After a stinging loss, Democrats debate where to draw the line on transgender rights

Laws imposing strict definitions of gender, and bans on gender medicine for minors had already divided Democrats. A Texas legislator left the party this year after voting with Republicans to ban “the hormonal suppression of puberty,” then losing her Democratic primary. But for the first time since Democrats fully embraced the movement — they first recognized “gender identity” separate from sex in their 2008 platform — they are facing public, pointed questions from members over whether they went too far, promising too much to activists, and bestowing rights that a new Trump administration can take away.

The questions came from two center-left Democrats whose districts shifted right in 2024, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton — one who faced a tough re-election, one with no opponent. Moulton, who briefly ran for president in 2019, told the New York Times on Thursday that he didn’t want to see his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” bemoaning that his party was “afraid to say that.”

In the ensuing days, Moulton lost staff, faced calls to apologize or resign from Democrats in his district, and hit resistance from House colleagues, who said that he was hurting people — hurting children — in a mean and misguided search for blame.

“When our leaders echo right-wing talking points, they betray the values of fairness and equality that should differentiate us as a party,” two Massachusetts Democratic legislators wrote in an op-ed on Monday.

“It’s very, very painful to see Democrats throw certain vulnerable communities under the bus or buy into Republican logic,” Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal told Semafor. (Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is the “proud mother of a trans kid.”)

Moulton hasn’t walked the comments back, instead doing what Democrats did after blaming the “defund the police” slogan for their weak down-ballot run in 2020 — finding TV cameras and talking into them. In a series of interviews, he’s said that the party needs to confront how it talks about the edge cases of gender identity, and that most liberals “have actually been willing to engage in a thoughtful debate, rather than just try to cancel me, like some of our Massachusetts politicos have done.” (On Tuesday, Tufts University ended its relationship with Moulton’s office.)

Other Democrats started to argue with activists, then gave up. Texas Democratic Party chair Gilbert Hinojosa told an Austin public radio station last week his party had stumbled on LGBTQ rights: “You can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support.”

Hinojosa was quickly condemned by Equality Texas and LGBTQ rights groups; Brigitte Bandit, a non-binary drag queen who Texas Democrats had invited to speak at their state convention, accused Hinojosa of “unchecked transphobia.” He resigned, a decision made easier by the party’s widespread losses. Democrats had rallied against the state’s anti-transgender policies, including the definition of gender medicine for minors as “child abuse” — and lost electoral ground, much of it in South Texas.

Few other Democrats had joined Moulton and Suozzi, publicly, in calling for the party to talk about gender identity differently. On Monday, the Democratic polling firm Change Research shared data it had first shown to activists, studying the effect of the $215 million in trans-focused ads on swing voters and finding that it didn’t move them.

“There was no drop in margin among late deciders who saw ads attacking Democrats on transgender issues, and a one-point drop among late deciders who didn’t see them,” wrote Betsy App of Change Research, in tandem with the Transgender Freedom Alliance. Other pollsters saw the ads making an impact, though, and both presidential campaigns thought they worked.

The party’s defeats were so broad, with so many potential targets for blame, that Moulton’s critics could credibly point to others. On Monday, Jayapal stood with other newly elected progressives to argue that the party had lost the election when working class voters doubted that they’d fight for them. When one reporter asked about whether “identity politics” shifted votes, Delaware Rep.-elect Sarah McBride — the first openly transgender American to win federal office — stepped up to the microphone.

“Let’s be clear: The party that was focused on culture wars, the party that was focused on trans people, was the Republican Party,” said McBride. “It was Donald Trump… when a politician tries to take an issue that impacts a handful of people in a handful of states and turn it into the most important issue in an election, everyone has to ask why.”

Afterward, Jayapal told Semafor that she’d had already spoken to parents and transgender adults panicking about whether they could continue to live in their states, or their country. She would talk to the colleagues who’d disagreed with McBride’s analysis, too.

“They are not doing anything for the Democratic Party,” Jayapal said. “We don’t want to fight for vulnerable people, whether it’s poor people, whether it’s union members, whether it’s trans. Too often, our party kind of abandons them and tries to be Trump-light. And I’m just not sure that the decision to campaign with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban got us more votes.”

Activists who had urged Republicans to campaign against trans rights, for years, felt vindicated last week. The American Principles Project, which was criticized after its 2019 ads about “boys in girls sports” didn’t stop a Democratic win in Kentucky that year, had never stopped running them. Similar attacks didn’t make a dent in the 2022 elections, or again in Kentucky in 2023 either, but the activists remained convinced throughout that they were on the verge of a breakthrough as more Americans engaged with their arguments.

According to APP president Terry Schilling, Republicans now saw not just a winning issue, but one that Democrats couldn’t retreat on, even as non-white Catholic voters swung right. While several Democrats ran ads saying that they didn’t support “sex changes” (Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzales) or “boys playing girls sports” (Texas Rep. Colin Allred), almost all Democrats supported the Equality Act, an LGBTQ priority that would bar discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

“They can’t do it,” Schilling told Semafor. “It’s too much against what they stand for. They hate the family, they know it’s a threat to them, and they don’t like parental rights. This is a hugely winning issue for Republicans, across the board.”

In its advice for Republican candidates, shared with Semafor, APP says that candidates can win arguments if they reject progressive language, even — or especially — if doing that offends reporters. Democrats say that they are trying to protect trans kids, and Republicans can argue that “there is no such thing as a transgender child.” References to gender medicine are really about “hormone treatments and surgeries that sterilize children.”

When he takes office, said Schilling, Trump can act quickly to reverse the Biden administration’s pro-trans rules, guidelines, and funding streams — from Title IX interpretations that allow trans women in women’s sports, to the funding of gender medicine for prisoners, made famous in the Trump campaign ads. While courts have interpreted the 8th Amendment to protect trans health care in prison, Trump could cut off the funding.

“He can ban federal funding of sex changes,” Schilling said. “He has the authority to do it for federal inmates.”

When they criticize their colleagues, or pundits, for calling for a rethink on trans rights, Democrats typically cite what happened after the 2004 election. Gay marriage bans appeared on the ballot in 11 states, and in all 11, they passed. Gay marriage isn’t universally accepted now, but it’s universally legal; the generation that cast its first presidential vote this year has trouble imagining how it ever wasn’t.

This is compelling, if you’re one of the supermajority of Democrats who believes that Republicans exploited a non-issue and voters will eventually see through it. But there are important differences. First, while voters in the Bush years opposed equal marriage rights, they didn’t always see how anyone was actually harmed by them (opponents often talked vaguely about damaging the “institution” of marriage). No one was denied a marriage license because a gay couple got one.

Republican attacks this cycle identified people who felt they had something to lose if trans people won something: They argued taxpayer dollars would be channeled to cover prison surgeries they didn’t support, or that cisgender athletes would lose medals to competitors they couldn’t beat. Democrats argued these issues concerned a limited number of cases overall, but the premise of the Trump ads (though other campaigns were less subtle) was not just that Democrats were doing things voters disagreed with, but that they were focused on someone else’s material needs. The tagline was “Kamala’s for they/them, Trump is for you,” illustrated by Trump meeting with workers in a factory.

Progressives who accuse their colleagues of selling people out say that they should do a better job selling people on pluralism and that voters will recoil at bullying. But this gets at the second change from 2004: Republicans got very confident that they could make fun of trans people and drag queens with no backlash or downside. This was a theme that traveled across issues; Trump himself said all sorts of things about migrants (“they’re eating the dogs”) and trans people that horrified liberals and wouldn’t have survived the edit in a news story or TV show.

This didn’t start with Trump’s campaign. It started with boycotts and mockery of major brands that advertised to or with trans people. A theme in some post-election Democratic self-criticism is that their party seems “preachy” to people, and that it’s overly concerned with saying the polite thing or punishing people who don’t. This was Moulton’s initial point, not just that he had concerns about trans women in sports, but that he wasn’t supposed to talk about it.

During Trump’s presidency, when he rolled back some gender identity protections, Democrats were completely unified in opposing him. The people I talked to over the last few days expected that dynamic to return; it was hard to position random cultural figures as the heavies, when conservatives actually were saying who had rights and who didn’t. But if they do partially retreat — this is what happened in 2005, when the party’s next set of presidential candidates said they supported civil unions, not gay marriage — then people like Moulton are debating what line they can defend.

Julia Serano argues that any Democratic retrenchment on these issues would be “bad politics,” losing people who trusted them without winning them anyone knew: “If Democrats abandon trans people, Republicans will no doubt feel empowered to further expand their attacks on gender and sexual minorities. And cisgender LGB people will take it as a sign that the party has retreated from their issues as well.”