Perhaps as a threat of what’s to come, on Friday, supporters of President-elect Donald Trump recirculated a video statement on X that he made last year on transgender issues. In it, he pledges to stop federal backing for programs that support the concept of gender transition at any age and to ban gender-affirming care for minors. Any hospital that performs gender surgery on young people would be ejected from Medicare and Medicaid. He would cut federal funds to schools that tell children “they could be trapped in the wrong body,” and get a law that bars “men from participating in women’s sports.”
And it wasn’t just one video — Trump made his intentions clear throughout the campaign, and he won handily.
During the closing weeks of the election, Republican campaigns spent over $65 million on ads ridiculing, among several candidates, Kamala Harris for supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” and “illegal aliens,” all ending with variations on the tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
At campaign events Trump attacked the idea of letting transgender girls and women play on female sports teams, and implied that children were having gender surgery in classrooms.
“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin, “and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation?”
Why did Trump and his allies devote so much attention and resources to something that seemingly affects a small number of people compared with top voter concerns like immigration, the economy, crime, abortion and democracy? Maybe because it worked. According to Harris’s leading super PAC, viewers shifted 2.7 percentage points toward Trump after watching one of these ads.
Clearly it helped paint Harris as a radical leftist, out of step with most of America. But as those of us who opposed Trump lick our wounds and take stock, it’s worth considering why these ads and rally cries resonated.
It is not because most Americans are bigots or haters or anti-L.G.B.T.Q. people. But many voters, including liberals and Democrats, disagree with positions Harris and the Democratic Party have taken on transgender issues. Polls show that most voters, while largely supportive of existing legal rights and protections for transgender people, have complicated views on other policies that fall under the umbrella of what’s commonly referred to as trans rights.
Trump’s charge that children are undergoing gender transition surgeries in school is obviously absurd. But his words may have struck a chord with those who disagree with school districts that have teachers and administrators hide from parents that their children have adopted new gender identities. As The Times reported last year, one mother of a 15-year-old only accidentally discovered her child’s public school had been covering up the fact that for six months, her child had been going by a new name and using the boys’ bathroom.
In recent years, the concepts of gender identity and the possibility of being born in the wrong body have been introduced as early as elementary school. But a Washington Post poll found that 77 percent of Americans do not want teachers discussing these ideas in kindergarten through third grade and more than half oppose trans identity being talked about even in middle school.
The Democratic Party’s platform includes a pledge to defend gender-affirming care for minors. For people who are not well versed in the issue, this may sound like therapy to make children feel comfortable in their bodies; what it usually means in practice is allowing children to adopt a new name and pronouns, and in many cases, enabling them to change their bodies to resemble that of the opposite sex. This process can include puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones and, in some cases, surgery. More than 14,000 American children had gender-related medical interventions between 2019 and 2023.
While much of Europe has been pulling back from the gender-affirmation model, evidence has emerged that in the United States, proponents of this approach have let politics color science.
To cite two recent examples, one prominent advocate of gender-affirming care suppressed her own government-funded research because she feared it might be “weaponized” against her agenda, The Times reported. Meanwhile, Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary of health and human services chosen by President Biden, worked to get a transgender organization to remove age limits from its proposed guidelines for surgeries, including mastectomies and hysterectomies for minors, because she said they would give fuel to political foes, according to recently released court documents. After this disclosure, the Biden administration released a statement saying it opposed such surgeries for minors.
Yet the Department of Health and Human Services continues to say that gender-affirming care is “crucial” for young people and “has been shown to increase positive outcomes for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents” — even though the most comprehensive overview of research, which assessed all major American and global studies on the subject, found scant evidence of this. Even so, all the leading American medical associations continue to back gender-affirming care.
In my reporting, I’ve spoken with many parents of gender-dysphoric kids, overwhelmingly liberal and Democrat, who told me they felt betrayed by Democrats and by the Biden administration on this issue. They resent being labeled “anti-trans” for questioning whether it’s right to simply accept what their children say about their gender, especially since those children often suffer from other mental health issues.
The number of people identifying as transgender is still tiny, but it is growing rapidly. While surveys show around 1 percent of American adults overall identify as transgender or nonbinary (meaning they choose not to identify as either sex), according to one poll, about 5 percent of adults younger than 30 now do.
Democratic politicians, the media and elite institutions frequently refer to our “evolving understanding of sex and gender.” But a majority of Americans still believe that gender is based on sex at birth.
This is not because Americans are “uncomfortable” with the existence of transgender people or need to get with the program. About /” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>44 percent of Americans already know someone who is transgender. Indeed, polls show that people have become less supportive of progressive ideas about gender identity as they have become more widely publicized and understood. According to Pew, 60 percent of Americans in 2022 said gender is determined by the sex at birth, up from 54 percent in 2017. Democrats’ opposition to allowing trans girls and women to compete in women’s sports increased to 48 percent in 2023, from 41 percent in 2021, according to Gallup, while independent voters’ opposition increased to 67 percent from 63 percent.
Rather than try to push Americans in a direction they clearly oppose, Democrats would be better off endorsing nuanced and humane alternatives. Some in the party are already seeing the value in such an approach.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Seth Moulton, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, told The Times last week. “I have two little girls; I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Democrats have long been on the right side of health care, scientific progress, women’s rights, gay rights and education. This is the party that truly cares about families and aims to address their needs, especially on the more pressing economic issues that have many Americans feeling that their backs are up against a wall. But on transgender issues specifically, one way to make clear that Democrats are listening to their constituencies would be to accept a broader range of perspectives.
Trump has made already clear how extreme a position he will take, even potentially moving toward bans on gender medicine for adults. Transgender people are understandably fearful of what a second Trump administration might mean for their future.
The tenor of Trump’s vitriol could embolden real transphobes and inflame wider hate of and discrimination against transgender people as well as gay men and lesbians. The gay rights movement rightly fears a backslide. This is a scary time.
Democrats should fight these tendencies and ensure that everyone, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, is respected and protected under existing law. Rather than double down on beliefs and policies that are out of step with the best medical evidence, Democrats and everyone else who support transgender rights should embrace a common-sense approach from their government, their schools, their mental health care workers and their doctors. Vulnerable people are depending on it.
The post On Transgender Issues, Voters Want Common Sense appeared first on New York Times.
