Why are Democrats pivoting to transphobia?

Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), the first openly trans woman in Congress, says it’s time for the Democratic party to take a big-tent stance on transphobia. “We have to create more space in our tent,” McBride told news site NOTUS last week, insisting that “a majoritarian coalition” is “going to have to include people who have a range of thoughts” on trans rights. 

Disappointing as it is to hear McBride speak this way, she’s not alone: Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH) told NOTUS that “Democrats could be a little judgy and annoying about [supporting trans people] and maybe we should be open-minded and appreciate that not everyone is where we are.” In widely circulated comments, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) claimed that “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” and that “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” 

A half-dozen other Democrats have quietly or not-so-quietly retrenched on trans issues in the past few months, in ways that ranged from the actively vile (Rahm Emanuel says he would have pretended to be trans to spy on girls in school bathrooms) to the merely opportunistic (Pete Buttigieg, whose politics tend to shift whenever the wind changes, has removed the pronouns from his bio on X). Most ominously, California governor Gavin Newsom—who is rumoured to be considering a presidential bid in 2028—has made a point of showcasing his anti-trans animus on his podcast, calling trans girls’ participation on sports teams “deeply unfair” in a conversation with right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. If that choice of guest seems ominous, you’re not wrong: This is the same podcast where Newsom recently “reached across the aisle” to Steve Bannon. 

This is all, supposedly, fallout from the 2024 election, which—according to many Democrats—was lost by defending trans people. Future Forward, a Harris-supporting SuperPAC (for Canadians: an organization that exists to fund political campaigns), says that a single Trump attack ad claiming that “Kamala Harris is for they/them” shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favour. Pundit Matt Yglesias, whose analysis is massively popular within the Democratic establishment, says on (where else?) his Substack that progressives “are not paying enough attention to the potential electoral ramifications of supporting trans participation on women’s sports teams,” and that “it’s important for them not to die on that hill.” Because Harris ran on trans rights, and supposedly lost on them, no Democrat can ever run on them again. 

Of course, it would be hard for most Democrats to die on the hill of their ardent support for trans people, given that they’ve never strongly supported them in the first place. Kamala Harris is a case in point: Prior to the 2024 election, Harris was unpopular with queer voters because of her track record on trans issues. In 2015, as California Attorney General, she fought to deny gender-affirming care to an incarcerated trans person. She spearheaded 2018’s FOSTA-SESTA, an anti-sex-work law that disproportionately affected trans people. In an op-ed for Out Magazine, lawyer and trans advocate Chase Strangio called her “an arm of the state fighting to lock people in cages and defending policies that destroyed lives and communities.” Even in 2024, where she was met with a warmer welcome from the community, she was notably ambivalent on trans issues, refusing to make a strong case for gender-affirming care outside of saying that decisions should be left to the doctors. 

It wasn’t until Trump’s “they/them” ad, and his debate comments about “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison,” that Harris’s campaign was associated with trans issues—and then, only for the positions Trump claimed she held, rather than the ones she actually did. Logic suggests that, if Democrats are going to be cast as gender-abolitionist trans radicals regardless of their actual stances, tacking to the right probably wouldn’t help. 

Still: let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that Democrats are embracing anti-trans politics to win elections, rather than as an expression of sincere anti-trans bias. If that’s the case, then we should be looking not just at how their policy stands to harm trans people—though I, selfishly, would like to live—but whether it works.

The answer is that it doesn’t. Newsom’s turn on trans rights (which he vocally supported until very recently) is a preview of what reaching across the aisle will look like in 2028, just as Ron DeSantis’s carpet-bombing of Florida’s LGBTQ2S+ population gave us an early look at the 2024 election. Yet, if Newsom has similar ambitions to Ron DeSantis, he may be similarly doomed. Both candidates tried to represent themselves as “reasonable” alternatives to Trump by partially embracing his culture-war positions—but if the past three electoral cycles have taught us anything, it’s that the American people are unwilling to vote for a softer, friendlier Trump substitute when they can vote for the man himself. If Trump doesn’t run in 2028, it will be more or less the first time he’s ever accepted constitutional limits on his presidency. Don’t hold your breath. 

Similarly, there’s little hope of gaining ground by making concessions on statewide bills, if only because the goal of those bills is (in many instances) not to be passed into law, but to shift the Overton window to the right and make more extreme legislation possible. You can already see this happening: As Democrats decide it’s “reasonable” to bar trans girls from sports teams, Texas Republicans have introduced a bill that would make it a felony for anyone to identify as trans at all. 

It’s staggeringly easy to predict where this will go, because the strategy Democrats are using here is the same one that led to their most resounding human-rights failure: The overturn of Roe v. Wade and the loss of federally secured abortion rights. Abortion was not a partisan issue, prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973; there were supporters and detractors in both major parties. It became a Republican litmus test thanks to cynical organizing from right-wing interest groups who were looking for a new culture-war issue to rally around after losing the battle against school desegregation. 

Yet, Democrats persistently tried to argue in good faith against a bad-faith opponent: They maintained a “pro-life” caucus until the very end (and used the manufactured and misleading term “pro-life” rather than anti-abortion, in deference to their opponents). They passed bans on public funding for abortion. They supported “moderate” restrictions such as term limits. They adopted stigmatizing framings like “safe, legal, and rare.” Not one of the “compromises” Democrats tried to make on abortion ever resulted in an actual compromise. Instead, right-wing propaganda grew more untethered from reality, anti-abortion activists became more violent, and anti-abortion legislation grew more draconian, with the result that anti-abortion bans now are significantly more extreme than they was pre-Roe: Where it used to be unthinkable not to include exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the pregnant person, it’s now commonplace. 

Would running on trans rights demolish a Democratic presidential campaign? We don’t know, because no Democratic presidential candidate has tried it. What we do know is that playing a culture war on your enemy’s terms guarantees that you will lose, just as multiple Democratic candidates—first Clinton, then Harris and (indirectly) Biden—have lost to Trump by neglecting the progressive base in favour of courting a mythical “moderate Republican” who doesn’t appear to exist anymore. 

Even as a cynical ploy to win elections, throwing trans people to the wolves just doesn’t work. It’s just a shame that trans people have to be the ones to point this out to our elected leaders. The penalties, here, are unevenly distributed: They’re going to lose their elections. We’re going to lose our lives.