Why Democrats Are Struggling on Trans Issues
Part two in a series examining at how the party got derailed on key issues.
There is perhaps no set of issues more closely tied to America’s culture wars than those related to “gender identity.” The speed with which even the concept became a part of the cultural zeitgeist is remarkable. Barely over a decade ago, these issues were nearly nonexistent in the country’s collective consciousness. Today, they’re seemingly everywhere: from left to right, and from schools to the White House.
America’s political tribes disagree vociferously over which side is responsible for opening up this new front in the culture war. Progressives maintain that transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been minding their own business and just trying to live their lives, and that as they’ve become more visible in public life and required reasonable accommodations, bigots and reactionaries have sensed an opportunity to pick on yet another vulnerable group. Conservatives believe they were minding their own business before progressive activists forced them to accept new and controversial notions about sex and gender and accommodations that go too far.
Regardless of how it started, one thing is becoming clear: the country has experienced a rightward shift on these issues, and it has been at the expense of the Democrats. Though it wasn’t the primary driver of Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, swing voters said one major reason they voted against her was that they believed she and her party paid disproportionate attention to groups like transgender people at the expense of helping the working and middle classes. One of the most effective ads that Donald Trump’s campaign ran against Harris reinforced this idea.
These sentiments have carried over into Trump’s second term. While voters have mixed views about his early policies, one of his most popular is an executive order recognizing only two sexes. Democrats have also continued feeling the heat, as they were forced to go on the record regarding their support for transgender women’s participation in women’s sports—a highly unpopular idea that nearly every one of their members defended.
Some elected Democrats, such as Congressmen Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi and California Governor Gavin Newsom, have begun to sense that their party’s current direction on the sports question, specifically—but perhaps on the gamut of related issues more broadly—is untenable. And at least some of their fellow party members are grappling with this reality. Yet even given this growing awareness, Democrats appear to be at a crossroads with public opinion, scientific opinion, activist opinion, and their own values.
Many conservatives—and even some moderates and liberals—seem mystified by the Democrats’ staunch support for pro-trans policies. A recent exchange with a TLP reader who was curious about this prompted me to think through the best, good-faith argument for the party’s heretofore positions on these issues. As someone with a very socially liberal peer group and whose own values err on the side of protecting the vulnerable, I think the reasons are pretty straightforward.
Most Democrats see transgender people as a vulnerable minority population in need of protection.
After watching the debates over gay marriage play out across the past several decades, many Democrats have become convinced that conservatives—at least a lot of them—always seem to be in need of a group to pick on. For decades, Democrats will argue, it was black people, then it was gay people, then Muslims, and so on. So, they see no reason to think that resistance toward, or even questions about, transgender and gender-nonconforming people are any different, because these actions are also clearly being taken with nefarious intent.
Relatedly, some see intraparty discussions about the need for moderation on these issues as tantamount to throwing a vulnerable group under the bus. Given the party’s historical commitment to protecting these groups, there can be very little appetite for anything even remotely resembling this.
The number of transgender athletes competing at least at the college level is very small, which reinforces the idea for many Democrats that the right is just looking for someone to bully. Why else would they care about such a small number of people?
Many Democrats prioritize the value of “inclusivity” above most others. They have moral qualms about making anyone feel excluded on the basis of an identity trait that makes them a minority, a sentiment rooted in the historical exclusion of women, black people, gays, and others from public life. This means, in their view, that whether a trans woman (someone born male) participating in women’s sports is “fair” is beside the point because it opens the door to excluding a minority group, which is wrong.
Democrats also believe that the political right has gone overboard on these issues. (Statements supporting the “eradication of transgenderism” surely contribute to this perception, even if those who uttered such statements argue they’re talking about an ideology, not a group of people.) It’s human nature to form solidarity in the face of attacks against a person or group with whom one sympathizes—many Trump supporters likely understand this in the face of years of criticism against him. So, as Democrats perceive attacks against transgender people, their reaction has understandably been to double down on their support for them.
In general, Democrats see the fight for trans rights as an extension of other past civil rights struggles, where they believe they were on the “right side of history” and conservatives were on the wrong side. Most recently, they won the fight over gay rights, and eventually, even many Republicans came around. So, the thinking goes, why would this time be any different?
Aside from positive-oriented moral calculations, there are also negative incentives keeping many Democrats in line on these issues as well. This includes pressure from activist groups who have dangled the threat of primary a challenge over members who deviate from the party line. And it may help explain why Democrats are reticent to even have internal debates about trans issues the way the have with “defund the police” or immigration.
Overall, Democrats sincerely believe their views on these issues are morally good and that their opponents are bad-faith actors. This is undoubtedly a major reason why they have stuck to their guns: a belief that history will ultimately prove them right. But their uncompromising approach on questions of gender identity has caused not just political peril but other problems too.
Unlike in much of the rest of the West, America has had a hard time creating space for sensible conversations about sex and gender, especially as it relates to public policy. Neither side of the ideological spectrum trusts each other to act in good faith, so such conversations often happen within the echo chambers of their own tribes. One result of this has been that Democrats can at times seem genuinely unaware of how society’s understanding of these issues has developed.
Recently, on the left-leaning Pod Save America podcast, host Jon Lovett argued in defense of Democrats’ views, claiming that “study after study shows that gender-affirming care saves…a lot of lives,” a common refrain from pro-trans advocacy groups. What Lovett likely didn’t know, however, was that just last year, one of the most comprehensive reviews of transgender healthcare to date found that this was not true. The study, dubbed the Cass Report (after its author, pediatrician Hilary Cass), found that the evidence underpinning the practice of so-called “gender-affirming care” was “remarkably weak.”
According to a New York Times summary of the report:
The four-year review of research, led by Dr. Hilary Cass, one of Britain’s top pediatricians, found no definitive proof that gender dysphoria in children or teenagers was resolved or alleviated by what advocates call gender-affirming care, in which a young person’s declared “gender identity” is affirmed and supported with social transition, puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. Nor, she said, is there clear evidence that transitioning kids decreases the likelihood that gender dysphoric youths will turn to suicide, as adherents of gender-affirming care claim. These findings backed up what critics of this approach have been saying for years.
“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass concluded. Instead, she wrote, mental health providers and pediatricians should provide holistic psychological care and psychosocial support for young people without defaulting to gender reassignment treatments until further research is conducted.
What’s notable is that much of Europe has been coming to this realization for some time, and many countries that Democrats consider to be quite progressive, such as Finland, Sweden, and Norway, have actually been scaling back this care. It’s also not as though Americans haven’t had access to this information: a handful of prominent U.S. news outlets have been reporting on it for some time. But based on how Lovett and others talk about these issues, it seems they are simply ignorant of this evidence—perhaps even willfully so.
In addition to questions about medical care, research on other related issues is mixed at best or even contradicts the views of activist organizations. Consider the sports question, which is front and center in today’s debates. The best evidence so far suggests that trans women retain a physical advantage over other women even “after the 1 year period of testosterone suppression that is recommended by World Athletics for inclusion in women’s events.” It’s thus not hard to understand why they have had remarkable success in women’s sporting events even after transitioning, and why many consider their participation in such events to be unfair. (More on this later.)
But despite this growing body of evidence, few Democrats have reconsidered their approach to these issues. In fact, the party has routinely moved in the other direction, passing policies that to many people are quite controversial. This includes the Biden administration’s push to remove age limits for gender-affirming surgeries and several measures at the state level to penalize parents who are deemed to be insufficiently supportive of their child’s desire to transition genders.1
In clearly staking out a claim on this side of a fraught debate, the Democrats have become associated with instances of overreach in the cultural realm as well, whether fairly or not. Take the rapid shifts in language that have produced new terms that few people ever use and many find bizarre or even offensive, such as “uterus-haver,” “pregnant person,” “birthing person,” “menstruating person,” “individual with a cervix,” or even “inseminated person” in lieu of woman or mother. Or “chest-feeding” over breastfeeding. Or “sex ‘assigned’ at birth.”
Many Democrats likely don’t use these terms themselves, if they’ve even heard of them, and probably hold fairly normie views about sex and gender. Nonetheless, their association with groups and people who do use them, combined with their reluctance to update their priors in the face of new scientific research, has left them out of step with the majority of Americans on these issues.
Whether Democrats were negatively polarized by Republicans, misunderstood or ignored what the science said, naively followed the guidance of activist groups—or some combination of the three—they have gotten way out ahead of the public. Indeed, while Americans today tend to be roughly evenly divided on most issues, usually along partisan lines, this isn’t one of them.
Extensive polling has found that sizable majorities of American believe, among other things, that transgender women should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports at any level; kids should not be taught lessons on “gender identity” until at least middle school, if not high school; and medical interventions such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones should not be accessible to minors. Among the most striking findings of late was a New York Times/Ipsos poll showing that the public opposed the participation of trans women in women’s sports by a lopsided margin of 79 percent to 18 percent, with even Democrats agreeing by a more than two-to-one margin.
What’s more: a recent survey from Pew Research found the public has shifted further away from the Democratic Party’s positions on these questions in recent years. This even includes some issues where a healthy majority continues to support the pro-trans position, including protecting transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces (56 percent) and allowing them to serve in the military (58 percent). Both of these figures have fallen from their past standing. Americans do also support increased access to counseling services for gender-distressed youth.
All this leaves Democrats in a somewhat tricky spot. On the one hand, they believe their values compel them to move only in one direction: toward supporting pro-trans policies without reservation. On the other, their uniformity of thought on these issues has left them struggling to understand where the public is, why they disagree with Democrats in key ways, and why the party that has long preached “following the science” has had a hard time doing so here.
Moreover, when a political party refuses to take a certain issue or viewpoint seriously, they virtually guarantee that any voter who is concerned about it will seek refuge among that party’s opponents. Shortly after the election, journalist Helen Lewis wrote in the Atlantic that the Democrats’ reckoning over gender identity is long overdue, admonishing them to have an “honest conversation about gender identity”:
…most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.
Democrats don’t need to abandon their principles to win votes, but they should be more willing to engage in good faith on these issues and listen with an open mind—and understand that not even all trans people oppose some reasonable degree of compromise. A failure to honestly reckon with the party’s positions on these issues may leave them stuck in the political wilderness for some time.
It should be noted that measures like these are often erected in direct response onerous measures passed in red states.
This is a good outline of TQ+-supporting Democrats' attitudes on the issue, but why shy away from the reasons the majority of voters, including lifelong Democrats like me, reject the demands to prioritize gender identity over sex in law and policy?
1. Legitimate civil rights movements do not seek to destroy the hard-won rights of other historically marginalized groups.
Redefining "woman" and "girl" to mean subjective, self-identified feelings instead of members of a material sex class puts an end to specific accommodations for female Americans: not only female-only sports and locker rooms but also domestic violence shelters, prisons, and more.
To take these accommodations away from women is to treat women as somehow an oppressor class of men, illegitimately keeping from them rights to which they are entitled.
Most of us can see that it is not a civil right for a male person to undress in front of women and girls as they undress; to be locked in a prison cell with a woman; or to sleep in the same room as an unhoused woman taking shelter for the night.
Further, redefining same-sex attraction as "same-gender attraction" is making it impossible throughout the Western world for lesbians and gay men to meet in spaces of their own without heterosexuals.
As same-sex attracted women, lesbians bear the brunt of this intersectional attack. That is why it was a lesbian radical feminist, Julia Beck, ousted from Baltimore's LGBTQ Commission Law and Policy Committee by the efforts of a male trans activist who called her support for single-sex incarceration for women "violent." It is why courts have ruled that lesbians in Victoria, Australia, may not have meet in public without admitting male "lesbians."
2. Legitimate civil rights movements seek to persuade others, not to crush all dissent by shouting down public meetings, issuing violent threats on social media, and making people fear for their livelihoods and even their safety. The more people see trans activists humming and howling to drown out parents at NYC school board meetings---or physically assaulting feminists gathering to speak about women's rights---the less TQ+ looks like a civil rights movement and the more it looks like male aggression against women.
(Trans identified females are a whole other story, but this comment is already far too long).
"Democrats see the fight for trans rights as an extension of other past civil rights struggles, where they believe they were on the “right side of history” and conservatives were on the wrong side."
The Dems conveniently forget that Eugenics was a "progressive" cause, as was the forced sterilization of "undesirable" people. But I digress.
"Most recently, they won the fight for same-sex marriage rights, and eventually, many Republicans even came around. So, the thinking goes, why would this time be any different?"
Here's why it is different: the proponents of same sex marriage rights did not demand that ALL churches must perform same sex weddings. They did not break into church services, call all the church members Nazis, and vandalize the altar. If gay marriage activists had behaved like trans activists, we would still not have same sex marriage rights in this country.