Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president of the center-left think tank Third Way, has studied the politics of transgender rights for four years. But it was only this past December that she had cause to utter the phrase “genital check” in the presence of a Democratic representative.
“Now I’ve done it many times,” she said, and with many lawmakers. When she does, she added, “their faces squish up.”
At the time, Ms. Erickson was meeting with Democratic lawmakers in hopes of blocking a Republican bill to enact a blanket ban on transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports. Awkward conversations, to her mind, were a necessary first step in escaping what many in and around Democratic politics had come to see as a sort of paralysis over the issue.
Stuck in a widening gulf between the views of the party’s liberal voters and advocacy organizations on one side, and those of the broader American electorate on the other, many Democratic politicians had resolved to say as little as possible about the subject. In surveys, Ms. Erickson and other public-opinion researchers had found that this allowed Republicans, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking Democrats on transgender rights in 2024, to define voters’ perceptions of Democratic policy positions.
“What they thought, in November, was that Democrats thought there should be no rules,” Ms. Erickson said. “That’s a caricature of the position from the right. And if you are too scared to articulate what your position is, that’s what they hear.”
The dilemma is reflective of the Democratic Party’s broader struggles with identity politics as it dissects its losses in 2024. Recovering its standing with voters, many in the party believe, requires coming to terms with the party’s transformation during the Obama and first Trump presidencies, when American liberals broadly embraced what had previously been vanguard positions on a range of social and cultural issues, including gender and race, immigration and policing.
In some areas, Democratic politicians, taking cues from liberal advocacy groups, found themselves signing onto positions about which even their own voters were uncertain, and have become more so in recent years.
This is particularly true of transgender rights, where polls now show majority support for some restrictions that advocates have fiercely opposed, and have sought to hold politicians accountable for backing.
Support for restrictions is growing among Democrats, too. A Pew Research survey in February found that 45 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning adults favored laws requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their sex assigned at birth, up from 37 percent just three years earlier. Democratic support for restrictions on medical care for transitioning minors and on bathroom use for transgender people has grown similarly.
In Senate races last year, Republicans targeted vulnerable red- and purple-state incumbents with millions of dollars’ worth of often-misleading ads exploiting this disconnect, like one claiming that Montana’s Jon Tester had voted to allow “biological men to compete against our girls in their sports.” The Trump campaign used the issue to present Vice President Kamala Harris as out of touch, in an ad with the tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.”
Although there is no evidence that transgender rights was a top issue for most voters in 2024, Democratic strategists believe that these attacks did have an impact. Blueprint, a post-election Democratic polling project, found that among swing voters who broke for Mr. Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, 67 percent believed Democrats were “too focused on identity politics.”
“We try so hard to represent everybody, we alienate everybody,” said Greg Schultz, the national campaign manager of former President Joseph R. Biden’s 2020 primary run.
Since November, the debate within the party over the way forward has been most visible in regards to transgender athletes’ participation in college and high school sports. Republicans from the White House to statehouses have pressed their advantage in that area, passing sweeping bans by executive order — as Mr. Trump did in February — and through state-level legislation. This month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two challenges to state bans, which have been passed in 27 states. But recent polls show that a narrow majority of Americans approve of Mr. Trump’s handling of transgender issues.
Democrats have overwhelmingly opposed such bans at the federal and state levels. And the handful of Democratic politicians who have broken publicly on the issue since the election, like Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, both of whom expressed the view that transgender athletes’ participation in girls’ and women’s sports raised genuine concerns of fairness, have faced significant backlash and accusations of political opportunism from within the party.
But Shannon Minter, the legal director for the National Center for L.G.B.T.Q. Rights, argued for a more charitable reading of their statements, as attempts to navigate a new political reality.
“I think they were trying to say that, ‘Yeah, we recognize that there are genuine issues here that need to be addressed around fairness, and let’s do that.’ We can do that,” he said. “It wasn’t said in the most artful way possible, but not every articulation is going to be flawless.”
Others have argued that the backlash is a big part of the problem for both Democrats and the transgender rights movement: Democratic politicians’ fear of angering advocates has limited their ability to meet voters where they are.
“We haven’t been pragmatic for the last 10 or so years,” said Mara Keisling, the founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “And that’s killing us.”
Exposing a vulnerability
Republican candidates and outside groups spent more than $200 million on campaign ads in 2024 attacking Kamala Harris and Democratic Senate candidates in close races, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Mr. Tester in Montana, over transgender issues.
Democrats have routinely denounced such campaigns as political exploitation of an issue that has little impact on the lives of most voters: Before Mr. Trump’s executive order, estimates of the number of transgender athletes competing in collegiate sports nationwide ranged from fewer than 10 to 40. But some in the party described the deluge of ads in 2024 as genuinely bruising, revealing Democrats’ vulnerability on the issue.
Some in the party see the beginnings of a way forward in polling conducted shortly after the election. Change Research, a progressive public opinion firm, polled voters in the eight states where Republicans spent heavily on transgender-themed ads and found that 55 percent of those voters agreed that transgender athletes’ participation in sports should be regulated by local schools and sports associations, not politicians.
In March, Senate Democrats embraced similar language as they unanimously opposed a Republican bill to ban transgender athletes from collegiate women’s sports. (The bill, which passed the House, failed in the Senate, though its language mostly duplicated Mr. Trump’s February executive order.)
“Everyone deserves a level playing field,” Jacky Rosen, the Nevada senator who was a target of the Republican ads in the fall, told Axios at the time. “But the governing bodies — the parents, the coaches, the N.C.A.A.,” she said, “need to make those decisions.”
In this year’s governor’s race in Virginia, where gender politics have factored unusually prominently in recent elections, the Democratic candidate, the former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, has similarly argued for leaving sports policy to schools and athletic associations. It was a “complicated issue,” she told reporters during a campaign stop in Martinsville, Va., in late June, adding, “I think it depends on the sport, depends on the kids.”
But Ms. Erickson argues that punting the issue to other authorities is ultimately unconvincing to voters. She believes that improving the politics around transgender athletes for Democrats will require them to engage with the substance of the bans. A proposed state ban in Ohio in 2022, for instance, drew fire for requiring physical exams of athletes to prove their sex — language that was later withdrawn but which some Democratic opponents of a ban have invoked this year to argue for the potential invasiveness of such laws in practice.
“If you can persuade people that this will impact every girl who wants to play sports, or every girl who wants to play sports who doesn’t look like a stereotypical feminine girl, then they turn against it,” she said.
Some in the party argue that the fight over transgender rights is a window onto deeper Democratic vulnerabilities. In interviews, several Democratic strategists conceded the effectiveness of the Trump campaign ad that highlighted Ms. Harris’s past support for transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports and for the public funding of federal prison inmates’ gender-reassignment surgery.
Rather than playing to voters’ fears of social change, as Republican ads about identity politics often do, the “they/them” ad presented transgender people as simply the latest on a long list of groups that had received special attention from the Democrats — and encouraged voters to think of that attention as coming at their expense.
“It was less an anti-trans attack and more a way to tap into something that people were feeling: ‘You’re fighting for everyone else other than me,’” said Alyssa Cass, the chief strategist for Blueprint.
For Democrats, “it has become so pervasive in our party that we must check all these boxes in order to do anything,” Mr. Schultz said. “But voters don’t think that way.”
The danger of being ‘diet Republicans’
Many Democrats argue that as long as Republicans are pointing the political conversation toward transgender issues, Democrats have limited ability to point it elsewhere.
“The Republicans will never stop talking about this,” said State Representative Aime Wichtendahl, an Iowa Democrat and her state’s only transgender legislator. This year, the Republican legislative majority in Iowa and the governor enacted the country’s first law rolling back broad civil-rights protections for transgender people.
In May, Ms. Wichtendahl called Rob Sand, the state auditor and the leading Democratic contender for governor in next year’s election, to express her concern after Mr. Sand told a conservative talk-radio host that he opposed transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports. In the interview, Mr. Sand described the issue as a matter of “settled law in the state of Iowa.” (Mr. Sand declined to comment, but a spokeswoman noted that he had opposed the new law when it passed.)
Ms. Wichtendahl argues that efforts to take the issue off the table in the election, as Mr. Sand appeared to be trying to do, were misguided. “Voters aren’t going to vote for diet Republicans,” she said. “They’re just going to vote for Republicans.”
But Ross Wilburn, a state representative and the former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, whose son is transgender, said Democrats needed to create space for dialogue on issues where voters were still sorting out where they stood.
It was important, he said, to give candidates “some grace on some issues they may not have a background in or experience with.”
Democratic politicians still diverge from the party on the issue at their peril. In May, The Dispatch asked Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona about his views on transgender athletes’ participation in sports. “As a parent of a daughter, I think it’s legitimate that parents are worried about the safety of their daughters, and I think it’s legitimate for us to be worried also about fair competition,” he said, adding, “I think the parents of these trans children also are worried, legitimately, about the health and wellness of their kids.”
The statement earned him rapid condemnation from a raft of L.G.B.T.Q. groups in Arizona that had previously endorsed him. Mr. Gallego has not spoken publicly about the subject since. Like most Democratic politicians contacted for this story, he declined to comment.
But some in the party have argued for more openness to debate — and a realist’s approach in states and districts where the politics of the issue clearly favor Republicans.
When Indiana’s State Senate passed a bill banning transgender athletes’ participation in college sports in April, the Republican majority was joined by four of the 10 Democrats in the chamber, all of whom had voted against a similar ban at the elementary and high school level three years earlier. (All four declined to comment.)
State Senator Shelli Yoder, the minority leader, opposed the bill, arguing in a statement that it was “meant to divide and distract.” But she declined to criticize the members of her caucus who had voted for it.
“Indiana is not a monolith,” Ms. Yoder said. “Leading in that reality requires navigating immense complexity.”
Charles Homans is a reporter for The Times and The Times Magazine, covering national politics.
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