Democrats are currently going through a crisis of gender identity. After Vice President Kamala Harris got shellacked on Election Day, folks on the left have acknowledged that their stance on transgender issues contributed to their losses.
That’s right, folks. At least some Democrats are seeing that trying to convince the public that men can become women and vice versa wasn’t exactly a winning messaging strategy.
But it appears they still have much work to do when it comes to dealing with issues related to transgender individuals. The party is ensconced in a debate over transgender rights and the role their positions played in the massive losses they sustained during the election, according to a report from The Hill.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) weighed in on the matter during an interview with The New York Times, noting that Democrats “spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.”
The lawmaker continued, saying that he does not want his two young girls “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Moulton almost sounds like a Republican, doesn’t he? Perhaps not, given that most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, disagree with forcing female athletes to compete against biological men.
Like clockwork, Moulton’s comments elicited outrage coming from his own party. They even prompted his campaign manager to resign in protest.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) also took issue with the notion that Democrats shouldn’t keep trying to force progressive gender ideology down our throats. “After the 2004 election, a lot of pundits said it was time for Democrats to stop standing up for gay people. They were wrong, and history showed we could stand up for what’s right and still win elections,” he told an independent reporter.
Still, Moulton is not alone among Democrats. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) rightly noted that gender ideology cost them big in 2024, saying he “got clobbered on all the transgender messaging in my district.”
What is truly mind-boggling about this development is that transgender rights ranked quite low among voters’ priorities, with many believing that the left went “too far” with it, The Hill reported.
When people are dealing with high inflation, rampant crime, and illegal immigration, it is amazing that Democrats went so hard on pushing biological men in women’s sports and restrooms. Yet, most prominent leftists have not gotten the message as Moulton and Gonzalez have. Gender ideology is not a winning issue for Democrats, which is why President-elect Donald Trump and other Republicans were wise to hammer on this point.
Over recent years, progressives have worked hard to use government-run schools to indoctrinate children into their views on gender identity. They have cultivated an environment in academia, sports, and other institutions aimed at making people afraid to speak out against it out of fear of being ostracized as transphobes.
To put it simply, the way progressives have gone about promoting “transgender rights” has been off-putting and authoritarian. These people don’t even try to understand why regular folks might be averse to allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports. They show no consideration for the myriad of reports in which female athletes have been injured or deprived of opportunities because of this.
Progressives have all the sympathy in the world for trans-identified individuals, but show nothing but scorn and contempt for others affected by their obsession with obscuring the notions of sex and gender. This is why they cannot win on this issue – they want to force their values on everyone else instead of using persuasion and engaging in productive conversations about the matter.
As long as this is the case, gender ideology will continue to be a losing issue for Democrats. Unfortunately for them, too many of these people simply can’t help themselves. When progressives see a group they view as marginalized, the temptation to don the red cape and fly to the rescue is impossible to resist. It is throwing a raw steak in front of a starving rottweiler, expecting it not to gobble it up.
However, there is still good news. The fact that Democrats took a sound drubbing on Election Day largely because of the gender issue shows that more Americans are willing to fight back not only in the public square, but at the ballot box.
