Can Democrats moderate on trans issues?

Jasper Johns

It turns out that Erin Reed and I agree about one thing!

Sports are the foot in the door, the asterisk they offer on our gender identity.

Once you give that up, they then sell you on adding that asterisk to kids...

To birth certificates, because you have to enforce the sports laws.

To bathrooms, which are like locker rooms right?

If you acknowledge that male rapists with prison-onset gender dysphoria* shouldn’t be housed with female prisoners and therefore aren’t really women, you’ve acknowledged that self-identification has limits.

Same goes for sports: either transwomen are women—in which case they get to clobber female athletes in the boxing ring and snag medals and scholarships at all-state track meets—or they’re… not.

Then there’s youth gender transition, which raises huge concerns for anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated out of their own common sense. If we acknowledge that these pharmaceutical and surgical interventions are (or can be) harmful and inappropriate for kids, we call adult transition into question. Either these interventions are “life-saving,” “medically-necessary care”—in which case they’re life-saving and medically-necessary for kids, too!—or they’re… not.

And if these interventions aren’t appropriate for children, then we must acknowledge that these procedures are elective and cosmetic—even harmful—for adults, too, but that adults are free to seek out and consent to elective, cosmetic, harmful procedures. Jettisoning youth transition imperils adult access. If these interventions aren’t ethical medicine—and I’d argue they’re not ethical and they’re not medicine—for minors, why would they magically become ethical medicine when a patient turns 18? Why would insurance and public healthcare programs cover these procedures? Why should transition be offered under the banner of medicine at all?

In the wake of Trump’s election, some Democrats are hoping to moderate on trans issues—ideally without looking like they’re underbusing what they so recently referred to as the “civil-rights issue of our time.” The trouble is that the trans movement’s most unpopular, bonkers, self-sabotaging policy proposals are indispensable to the broader project.

You can say, well, maybe some of these kids are caught up in a social contagion and shouldn’t transition, but in the very next breath you must say: but we can’t let that take life-saving gender-affirming care away from the real trans kids! You can’t leave the kids alone. You don’t have to take the bait when the ACLU asks if you support sex changes for prisoners, but you can’t dump trans-identified convicts, or else you put an asterisk on everybody else’s gender identity and the whole idea that gender identity should ever supersede sex. If we stop treating men “like women” in settings where sex matters, we might start to wonder what it even means to treat men “like women” in any setting at all. That’s a dangerous road to go down.

Reed is right about the futility of moderation on this issue when he says “[i]t doesn’t work. There’s no amount of give you can offer that stops them from taking.” He’s just got the givers and the takers mixed up.

*I don’t know who to credit for this term but it kills me every time!