Status: 🔴 Conservative think tank whose director publicly described attacking trans kids as “a winning issue for Republicans”
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a conservative public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., founded in 1938. In March 2021, AEI director Dan Cox told Axios that the record wave of anti-trans state legislation was a political winner for Republicans, providing intellectual cover for the first sports bans signed into law in the U.S.
In an interview with Axios cited by Them.us, AEI’s Dan Cox said attacking trans kids “seems to be a winning issue for Republicans, at least in the places where they’re fighting it most aggressively.”
“On the Democratic side, this is not an issue that really excites the base. But on the right, I think these issues are really, really salient, so it tends to fire up folks disproportionately on the right than the left.”
The remarks came as at least 73 anti-trans bills were introduced in state legislatures in the first three months of 2021 — 65 targeting trans youth, 41 targeting trans student athletes — a wave that produced the first sports bans ever signed into law in South Dakota and Mississippi.