Democrats Can't Win Until They Can Answer This Question. Here's What They Should Say.

(Yes, this should be in The New York Times)

Second edited to add: I’ve made some changes based on reader suggestions. The title was “How Democrats Can Heal Our Achilles Heel,” but one reader pointed out the metaphor doesn’t work. Elsewhere I’ve struck out what I wrote to replace it with reader suggestions. It can be a perpetual work in progress but the question remains: How should Democrats running for office or reelection answer the question?

Edited to add: I’ve been getting some critiques of word choices—which I welcome. But I have a favor to ask: if you'd like to change my suggested answers to “that question,” or some individual phrase, please do so with mainstream media publications in mind. I am keen to hear how you think elected Democrats or those in the party machine should answer that question out there in the real world as it is. In fact, it would be great to do a post just with people's responses to this—the serious ones, that reflect the moment we're in. Have at it!

During a hearing about abortion pills on January 14, an OB-GYN named Nisha Verma stumbled over Missouri Republican Josh Hawley’s question: “Can men get pregnant?”

Verma couldn’t summon a response, other than to critique Hawley for asking. She accused him of wielding the question as a political tool, reducing complexity, and trying to be polarizing.

That all may be true—even some conservatives think so—but so was Hawley’s reply: Verma was making a mockery of the proceeding and putting politics over science—the very thing she’d condemned Republicans for doing with abortion.

Democrats are largely united in our opposition to Donald Trump—to his nation-building, norm-busting, law-bending regime. Most of us can also agree on a few other things, such as the need for more affordable housing and better healthcare. But the one issue that seems to not just divide but weaken us is gender identity: the idea that each of us has an inner sense of being male, female, both, or neither, independent of our sex—and that the identity should override sex in culture, law, and policy.

In the aftermath of Trump’s reelection, some Democrats showed willingness to grapple with the issue. After all, Trump’s pithy ad tagline—“Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you”—might have tipped the electorate as much as 2.7 percent, enough to secure his victory. It tapped into the average voter’s sense that Democrats cared more about the feelings of the elite few than about the material reality of the many. While neither “transgender” nor “trans” appeared a single time in Democrats’ 2012 platform, between 2012 and 2024, the frequency with which LGBT appeared increased 1044 percent. The words that declined the most: crime, economy, fathers, jobs, men, middle class, and tax cuts.

Massachusetts representative Seth Moulton and Arizona senator Ruben Gallego admitted the real problems of fairness and safety when dividing sports based on gender identity rather than sex. A majority of Democrats agreed, and not just about sports; more than half of those polled also believed minors should not receive puberty blockers. Representative Sarah McBride, a trans woman, conceded that the trans rights movement had “shut down needed conversations.”

Those conversations would have noted that several systematic reviews of evidence—which evaluate not just study conclusions but their reliability—have found the science behind gender-affirming care for youth to be “remarkably weak.” We have no way of knowing who will be helped or harmed by social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on secondary sex characteristics. As a result, some countries determined that the risks outweighed the benefits and sharply restricted treatments.

In a long-term study of medically transitioned youth in the United States, funded with nearly $10 million in grants from the NIH, two out of the 315 patients died by suicide—after being affirmed and medicated. There is no evidence that transition mitigates that risk. While many young people avow that transition vastly improved their lives, others insist on the opposite. Detransitioners, who regret their transformations, have sued doctors and therapists for failing to properly evaluate them. Many are gay and lesbian, and compare gender-affirming care to a form of conversion therapy.

We need to confront these concerns, not dismiss them. After all, despite the death and destruction wrought by Trump, Democrats are still effectively lost. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats in a Pew poll felt frustrated with their own party. Others have called the party “weak” and “ineffective.”

But no matter how m Critics have offered many rebuttals offered to the advocacy group talking points that gender-affirming care is evidence-based and life-saving. But proponents of these interventions its proponents have been unwilling to reform or compromise. The American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed its policy position on gender-affirming care, despite a comprehensive fact check revealing it was riddled with errors.

Into this regulatory vacuum waded Republicans—along with the support of many lesbians and gays, feminists, liberals, and even adult transsexuals—who filled it with the only tool left: bans. Those policies are supported by a majority of Americans, including Democrats. The Supreme Court, having already upheld states’ right to ban youth gender medicine, will likely do the same with sex-segregated sports. We need to pivot to reflect reality—and the majority.

Yet, as Trump and his “cabinet of curiosities”—as Saturday Night Live referred to Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller—wreak more havoc on Americans and the world than even the biggest cynics could have imagined, Democrats are retreating. Our brief moment of introspection has passed, and we are once again digging in and defending ideas and practices that desperately need revision. Trumpian in our refusal to pivot, we find ourselves dumbfounded by the simplest of questions.

When The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis asked the otherwise slick-talking California Governor Gavin Newsom whether “we should treat everyone with respect and dignity, but also acknowledge that in some circumstances—sports, prisons—biological sex matters”—he became, Lewis reported, “uncharacteristically ineloquent.” “Yeah. It’s … I … I’ve just—it’s been—it’s been really, it’s been an interesting—” When conservative pundit Ben Shapiro pressed him on whether boys can become girls, Newsom offered weakly: “Yeah, I just, well, I think, uh, for the grace of God.”

Axios polled a variety of Democrats about transgender issues. who largely Most punted on the answers, with the exception of Rahm Emanuel. When asked if “boys should be able to play in girls’ sports” or “can a man become a woman,” he answered no. But this week’s guest on The New Yorker Radio Hour, a podcaster named Jennifer Welch, dismissed Emanuel’s position as bullying and throwing trans people “under the bus.” Last week, ACLU lawyer Joshua Block argued before the Supreme Court that we should not define sex when deciding whether trans girls and women should be able to play sports against females.

A couple of decades ago, the answer to “Can men get pregnant?” would have been, “Only in a sci-fi or comedy movie.” When asked whether men should compete against women, Democrats would have said no. Can we change sex? No again. Our sex simply refers to our reproductive class, whether we’re designed to produce sperm or eggs (whether we’re capable of it or not.) It cannot be changed.

But can we change our bodies to look like the opposite sex? Yes. Do some people desperately want to, and are they happier once they do? Absolutely.

It is not cruel, bullying, or throwing people under the bus to uphold the reality of sex and still make cultural space for people who defy the expectations we attach it. It is not, as anti-Trump conservatives like Tim Miller, in a conversation with strange bedfellow Sarah McBride, described as a “rage-bait” question. It’s a question about the most fundamental facet of human existence; it is only laden with underlying discriminatory motives in the ear of the listener.

In reporting on this issue for the better part of the last five years, my north star has always been a quote from the artist Nina Paley: “Sex is real. People are weird.” We can support people who want to change their appearance to look like the opposite, or neither, sex, who have a sense of themselves at odds with their bodies, while upholding that sex is real and that it matters in law and policy and everyday life.

Such policies will make some things harder for a small group of people, especially natal males who never go through their endogenous puberty, and venture from puberty blockers straight to cross-sex hormones. They must be fortified to handle those hardships, the fallout from the difficult choices they made, the options limited by the medical interventions—just as they will have to handle the physical effects of transition, including infertility and lifelong medication. Doing so will also make it easier for the many women and girls who have been begging the Democratic establishment to take their concerns about fairness and safety seriously.

The answer to Hawley’s question was simple: “No, men cannot get pregnant.” Or: “Adult human males cannot get pregnant.”

But Verma could have added that people born female who identify as men can. She could have said, But if they want something that acknowledges those who believe deeply in gender identity, there are other options. One could be:

“By your definition, based on sex, no. But by mine, based on identity—yes. Because women who identify as men are still female.”

We need to be able to speak the truth. We don’t have to do so at the expense of compassion, or viewpoint diversity. But if we don’t strengthen our responses, we’ll be holding our tongues at the expense of the country.