No, Republicans Did Not Start the Culture War over Transgenderism

By Madeleine Kearns

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

 

The New York Times recently published a piece titled “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives,” in which its authors paint conservatives as aggressors in the culture war over transgenderism. Really, opposition to transgenderism is a defensive movement. The political story is more about how a campaign for so-called transgender rights mobilized not only conservatives but also women’s-rights campaigners and moderates.

 

The authors, Adam Nagourney and Jeremy W. Peters, begin the story eight years ago when the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage, they say, was an issue that conservatives “had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors.” Its defeat at the court, therefore, “left them searching for a cause.”

 

But Obergefell v. Hodges didn’t dissuade supporters of traditional marriage any more than Roe v. Wade discouraged pro-life advocates in pursuit of their cause. What it did do was prompt a change of focus and a redirection of resources. The fight to defend marriage, defined as a union between one man and one woman, was lost. But the fight to defend religious freedom around the issue was renewed with greater urgency.

 

Really, it was the victors in the same-sex marriage debate who had been left idle by its conclusion. Gay-rights activists and lobbying groups were victims of their own success. With same-sex marriage now settled by law across all 50 states, what would occupy their time and resources? Some groups, such as the ACLU, pursued aggressive action against individual business owners who did not wish to provide services for gay weddings. But it’s hard to build a rights movement based on that alone — let alone justify a $40 million budget, such as the one boasted by the Human Rights Campaign.

 

Progressives declared transgenderism to be the new frontier. In May 2014, one year after the Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, Time magazine ran a cover story featuring Laverne Cox, titled “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier.” The author, Katy Steinmetz, heralded the arrival of “another civil rights movement [that] is poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs.” It sounded promising. But as time would tell, it lacked the libertarian selling points of its predecessor.

 

In their New York Times article, Nagourney and Peters claim that, politically, the transgender culture war “started with a smattering of Republican lawmakers advancing legislation focused on transgender girls’ participation in school sports,” and that it was “accelerated by a few influential Republican governors who seized on the issue early.” This is wrong on both counts. The first political fight wasn’t about sports, but bathrooms. And the first shot wasn’t fired by Republican governors, but by the Democratic administration under President Obama.

 

Idaho, which became the first state to ban males from participating in women’s sports, did so in 2020. Nine other states joined in 2021, eight more in 2022, and three so far in 2023. All this happened at least five years after the initiation of the transgender culture war. Again, these bills were defensive in nature, responding to changes set in motion as early as in 2016.

 

In February 2016, local officials in Charlotte, N.C., made changes to the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance allowing men who identify as women (and vice versa) to access public facilities belonging to the opposite sex. Republican lawmakers, who held supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, responded with House Bill 2, which prevented cross-sex use of intimate facilities. The response was corporate boycotts and criticism from leaders in the music, sports, and television industries, resulting in a devastating blow to North Carolina’s state economy.

 

The Obama-era Justice Department, meanwhile, sued North Carolina for its bathroom bill, as the Department of Education released its “Dear Colleague” letter instructing schools nationwide to interpret sex to mean gender identity for the purposes of Title IX. Not only were males who claimed transgender status to be given access to intimate female facilities such as bathrooms, showers, dormitories, and locker rooms, but they were to be allowed to join women’s sports teams as well.

 

In 2017, the Trump administration withdrew the guidance. Now, in 2023, the Biden administration has effectively reinstated it through its new Title IX rules. Amid this back-and-forth, many school districts have adopted policies based on identity rather than sex. The harms are clear, as they have been in the case of two male athletes who were allowed to compete in women’s track events in Connecticut and in the participation of Lia Thomas at the NCAA swimming championships.

 

The Times authors argue that it was amid the shifting gender norms and the “sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender [that] conservative groups spotted an opening in a debate that was gaining attention.” The authors don’t specify what the debate was about or why it was getting attention.

 

Indeed, they are strangely dismissive of objections to medicalized gender transitions for minors, attributing these concerns to “the same resentments and cultural schisms that have animated Mr. Trump’s political movement: invocations against so-called ‘wokeness,’ skepticism about science, parental discontent with public schools after the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns and anti-elitism.”

 

Elsewhere, New York Times reporters have acknowledged the debate within the medical profession as legitimate. But Nagourney and Peters seem less interested in the global controversy around the use of life-altering drugs and surgeries on patients too young to consent. They make no mention of the fact that clinicians in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland have already slammed the brakes on these procedures.

 

The Times reporters note that “the 2024 presidential election appears poised to provide a national test of the reach of this issue,” noting that both Trump and DeSantis have “aggressively supported measures curtailing transgender rights.”

 

What’s ironic is that, in the beginning, progressives wanted the transgenderism issue to have national reach. They picked this fight. It’s only now, because they’re worried — and because they’re losing — that they want to act as if they’re quietly maintaining the status quo.