Goldberg: Democrats lack nuanced answer to transgender attacks

It’s hard to imagine how terrifying it must be to be a trans person, or the parent of one, in America right now.

Donald Trump and his party, having triumphed in an election in which they demonized trans people, seem hellbent on driving them out of public life. Democrats, some of whom blame the party for staking out positions on trans issues that they couldn’t publicly defend, are shellshocked and confused. Democratic leaders have been far too quiet as congressional Republicans, giddy and vengeful in victory, seek to humiliate their new colleague, Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, D-Del., by barring her and other trans people from using the appropriate single-sex bathrooms in the Capitol.

I say this as someone who has been called a TERF, a contemptuous acronym that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, more times than I can count. For a decade now, I’ve been trying to balance a belief in the rights of trans people with my skepticism of some trans activist positions. I’ve written with a degree of sympathy about feminists who’ve been ostracized for wanting to maintain women’s-only spaces. I believe that the science behind youth gender medicine is unsettled, and I dislike jargon like “sex assigned at birth” that tries to mystify or elide the reality of biological sex. (Except for rare exceptions, doctors don’t “assign” sex, they identify it.) I care very little about sports, but it seems dishonest to deny that male puberty tends to confer advantages on trans women athletes.

Occasionally, I receive angry or plaintive messages from trans people accusing me of helping America down a slippery slope that has brought us to our lamentable present, when discrimination against trans people has been normalized to a degree that recently seemed unthinkable. During Trump’s first presidential campaign, he said his trans supporter Caitlyn Jenner was welcome to use whatever bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower. At the time, North Carolina’s bathroom bill, which resulted in economically painful boycotts of the state, was widely seen as a self-inflicted wound.

Keeping quiet

Eight years later, anti-trans rhetoric was a central part of the Trump campaign; between Oct. 7 and Oct. 20, more than 41% of pro-Trump ads promoted anti-trans messages. Over a dozen states now have laws restricting trans people’s access to single-sex bathrooms. In the face of this onslaught against a tiny and vulnerable group of people, there’s pressure on liberals to keep any qualms we might have about elements of progressive gender ideology to ourselves.

That’s one reason, despite my interest in sex and gender, I haven’t written about these debates as much as I otherwise might have. But I’m increasingly convinced that this widespread reticence hasn’t served anyone very well. The basic right of trans people to live in safety and dignity, free from discrimination, should be uncontested. But evolving ideas about sex and gender create new complexities and conflicts, and when progressives refuse to talk about them forthrightly, instead defaulting to clichés like “trans women are women,” people can feel lied to and become radicalized.

Rejection of progressive orthodoxy on gender can even become a lens through which people see the world; just look at Dave Chappelle or J.K. Rowling. As writer Sam Harris put it in an election postmortem, “I know people who haven’t been touched by this issue personally, for whom it was the only issue that decided their vote.”

There are some Americans, no doubt, who won’t be mollified by anything short of the erasure of trans people from society. But others simply feel that progressives aren’t leveling with them, a perception Democrats might have been able to address with a bit more frankness.

Time for honesty

In 2023, for example, Joe Biden’s administration proposed a common-sense rule that would prohibit outright bans on trans girls and women in school sports, but allow for exceptions to promote fair competition and prevent injury. “This more nuanced stance marked the first time the Biden administration took the position that sex differences can matter in school sports, something hotly disputed by leading LGBTQ rights organizations,” Rachel Cohen wrote in Vox. But, she pointed out, the administration, perhaps wary of inflaming tensions in the Democratic coalition, never spoke about the new policy. Instead, Kamala Harris was largely silent in the face of relentless Republican attacks, as if hoping the whole issue would just go away.

Politically, nuance is a harder sell than certainty. But it’s more honest, and honesty is what’s needed in the face of a coming tsunami of malicious MAGA propaganda. To have a chance of weathering it, Democrats are going to have to do two things at once. They need to have some uncomfortable conversations about complicated subjects, while at the same time standing up for a minuscule minority that’s increasingly under siege. After all, the bullying of McBride — who has handled Republican cruelty with exceptional grace — is only the opening salvo in what is likely to be a far-reaching national campaign against trans people.

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who is rapacious for media attention, is campaigning to extend the congressional bathroom ban to all federal buildings, including museums and airports. (She’s hawking T-shirts celebrating her crusade.) The Times of London reported last week that Trump is planning an executive order that would prohibit trans people from joining the military and medically discharge those already enlisted, labeling them unfit to serve. (The transition team has denied this.) The new administration will most likely attempt to ban Medicare and Medicaid coverage for trans people’s hormone therapy, meaning some could be cut off from drugs they depend on. At a time when some parents of trans kids have fled red states to protect medical care they see as essential, the Trump administration wants to prohibit such treatment for minors nationally.

There’s some ideological ground that Democrats should retreat from. But then they need to find a place where they will stand and fight.

Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist.