The Transgender “Issue” Is Not a Distraction for Democrats
It’s an opportunity to speak clearly about human rights and morality. Follow the facts and the Golden Rule.
“HUMAN RIGHTS ARE WOMEN’S RIGHTS—and women’s rights are human rights.” It’s been nearly thirty years since Hillary Clinton stirred a United Nations women’s conference with those words, but they are with me often these days as Donald Trump and Republicans target the transgender community for what looks and feels very much like extinction.
You can’t get much more explicit than Trump’s pronouncement, cheered on by a bunch of rich, mostly white masters of the universe at his inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda, that “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
This absurdist edict—in which Trump conflated gender, a social and psychological concept, with terms for biological sex categories (male and female)—was just the start of his un-American assault on a vulnerable group of about 2 million. It’s possible, even probable, that Trump—a onetime supporter of transgender rights and individuals—is interested in the issue mainly as an instrument for bludgeoning Democrats. This certainly worked for him in 2024, and it may keep working for him.
But Democrats don’t have to make it easy. There’s no reason for them to fuel the MAGA fires by overthinking, underreacting, and avoiding confrontation, especially as real people are enduring difficult conditions and sometimes suffering irreversible damage. Democrats hold the high ground and they should dominate this debate, not dodge it as a distraction from some other (perhaps easier) subject.
Every single “distraction” these days is a main event. What are you going to minimize? The death of democracy, Supreme Court legitimacy, and the U.S. Constitution? The unaffordably high cost of living? Trump’s off-the-charts corruption and self-dealing? The GOP’s relentless exacerbation of an already galactic wealth gap, including its current push to make it even harder for low-income Americans to work, get health insurance, and raise kids? The vicious treatment and demonization of immigrants? Foreign students? The transgender community, from children to adults, denied self-determination and even their own identities?
The fictional detective Harry Bosch might describe this as “everything is a distraction or nothing is a distraction.” I’m going with nothing. Fight it all. Fight it by following the facts, the golden rule, and America’s North Star values.
Respect science and the facts
RESEARCH SUGGESTS THE MAJORITY of transgender adults first experience gender dysphoria—a feeling of a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity, accompanied by clinically significant distress—by age 7. Often children have such feelings years earlier. For an example of this, read Nevada Independent publisher Jon Ralston’s emotional essay about his little blonde daughter who threatened to cut a doll’s head off, refused to wear girls’ clothing, preferred fishing over malls, and told him she wanted to be a boy. He figured she was a tomboy, then maybe a lesbian. “Maddy never really talked about what the truth was until junior year. But somehow she had known since she was 5, when she eschewed dolls and dresses,” Ralston writes on the way to a gorgeous closing that will make you cry.
Studies do not support the idea that peer pressure leads to “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” among susceptible teens or young adults (the “social contagion” effect). In addition, research shows that the prevalence of regret among people who transition is “extremely low.” And intriguing recent research points to possible factors in brain anatomy that correlate with identifying as transgender—which suggests it is wrong to describe transgender identity as a “subjective preference,” as the Ohio attorney general did in 2023.
So let’s be clear: Trump’s “two-genders-only” is not science, it’s an ideological bumper sticker. Fundraising pitches are just that simple, but life is not. Here’s what the American Medical Association told governors in 2021: “Empirical evidence has demonstrated that trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”
Aside from gender, it isn’t even correct to say there are only two sexes. About 1 in 100 Americans are intersex in some way, for instance. Back in 2017, when I was USA Today’s commentary editor, I published a powerful personal account from Kimberly Mascott Zieselman, an advocate for intersex kids. Intersex individuals have sex characteristics that do not fit typical definitions of male or female, she wrote, but doctors often convince their parents they must have surgery. “We are erased before we can even tell our doctors who we are,” Zieselman wrote. She urged parents and doctors to “wait until an intersex person can participate in these life-altering decisions” instead of “inflicting irreversible harm solely because of a discomfort with difference.”
And one more thing: The two-genders-only fiction is presented by conservatives as a means to protect real women. This is not only offensive and sexist, it’s specious. The doublespeak headline of Trump’s Day One executive order—“DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT”—was bad enough. Even worse was a precursor from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in a 2023 campaign appearance.
Transgender girls playing girls’ sports is “the women’s issue of our time,” Haley said in June 2023 during her presidential campaign. “How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker room? And then they wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.”
AYFKM? Haley is no idiot, so I’d chalk up that cause-effect assertion to attempted deviousness or a belief that the rest of us are idiots. The sad truth is that the rate of depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, and suicide among the general population of teen girls is low compared to the rate among the population of trans and nonbinary young people. A Trevor Project study last year found that 46 percent of them have seriously contemplated attempting suicide.
Surgeon Jonathan Keith wrote memorably in 2018 about why he does gender-reassignment surgery for his patients: “Many were open about their plans for suicide should they not be able to have surgery. I had never experienced such a demonstrable need for urgent medical intervention outside the Trauma Bay. My patients were at death’s door and needed someone to act.”
I edited that article as well as a 2020 essay about the physical and legal risks of simply being trans in public by Charlotte Clymer, the writer, military veteran, and transgender advocate. “There aren’t enough hours in the day to fight every battle and not enough rights to guarantee our safety,” she wrote, with damning examples throughout.
Respect people and their rights
THE FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS should not be trying to expunge transgender people from the military, from passports and birth certificates, from websites, from prisons, from health research projects, and all the rest that’s tied up in at least 62 court cases.
Nor should the federal government or any state governments pretend to be doctors and ban treatments the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and many other groups consider best-practice care. The AMA, in a 2021 letter to governors, urged them to halt a “dangerous governmental intrusion” into health care that will hurt transgender children. But the assault keeps intensifying. So far this year, 942 anti-trans bills have been introduced in 49 states—already many more than in all of 2024.
And while we’re at it, let’s also keep the feds and state governments off the athletic fields and out of school bathrooms. Decisions about who plays on what teams and uses which bathrooms are best made by schools and school districts who know the students and the community.
The horses are out of the barn on much of this. But (to switch metaphors) that’s a reason to ramp up the battle, not desert the field, and the battle plan is simple: Treat people as you would wish to be treated. Our political differences, religious views, comfort or discomfort levels with someone else’s life or what they want to be called—that’s immaterial. All that matters is common courtesy, respect for fellow Americans, and horror at the attacks on them.
If I were running for something, or advising someone who was, I’d say don’t worry about polls. Worry instead about activating “the better angels of our nature.” Go with decency. Go with values. Go with science. And go with historian Heather Cox Richardson’s classic definition of what it means to be an American: “The whole point of American democracy is human self-determination. This is really about whether or not people—my neighbors, my friends, people I don’t like, myself—get to determine our own fate. It’s very hard . . . to think of anything that’s more important.”
Or anything that’s more relevant, and urgent, in this moment.
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