The Democrats’ catastrophic performance on November 5 showed their vulnerability on a number of key issues, but none perhaps as obvious as on transgender policy. So powerful is transgender activism’s chokehold on the Democratic Party that, when Kamala Harris was asked whether she would uphold her promise from 2019 to use taxpayer dollars to fund sex “change” procedures for incarcerated illegal immigrants, she did not disavow it. To repeat: Sex change surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison, paid for by taxpayers. Harris couldn’t have touched more third rails had she tried.
From hiding children’s gender transitions in schools from their parents to letting boys compete in girls’ sports; from replacing words like “woman” and “breastfeeding” with “uterus haver” and “chest-feeding” to supporting sex “change” surgeries for children; from appointing a Supreme Court justice who wouldn’t define “woman” because she is “not a biologist” to diverting millions of federal dollars to researchers who suppress scientific evidence that puberty blockers don’t work; it is hard to think of a single transgender policy that the Biden administration did not support, directly or indirectly, that Harris walked back from on the campaign trail. Bill Clinton, seeing the writing on the wall, urged Harris’s team to respond to the Trump campaign’s devastating attack ad—“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” They ignored him.
That proved costly. As the New York Times reported, polling by Harris’s leading super PAC found that Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” ad swung “the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” This alone could have won Trump the popular vote, and possibly some swing states.
Enter self-interest, that most reliable of human motives. In the wake of Democratic defeats, party representatives and liberal pundits could no longer pretend that bending the knee to their coalition’s radicals came without cost. Representatives Seth Moulton and Tim Suozzi, Democrats from Massachusetts and New York, respectively, told the New York Times as much. Souzzi said he didn’t “think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” Moulton added, “As a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Both faced swift and sweeping condemnation from local LGBT advocacy groups and Young Democrats of America. Their Democratic colleagues in Congress, however, remained largely mum.
The liberal press has joined the post-election reckoning. New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul, generally sensible on transgender policy, wrote that Harris lost “not because most Americans are bigots or haters or anti-L.G.B.T.Q. people,” but because “many voters, including liberals and Democrats, disagree with positions Harris and the Democratic Party have taken on transgender issues.” In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis penned an article titled, “The Democrats Need an Honest Conversation on Gender Identity,” arguing that Democrats must distance themselves from trans extremism in order to “defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.”
As I’ve noted previously, liberals who see a problem with the Democrats’ position on transgenderism tend to resort to the golden mean fallacy: If one party says X and the other says Y, the truth must be somewhere in the middle. But the truth, in every case, is found where the evidence and reasoning lead, not at the average of two extremes. If Donald Trump says that child sex “change” procedures lack evidence, that it is unfair for boys to compete in girls’ sports, or suggests that sex is determined at conception, these sentiments don’t become less true simply because they are said by the Democrats’ bogeyman. Ad hominem reasoning may appeal to hyper-partisans, but November 5 demonstrated that most Americans care more about the message than the messenger.
Sam Harris, a popular author and self-described liberal who detests Trump, offered an even more biting assessment of Democrats’ failure on the transgender front. In a 40-minute episode titled “The Reckoning,” recorded on November 11 for his podcast Waking Up, Harris equated gender ideology to a “new religion” and its followers to a “cult”:
A shocking percentage of [Democrats] imagine that all the controversy about trans rights and gender identity in kids is just right-wing bigotry, and a non-issue politically, whereas it is obvious that for millions of Americans it might as well have been the only issue in this election—not because they are transphobic . . . but because they simply do not accept the new metaphysics, and even the new biology, mandated by trans activists and the institutions that they have successfully bullied and captured. . . . Congratulations, Democrats: you have found the most annoying thing in the [expletive] galaxy and hung it around your necks.
Americans, Sam Harris observed, are fed up with identity politics and are not buying gender ideology’s dogmas; they refuse to nod along in approval as a man pummels a woman in an Olympic boxing ring. “If that sounds like transphobia to you,” Harris told his listeners, then “you are the problem.”
One well-recognized problem of American “rights talk” is that it conceals the concrete realities of policy choices: their costs, trade-offs, and unintended consequences. Rights claims are by their nature absolutist and uncompromising. Helen Lewis and Pamela Paul agree that not everything proposed in the name of “transgender rights” should be taken as such. But the reality is that embracing rights claims, in lieu of sober policy analysis, has become a deeply embedded feature of contemporary liberalism. That shift has been institutionalized across American society, from universities to corporate board rooms, from public schools to the military, from the interlocking layers of state and federal bureaucracies to the information superhighways of Google and AI. It is precisely why Democrats will struggle to walk back their support for radical transgender policies. Democrats spent years lecturing the public that boys’ participation in girls’ sports and mastectomies for teen girls who identify as boys are non-negotiable “civil rights.” If they change course now, they will either have to admit they were wrong before or become rights-violators by their own definition.
The Democratic Party’s bind is partly due to structural changes within the American political system that have occurred over the past 60 years. Party and campaign-finance reforms of the 1960s and 1970s weakened parties as institutions, leaving elected representatives ever more dependent on the open primary process, which tends to favor more ideologically extreme voters. Additionally, the erosion of the parties’ strength left a vacuum that the media stepped in to fill, replacing the parties as the entity responsible for organizing and disseminating election-relevant information about candidates. Parties remain accountable to the people through elections, but to whom, exactly, does MSNBC answer to?
Another challenge Democrats face is the rise of interest-group liberalism—specifically, the “public interest” nonprofits that now make up the backbone of the Democratic coalition. These groups have no incentive to moderate their stances on controversial issues; they report to foundation and deep-pocket donors, and they increasingly recruit staff based on ideological commitments. There is a reason, after all, why Chase Strangio—who uses “they/them” pronouns, has called for the banning of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, and told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, “I am a civil rights and constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution and the legal system”—is one of the most influential ACLU attorneys.
Pamela Paul made an important observation in her Times piece. The “contact hypothesis,” which predicts that the public becomes more sympathetic to a group and its expressed needs as contact with members of that group become more routine, has not held in the case of people who identify as transgender. Quite the opposite, in fact: as the American public became more familiar with such people, it became less accepting of the transgender movement’s belief system and policy preferences.
The first salvos in what is sure to become a bitter internal feud within the Democratic coalition have thus been launched. The common thread running across Helen Lewis, Pamela Paul, and other concerned liberals’ commentary seems to be this: even if Democratic politicians and voters believe that “gender-affirming care” is scientific and ethical (it isn’t), or that “trans women are women” (they’re not), it is now in their interest to set those beliefs aside and try to understand why so many Americans disagree with them.
That’s not enough, but it’s a first step. And who knows? Maybe the pursuit of political power will lead some Democrats to realize that on transgender issues, they were wrong on substance, too.
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