It’s significant that Dem candidates for higher office are still betting that they can dodge this issue and face no consequences from voters.

On Wednesday, Virginia Democrats’ lieutenant governor nominee, Ghazala Hashmi, held a roundtable discussion on “protecting public education.” Virginia Republicans observed that this was a curious discussion topic for a state legislator who helped kill legislation in 2023 that would mandate parental notification when an elementary or secondary school-aged child is experiencing “gender incongruence” in school, and who has expressed disdain for the “subset of parents who think that they can legislate what children are reading” in K–12 public schools.

Local reporter Tyler Englander correctly identified Wednesday’s campaign event as a prime opportunity to press Hashmi for a clear position on whether transgender athletes have a right to play in K–12 girls’ sports teams or to access girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

Here’s her full answer, which you can also watch here:

So, we’ve been working to address those issues at a local level, and I know our local school boards have enunciated their policies on — on a variety of issues, including our transgender children and the issue of children in sports. That authority rests in the hands of the Virginia High School League, and they have made their policy decisions. The General Assembly invested the authority in the VHSL, and their decisions are the factor that control the issues of sports.

Hashmi then insinuates that the transgender athlete debate in K–12 schools is a distraction from more pressing priorities. She pivots:

But you know, the most important thing I hear from parents is really a concern on academics, what’s happening in the classroom. And so many parents that I talk to, as well as educators that I talk to, want us to be focused directly on what’s happening to student learning and returning our emphasis and our concern, our policy focus on the issues of reading, writing, mathematic skill, critical thinking, scientific reasoning. That’s the direction I am very focused on, and that’s what my policy work has always been consistently addressing and that’s what parents want. They want students that can read, write, do math and reason effectively, because we know that the jobs of the 21st  century depend on students’ ability to have those skills in place, and we want our students in Virginia to be competitive, not just in the state level, not just at the national level, but globally. We need our students to be in a competitive posture.

Hashmi’s nonresponse is similar to how Virginia Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee, Abigail Spanberger, talks about how she’d address transgender athletes in K–12 schools if elected. Spanberger calls it a “complicated issue,” and has told reporters, “It depends on the sport, depends on the kids.” She often talks about how she’s a mom to three young girls, and that she opposes politicizing children via the transgender debate.

Virginia Democrats’ decision to dodge on this issue remind me of an interview that Lanae Erickson, senior vice president of the centrist liberal think tank Third Way, gave to the New York Times earlier this year. Erickson believes that when Democrats punt this issue to local officials, voters walk away with the impression that the Democratic Party isn’t willing to engage with the crux of the problem: fairness.

“What they thought, in November, was that Democrats thought there should be no rules,” Erickson told the Times. “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.”

I’m skeptical that this issue will be the determinative factor in this year’s Virginia elections, as the party’s gubernatorial nominee seems to believe. Culture war issues are important in Virginia this cycle, but not as resonant as they were in 2021, when Glenn Youngkin flipped the state red for the first time in twelve years by capitalizing on Virginia parents’ concerns about critical race theory and pandemic-induced K–12 school closures. Republicans have an uphill battle this fall in their fight to hold onto currently GOP-controlled offices, as National Review has reported at length.

But the transgender athlete issue still matters, and it’s significant that Democratic candidates for higher office are still betting that they can dodge the issue and face no consequences from voters. Democrats across the country should be thinking carefully about whether they’re planning to moderate on the issue at all heading into the 2026 midterms, especially considering that support for restrictions on transgender athletes is growing among Democrats, according to recent Pew Research Center data.