There can be no compromise in the trans debate

As the Democrats are now forced to contend with the reality of Trump’s landslide win, progressives are scrambling to catch up to a world that no longer wants to play along with identity politics. Longtime leftists, who made bank hurling invectives at anyone who dared question the woke orthodoxy, are now trying to gracefully fling themselves into a backstroke to catch the changing tide.

Hyperbolic media commentators like The Young Turks’s Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian both did rather sudden about-faces. They’ve begun to criticise the Democrats as intolerant elitists, despite themselves having spent years vilifying anyone who failed to toe the line on trans activism as ‘terrible bigots’. Suddenly, the questions asked by the targets of people like Uygur and Kasparian are being repeated by these panicked progressives, who now present themselves as ‘moderate’.

Democrat and trans activist Brianna Wu, who many will recall as the ‘woman’ who sparked the Gamergate movement by claiming to have been ‘harassed’ for being ‘female’ in the videogaming world, only recently began to openly identify as ‘trans’. He now positions himself as a ‘reasonable’ trans activist, willing to compromise when it comes to trans rights.

According to Bari Weiss, who recently interviewed Wu, Wu now believes that ‘trans activists have lost the plot and have alienated regular Americans, thereby weakening the trans-rights movement as a whole’. This is true, of course. One thing we learnt from the recent US election is that Americans are done with watching males win gold in female sports competitions. They will no longer stand by while grown men waltz into their daughters’ changing rooms. The gender-identity ideology forced upon us all over the past decade is very quickly becoming a thing of the past. And Democrats are noticing.

According to the New York Times, Democratic congressman Seth Moulton has suggested the party ‘shift in approach to transgender issues’. ‘Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face’, Moulton said. ‘I have two little girls, I don’t want them 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.’

It’s a rather tepid comment, particularly considering that Moulton backed a number of trans-rights bills in the US. Last year, he signed a letter calling on President Joe Biden and Democratic congressional leaders to reject any ‘anti-LGBTQI+ provisions’ in the budget, including one related to preserving women’s sport in schools and colleges. Yet now he says he has ‘nuanced views’ on these issues. ‘I do know that women’s rights are important and transwomen’s rights are important, so we have to find a balance that makes sense’, he said.

While that might sound like a reasonable approach, the truth defies it. There is no balance on the question of biological sex – either you are male or you are female. There is no changing that. Forcing people to say otherwise has proven to be a losing strategy.

In the face of such coercion, people stopped being afraid to tell the truth about trans. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has had a particular impact, as what was censored before is no longer. As of two years ago, we could suddenly say – on what is now called X – that no child is ‘born in the wrong body’. We are free to correctly sex males, despite their preferred pronouns. We can say that it is unacceptable for men to compete in women’s sport. We can speak the truth I was banned for tweeting in 2018: ‘Men aren’t women.’

What I knew, and what the then social-media tsars also clearly knew, was that the more people who said such things out loud, the more people would feel emboldened to join in. Courage is contagious, and so is the truth.

The tides turned hard and fast. Only weeks after Trump won the 2024 election, Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace introduced a resolution banning biological men from entering women’s toilets on Capitol grounds. ‘Full TERF’, Mace wrote on X, in response to a news story shared about her resolution. Just two days later, House speaker Mike Johnson announced the order: ‘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.’

Wu, the supposed moderate, was incensed by this. He should be entitled to use the women’s bathroom, he claimed, because he is a proper trans person. ‘I have a vagina. All my documents say female. I’ve been married to a man for 16 years’, he argued on X. But Wu’s arguments are no more reasonable than those who say anyone may use whichever changing room, locker room or washroom they identify with. What is the difference between a man who has ‘transitioned’ and a man who has not? There isn’t one. Cosmetic surgery and a piece of paper don’t make a man a woman any more than a deep desire to be female does. Besides, gender identity has always just been about feeling and pronouncement. It is not a concrete, verifiable or coherent concept.

What Wu and those attempting ‘moderate’ approaches to trans issues fail to understand is that the entire concept of gender identity must be scrapped. There is no surgery that can turn a male female. There is no child that must be mutilated and sterilised in order to ‘really be themselves’. There is no circumstance where it is reasonable to allow a male to compete as a female in sport. So long as gender identity exists as a concept under law – that is to say, the idea that one can ‘identify’ as the opposite sex – men will be able to claim they are female and access women’s spaces.

Transgender ideology doesn’t make sense in any context, and whether that inconveniences people like Wu is beside the point. We don’t make laws to accommodate every single preference of every single individual. We have to draw the line in ways that make sense. And it doesn’t make sense to say that some men are actually women because they feel it more strongly than other men, or have gone to greater lengths to perform femininity than other men, or because they deserve it, or because their ID says so, or because they are married to other men. The line must always be drawn at the truth. Making exceptions based on feelings is how we got into this huge mess in the first place.

We are already seeing the rewriting of history – or at least the whitewashing of history. The same progressives and Democrats who called those of us who spoke out against trans activism loathsome bigots now play at reasonable discourse, pretending things were never really as bad as they were.

An article in the New York Times this week described the threats, censorship and persecution experienced by dissidents as ‘unsparing criticism’. I guess if that’s what you want to call my having to hire private bodyguards in order to speak about women’s rights in public, or having to outrun a masked gang of trans activists desiring to ‘kill all TERFs’, or having been banned from social media for four years for calling a man ‘he’, that’s your prerogative. But it’s a lie.

The response to those of us who spoke out against gender-identity ideology was not simply criticism. It was years of violent threats, blacklisting, loss of income and jobs, stalking, censorship, No Platforming, harassment, ostracisation, loss of friends and endless public libel. Women in the UK were visited by the police over tweets. Women like Maya Forstater lost their jobs for saying men can’t change their sex. Women in prison were sexually harassed and assaulted by violent male predators because of Democrat policies. The bodies of minors were permanently disfigured and rendered sterile thanks to ‘gender medicine’. Women lost their ability to protect themselves and their children or to speak out in their own defence.

Now, the very same activists who pushed all this on us are apparently ‘rethink[ing] and recalibrat[ing] their confrontational ways, and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition’. I call bullshit.

The trans reign of terror is over in America. We won. Any related ‘soul-searching’ happening is in response to that reality. It is an attempt to convince us to roll back this massive triumph. But we mustn’t allow a softer approach to cloud our commitment to women, kids and reality.

Democrats like Moulton claim they want to ‘find a balance’ between ‘trans rights’ and women’s rights, saying that if the Democrats can achieve this, ‘I think we can turn this around and actually win on this issue’. Wu apparently has a desire for Democrats to ‘get back to common sense, kitchen-table issues’.

Here’s my compromise: if we all agree that men aren’t women, ever, then at last we can move on.

Meghan Murphy is a Canadian and American writer living in Mexico. Her podcast is The Same Drugs.