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Margaret Cho has spent decades turning comedy into confrontation, and she has never been particularly shy about telling politicians what she thinks of them.
Now the openly bisexual comedian is once again using her platform to defend transgender people amid intensifying political rhetoric ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections.
In a TikTok discussed by Queerty on 3 September, Cho responded to recent anti-trans political messaging from Donald Trump and his supporters, dismissing the idea that attacks on transgender people will intimidate the wider queer community. Her warning was characteristically Cho: “You don’t want this smoke.”
Margaret Cho refuses to separate the T from the rest of LGBTQ+
There is a reason Cho’s intervention matters beyond another celebrity political video.
As transgender people become a recurring target in American election messaging, a familiar temptation appears: other parts of the LGBTQ+ community can distance themselves, remain quiet and hope the political storm passes them by.
Cho is arguing for the opposite.
Her message is essentially one of collective defence: an attack on transgender people should concern lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer people too.
That is not merely emotional solidarity. LGBTQ+ history repeatedly shows how political campaigns against one section of the community can broaden quickly into attacks on education, healthcare, family recognition, public expression and anti-discrimination protections.
When trans lives become campaign material
It is worth being careful with political rhetoric here.
Claims about what individual politicians intend to do should be judged against their actual policies and statements, not just viral paraphrases. But there is little doubt that transgender rights remain an active electoral issue in the United States, and LGBTQ+ organisations continue to challenge federal and state policies affecting trans people.
What Cho adds is not a legal argument. It is cultural resistance.
She is reminding an audience that transgender people are not an abstract “issue” to be deployed during an election campaign. They are members of families, workplaces and communities — including the LGBTQ+ community itself.
And perhaps that is why her language is deliberately confrontational.
There are moments for carefully worded policy briefs.
Margaret Cho has never pretended every moment is one of them.
Queer solidarity cannot be conditional
The real test of a community is rarely how loudly it celebrates when things are easy. It is whether people remain together when solidarity becomes inconvenient.
Gay and lesbian rights have made enormous advances over recent decades. Transgender equality has increasingly become one of the principal battlegrounds in the backlash against that progress.
Cho’s intervention is a reminder that LGBTQ+ is not just an acronym used on Pride merchandise.
It describes people whose histories and rights remain connected.
And if politicians want to test how strong those connections really are, Margaret Cho appears more than happy to answer.
