Negative Ads
There are some essays that might be better left unwritten. This might be one of them, but here goes. If you live in Ohio, you’re likely to be familiar with the battle between appointed Republican Senator John Husted and former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown. In fact, you’d have to be near dead not to know about it. Republicans are spending over $100 million on ads, and Democrats are countering with about $60 million of their own.
At this point in the election season, it’s “negative ad time”. Brown is running ads talking about the First Energy scandal, where a power company put $60 million in the hands of the Ohio Republican Party in return for billions of dollars of state aid. Husted was right in the middle of that, First Energy’s “Golden Boy”, as they called him. Brown is going to remind Ohioans of Husted’s role in the scandal over and over again.
And Husted is falling back on the “transgender” issue. Two years ago, when Brown was defending his seat against now-Senator Bernie Moreno, Brown’s supposed stand on the specter of “men in women’s sports” is credited for taking him down. The fact that Trump was on the ballot in that Presidential year is discounted. Brown lost to Moreno by 3.6%, in a state where Trump beat Harris by 11.21%. But Republicans aren’t giving up on “talking dirty”.
Soren’s Story
So there’s this advertisement running now, showing a young woman, Soren, who has a tragic tale. She was troubled from the time she was eleven, and at seventeen was diagnosed with gender dysphoria. In short, she thought she wanted to be a boy. So she began to take female hormone blockers and male hormones, all under medical supervision. Two years later, as an adult, she had surgery, a double mastectomy. After the operation there were long-term complications, and during that recovery he determined to “de-transition” back to a girl.
Now all of this happened in Texas. Soren has no connection to Sherrod Brown, or Ohio. Soren had drug therapy at seventeen, but no surgeries were performed until she was nineteen, her second year of legal adulthood. So Soren, a legal adult in Texas, determined to have a mastectomy. Now Soren, a twenty-three year old, still in Texas, regrets that decision.
The Law
Here in Ohio (and in Texas), it’s illegal to perform gender-affirming surgery on minors. But that didn’t happen to Soren anyway. So why are we seeing pictures of her, as a cute, smiling eight-year old in the ad? Or a young looking person with “Harry Potter glasses” and a bandaged chest in bed? Even more, why are we seeing this ad in Ohio? (Oddly, Republicans aren’t using the ad in Texas where Democrat James Talerico is running a strong race against Ken Paxton for US Senate.)
In a 2023 interview, Sherrod Brown said he felt it was best for the parents, the child and the medical team to make determinations about gender-dysphoria treatments, rather than government. It seemed like a reasonable decision. That’s all it took for Republicans to “hook” Soren’s sad story to the Ohio candidate.
Soren’s tells her story, ending in the line, “I was just a kid.” But, of course, she wasn’t a kid, she was an adult, in Texas. Republicans infer that somehow Sherrod Brown is in favor of gender-affirming surgery on children, something that doesn’t happen here in Ohio, and Sherrod hasn’t supported.
Playing Us Stupid
Republicans (paid by the Republican Senate Leadership Fund) want to distract from sky-rocketing gas prices, and Husted’s very real involvement in the First Energy scandal. They want Ohioans to go out and vote to save children from “forced” mastectomies, hysterectomies, and castrations. But there are no forced surgeries, and those elective surgeries aren’t legal here in Ohio today. And, by the way, they’re not legal in Texas either.
A young adult made a decision, one that she regrets now four years later. I’m sorry for her. Looking with the benefit of hindsight, she can claim that she was given bad advice from her doctors and her parents. But she was wholly responsible as a legal adult in Texas (and would have been in Ohio).
To be blunt: she’s not Ohio’s problem, and former (and hopefully future) Senator Sherrod Brown has nothing to do with her, her decisions, or the laws that controlled them. She did this to herself. And she did it in Texas.
Most Ohioans know when they’re being “played”. And the Republican Senate Leadership Fund is playing us for stupid.
That’s just one more reason to vote for Sherrod, and against the “Golden Boy”.
