Meet the unwilling faces of GOP anti-trans ads: ‘I haven’t been able to sleep’

Former President Trump and Republican congressional candidates have blanketed the nation with campaign ads critical of transgender rights, painting their Democratic opponents as radical for supporting trans-inclusive policies. 

“Crazy liberal Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” says one pro-Trump television ad that aired this month in battleground states.

“No men in girls' sports,” reads another, paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC with ties to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

Splashed across those and other ads are the faces of transgender women, girls and drag performers, often without their prior knowledge or consent. 

Gabrielle Ludwig, a 63-year-old biomedical equipment technician, is one of those women. 

Photographs and footage of Ludwig taken in the early 2010s, when she was a student at Mission College in Santa Clara, Calif., appear in at least nine Senate Leadership Fund ads targeting Democratic Sens. Bob Casey (Pa.), Jon Tester (Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio).

The ads, which show Ludwig playing on the community college’s women’s basketball team, criticize the three Democrats for opposing an amendment to a 2021 COVID-19 relief bill that would have stripped federal funds from states, school districts and universities that allow transgender women and girls to compete on female sports teams. 

Another photo of Ludwig, who played for two seasons at Mission College between 2012 and 2014, appears in a campaign ad for Trump. The camera zooms in on Ludwig, then in her mid-50s, in uniform on the basketball court, before widening to show her college-aged teammates. 

The ads call Ludwig and other transgender women “biological men,” a term that conflates sex with gender and is used by individuals critical of trans rights to suggest that trans people are not who they say they are. The ads weigh heavily on Ludwig, who has not played basketball competitively in a decade. 

“I haven’t been able to sleep,” she said in an interview. “I don’t want my family affected. I have granddaughters, daughters who are in college. I only did this because I love to play basketball. That’s all it ever was.” 

Unwanted political attention

Ludwig did not know her image appeared in the Senate Leadership Fund ads before The Hill contacted her. Her daughter told her about the Trump ad, she said. 

Ludwig made national headlines in 2012 when she stepped onto a basketball court for the first time as an out trans woman more than twice the age of most of her teammates. Media coverage of Ludwig’s return to the court — she played on the men’s team at Nassau County Community College in New York for one season in 1980 — was largely positive, but the attention came at a price. 

At basketball games, spectators verbally harassed her. She was briefly assigned police protection after receiving an anonymous threat. Two ESPN radio hosts called her an “it.” 

Ludwig left the team when she graduated in 2014. Years later, she lives a quiet life in Nevada with her family. She discovered an interest in amateur rocketry and joined a group of fellow aeronautics enthusiasts to fly rockets in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert earlier this year. 

The ads, she said, have thrust her back into an unwanted spotlight. Comments left on her Facebook page disparage and threaten her, and a fear that she is being watched sets in when she leaves the house. Her employer is avoiding sending her to Ohio, where she travels at least twice a year for work, because of the ads. 

“I fear for my life, for my family,” Ludwig said. “There are trans people killed for no other reason than because they're trans. By Trump coming out and using my image, I feel that he’s feeding the fire.” 

Ludwig and her wife, Theresa, are considering taking legal action against the Trump campaign and the Senate Leadership Fundfor unauthorized use of her image, though the couple has some reservations about doing so. 

“If I go that route, and it ends up in litigation, my life is going to be splayed,” Ludwig said. “I wish I never lost my anonymity. I wish I never, ever joined a women's basketball team.” 

No permission

A second Trump ad criticizing the military under President Biden shows footage of Joshua Kelley, a Navy sailor and drag performer who drew GOP outrage last year when they were selected for a pilot program to increase military recruitment through social media outreach.

Kelley has been performing under the stage name Harpy Daniels since 2013 and has performed in drag for their shipmates since at least 2017, while Trump was in office. 

“To those who want to use me for their campaigns. Remember to keep that same energy when we keep winning, and I'm still serving,” Kelley said in an Oct. 12 post on the social platform X, apparently responding to the Trump campaign’s ad. “I am proud to serve my country no matter if the hate is coming from inside the house. Here to SERVE and protect all!” 

The drag performer and environmental activist Pattie Gonia, whose real name is Wyn Wiley and who appears in another Trump ad highlighting Vice President Harris’s support for transgender Americans, said the Trump campaign did not have permission to use her name or likeness. She and her team are “reviewing our legal options,” she said in an Instagram post this month. 

The Trump ad also features images of Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services and the first openly transgender federal official to win Senate confirmation, and Sam Brinton, a former Biden administration official who is nonbinary. 

Trump and Republicans have bet big on anti-transgender messaging in the final weeks before the election. The Trump campaign alone spent $19 million on two of the ads, according to a CBS News report, and the Senate Leadership Fund funneled at least $15 million into ads hitting Brown on trans athletes in Ohio, NPR reported. 

Three Democrats — Brown and Texas Reps. Colin Allred and Vicente Gonzalez — have run ads claiming Republicans are lying about their positions, according to Punchbowl News. Altogether, Democrats have only spent about $1.6 million on ads related to trans issues. 

“It's just so disappointing and discouraging because these politicians are using my image, other people's images, in just such disingenuous and misleading ways,” said Lil Miss Hot Mess, an Arizona drag performer whose photo appeared earlier this year in a campaign ad for Chris Miller, a former West Virginia gubernatorial candidate. The Hill is not using the performer’s legal name at her request for safety concerns.

Miller, a Republican, suffered a primary defeat in May to the state’s Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who has also leaned heavily into anti-transgender rhetoric on the campaign trail. 

The Miller ad features a still image of Lil Miss Hot Mess reading to children during a Drag Story Hour event, part of a national program in which drag performers read to kids to encourage reading and celebrate diversity, according to the organization’s website. The photograph was taken at a public library in New York. She has never been to West Virginia, she said. 

The ad also flashes a photograph of the Welsh drag performer Aida H. Dee, who founded Drag Story Hour’s British counterpart in 2017. It is unclear whether she has performed in West Virginia or the U.S. Aida H. Dee did not respond to requests for an interview. 

Lil Miss Hot Mess — who, when not performing in drag, is a media studies professor at a public university in Arizona — said she was unaware her image appeared in the Miller ad before The Hill contacted her, but she was not surprised that it did. “This isn’t my first rodeo,” she said. 

In 2022, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) used Lil Miss Hot Mess’s image in a campaign ad critical of LGBTQ-inclusive policies in schools. “The radical left will destroy children if we don’t stop them,” Rubio says in the ad. “They indoctrinate children, try to turn boys into girls.” 

Rubio invoked Lil Miss Hot Mess again that year in a letter addressed to Frank Kendall, the secretary of the Air Force, that called on the military to “immediately cancel” a planned Drag Queen Story Time event at a library on a U.S. Air Force base in Germany. The 30-minute event, at which Lil Miss Hot Mess was not slated to appear, was canceled shortly thereafter. 

Strong protections

Lil Miss Hot Mess said she explored her legal options after the Rubio ad aired, but was advised by a lawyer that she could do little to get the ad taken down because she performs publicly, even if the ad falsely suggested she was acting inappropriately or in ways that are harmful to children. 

“There is pretty strong protection for making political commentary,” said Andrew Gilden, an associate professor at Willamette University College of Law. “So, as long as there is a reasonable relationship between that message and the use of this image, it's much harder to defeat that claim.” 

Historically, the strongest and most successful arguments against the unauthorized use of images for political purposes are copyright claims, said Cathay Smith, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and co-director of the school's intellectual property law program. But that requires ownership of the copyright, she said, meaning the photographer must be the one to file the claim, or transfer the copyright to someone else. 

“It’s just disheartening that people like politicians who are running for office are able to do this to their constituents and there is no safeguard for normal people who are just honestly living their everyday life,” said Megan Cortez-Fields, a former collegiate swimmer whose photo appears in a campaign ad for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).  

The ad hits Cruz’s opponent, Allred, for his past support of policies that allow transgender student-athletes to compete on sports teams that match their gender identity. Cortez-Fields said she was not aware her photo was used in the ad until The Hill contacted her. 

Cortez-Fields, who graduated last year from Ramapo College of New Jersey and is now pursuing a Ph.D in analytical chemistry at a university in Indiana, swam for three years on the school’s men’s team before switching to the women’s team her senior year. She completed a full year of hormone replacement therapy before changing teams, she said, in line with NCAA rules. 

While Cortez-Fields was raised in Texas and retains her residency — Cruz is her senator — she has never swum competitively in the state as an openly transgender athlete. 

The ad has made her wary of returning home to Texas to visit family, she said, even though her hometown is mostly accepting, and she has a large support system. 

“The amount of people that saw this ad before I knew about it is crazy, and it means that I might not know of people who actually feel strongly about this,” she said. “I might be in public, and they might be like, ‘Oh, I remember that person. Let me, you know, spew hate towards them.’ It’s a weird feeling, because I don’t know who does know and who doesn’t.” 

Cortez-Fields said she sought legal counsel after learning her image appeared in Cruz’s ad but was told that the chance of successfully arguing a right of publicity claim is slim. She also does not own the copyright to the photo, meaning she cannot file a copyright claim. 

“It definitely takes away my agency,” Cortez-Fields said. “There is literally nothing I can do to make him stop or to have him face any sort of consequences. It makes me feel helpless.” 

The Cruz campaign’s ad also features images of former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas and Cecé Telfer, a Jamaican-born sprinter and the first out trans woman to win an NCAA title. Representatives for Thomas and Telfer did not respond to requests to be interviewed. 

Cruz’s campaign ads, part of a multimillion-dollar media blitz hitting Allred over trans athletes and gender-affirming care, also include a photo of two teenage girls who compete in track and field events at neighboring high schools in Oregon. Neither of the girls pictured is transgender, though Cruz’s ads suggest at least one of them is. 

A representative for one of the girls’ school districts said the district and the girl’s family were unaware of the ads until The Hill contacted them. The girl’s parents did not give Cruz’s campaign permission to use the photo, the representative said. 

In an email to the Cruz campaign shared with The Hill, the school district called for the ads to be pulled “from any and all distribution platforms.” 

“It is alarming that your campaign would have produced/distributed/promoted this ad with false information, especially with minor children involved,” the school district representative wrote in the email. 

A Cruz campaign spokesperson did not directly answer questions about the district’s request to take the ads down or whether the ads are misleading. 

Even where minors are involved, there is little legal recourse for unauthorized use of an image in political campaign ads, said Gilden, of Willamette University College of Law. In the case of the Cruz ad, “As long as there's some real relationship between the photo used and the message, it doesn't have to be strictly true,” he said. 

Political speech, which includes campaign ads, receives the greatest protection under the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), tasked with protecting consumers from false advertising, can do little to intervene in political advertising that misleads audiences or includes false information.