One of the mysteries of this election is how Democrats approached Election Day with a set of gender identity policies that they were neither proud to defend nor willing to repudiate.

Although most Americans agree that transgender people should not face discrimination in housing and employment, the level of discrimination is nowhere near comparable. support for allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports – which is why Donald Trump has continually raised the issue. Her campaign also bombarded swing-state voters and sports fans with ads reminding them that Kamala Harris had previously supported taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgery for prisoners. The ads were effective: The New York Times reported that Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, find this ad “moved the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The Harris campaign has largely avoided the subject.

Since the election, reports of dissent from this strategy have begun to trickle in. Bill Clinton would have raised alarm about allowing the attacks to go unanswered, but was ignored. After Harris’ defeat, Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts went on record with his concerns. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them to get run over on the playground by a male or former athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he told the Times. The recriminations extend to the White House, where Joe Biden’s allies said to my colleague Franklin Foer that the current president would have countered Trump’s ads more aggressively and would have “clearly rejected the idea of ​​trans women participating in women’s sports.”

One problem: The Biden administration has long championed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters — or, more importantly, what it actually entails. Its officials have recommended for the removal of lower age limits for gender surgeries in minors, and in January 2022, its Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, denied define the word womentelling Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, “I’m not a biologist. »

Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the Left Keeps Getting Wrong

When it comes to sports – an issue that the Trump campaign has seized on – the Biden White House has always priority gender identity rather than sex. Last year, the Ministry of Education propose regulations establishing “that policies violate Title IX when they categorically prohibit transgender students from participating in sports teams consistent with their gender identity simply because of who they are.” Schools were, however, allowed to limit participation in specific situations. (In April, as the elections approach, this part (Title IX review has been suspended.) Harris went into the campaign tied to the Biden administration’s positions and lacked the courage, or strategic sense, to publicly reject them. She didn’t defend them either.

The fundamental problem is that athletes who have gone through male puberty are generally stronger and faster than biological females. Rather than accept this fact, many on the left have retreated into a comfort zone by claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is primarily driven by transphobia. But that’s not the case: When trans men or non-binary people born female competed in women’s sports against other biological women, no one objected. The same season that Lia Thomas, a trans woman, sparked controversy by swimming in the women’s division, a trans man named Iszac Hénig did so without any protest. (He was not taking testosterone and therefore did not have an unfair advantage.) Yet even talking about this issue in language that ordinary Americans can understand is difficult: on CNN Friday, when conservative political strategist Shermichael Singleton “There are a lot of families who don’t believe boys should play girls’ sports,” he said. immediately shouted by another panelist, Jay Michaelson, who said that the word boy was an “insult” and he “wasn’t going to listen to transphobia at this table.” The moderator, Abby Phillips, also chastised Singleton, telling him to “talk about this in a respectful way.”

Some Democrats, like Texas Senate candidate Colin Allred, have tried to counter Republican ads by forcefully supporting women’s right to compete in single-sex sports. SO. In states like Texas and Missouri, the political right is monitoring and threatening to pursue parents whose children seek medical treatments for gender dysphoria, or restrict transgender adults’ access to Medicaid. In this climate, activists say, Democrats should not further compromise the rights of a vulnerable minority by legitimizing voters’ concerns. “Please don’t blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, director of LBGTQ engagement for the Harris campaign, wrote on X. “Trans people have been and will be a main target of Project 2025 and need us to support them more than ever. »

During the race, many journalists wrote about the pervasiveness — and sinister nature — of Trump ads on trans issues, including SemaforIt is David Weigel. But at the time, I was surprised how much disdainful many commentators have weighed in on their potential effect, given the huge sums of money involved. My theory That’s because these ads tapped into a broader concern about Democrats: They were elitists who ruled by decree, refused to defend their unpopular positions, and treated skeptics like fanatics. Gender may not have been at the top of voters’ list of concerns, but immigration and borders were — and the same criticisms of Democratic messaging apply to those topics, too. .

Unwilling to engage in a losing case, Harris ultimately bluntly noted that Democrats respected the law on providing medical care to detainees, as well as Trump did it during his mandate. On the integrity of women’s sport, she said nothing.

Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost

How did we get here? At the end of Barack Obama’s second term, same-sex marriage was expanded to all 50 states, an achievement that LGBTQ groups spent decades campaigning for. In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County find that, in the words of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, “an employer who fires a person simply because they are gay or transgender is defying the law.” This progress meant that activist organizations, with large staffs and existing donor networks, had to set out to find the next big progressive cause. Since Trump came to power, they have remained relevant and well funded by adopting maximalist stances on gender – partly in reaction to controversial red state laws, such as the total ban on gender medicine for minors. THE ACLU, GLAADTHE Human rights campaignand other similar groups have done so safely, knowing that they are responding to their (mostly wealthy and educated) donors, rather than to a more diverse and skeptical electorate. “The fundamental lesson I hope Democratic politicians take from this election is that they should not take positions unless they can defend them, honestly, in a one-on-one conversation with the median American voter , who is a 50-year-old white non-college voter. -years old living in a suburb of a small town”, the author (and Atlantic contributing writer) James Surowiecki argued last week on X.

Even today, many Democrats are reluctant to discuss their party’s positions on trans issues. The day after comments from Moulton, his campaign manager resigned in protest, and the chairman of the Massachusetts state party intervened to say that they “do not represent the general views of our party.” But Moulton did not back down, saying in a statement that although he was accused of failing “the Democratic Party’s tacit purity test,” he was committed to defending the rights of all Americans. “We did not lose the 2024 election because of a trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we humiliated and devalued too many opinions held by too many voters and it must stop. »

Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democrats, faced a similar backlash. He initially told reporters, “There are some things that we’re going too far on, that a lot of our population doesn’t support,” but he quickly walked back his comments. “I extend my sincere apologies to those I hurt with my comments today,” Hinojosa said. “Frustrated by the Republican Party’s lies aimed at inciting hatred toward trans communities, I have failed to communicate my thoughts carefully and clearly.” (Friday, he resignedquoting the party’s “devastating” election results in the state.)

The tragedy of this topic is that there are compromise positions that would please most voters and end a broader backlash against gender nonconformity that manifests itself in punitive laws in red states. America is a more open-minded country than its harshest critics believe – the latest research shows that there are as many people who think society hasn’t gone far enough in accepting trans people as there are who think it has gone too far. Delaware has just elected the first transgender Congresswoman Sarah McBride. But most voters believe biological sex is real and has legal and political importance. Asking them to believe otherwise and not ask any questions is a strategy doomed to failure. By abandoning their most extreme positions, Democrats will be better positioned to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.