The Democratic Party Has Abandoned Women

That's why some liberals are looking elsewhere for support

Kim Jones was desperate to talk to Democrats.

In 2022, she had watched her daughter, a junior at Yale, race against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the Ivy League Women’s Swimming Championships. She’d listened to girls—who’d dedicated their lives to the sport—crying, not just because they were uncomfortable with a male-bodied person in their changing rooms or outpacing them in the pool, but because they’d been told by coaches and athletic directors not to speak publicly about their feelings, and to seek therapy if they needed help, rather than object. Harvard’s athletic directors had sent a note to the women’s team—which was widely circulated among concerned parents, but not in the press—warning them to not get “annoyed or frustrated”

“I saw the emotional damage, the psychological harm, the just crumbling of confidence and empowerment that sports was supposed to be giving women,” Jones told me. Shocked that no leaders were standing up for the rights of women and girls, Jones decided “that if I could do anything to stop any other little girl or woman having to face this, I was going to do whatever it took.”

Her first call was to the ACLU. “These are the defenders of freedom of speech. These are the historical defenders of women,” Jones said. The lawyer she spoke with dismissed her, saying they would never “side with cis women against women.”

As a lifelong liberal, she supported the civil rights of transgender people, which had been codified in the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock case. But she also considered her party the defenders of women and of free speech. They had to be able to talk about how these new policies for trans kids—in schools, sports and medicine—might affect natal women and girls.

She reached out to her Democratic federal congressman in Connecticut, for whom she’d voted, and secured a meeting. “He agreed that in practice this surely didn't seem fair,” Jones said. But what he said after shocked her. “He said: ‘I’m not sure this is important enough.’”

Jones kept trying, meeting with Democrats and their staffers across the country. One staffer stormed out of the room, but almost all of them, Jones said, appeared sympathetic. Still, they either didn’t think it mattered much, or considered it political suicide.

“It is very frustrating to realize that half of the political spectrum in power is not willing to listen,” she said. “They want to shut down debate. They won’t discuss what women are going through.”

Eventually, Jones did find a supportive audience: Republicans.

She and others in the group she co-founded, the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS), met with legislators in North Carolina and Virginia to explain what girls and young women have gone through; to understand the science of sex; to connect them to local athletes who’ve been directly affected by policies that allow trans women to compete against females and to introduce them to experts. And when Republicans have drafted bills, they’ve testified at hearings.

“We have to go people are open to hearing from us,” she told me. “But it’s devastating to so many of us that the party that has historically supported women’s rights is just abandoning women.” She’s not shunning the Democrats, she told me. “I would say the Democrats are shunning women.” In fact, the Democrats have given the gift of this contentious issue to the other side. “It’s a handoff on a silver platter from the Democratic Party.”

Many of us liberal types have been told by our media that these are left-right issues, that trans rights don’t interfere with or threaten women’s rights, and those who say so are either bigots or power-hungry politicians trying to manipulate voters by way of moral panic. They accuse those supporting women’s rights or children’s safety of succumbing to the right wing and abandoning our party.

We have to break the binary—on that framing. Because slowly, slowly, Democrats are waking up, shifting from navel-gazing to soul-searching. Jones keeps a spreadsheet with names of supportive Democrats with the words “This is not a left/right issue” written across the top. But it’s a message few in the media, medicine, law, education or politics seem to have internalized.

In Kansas, the “Women’s Bill of Rights” overwhelmingly passed. Though bills like this have been referred to in the media as bans on trans women, the Kansas bill is designed to safeguard women’s spaces by defining “sex” as male and female. It ensures that “with respect to athletics, prisons or other detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms and other areas where biology, safety or privacy are implicated” separate accommodations are provided—according to sex.

The reasons: women have been getting raped in prison by men claiming to identify as women. They’ve been losing to males in competitive sports. They’ve been accommodating men’s feelings over their own safety and comfort—what women have been trained to do for centuries.

Two freshman Democrats, Marvin Robinson and Ford Carr, broke ranks and supported the Kansas bill. Robinson was accused of endangering the lives of trans people and risked alienating his party, but he defended his vote. In part, Robinson said, these issues just weren’t relevant to the lives of most people, he told a conservative radio host the next day. “I don't give a damn about the Democratic Party political policies or ideologies, and I did not give a damn about the Republican Party political ideologies,” he said. “What I care about a little bit are the issues, everybody knows the issues, how do we get to some solutions and meet halfway in the middle?:

Meanwhile, five Democrats supported Pennsylvania’s HB972, the “Protect Women's Sports Act”—which was successfully vetoed by the Governor—and 10 Louisiana Dems supported the state’s “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.”

And popular-ish presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. has expressed his support for such bills, preventing males from competing in women’s sports. He said, “I don’t think that’s fair.”

Kim Jones recognizes that a select few Democrats are beginning to see the light. “There are several Democrats in state legislatures that have been bold enough and brave enough to recognize that their party’s on the wrong side of that and and cross over on party lines,” she said. “There are Democrats in state legislatures around the country that have reached out to us to try to help educate themselves. There are a lot of Democrats in lower levels of government who are recognizing that they’re going to have to be able to have this conversation openly and transparently and be informed.”

Of course, many more confide their concerns to Jones and others behind the scenes, but don’t want to commit political suicide by, well, following their own moral code. Perhaps if more constituents communicated to their representatives that they wanted them to take a stand, those politicians would feel empowered to do so. (Find your local reps here.)

In the meantime, people like Jones will keep seeking audience with those willing to hear her, but she’d like that audience to be politically diverse. It would be great if, say, Democrat-appointed Supreme Court Justices could define what a woman is—and if the law, and Title IX, could define sex according to objective biology rather than subjective identity.

Women’s rights, she said, “can’t be a hockey puck that gets batted back and forth between Republicans and Democrats as they’re elected into leadership positions.” Women’s rights can’t be a wedge issue, she told me. “This is something that permeates every part of our lives. And we can’t discuss anything that pertains to women’s rights, women’s health care, women’s roles in society or their choices if we don’t define and know clearly who is a woman.”

So far, the people willing to define woman as “adult human female,” and offer protections for them—in sport, if not in abortion—are Republicans. “We need them to collectively get together and recognize the gross injustice that is being hammered down on women in our society,” Jones said. “Right now, I just I need them to carry a passion for it.”

ICONS’ conference will be held July 21-23 in Denver.