Why Democrats can’t give up gender ideology
Upon entering the White House in mid-March for a standard tour, I glanced to my left and saw an iconic photo hanging on the wall. Dozens of girls and young women, some dressed in athletic apparel, huddled around President Donald Trump in the East Room on February 5 as he signed an executive order prohibiting men from participating in women’s sports.
“Congratulations to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights. Without you, there’d be no images like this,” quipped an irritated J.K. Rowling the following day in a post on X, along with a similar photo of Trump showing off the order he had just signed.
Rowling was expressing consternation at a genuine mystery. Why do elected Democrats continue to support a cause that reputable polling shows their voters are rejecting? Not even a thorough shellacking in November and significant swing state voter discontent over these issues has caused the party leadership to course-correct.
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The Left’s obstinate posture appears to be rooted in at least three factors: an unwavering sense of moral superiority derived from framing it as a civil rights issue; the ideological chokehold of the moneyed NGO world; and the horrifying reality of transgender medical atrocities — that is, the emerging medical scandal in which they are often personally connected and unambiguously complicit. Indeed, it is so gruesome that Democrats prefer not to talk about it or to deflect to the supposed experts.
On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt the trans movement a significant setback when it ruled in United States v. Skrmetti that states can prohibit transgender procedures for minors without violating constitutional rights. But the Skrmetti ruling does not mark an end to the trans issue. Democrats will continue to pursue it as long as those three factors continue to operate.
The idea that the trans issue is a continuation of the civil rights movement is deeply ingrained in the Democratic mentality as they have styled themselves as defenders of civil liberties for minority groups and disadvantaged people: African-Americans and other non-White ethnicities, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and in the last decade, “trans” people. They consider the 1960s Civil Rights Movement the glory days full of unquestionably brave heroics, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders, and the marchers who courageously crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, led by civil rights icons John Lewis and Rev. Hosea Williams. To be sure, great and noble civil rights gains were indeed acquired for Black Americans during that time, and it is good and right to celebrate them.
During oral arguments in the Skrmetti case, Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson compared the Tennessee statute restricting puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for under-18 youth to laws banning interracial marriage. “I’m worried that we’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases,” she said, invoking Loving v. Virginia, which overturned bans on interracial marriage in 1967. “I wonder whether Virginia could have gotten away with what they did here by just making a classification argument, the way that Tennessee is in this case.”
What does interracial marriage between adults have to do with a contested law intended to safeguard children from the harms of experimental medical interventions that are irreversible? As Christopher Rufo pointed out in response to Jackson’s comparison, the racial struggles of that era constitute the “single prism” through which the Left sees everything.
No matter how much progress the nation has made they are “stuck in the past, terrified it will lose the narrative,” and cling to the civil rights script by creating new categories of oppression, culminating in “trans” children, a “purely ideological phenomenon that is justified post hoc through fake ‘medical necessity,’” he continued.
Especially since the rise of former president Barack Obama, Democrats have emphasized reckoning with past wrongs, namely America’s racial sins. Many religious Black Americans have resented the comparison of their struggle for civil rights to gay rights, but that political strategy has proven successful. “Trans rights,” however, has been a much harder sell.
And that is because for the postmodern leftist, every subsequent civil rights cause is somehow an extension of that era no matter how unrelated the topic. This habit of mind and framing of the issue goes all the way to the top. As far back as 2012, then-vice president Joe Biden described transgender rights as the “civil rights issue of our time,” and made several similar declarations ever since, including throughout his presidency.
Lifelong Alabama Democrat Matt Osborne, who served as an outside operative during Doug Jones’s successful Senate campaign in 2017, tells me in an interview that Democrats needed something to believe in, and the so-called “civil rights movement of the 21st century” gave them “perfect ersatz belief.”
It is ersatz, he says, because the substitute is not as good as the real thing. “Trans rights are not as good as the real civil rights movement of Selma Bridge,” he says, “because the agenda demands that the project infringes on the established civil rights of other people,” women’s sports being “one glaring example.”
With intersectionality all the rage, the trans issue became useful for seizing and wielding the power to punish wrongthink inside the party. This has fueled increased polarization on the left. Even in Alabama, the reddest of the red states, stalwart Democrats champion trans rights. Osborne says that every Democrat in Alabama who still talks to him admits that things have “become unrecognizable.”
Osborne left the party to become a military historian when he discovered that gender ideology had infected every organ of progressive politics. He now writes for the Substack The Distance Mag.
Shawn Thierry, a black former Democratic lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, maintains Democrats do indeed know of the gravity of the harm caused by the trans movement but are suppressing their consciences and turning on colleagues who dare to break ranks.
At Genspect's “Detrans Awareness Day” briefing on Capitol Hill in March, Thierry recounted the story of deciding to cross the aisle and vote with her Republican colleagues to restrict gender modification drugs and surgeries for under-18 youth. She was suddenly persona non grata and received death threats.
Thierry said that, as the vote neared, her colleagues privately admitted to her that they believed these gender interventions were wrong to carry out on children. One in particular took her aside and said: “I know [it’s wrong], but hold your nose and vote with us.”
She refused to budge. As a result of her stance, Thierry was primaried and narrowly lost her seat.
In New Hampshire, a 22-year-old black Democratic state house representative, Jonah Wheeler, was put through a veritable struggle session when he joined Republicans in supporting a bill allowing private spaces (such as restrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, and prisons) to be separated by sex, not gender identity.
“There are people out there who don’t want to be labeled as transphobic—and they aren’t. People who believe ‘live and let live,’ who also believe that women’s spaces should be for women. And that position needed to be said by a Democrat,” Wheeler said in an April profile in The Free Press. “The party has moved to this place where, ‘You have to agree with me or you’re the devil.”
Wheeler noted that when he spoke to explain his vote, 100 of the 177 Democrats in the chamber got up and walked out. In the weeks after that vote, he was called a “Nazi,” a “fascist,” and a “puppet of the right.”
Even with the emerging realization that transgenderism is a political albatross around their necks, those who pay the bills and shape the thinking on the left are not about to relent, if the massive money trail is any indication.
Independent journalist Jennifer Bilek has shown in her extensive investigative reporting that billionaires such as the Chicago-based Pritzkers have been funding transgender initiatives worldwide through strategic philanthropy. Similarly, Jon L. Stryker, heir to the fortune of Stryker Medical Corporation (which as of June 2025, is worth around $145.4 billion), funds the Arcus Foundation, another enormous funder of LGBT advocacy groups. In March of 2021, Arcus gave the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation a $15 million grant, from which it launched an LGBTQ & HIV Project in Stryker’s name, “the largest LGBTQ rights-focused gift in the ACLU’s history.” Not coincidentally, the ACLU has been active in filing lawsuits challenging state laws prohibiting the hormonal and surgical trans-ing of minors.
Arkansas was the first to enact such a law on April 6, 2021, after the state legislature overrode the veto of its then-governor, Asa Hutchinson, a Republican. The ACLU’s lawsuit was filed against Arkansas on April 30. They have taken similar action in many states over similar laws, including in Tennessee, which was at the center of the Skrmetti ruling.
When asked how this colossal largesse shapes the contours and ideological direction of the Democratic party, Bilek says that this economic clout has undoubtedly helped institutionalize transgenderism but it has also financially benefited other powerful industries — pharma and tech — from which gender ideology has, in part, emerged. The intersection of these industries is what makes “trans” the multi-tentacled behemoth that it is.
“The LGBTQI+ lobby, consisting of powerful NGOs, plays a key role in promoting the narrative of gender ideology into mainstream culture, with many of the largest organizations in this network maintaining close ties to both the medical and tech sectors, and seated at their heads are men who identify as LGBTQI+,” she explains.
“So the power of the Democrats’ attachment to ‘trans’ ideology is a confluence of tribal loyalty, technological fervor reaching a religious peak, and profit.”
Few people embody that techno-religious fervor more than Tim Gill. In 2017, Rolling Stone described Gill as “a visionary, a computer-nerd-turned-brilliant strategist, the megadonor who coalesced a movement around the fight for marriage equality and then pushed on to victory, investing hundreds of millions of his fortune into LGBTQ causes.” The Gill Foundation’s 2023 annual report records that it gave just over $7 million to “LGBTQ Equality” causes that year, representing approximately 60% of all its grants for that year.
Colorado, Gill’s home state, is ground zero of the Democrats’ dilemma on the trans issue. Once a red state but now solidly blue, Colorado’s trans policies are becoming increasingly extreme.
Earlier this year, the Colorado legislature passed HB25-1312, which among other elements, makes “misgendering” or “deadnaming” a trans-identified person an act of discrimination. In the upper chamber, only two Senate Democrats joined Republicans in opposing the bill. Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed it on May 23. That same day, he also signed another similar bill, the Kelly Loving Act, which codified into law that health insurance must cover so-called “gender-affirming care.”
According to Travis Morrell, a medical doctor from Grand Junction, Colorado, and a fellow with the advocacy group Do No Harm, “Colorado is a Chernobyl about to blow.”
He cites a 2024 paper by Elizabeth Jensen, a safety engineer, presenting the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) as a case study of organizational failure. All major medical associations in the U.S. continue to defer to WPATH and its Standards of Care despite overwhelming evidence of corruption, extreme negligence, and widespread medical malpractice.
“You can recognize an organizational safety failure when free discussion of dangers is penalized,” says Morrell. “With Chernobyl, the nuclear reactor in Ukraine that melted down in 1986, you know that the problem isn’t one person flipping the wrong switch, but years of problems that built up unnoticed, because if you spoke up, you could lose your job, get demoted, or be sent to Siberia.”
Due to the work of the Alabama Attorney General’s office, it was exposed that former HHS Secretary Rachel Levine (a man who claims to be a woman) urged WPATH to not include any age limits for trans-medical procedures in the newest version of its guidelines, the 8th version of its Standards of Care (SOC-8). Among its many insanities, SOC-8 claims “eunuchs” are a type of “gender-diverse” people.
WPATH is analogous to the Chernobyl disaster in that dissent is ruthlessly excluded from the echo chamber. In the Colorado legislature, insulated Democrats sit in their state capitol offices listening day after day to paid activists from One Colorado, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU, all of which shill for WPATH and the larger trans industry. In other words, Democrats are financially and ideologically locked in, with very few willing to run afoul of their sponsors enforcing the trans orthodoxy.
Radical feminist Kara Dansky, author of the 2023 bookThe Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, noted on her Substack, the TERF Report, in March that the Left is blind here because they have a consistent pattern of believing they are on the “right side of history.”
“They don’t see themselves as capable of being morally wrong — at most, they might acknowledge using the wrong tactics or moving too quickly. They might even concede that there are some compromises to be made without realizing that compromise is impossible,” she observed, citing a like-minded friend.
Dansky tells me that this is not about compromise on a public policy issue where you may not get everything you want but you will accomplish something important and move a legislative debate forward. The trans issue is altogether different because the stakes are existential.
“Any compromise on the material reality of sex means not only a compromise on reality but a compromise on the humanity of women and girls as a sex class,” Dansky says. “As a feminist, that is unacceptable to me.”
Dansky puts federally elected Democrats into three camps: the true believer trans allies who are dug in and will not let it go; the newer electeds who seem befuddled and do not appear to understand the issue but still vote in step with trans activist lobby groups; and those who do understand the issue but think they can continue to deflect until it goes away.
She places politicians like Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and Senator John Ossoff (D-Georgia) in that third camp. Moulton spoke of his concern for his daughters playing against males on the sports field in the days after the 2024 election, calling his party “out of touch” on the issue. Ossoff was the deciding vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee last summer rejecting magistrate judge Sarah Netburn for a federal court seat for the southern district of New York. Netburn had recommended, against the objection of the Bureau of Prisons, that a trans-identified man who had raped a 9-year-old boy and distributed child pornography while out on parole be housed in a women’s correctional facility.
But the deflection option is becoming less and less feasible as the grisly truth of what transgender policies cause — sterile and disfigured children, boys injuring girls in athletic competition, male sexual predators locked up alongside female prisoners — becomes harder to deny in light of viral social media clips that disrupt the mainstream media’s framing of the issue.
In one such viral clip, at a state legislative hearing in Wisconsin, clinical researcher Jamie Reed spares no details about the gruesome reality of trans medical procedures on young people. During her remarks, she mentions the case of an otherwise healthy 18-year-old man who underwent a laparoscopic intestinal vaginoplasty, in which surgeons harvested a portion of his colon to fashion a fake vagina. The puberty blockers he had taken had inhibited his penis from growing, so the usual surgical inversion of the sex organ could not be performed as there was not enough penile tissue. That young man tragically died from sepsis shortly after the surgery. This teenager was among the 70 young people in the linchpin study upon which the entire youth sex change experiment was based.
In February 2023, Reed blew the whistle at the now-shuttered transgender center at Washington University in St. Louis, where she once worked.
“I saw a patient population go from four new intakes per month, who were mostly pre-pubertal boys, to 50 to 60 patients per month, and 80% of them were teenage girls,” Reed told Wisconsin legislators in March. She was speaking in support of AB 104, a proposed bill restricting gender medicalization for minors.
She also told them about a female patient who had grown up in foster care. She had undergone a double mastectomy at the center, then called the clinic asking if she could have her breasts reattached. She had reportedly de-transitioned, become pregnant, and concluded that her trans identity was partly a result of peer influence.
Reed, who had previously supported the trans medical protocol, implored Wisconsin Democrats, “I beg my party, please do the scientific right thing.”
The Wisconsin Assembly approved the bill, but Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, has vowed to veto any such measure that reaches his desk.
Reed said in an April interview that she could charitably consider that some Democrats and progressives still may not have learned about the true nature of trans medicalization, given how slanted the liberal media’s coverage has been.
“But what I always held as a core value as a Democrat was to question the narrative, especially when it seemed too good to be true. True classical liberals, those who trust but verify, have pulled back the curtain and seen the wizard,” Reed said.
Dansky is convinced that Democrats know about the ghastly reality of gender-affirming care and that many of them are living in a kind of psychological paralysis.
“They can’t move away from it because they can’t acknowledge what they have been supporting for the past couple of decades. They just can’t,” Dansky says.
The cognitive dissonance is strongest for those who have affirmed their trans-identifying children or whose friends and family members have done the same. She wants a reckoning, mea culpas, and apologies from Democrat leaders. But she thinks what is most likely to happen is that they will try to “let the matter die on the vine and hope for the best.”
The trans mania may indeed be starting to die on the vine, but it is too early to say. Particularly in light of Tennessee’s win in Skrmetti, the legacy media is signaling that the trans movement has overreached and it is time to pivot.
Last week, Ezra Klein of TheNew York Timesinterviewed Sarah (formerly Tim) McBride, the lone trans-identifying member of Congress, who admitted that support for trans rights was “built on a house of sand.” Nicholas Confessore’s New York Times postmortem on the Skrmetti case described the lawsuit as a strategic miscalculation for the Left.
“Everyone who tried to avert this disaster,” lamented The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait, “was smeared as a transphobe.”
Abigail Shrier is among those who believe that the gender fever has finally broken. In a January 30 essay in The Free Press, the author of the 2020 watershed book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters credited the ending of this spell to a “ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff.”
Her optimistic words came two days after President Trump signed Executive Order 14187, which decried the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of minors as “a stain on our Nation’s history" and demanded that "it must end."
At the moment, approval ratings for the Democratic Party are hovering at historic lows. But given historical precedent, it is entirely likely that Democrats will regroup enough to retake the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. They will only have to win a few seats, given the current slim margin.
Whatever happens, Democrats will be facing a barrage of Republican ads that are sure to include the iconic photo of Trump signing the EO on women’s sports surrounded by girls in their athletic gear. Those ads may help decide tight races.
Osborne, the Alabama Democrat, predicts that Democrats will have to experience more election losses before they finally dispense with all things trans.
“They benefit from the false media framework of Trump versus the trans. They figure that he will fail, because of the tariffs and NATO or whatever, and the default response of voters will be a blue wave in the midterms, so they can say the trans rights crusade is still on. It’s denial, of course, but it works for them as a concept,” he says.
“Until it doesn’t work in the ballot booth.”
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