Why Anti-Trans Campaigns Keep Returning to the Politics of Meat

The Trump Administration’s dangerous crusade against transgender and genderdiverse people has been facilitated by major political spending — with a boost from the meat industry.

In the last campaign cycle, the GOP spent a record-high of nearly $215 million on anti-LGBTQ political ads in both the presidential and down ballot elections. This included ads that relied on meat industry funding to compare transgender people to cattle and denigrate treatments that fall within gender-affirming care. These ads reflect a rhetorical trend in rightwing political campaigns: the use of language invoking meat to dehumanize transgender people — and then justify extreme anti-trans laws.

Take, for instance, cattle rancher Shawn Tiffany’s very explicit anti-trans ad in his bid for the U.S. House to represent Kansas’ 2nd Congressional District in 2024. Billing himself as an “America first cowboy,” he wears a cowboy hat and shirt advertising his ranch, while standing outside a gleaming, white barn on a sunny day. He then goes on to make a convoluted metaphor, comparing the castration of cattle to gender-affirming care for minors — healthcare that is explicitly recommended by the American Medical Association.

“In Kansas, we know the difference between a cow and a bull,” Tiffany says to the camera. “And Rocky Mountain Oysters are a real delicacy but castration is for cattle, not our kids.” (Rocky Mountain Oysters are a regional dish made out of the testicles of bulls, sheep and other mammals.) He then promises to voters that he will “ban boys from girls sports and bathrooms and stop the radical left from mutilating children. Cowboy Shawn Tiffany, conservative to the core.”

This grotesque language is trafficking in a common form of disinformation. The reference to “castration” is presumably referring to transgender surgery for minors, particularly bottom surgery — a procedure that is generally not performed on minors at all. The vast majority of trangender youth who receive gender-affirming care get it in the form of puberty blockers, which slow or delay the onset of puberty.

Yet the image of “castrating” youth lingers in the political imagination, driving misinformation about what gender-affirming care for young people typically entails.

Beef Industry Helped Fund Anti-Transgender, Pro-Meat Ads

Tiffany’s ad was paid for by his political campaign for Congress, whose top donors were all meat industry trade groups, indirectly funding anti-trans rhetoric. This included a $5,000 donation from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association PAC, the political committee for the primary trade association for the beef industry and another $5,000 from the Livestock Marketing Association PAC, the political committee of the largest membership organization in North America representing the livestock industry.

His campaign also received an individual donation of $3,435.35 from Amy Langvardt, who serves on the board that oversees the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Beef Checkoff program, designed to promote the demand for meat. He was also backed by local meat producers, including $6,600 from Scott Foote, the owner of Foote Cattle Company, which operates five cattle feedlots across Kansas, and $5,000 from Terry Nelson, who made headlines for building massive, unauthorized hog farms.

Tiffany didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Livestock Marketing Association, National Cattleman’s Beef Association, Amy Langvardt of the Beef Checkoff program and the other campaign funders noted in this story also didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether they support the message of the anti-LGBTQ ad.

While Tiffany lost in the Republican primary, this rhetoric and disinformation reflects transphobic sentiment and legislation in Kansas and beyond. In February, Kansas became the 27th state to ban gender-affirming care for minors, prompting a lawsuit from Kansas teens and their families over their “unimaginable suffering” from being denied access to puberty blockers.

Kurtis Gregory, a State Senator in Missouri, drew on very similar rhetoric. In an ad for his 2024 campaign, Gregory wears a mesh trucker hat as he bounds through stalky, bright green fields in a wide-set truck, while a deep-voiced narrator spews transphobia: “Kurtis Gregory knows the difference between a bull and a steer, and he knows the woke mob threatens our children. That’s why Kurtis Gregory led the fight to keep men out of girl sports,” referring to a bill he sponsored limiting transgender students from participating in sports.

Gregory, who won his election, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Like Tiffany, Gregory’s campaign for State Senate received substantial support from livestock and other agricultural groups, including an endorsement from the political action committee of the Missouri Farm Bureau, the primary trade and lobbying group for Missouri farmers and ranchers. This support isn’t exactly surprising, given that the Missouri Farm Bureau has quietly opposed LGBTQ rights for years, including gay marriage.

According to its 2023 handbook, the Missouri Farm Bureau also supports strongly enforcing anti-obscenity laws, which often target LGBTQ books in schools under vague, highly subjective bans on distributing “obscene” material to children.

The Latest Iteration of the ‘Sexual Politics of Meat’

Tiffany operates a cattle feedlot with the slogan of “faith, family and feed,” — a slogan that attempts to make the business of raising cattle synonymous with a vision of Christian conservatism and the nuclear family, which his ad takes a step further by framing trans people as a threat to this world.

It’s the latest iteration of what feminist scholar Carol J. Adams refers to as “the sexual politics of meat,” a framework for understanding meat as a symbol that enforces rigid, binary conceptions of masculinity and femininity, upholding the social order.

“The ‘sexual politics of meat’ reinforces the gender binary,” Adams tells Sentient. “Meat-eating functions as a marker that legitimates the gender binary system,” because ‘real men’ eat meat while men that eat tofu are “seen as emasculated or feminized, sissies, etc.” It’s a social order that transgender people, by nature of their existence, threaten to upend by revealing gender as fluid and mutable.

This strict allegiance to the gender binary, encoded even in our eating habits, is at play in these extreme ads attacking trans people, according to Adams who reviewed the ads for Sentient. The ads draw upon the symbolic language of meat — a marker of stability, masculine dominance and gender conformity, according to Adams — to cast trans people as outsider threats to children, rural communities and the world as they know it.

“These extreme reactions show us the threat to their rigid understanding of their place and everyone else’s in culture,” says Adams, referring to the language used in anti-trans political ads. This vilification of trans people betrays the fragility of the gender binary. “If we pull at the thread, the fabric of an oppressive culture unravels. So that’s part of the appeal of Trump — the authoritarianism that gives them the assurance of their place.”

Both Tiffany and Gregory’s political ads do not rely on any medical information or research to support their views. Instead, they are relying purely on symbolic associations with meat, cattle and gender to frame transgender people as a threat to children and “traditional” American families. Like any good advertisement, they are both creating a problem and then selling a solution: a cattle-farmer-turned politician who can produce meat, a symbolic offering of a return to a more stable world where “faith, family and feed” reign supreme.

“Meat in the meal is a reassurance of the stability of a patriarchal world, and a patriarchal world is anti-trans, so it’s going to be part and parcel of the need to have meat at a meal,” says Adams. “Because meat is the symbol. It’s a mirror. It’s a reflection.” Her book, “The Pornography of Meat” draws extensively on ads to show how meat-eating is depicted as the epitome of masculine in American culture, a flex of virility.

The meat industry may also have a financial stake in funding ads that uphold this gender binary. After all, men are the meat industry’s primary consumer base, consuming more meat than women across nearly all countries, according to a 2024 study. But gay and bisexual men are a noted exception, consuming less red and processed meat than their heterosexual male counterparts — an eating habit that may reflect a different relationship to masculinity too.

Beef’s Unique Role in American Culture

It’s also no coincidence that the ads reference cattle, which is not only associated with masculinity but also the violent settling of the West and construction of white American identity, as media scholar Christopher Sebastian Mc Jetters has observed:

“American conservatives do have a weird relationship with fruits and vegetables, and that’s because animal products, especially beef, hold a unique place in the construction of white American identity,” he said in a social media post. “The expansion of the cattle beef complex is one of the primary drivers of manifest destiny, or the belief that the westward expansion of European settlers and genocide of Native Americans was ordained by God himself.”

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The symbol of cattle then eases the rightwing fear of white American identity, rooted in supremacy, under threat. “When you see conservative people, especially men, getting horny for meat, meat, meat, that’s a dog whistle for white supremacy,” Sebastian Mc Jetters added.

While both Tiffany and Gregory use meat metaphors to dehumanize transgender people, they also rely on the symbolism of meat to legitimate their own white American masculinity — to tell a story about their own identity in contrast to the transgender people they vilify. “They aren’t just using these examples to reinforce their homophobia and transphobia, but the examples offer a very proud reminder of their power over animals,” says Adams.

While casting transgender people as outsiders, these political ads also frame Tiffany and Gregory as insiders through their mastery of animal agriculture.

As Gabriel Rosenberg, an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University tells Sentient, “Demonstrating power over animals is a way of demonstrating authenticity. It’s a way of demonstrating something like community membership or citizenship within the specific context of cowboy culture or rancher culture.”

Rosenberg also notes that there is a strain of Christian belief that views animals as on earth for humans. Under some interpretations of Christian dominionist theology, which increasingly underpins the political aspirations of rightwing Americans, he explains that, “God gives humans dominion over the earth, and particularly over non-human life, and as a result of that, we are superordinate to animals, and that they are there for our use.”

This may lead to the idea that it is not only justifiable to kill animals, but also to control their sexual reproduction through castration and other means. “So they might argue something like ‘it’s actually consistent to say that we can modify the sex of animals in ways that we should not do to humans, simply because of that hierarchical difference,’” says Rosenberg.

The ads also acknowledge and justify an aspect of animal agriculture that is rarely discussed in the public: the process of reproduction on farms is far from natural, and is reliant on many of the same technologies used by humans.

“Animal agriculture is about the organization and management of animal sex. That’s what it is — that’s the fundamental task of animal agriculture,” says Rosenberg. “Technologies like IVF, artificial insemination, cloning, all sorts of hormonal treatments — these are all things that have deep histories within livestock agriculture.” Of course, the end goal of these technologies is fundamentally different when used on animals to maximize reproduction.

In fact, the routine use of artificial insemination on animal farms — which requires forcibly ejaculating and inserting sperm into animals — so closely resembles bestiality that it is included as an exemption under most state anti-bestiality laws. “Cognitive dissonance has haunted these statutes from their inception,” Rosenberg and co-author Jan Dutkiewicz wrote in The New Republic. “Bestiality, a highly stigmatized act, lends itself well to loud denunciations but not so much to moral consistency.”

This same cognitive dissonance is on display in the political ads. In attempting to denounce trans healthcare as castration, the politicians also strain to make the moral argument that castration, in the case of farm animals, is good. Similarly, these same politicians concerned about “obscenity” in LGBTQ books are putting out ads that make graphic reference to animal castration, mutilation and eating testicles — images that are far more explicit than anything in banned books like Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir.”

The Fragility of the Gender Binary

The escalating assault on trans rights has coincided with a renewed frenzy over meat, particularly from the rightwing and online influencers. Joe Rogan, one of the most influential figures shaping rightwing and masculine culture, has been one of the largest proponents of the carnivore diet. “I’m obsessed with cooking meat over fire. I get prepared for it. I make sure I’m hungry before I cook it,” he wrote in a post.

Rogan has flinched at the very thought of associating with soy. “I don’t do anything with soy,” he said during a 2020 podcast episode. “People call you a soy boy. If you’re a Republican, people call weak men soy boys,” he said. The consumption of soy is perceived as a transgression of gender norms in rightwing circles, which even Rogan acknowledges. “Soy is one of the rare foods that’s actually attached to being a bitch,” he said.

This reveals a deep insecurity — a fear of failing in the performance of masculinity by simply consuming the wrong food.

Christopher Sebastian Mc Jetters links the rise of the carnivore diet to the broader rise of fascism, which is also rooted in deep fragility, as he observed in the same social media post: “During times of economic, social and political instability, more and more people would find security in the warm cloak of traditionalism.” Jetters contrasts this with “plant-based eating,” which is “perceived as non-conformist behavior that’s synonymous with progressivism in the left.”

Political attack ads on transgender rights — specifically the use of grotesque comparisons to animal castration — isn’t about protecting the health of children or trans people. It’s about upholding a social order and gender binary that are fundamentally unstable, observes Adams. Rather than viewing these ads as displays of virility; she sees them as displays of fragility.

“The gender binary is so fragile that it has to be constantly reinforced — it’s sort of like trying to protect the sandcastle,” says Adams. “There would be no need to assert these sorts of things if it were a given in society.” But the gender binary isn’t natural. Instead, it requires pouring money into network television ads to uphold.

Correction: an earlier version of this post misattributed authorship of an article to the illustrator.