Tea Party organization called “True the Vote” plans to target transgender voters this election day. Be prepared by being informed. If you’re struggling, reach out. If you don’t have […]
They’re not taking an anti-trans position, or even thinking about you at all. They’re showing examples of somebody who’s obviously not the person on the ID card voting fraudulently, as has been documented to happen in 0.00000001% of the votes, which is what justifies their lobbying push to patriotically disenfranchise 5-10% of eligible voters who are poor or elderly enough to not have ID and might be likely to vote Democrat.
They’ll be happy to disenfranchise you also, of course, because you’re probably not voting Republican either, but if they thought about you at all they assumed you probably already live in California or New York where they’re not winning anyway.
Bill, you are charmingly naïve. They are absolutely targetting trans voters, trans women in particular. At the very least, they are using trans women as the butt of their joke, so to speak. I will assume from your name that you are a man, and from your choice of pronouns that you are not trans, and therefore, tell you that I don’t need a cisgender man to tell me who they are targetting, when I am a member of the targetted group.
They ARE targeting us, but not ONLY us…
We just happen to be an “easy target” for them.
Gemma, your train of thought seems to have derailed. If, as you suggest, Bill is a cisgender man, that makes him MORE qualified than you to determine what a fellow cisgender man meant when when said fellow made that pamphlet. Kindly stop trying to put words into others mouths. The simple fact of the matter is that while the author of that thing would most likely consider transgendered people horrifying if he thought of them, he probably never does.
Would you say the same thing if they showed a cartoon of someone in black face? Seriously?
Even if it wasn’t “directed” at black people? Oh no it’s not racist, it’s a joke! get it?
“They’re showing examples of somebody who’s obviously not the person on the ID card voting fraudulently”
Could you give me another example of what they’re looking for then? I mean- all over their site it says that “if you see something that doesn’t look right” and then they give you this picture to demonstrate something that doesn’t look right…
I have reached the point in my transition where I am having increasing amounts of trouble convincing people I am who I say that I am, particularly because I have not yet filed for a legal name change. In the absence of presentation of photo identification, which is the case at the polls in NJ, I get challenged.
Since my driver’s license has been updated with a new picture and sex marker, as long as I give my driver’s license, I don’t have problems, but when I need to interact with people in situations where only my given name is used, people don’t believe that I am that person, because I now receive conditional passing privilege in most circumstances, and my given name is not exactly a common name for women. I have in my life only ever heard of two women with my given name, which is one of the most common for men.
As you can imagine, since I now regularly pass as cisgender female, it can be quite embarrassing to have to out myself to complete strangers in rural South Jersey.
Reblogged this on Cait.
I ran for the office of Constable and won!
So one of my jobs as Constable is poll security!
As a transwoman myself, you can bet that I am not going to allow harrassment of voters, especially other Tfolk when I’m on duty!
It all comes down to tomorrow!
See you at the polls!
some moron tries to stop me from voting, and there’s going to be at least one less moron on this planet when I finish. People need to quit being sheep.
Where is the full image? What did you crop out of it? Why the incomplete picture?
[…] National Center for Transgender Equality and their really sad attempt to paint True The Vote as an enemy to the LGBT […]
Thanks for the information, shared.
More information on True the Vote http://www.chron.com/news/politics/article/The-Texan-behind-the-charge-for-voter-ID-laws-3967883.php
This, the Tea Party, TTV and so on are all pretty terrible, but where in the image does it indicate it’s part of anti-trans activism/rhetoric?
I’m quite willing to believe the worst of these groups, but unless some of the relevant part of the manual has been cut off, this is very clearly a tone-deaf cartoon attempting to show somebody passing themselves off as someone else while in disguise. That the disguise is feminine attire being worn by a burly man almost certainly isn’t a dig at anyone in the LGBT(and so on) population, but an invoking of old tropes common to visual media. Unless I’m missing some provided supplementary material, you’re assuming malice when old-fashioned ignorance is much more likely.
It’s like if the disguise was a Groucho Marx mask on a black man pretending to be a white voter. It’d be easy to assume racism coming from the Tea Party, but it would be just as likely (if not moreso) that someone thought they were making a cute little cartoon about identity fraud in general.
I do not think it matters if it was intended to be explicitly anti-trans. I actually quite doubt it was. The thing is though that there’s this group which exists to discourage the “wrong kind” of people from voting. And all their uninformed members are being given training materials reminding them, jokingly or no, to look out for someone whose ID says female but who looks like they’re “really” a man. And that is a very real recipe for problems.
The pathetic caricature obviously IS intended to invoke the “man in a dress” trope. This propagandist rebus is little more than an attempt by the Tea Party group to evade responsibility for their obvious moral position on trans. Some of the rationalization going on here in defense of the pamplet is politically naive and amusing.
[…] And is someone giving you bullcrap at the polls because you’re trans* (lookin at you, TEA PARTY)? There’s a number for that, too. […]
If the tea party had their way all of us would;d be in consternation camps or tarred and feather
[…] ID laws, which has created problems for transgender voters. It’s also possible that voters may experience intimidation to keep them from voting. The most important thing is to know your statewide voting ID laws. If a […]
[…] voted because I must; I voted in part because there are people trying to stop us, and with good reason. “Us” refers to a whole swathe of people: transgender people, […]
[…] https://transgenderequality.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/tea-party-group-targets-trans-voters/#more-1976 […]
[…] to Mara Keilsing, NCTE Executive Director “It is disgraceful that True the Vote would try to thug […]
[…] who may be trying to vote under their new names. The National Center for Transgender Equality has a voting guide to deal with just such assholery. (Via Zack Ford @ Think […]
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