Democrats Need to Get Real on Gender
I had been in Arizona for graduate school for less than two weeks when my neighbor knocked on my door very early one Tuesday morning.
“Something happened in New York,” she told me. I turned on the TV, saw the column of smoke where the World Trade Center tower used to be, called my boyfriend back in the City, watched as the second plane hit the second tower.
I was supposed to fly home four days later, September 15th, 2001. Instead, I found myself stuck in America, as I’d come to think of suburban Phoenix. I had lived only in the Bay Area, New York City, and various college towns. I’d never lived in actual America before.
The upside of the horror, I thought, was that now, we as a nation would become introspective. I thought we’d ask: What policies have we enacted, what actions have we undertaken, that would convince people to commit jihad? Yes, of course, the terrorists had been radicalized by their own beliefs—but what kind of quiet radicalization might we ourselves have undergone, numbing us to the reality of our own bad policies?
Well, I could not have been more wrong. Suburban Phoenix did not become introspective, nor did the rest of the country. Our unfit leader became blindly bellicose, so deep in his own daddy issues that he invaded the wrong country—which plenty of Democratic politicians supported.
I start with that anecdote because that optimism, or ignorance, has kept me thinking, over and over again, that there was something I—or anyone else from the blue bubble—could say that would change Democrats’ minds or stances on what we’ve come to know as “trans rights.”
Admittedly, it seemed for a moment, after Harris’s defeat and Trump’s victory, that we actually were introspecting. And in the past few weeks, The New York Times—our liberal Bible—has turned from its singular framing that people who oppose the institutionalization of gender identity are bigots. Instead, they’ve admitted that forcing people to affirm someone else’s subjective identity—compelling both speech and belief—was a bridge too far, and has cost them political points. Forcing women to change in locker rooms with and compete against males who identify themselves as women? Maybe that needed a refresh.
These are not brave positions to take. They’re mainstream. A major reason people rejected Harris was, per one poll, her focus on “cultural issues like transgender issues.” The New York Times’ own poll revealed a majority of Democrats don’t want men in women’s and girls’ sports. Even 54% of Democrats—71% of all voters—think youth gender medicine should be restricted.
And yet, when pressed, Democrats at the national level have still defended these unpopular policies, declining to pass a ban on men in women’s sports, urging the Supreme Court not to uphold bans on youth gender medicine. The Democrat who just swept New York City’s mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani, wants to spend $65 million on gender-affirming care.
That is, Democrats have been unwilling to officially change course.
I called up Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute, founder of the Liberal Patriot Substack, and co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? to ask why.
“You can’t underestimate the power of the ‘shadow party,’” he said, the name he uses for the NGOs, academics, donors, advocacy groups, and nonprofits that shape the party platform behind the scenes. The shadow party is far left of most voters, and cries “traitor” when Democrats take moderate positions that reflect majority values, rather than the values of shadow party elites.
If Democrats remain too fearful or meek to defy them, or to withstand the pain and pressure of being labeled a bigot or transphobe, “they're not going to signal to people in a broader sense that they really get it, that they are willing to change,” Teixeira said.
But that’s exactly what Democrats need to signal: that they hear the concerns of the average voter and will not just be nicer to them, but craft fairer and better policies, more in line with their values.
Democrats have tried to wriggle out of authorizing such policies, by arguing that banning youth gender medicine or transgender athletes goes too far, and that medical and sports associations, and individual clinicians and families, should make these decisions. But those associations and organizations are the shadow party, and have lost all credibility by continuing to support gender-affirming care, or insisting that sex isn’t binary or relevant, despite evidence to the contrary. They can’t abdicate their own responsibility anymore. They have to stand up and do the right thing. That means, in part, crafting laws and policies in clear, reality-based language.
One reason the gender-affirmation industry has progressed so far is that it deals in vagaries and euphemisms. The original cohort of minors accessing these interventions were called “juvenile transsexuals,” not “trans kids.” That primary terminology forced us to reckon with transition as something you did, not a way you were born; a transsexual was someone you became.
A trans kid, on the other hand, is an umbrella term that encompasses tomboys and transsexuals, anyone who defies gender stereotypes or who has a “gender identity” at odds with their sex. But “gender identity” is a “sense of one’s gender”—a circular definition, impossible to untangle into a straight thread of clear meaning. Men and women weren’t subjective feelings but objective biological classifications. Now they are “identities.”
These interventions were once called “sex changes”—even though they did not change a person’s sex, they changed the appearance of one’s sex characteristics. The terminology helped us conceive of the actual procedures, the reality of one’s sex and the changes one makes to the body. Now double mastectomies and penectomies and cross-sex hormones huddle beneath the cloak of “gender-affirming care,” which can be concept crept into anything.
This cloudy language helped fuel support for “trans rights,” when the term wasn’t defined. But when asked specifics—about men in women’s sports and spaces, about teen girls getting double mastectomies—the answers changed. If terms aren’t well defined, then people embrace policies whose implications they don’t understand.
So Democrats should purge “gender identity” from law and policy, replacing it with sex. They should support sex-based segregation in appropriate sports and spaces. They should be honest about the lack of evidence to support gender-affirming care, conceding that it is not medically-necessary, evidence-based, or life-saving, as the shadow party insisted and convinced Democrats to avow. They should emulate countries like Finland and Sweden, and have government health agencies craft careful guidelines with serious restrictions, based on unbiased evidence reviews.
Of utmost importance to liberals and Democrats is being seen as good people—the kind and inclusive moral counterpart to what they see as immoral and bigoted Republicans—since liberals don’t realize that they, too, have been radicalized by their own beliefs, numbed to the reality of their own bad policies. And good people, per their code, support trans people, and make room for gender diversity.
So: How can Democrats both uphold the reality of sex in law and policy, and still encourage cultural acceptance of people who are gender nonconforming, or transsexuals, or people who call themselves genderqueer or nonbinary? How they can they erect a big tent that won’t keel over in the endless storm of this issue?
Two-and-a-half years ago, I described such a world. It’s a world in which trans women are accepted as variations of men, not women, and welcomed into men’s rooms—without having to fear for their safety. If we're going to revert to sex-segregation but allow for gender misfits, men must hang a "Welcome, Sarah McBride" banner over the urinals in the men’s room.
It’s a world in which gender nonconformity is unremarkable, in which we tolerate and accept masculine girls and feminine boys without having to impose identities onto them, or tell them they’re vulnerable and need special accommodation. It’s a world in which the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision still stands, in which one cannot be discriminated against in housing or employment for gender nonconformity. It’s a world where people can consider themselves transgender, and people can cherish a belief in gender identity—but where non-believers aren’t forced to participate.
It’s not a world with self-ID. It’s not a world where the medicalization of gender identity, or gender nonconformity, is covered by insurance, or where the belief of gender identity is taught to kids as fact. No one has the “right” to redefine biological categories, or to impose their subjective reality onto the rest of society—not trans people, and not Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, Democrats don’t seem poised to go this direction, and help draft these policies and this iteration of the world. “I think it's clear what they need to do,” Teixeira told me, “but it's also clear at this point they're not willing to do it.”
That’s because to do so—to align with the values of the average voter—also means aligning with Trump, at least on this issue. And that’s something most Democrats can’t bring themselves to do, because he, too, is an unfit leader, deep in his own daddy issues. They consider it not only a moral failing but a political liability to sidle up to him in any fashion.
Teixeira thinks they’re wrong. “To a lot of people in America, [aligning with Trump] won't bug them. They’ll be fine with that.”
What we need then, are Democrats with courage, strong enough to push back against party—and shadow party—orthodoxy, who are self-possessed enough to know that they can agree with Trump on this and still dissent elsewhere. They need to choose country over party, truth over belonging. And if they do that, they may not only be rewarded by voters, they may find that choosing reality over the team belief system reveals a new team—the world of heterodoxy, of independent voters, of free speech.
“I think if you want to keep your intellectual integrity and your critical faculties intact,” Teixeira said, “you have to be politically homeless to some extent.”
Democrats, it’s fun and interesting in here. Come on in, the water’s warm.
The Democratic Party has lost its collective mind over this issue. They've thrown women and girls under the bus so that a few males can cause chaos in women's sports and changing rooms. When Gavin Newsom suggested a few months ago that this policy was "deeply unfair", I thought things were going to change. A few weeks later he allowed AB Hernandez to compete in the girls' category at the California State Championships, where "she" won two gold medals in track and field. The governor kindly allowed the girls who came in second and third (the real winners) to share the podium with a long-haired male wearing makeup. That's his idea of "compromise".
Girls are now being awarded "consolation prizes" in their own sports category. All it takes is three transpeople to completely eliminate females from gold and silver medals. This has already happened at two recent cycling events.
Lisa Selin Davis’s vision of “cultural compassion and legal clarity” is a welcome corrective to the ideological capture of gender policy. Grounding law in biological sex while allowing space for gender nonconformity is, in theory, a fair and reasonable compromise. But in practice, it still leaves unresolved a central problem: can males who identify as women be relied upon to respect boundaries when interacting with real women in workplaces and other shared environments?
Even when legal categories remain sex-based, social norms and expectations don’t automatically follow. Many trans-identifying males retain the habits of male socialization—entitlement to space, deference, and affirmation. In workplace disputes, locker room conflicts, and sports controversies, it’s rarely women making demands. It’s men insisting that others recognize and validate their self-perception, often at women’s expense.
While Davis rightly calls for ending legal fictions, social coercion will persist unless explicitly addressed. Women will still be pressured to “perform inclusion” in daily life—whether that means sharing changing rooms, holding back criticism, or suppressing discomfort. A small but transgressive subset of men will exploit this ambiguity, and women will continue to pay the price for any resistance.
What’s more, even in ostensibly “gender-critical” models, women are often expected to justify or negotiate their own boundaries—a burden men rarely bear. Without firm cultural support for women’s right to exclude males from certain contexts, legal clarity risks becoming a hollow victory.
Davis’s framework is a step forward—but only if it’s accompanied by a frank acknowledgment that male self-perception should never override women’s right to safety, dignity, and free association. Compassion for gender nonconformity must not come at the cost of women's freedom to say no.