Democrats Just Can’t Quit Their 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 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 that featured 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 the progressive position on a range of transgender issues has caused the party leadership to course-correct.

The obstinate posture appears to be rooted in at least three factors: an unwavering sense of moral superiority derived from the framing as a civil rights issue; ideological enforcement by activist funders; and an inability to acknowledge the emerging medical scandal to which they are often personally connected and unambiguously complicit.

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The idea that the trans issue is a continuation of the civil rights movement is deeply ingrained in the Democratic mentality. During oral arguments in U.S. vs. Skrmetti, the recent case testing the constitutionality of a ban on transgender medical procedures for minors, 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.”

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.”

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.

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 a “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.”

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This ideological enforcement is backed by some of the party’s top donors. 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, 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 treatments for minors.

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,” 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 a similar bill, the Kelly Loving Act, which codified into law that health insurance must cover “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 in 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.”

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Radical feminist Kara Dansky, author of the 2023 book The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, observed to 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 tells me that she puts the 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-MA) and Senator John Ossoff (D-GA) 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 district 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 child 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 where transgender ideology and transgender policies lead—not only boys dominating girls’ athletic competitions but also sterile and disfigured children and male sexual predators placed in female prisons—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, Jamie Reed spares no details about the gruesome reality of trans medical procedures on young people. 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 detransitioned, 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.

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.”

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The radicalism and inflexibility of the trans movement may indeed be starting to fade, but it is too early to say.

On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt the movement a significant setback when it ruled in U.S. vs. Skrmetti that prohibitions on transgender procedures for minors do not violate the Constitution. In response, the legacy media is signaling that the trans movement has overreached and it is time to pivot. Last week, Ezra Klein of the New York Times interviewed Sarah 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 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.”

Osborne, the Alabama Democrat, predicts that Democrats will have to experience more election losses before they finally return to the American mainstream.

“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.”