Democrats Retreat from Transgender Priorities

Democratic leaders have retreated from supporting Rep. Sarah McBride’s transgender priorities amid growing evidence transgenderism is Russian roulette for candidates in swing districts.

“It’s one thing to be up against this and fighting these fascists, it’s another when our [Democratic] allies cave like this and don’t even put up a fight,” advocate Alejandra Caraballo said November 20 on Blue Sky, the progressives’ social-media safe space. Carabello added:

I’m not gonna lie, today was one of the hardest days I’ve had since I came out. But I’m not giving up. I’m resolved to fight even harder.

The dispute began when Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) asked for House leaders to set rules that keep Deleware-elected McBride — a male who says he is a “transgender woman” — out of the private spaces reserved for women in Congress.

Democrats first tried to distract their media allies from the core issue — what is the border between men and women? — and then tried to portray McBride as a victim of bullies.

But Mace kept up a barrage of popular tweets, and Democrats quickly retreated from their loud claims that men should be allowed to freely cross the sexual border by declaring themselves to be “transgender.”

That retreat forced McBride to agree not to intrude into spaces reserved for women.

McBride’s retreat is likely temporary and tactical. “They are going to do that to get a rise out of me and my job will be to not give them the response they want,” McBride told a podcaster in October. “I can’t do right by the trans community [in the long run] if I’m not being the best member of Congress that I can be for Delaware,” McBride said.

But the collapse in Democratic support comes after the presidential election where President Donald Trump successfully used the Democrats’ support for transgenderism to paint them as out-of-touch extremists. “Kamala [Harris] is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” said a heavily funded ad.

“Democrats [are] now turning to rebuild after a demoralizing and decisive loss, [so] the question of how the party deals with transgender rights has emerged as a challenge for the years ahead,” the New York Times reported on November 20. The article noted:

In the weeks before Election Day, aides to Kamala Harris could see in campaign polling that Donald J. Trump’s attacks on Ms. Harris’s support for transgender rights were driving away swing voters.

…

But none of the [Harris counter] messages significantly swayed voters when the ads were tested with focus groups, according to four former Harris campaign aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

After a sharp, internal debate, the campaign shelved the ads. Instead, it settled on an anodyne television spot that showed the vice president condemning “negative ads” without mentioning Mr. Trump’s transgender attacks.

One of Trump’s transgender ads “ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC,” the New York Times reported on November 7.  “It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.”

Many polls show that the sexually-driven transgender ideology is deeply and increasingly unpopular outside the establishment’s media outlets, progressives’ social-media refuges, and academic offices.

The McBride spat also helped ideologically cautious Republicans to handle the tangled issue of transgenderism, which demands the courts force women to submit to the personal wishes of men who wish to be treated as women.

That extraordinary demand is hidden behind pseudo-medical claims about many “genders,” by confusing language, and media cheerleading. For example, the establishment media framed the dispute around “transgender bans” instead of “protections for women.”

The demand is also hidden behind claims of victim status, threats, youth vulnerabilities, suicides, and non-existent rights, plus appeals for pity from sexually aggressive men.

But Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) used clear language when he settled the dispute on November 20:

All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.

“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” he added.

The election defeat is a major problem for Democrats.

Transgenderism has been a powerful carrot for their base of progressives eager to champion new minorities, such as “trans kids.” That advocacy matches their 2018 advocacy for migrants and “kids in cages” at the border between Mexico and the United States.

Moreover, the transgender agenda does not clash with their donor base of investors and wealthy liberals.

If Democrats double down and direct their transgender allies back to the transgenderism fight, they will make it easy for future GOP candidates to win over more swing voters. Those GOP gains would likely include many non-ideological women in critical suburbs.

But if the Democrats give up the transgender fight after their 2024 disaster, they will have to promote new causes and new victims for their progressives to champion. Those causes may also be unpopular — for example, Biden’s Extraction Migration policies — or further divide the Democrats’ mix of wealthy donors and various diversity groups.

Democrats hope the U.S. Supreme Court creates new legal rights for sexual migrants — but that hope has been damaged by the election and recent court decisions.

Republicans, however, can make this balancing act by Democrats even more difficult. For example, Mace has drafted a bill that would force Democrats to vote yes or no on whether to bar men from women’s private spaces in all federal buildings.