This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 17 episode of “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
There is obviously a lot of soul-searching going on right now within the Democratic Party — and that’s a good thing. However, I do worry that, in the course of that soul-searching, some Democrats might reach the wrong sweeping conclusions. There are a lot of issues that could fall into that bucket but one in particular is transgender rights.
Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads this election cycle, including one that showed Vice President Kamala Harris talking about government funding for gender-reaffirming care for prisoners and detainees. If that sounds like a particularly obscure issue, that’s because it is. It applies to only a tiny group of people. It’s also a policy that was in place during the first Trump presidency.
Legislators in more than 20 states could not cite a single instance in their own state or region in which a transgender athlete competing was a problem.
Another one of the lines that ran over and over again in ads and throughout right-wing media is the idea that America is faced with a crisis of boys playing in girls’ sports. These ads created this perception that the issues of trans kids playing sports was dominating schools across the country. Even though that is completely false, some people still got pulled into the argument.
Immediately after the election, Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.”
“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” he said. “But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Last weekend, Moulton came on this network to discuss those comments. “I was just speaking authentically as a dad about one of many issues where I think we’re just out of touch with a majority of voters,” he told Alex Witt last Sunday. “I stand by my position. Maybe I didn’t get all the words exactly right, but the point is the backlash I’ve received proves my point that we can’t even have these discussions as a party.”
Look, if that was actually an issue at thousands of schools across the country, then it would be worthy of a debate. But there are just incredibly few examples of transgender girls playing in youth sports. And when we see those examples, there isn’t evidence that these kids are a threat to safety or fairness. When I say few examples, I mean that if you were to count the examples of transgender girls playing youth sports in any single state, the number usually rounds to zero.
Take Utah: When a transgender athlete ban was passed there in 2022, there was a grand total of one transgender girl playing in youth sports. When South Dakota passed a ban, only one transgender girl had competed in high school sports since 2013.
In fact, when bans were making their way through Republican statehouses in 2021, legislators in more than 20 states could not cite a single instance in their own state or region in which a transgender athlete competing was a problem. And yet, the noise on this issue has been constant.
And according to Donald Trump, that is on purpose.
“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about this,” Trump said during an event in North Carolina in 2023. “I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy, who would have thought five years ago you didn’t know what the hell it was.”
Trump and Republicans have managed to amplify their bad-faith attacks to the point that people do have concerns, as misguided and misinformed as those concerns may be.
So, is this a good time for Democrats to self-reflect about what went wrong and what to do better moving forward? Of course it is. But during that process, it’s important not to yield to the manufactured panic and to align with the facts before making sweeping claims.
Echoing and adopting the panic from the other side is not leading. It’s not meeting people where they are. It’s simply falling prey to right-wing propaganda without checking the facts first.
Allison Detzel contributed.
