Democrats still don’t understand why they lost public support for this cause.
Representative Sarah McBride (D., Del.) said progressives are losing on the transgenderism issue because the left overplayed its hand. However, the lawmaker’s comments suggest that Democrats still don’t understand why they lost public support for this cause.
McBride, the first transgender member of Congress, was interviewed by the New York Times’ Ezra Klein on Tuesday, when the representative discussed why support for the “trans rights movement” has rapidly declined. McBride believes that progressives “went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage.” The lawmaker said Democrats attempted to “push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready.”
Polling cited in the interview shows that the proportion of Americans who believe that insurance coverage of transition procedures should be mandatory has declined since 2022. Support for the legality of gender reassignment surgeries for minors has similarly crashed in both parties. Furthermore, people are more likely to say that trans people should use bathrooms that match their sex.
The Democratic lawmaker acknowledged this. “By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago.” However, McBride believes this is because of a “well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people.”
While McBride said Democrats “lost the art of persuasion,” the representative failed to consider whether the left is losing on the transgenderism issue because it is wrong on the transgenderism issue. The moral case for allowing children to receive experimental surgeries, for men to participate in the same sports leagues as women, or for teenage boys to change in the same locker room as teenage girls is nonexistent, and progressives still have not reckoned with this.
McBride argued that the push for trans rights was merely a continuation of the same-sex-marriage movement. This may be true, as redefining gender may be a natural progression from redefining marriage, but the ends of the transgenderism movement are far more radical. While a girl on a track team can happily run against a lesbian, racing a six-foot-tall “transgender woman” is a different story. The legalization of gay marriage did not have a direct and undeniable effect on most people’s lives in the way the transgenderism movement has.
On transgender individuals’ participation in sports specifically, McBride said, “Allowing for individual athletic associations to make those individual determinations” is akin to those who promoted civil unions as an alternative to gay marriage. The representative still believes that making women’s sports unsafe for women is the endgame but is willing to compromise in the meantime.
McBride thinks the left’s transgenderism agenda is not flawed; it merely came too quickly. The lawmaker believes that Democrats need to reclaim the “art of changemaking.” Progressives seem not to understand that people don’t want radical change legislated from above, but they are unwilling to back down on the issue.
Fundamentally upending what it means to be a man or a woman is not something that can be changed through government. In fact, it’s not something that can be changed at all. The differences between the sexes are clear-cut and objective, so the left’s policies on transgenderism are attempts to force people to ignore reality. In the same way that the government couldn’t force people to say the Earth is flat, it can’t force people to say that some dudes are ladies. This is a lesson Democrats still need to learn.
McBride’s office did not respond to a request for comment from NR.