Vox: Democrats Still Don’t Have a Clear Answer on Trans Issues

Vox has an article up today making the case that having lost some recent public battles over trans issues, Democrats still haven’t managed to come up with a better approach. This, the author argues, is only making it easier for opponents to continue their winning streak.

For much of the past eight years, the political fight over transgender rights in America has centered on two questions: whether trans women and girls should play on sports teams matching their gender identity, and whether minors should have access to gender-related medical treatment.

Those debates aren’t over, but the policy and legal fights are expanding fast — and the leaders who should be responding to the new fights still haven’t figured out how to talk about the old ones.

Those debates may not be over in the sense that no debate about politics is really ever over, but you’d be kidding yourself if you didn’t acknowledge that conservatives seem to have won these issues with the public and also politically. It’s not just that a majority of Americans believe sports should be segregated by sex rather than self ID’d gender, it’s also that most major sporting bodies around the world have made this police. 

So, for instance, in the last summer Olympic games we had a man competing as a woman boxer who won a gold medal. In the coming summer Olympics, this same boxer probably won’t be eligible to compete because a cheek swab to test DNA is now a requirement. The Supreme Court is very likely going to make clear that this should be the standard for all school based competitions in a few more months, bringing the issue as much to a close as it can be. And that’s not all the court is deciding.

The Supreme Court has also been moving aggressively. Earlier this month, the Court effectively ordered California public schools to inform parents when their children are transitioning at school, even if the students want to keep their gender identity private.

This is a common sense decision. Schools shouldn’t be hiding student’s behavior from parents who are responsible for them. So, really, what can Democrats say at this point other than ‘we were wrong’? But of course they’ll never say that which is why they just say nothing.

In practice, Democrats have mostly tried to avoid the subject over the last five years. The party has broadly supported anti-discrimination protections for transgender people and opposed the most aggressive Republican legislation, but on the specific questions that dominated the political debate, most Democrats declined to stake out clear positions…

Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy at Third Way, a centrist think tank, put it more bluntly. “The silence killed us,” she told me. “It created this political narrative that trans issues were poisonous for Democrats, that we were out of step with public opinion — and that eroded a lot of support among moderate Democrats.”

Democrats were out of step with public opinion. Again, that’s why they still don’t know what to say even now because it has become very clear where public opinion rests on these issues and Democrats are still wildly out of step.

But the article argues that the progressive stance is, as always, that Dems shouldn’t give an inch on anything.

Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union, argues that the issues many Democrats want to treat as separate — sports, youth medicine, bathrooms, identity documents — are legally and politically interconnected, and the idea that you could sacrifice rights in one area to protect them in another reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of discrimination law and what’s at stake…

Public opinion has shifted, too. Over 60 percent of voters now support requiring trans athletes to compete by “biological sex,” 52 percent support bathroom restrictions, and even Democrats are evenly split on sports, a major reversal from just a few years ago.

This is the environment Branstetter is warning about. If these issues can’t be siloed, then concessions in one area won’t hold the line in others.

Gillian is right in a sense. The issues are connected, which is why opponents feel the need to keep pressing. Anything involving children and trans issues has to go or proponents will use it as a platform to push back.

Children have rights of course but boys don’t have a right to be in the girls locker room and no child has a “right” to elective sexual surgery or even elective hormone treatment. Those things can be restricted at the state and federal level as well as by parents who know a social fad when they see one.

There’s only one good way to talk about these issues, especially when they involve kids, and that’s an admission of fault. In that way it’s just like the situation Dems were in after a bunch of them pushed to defund the police. There is a right way to talk about that, and that’s to say “Wow, that was a dumb idea, what were we thinking?” Again, the fact that Democrats still won’t say that about many of these trans issues is very revealing.

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