Moderation Is Not the Same Thing as Surrender

By Jonathan Chait

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

 

Before this month’s elections, when Democratic candidates were being attacked for letting transgender athletes compete in girls’ sports, trans-rights activists and their allies had a confident answer: They had nothing to fear, because anti-trans themes were a consistent loser for Republicans. That position became impossible to maintain after the elections, when detailed research showed that the issue had done tremendous damage to Kamala Harris and other Democrats. In fact, the third-most-common reason swing voters and late deciders in one survey gave for opposing Harris was that she “is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class,” an impression these voters no doubt got from endless ads showing her endorsing free gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained migrants.

 

Now some of the very people who pushed Democrats into adopting these politically toxic positions have shifted to a new line: Abandoning any element of the trans-rights agenda would be morally unthinkable. “To suggest we should yield even a little to Mr. Trump’s odious politics, to suggest we should compromise on the rights of trans people,” wrote the New York Times columnist Roxane Gay, would be “shameful and cowardly.” Asked whether his party should rethink its positions on transgender issues, Senator Tim Kaine said, “Democrats should get on board the hate train? We ain’t gonna do it.” The writer Jill Filipovic recently argued that Democrats must refuse “to chase the median voter if that voter has some really bad, dangerous, or hateful ideas.”

 

Refusing to accommodate the electorate is a legitimate choice when politicians believe they are defending a principle so foundational that defeat is preferable to compromise. But in this case, the no-compromise stance is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of the options on the table. Democrats do not, in fact, face a choice between championing trans rights and abandoning them. They can and should continue to defend trans people against major moral, legal, and cultural threats. All they need to do to reduce their political exposure is repudiate the movement’s marginal and intellectually shaky demands.

 

The major questions about trans rights are: Do some people have the chance to live a happier and more fulfilling life in a different gender identity than the one to which they were born? Do some of these people need access to medical services to facilitate their transition? Do they deserve to be treated with respect and addressed by their chosen names and pronouns? Do they deserve equal protections from discrimination in employment, housing, and military service? Must society afford them access to public accommodations so as not to assault their dignity?

 

I believe the moral answer to all of these questions is a clear yes. The evidence also suggests that this is a relatively safe position for politicians to take. Americans broadly support individual choice, and trans rights fit comfortably within that framework. Sarah McBride, the incoming first transgender member of Congress, faced down bullying by her new Republican colleagues—an example of how Democrats can defend the dignity of trans people without allowing themselves to be depicted as extremists. The Trump administration is reportedly planning to kick transgender people out of the military, a move that only 30 percent of the public supports, according to a February YouGov poll. If Trump follows through, this fight would give Democrats the chance to highlight the pure cruelty of the Republican stance.

 

Democrats mainly ran into trouble because they either supported or refused to condemn a few highly unpopular positions: allowing athletes who transitioned from male to female to participate in high-level female sports, where they often enjoy clear physical advantages; allowing adolescent and preadolescent children to medically transition without adequate diagnosis; and providing state-funded sex-change surgery for prisoners and detainees. The first two issues poll horribly; the last has not been polled, but you can infer its lack of support from the Harris campaign’s insistence on changing the subject even in the face of relentless criticism.

 

I think there’s a strong case to be made for the Democrats adjusting the first two of these stances on substantive grounds. But even if you disagree with that, as many activists do, there remains an almost unassailable political case for reversing course. Why not stick to what I’d argue are the clearest, most important cases where trans rights must be protected, while letting go of a handful of hard-to-defend edge cases that are hurting Democrats at the polls—yielding policy outcomes that work to the detriment of trans people themselves? The answer is that much of the trans-rights activist community and its most vocal allies have come to believe that the entire package of trans-rights positions is a single, take-it-or-leave-it bloc. That mistaken conviction underlies the insistence that compromise is impossible, and that the only alternative to unquestioning support is complete surrender.

 

This maneuver is common among political movements of all stripes. Consider how, say, Israel hawks routinely define being “pro-Israel” as not only supporting the existence of a Jewish state but also withholding any criticism of Israel’s military operations or settlement expansion. Once you have defined acceptance of your entire program as a moral test, it becomes easy to dismiss all opposition as bigotry—hence the disturbing ease with which many Israel hawks routinely smear even measured criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

 

Examples of this dynamic are easy to find. Gun-rights advocates will denounce even the mildest firearms restriction as gun-grabbing and a rejection of the Second Amendment; some climate activists have extended the term climate denier from those who deny the science of climate change to anybody who rejects any element of their preferred remedy.

 

Trans-rights activists have made especially extensive use of this tactic, frequently accusing anyone who dissents from any element of their agenda as transphobic. Quashing internal disagreements is a necessary step toward casting all dissent as pure bigotry. “A lot of LGBTQ leaders and advocates didn’t want to say they had concerns because they worried about dividing their movement,” the New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters noted.

 

Perhaps the nadir of this campaign occurred last year, when a group of Times contributors and staffers published an error-riddled letter attacking the paper. The letter accused the Times of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” with its reporting on the debate among youth-gender-care practitioners about the efficacy of providing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children. It effectively transmitted the message that calling into question any position maintained by trans-rights activists would create a reputational cost for anybody working not just in journalism but in other industries, too—particularly people in Democratic politics and other nonconservative elite fields. The hothouse dynamic no doubt contributed to Democrats’ inability to form reality-based assessments of their positioning on the issue.

 

A few days after the election, Democratic Representative Seth Moulton told the Times, “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” This sparked a furious backlash. Kyle Davis, a Democratic official in Moulton’s home city of Salem, called on Moulton to resign. “We’re certainly rejecting the narrative that trans people are to be scapegoated or fear-mongered against,” he told reporters. Moulton has supported the Equality Act and the Transgender Bill of Rights, both of which would extend broad anti-discrimination protections to trans people. He has explained that he favors “evidence-based, sport-by-sport policies,” rather than the sweeping bans favored by Republicans. But Moulton’s general support for trans rights makes his heresy on female sports more, not less, threatening to the left.

 

The MSNBC columnist Katelyn Burns argues that placing any limits on female sports participation means denying trans women all their other rights. “If trans girls are really boys when they’re playing sports … then trans women should be considered men in all contexts,” she wrote in October. That simple equation collapses under a moment’s scrutiny. Female sports is one of the rare cases in which the broadly correct principle of allowing trans people to set the terms of their own identity can meaningfully inhibit the rights of others. One can easily defend Lia Thomas’s right to be addressed as a woman and allowed access to women’s bathrooms without supporting her participation on a women’s college swim team.

 

In place of careful reasoning, advocates of the maximal position frequently resort to sweeping moralistic rhetoric. Innumerable columns after this month’s elections have chastised moderates for “throwing trans people under the bus.”

 

Arguing in this spirit, the New York Times columnist M. Gessen worries that trans people will be outright “abandoned” by the Democratic Party, and insists that Democrats cannot separate trans rights from other social issues, in part because Republicans see them all as linked. “On the right, all fears are interconnected, as are all dreams: Replacement theory lives right next to the fear of trans ‘contagion,’ and the promise of mass deportation is entwined with the vision of an America free of immigrants and people who breach the gender binary.”

 

As they refine their position profile, Democrats should obviously continue to listen to trans people themselves about their priorities. Those priorities are not always uniform, however, nor are they perfectly represented by the activist organizations speaking on their behalf. Dr. Erica Anderson, a trans woman and the former president of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, has criticized rapid medicalization of gender-questioning youth. The trans writer Brianna Wu argues that the movement’s adoption of more radical positions has imperiled its core goals. The tactic of smearing all of these critiques as “anti-trans” is deeply misleading.

 

In a column demanding that Democrats give not an inch on any element of the trans-rights agenda, the Time columnist Philip Elliott asserts, “Conceding ground to the winners, as seems to be the case here in a culture-war fight that is as over-simplified as it is ill-considered, is not a way to dig out of this deep hole.”

 

But the hole is not actually that deep. Harris lost both the national vote and Pennsylvania, the tipping-point state, by less than two percentage points. A Democratic firm found that exposure to Trump’s ubiquitous ads showing Harris endorsing free sex-change surgery for migrant detainees and prisoners moved the audience 2.7 points in his direction. And conceding ground to the winners is a time-honored way to escape political holes of any size. After Mitt Romney was hammered in 2012 over Republicans’ desire to cut Medicare, Trump repositioned them closer to the center. In 2024, Trump partially neutralized the GOP’s biggest liability, abortion, by insisting that he would leave the matter to the states, allowing him to pick up enough pro-abortion-rights votes to scrape by.

 

Gessen argues, “It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.” But there is plenty of reasonable room for Democrats to retreat—on female-sports participation, youth gender medicine, and state-sponsored surgery for prisoners and detainees. You may wish to add or subtract discrete items on my list. I can’t claim to have compiled a morally or politically unassailable accounting of which compromises Democratic politicians should make. What is unassailable is the principle that compromise without complete surrender is, in fact, possible.