Donate

Will Democrats ever drop the ‘transgender lunacy’?

Americans have rejected gender ideology, but the Democratic leadership won’t budge.

Kara Dansky

Topics Feminism Politics UK USA

Want to read spiked ad-free? Become a spiked supporter.

It’s difficult to know exactly when the Democratic Party began its full-throated embrace of gender-identity ideology, at the expense of women and girls as a sex class.

We know that Joe Biden was saying as early 2012 that anti-transgender discrimination is the ‘civil-rights issue of our time’. That happens to be the same year that his friend, Tim McBride, decided that he is a woman named Sarah (he has since been elected to Congress). We know that Democratic members of Congress first introduced the so-called Equality Act, which redefined sex to include ‘gender identity’ for all purposes under US civil-rights law, in 2015. We know that under President Obama, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued a joint ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to US schools in 2016, instructing them to interpret sex to include ‘gender identity’ for all purposes under Title IX, which was originally intended to prohibit sex discrimination in education. Earlier this month, during a debate on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, a perfectly sensible proposal to maintain single-sex sports in US schools, every single Democrat who spoke in opposition to the bill came off as an unhinged lunatic.

All of this is deeply unpopular with the American electorate, but the Democrats in power don’t seem to care. On 5 November, Donald Trump won a decisive victory in the US election, winning both the popular vote and the electoral college. He won every swing state, in addition to holding on to all the states he won in 2020. He did this on the heels of a weeks-long campaign of adverts that said, ‘Kamala Harris is for they / them; President Trump is for you’. Polls showed that ‘the most frequent criticism among swing voters who broke for Trump’ was that Harris ‘focussed on liberal cultural issues’ like trans. And the Republicans now hold majorities in both chambers of Congress. Democratic leadership, as a whole, failed to take heed of public opinion. Earlier this week, on the very first day of taking office, Trump signed a sweeping executive order protecting women and girls as a sex class.

One Democratic congressman did see the light. Less than a week after the election, Seth 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.’ In response, Matt Chilliak, his campaign manager, had a temper tantrum and resigned.

Last month, a former Democratic fundraiser named Lindy Li quit the Democratic Party, having raised ‘tens of millions of dollars’ for the Harris-Walz presidential campaign. She said on Piers Morgan Uncensored that the Democratic Party is a hypocritical and racist cult, that Kamala Harris is delusional, and that the Harris-Walz campaign spent millions of dollars on five-star hotels for campaign staffers. She concluded by saying that she wants to ‘be a part of the team that says that men are men and women are women, and that men shouldn’t play in women’s sports’, presumably meaning the Republicans.

Still, none of these criticisms or defections seem to have prompted any soul searching from Democratic leaders. Americans have heard nothing from Biden or Harris on this issue. We have heard nothing from senior Democrats Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer.

In November 2021, I published a book titled The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls. In it, I said:

‘Here is the truth we cannot speak: “gender identity” does not exist in any real, material sense, and “transgender” is simply a made-up concept that is used to justify all kinds of atrocities. It is, in effect, a men’s rights movement intended to objectify women’s bodies and erase us as a class. It is left-wing misogyny on steroids. I say this is as a leftist and a Democrat.’

My aim with that book was to get the Democratic Party leadership to knock it off with the trans nonsense.

In November 2023, I published a book titled The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. By then, it was clear to me that the Democrats in power were not going to knock it off with trans nonsense, so I at least wanted to make the case that if they didn’t, they were going to lose in November 2024. The US chapter of the global radical feminist group Women’s Declaration International sent copies of the book to the White House, to every member of the House and Senate, and to their chiefs of staff. Clearly, the Democrats took no notice.

Things are changing in the UK, where the Democrats’ sister party, Labour, has been forced back away from its past embrace of trans-activist positions. Health secretary Wes Streeting has apologised to MP Rosie Duffield for how Labour treated her after she spoke out for women’s sex-based rights. He has also introduced an indefinite ban on the sale of puberty blockers. Even prime minister Keir Starmer now appears to understand which class of human beings have cervixes and vaginas.

Sadly, things are not changing in the US Democratic Party, and it appears that the Democrats are indeed prepared to die on the hill that ‘some men are women’. Democrats are welcome to sign the Democratic Women’s Declaration, if they want to tell those in the party leadership how they feel. It’s still not too late for the Democrats to change course. They’d better do it soon if they hope to gain back voters.

Kara Dansky represents Women’s Declaration International USA on its amicus brief in US v Skrmetti. She is also the author of the 2023 book, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, published by Bombardier Books.

Picture by: Getty.

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Only spiked supporters and patrons, who donate regularly to us, can comment on our articles.

Join today