the longest-serving woman in congress made an ad about trans kids. republicans are the ones calling it a lie.

via Metro Weekly and The Buckeye Flame, with roll call records from the Office of the Clerk of the House.

There is an ad running in northwest Ohio right now in which a Democrat looks into a camera and says she voted with Republicans "to keep transgender ideology out of our schools." The Democrat is Marcy Kaptur. She has held Ohio's 9th district since 1983, which makes her the longest-serving woman in the history of Congress, and she is asking for a 23rd term.

The first ad went up on September 17, posted to X by Medium Buying, a Columbus firm that tracks political spots. A second one followed, in which she lists what she has refused her own party: "No to defunding the police. No to open border policies. And no to teaching gender ideology in schools." The first ad also says that "boys should not play in girls' sports."

One of those claims is a vote she cast. The other is a vote she declined to cast, and you do not have to take our word for it, because the roll call is a public document.

the vote she did cast

On May 20 the House passed H.R. 2616 by 217 to 198. The bill requires elementary and middle schools that take federal money to get a parent's permission before using a name or a pronoun that does not match the sex in a child's records, which in practice means school staff have to out the kid at home. Eight Democrats voted for it. The Clerk's roll call has all eight names, and Kaptur's is there with Henry Cuellar, Vicente Gonzalez, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Eugene Vindman, Cleo Fields, Laura Gillen and Don Davis.

So that half of the ad is straight. She did it, it is on the record, and she is now running on it.

the vote she didn't

The sports line is the problem. The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act reached the House floor on April 20, 2023. It is the bill that would make it a Title IX violation for a federally funded school to let a trans girl on a girls' team, and it is the single clearest test of the sentence Kaptur just put in a television ad. It passed 219 to 203. She voted no.

She has made a commercial about a position she turned down the one time it was actually in front of her.

when the nrcc is your fact-checker

The best part, if you are in a mood to find one, is who noticed first. On the same day the ad appeared, the National Republican Congressional Committee published a post titled "Nobody is Buying Marcy Kaptur's Desperate Lie," and the evidence it offers is exactly that: her vote against the sports bill, plus her support for the Equality Act. Townhall ran its own version. The people calling the ad dishonest are the Republicans she is doing an impression of, and they are right, which is a genuinely unusual sentence for us to type.

why northwest ohio

None of this is a mystery. Kaptur faces Derek Merrin again in November, the same Republican she beat by less than a percentage point in 2024, in a seat Trump carried by seven that year and would have carried by eleven under the lines Ohio's redistricting commission approved last fall. She is a Democrat in a Republican district doing what frightened incumbents do, and she has decided which part of her coalition is cheapest to spend.

Ohio's queer organizations were not persuaded. "Targeting trans people isn't the winning strategy some people think it is," Equality Ohio CEO Dwayne Steward told Metro Weekly. Dara Adkison, executive director of TransOhio, was blunter with The Buckeye Flame: "Transgender people are not an ideology, we are not an issue, we are human beings."

And she has company, which is the part that should bother you more than the ad does. James Talarico spent last week explaining his own version of this in Texas. Seven other Democrats' names sit on that same May roll call. And while Kaptur's ad was going up, the only trans person in Congress was asking her colleagues to put her in charge of what the party says next.