A story has begun about the 2024 election, and it is likelyto be perpetuated for many decades. It is the kind of plausible fallacy thatgets deep traction in the discussion of electoral competition. For this reason,it will become the equivalent of a political “urban myth”: the notion that theDemocrats lost the 2024 election because of their delusional militancy on theissue of transgender rights.
Thereason this myth will take hold is easy to understand. The Trump campaign madeone of the biggest media purchases in campaign history, to air a television adhighlighting comments that Kamala Harris had made during the 2019 Democraticprimary. Asked (initially on an ACLU questionnaire, later in a taped interview)if she would approve publicly funded gender transition surgery for prisoners,Harris had said that she would. The ad shows a series of photoshopped images ofHarris standing with transgender (or gender-ambiguous looking) people, includessoundbites of her comments, and concludes with the trolling tagline: “Kamala isfor they/them.”
The adis grotesquely bigoted, but its callousness is only fully recognizable tosomeone who has some knowledge of and/or personal experience with the issue oftransgender rights. Its message very effectively exploits viewers’ low-context,knee-jerk reactions to stimuli that have been extracted from an issue thatremains poorly understood by most voters. Though the deliberate bigotry of thead is entirely to the disgrace of the Republican operatives who deployed it, Democratsfailed to give the ad a robust and timely response. This is why the myth willpersist that “Democrats lost in 2024 because of their delusional support fortransgender rights.”
On thesurface, the issue of transgender rights seems to operate like other questionsof civil and human rights. Even so self-righteous an opponent of transgenderrights as J.K. Rowling acknowledges that transgender people (that is, peoplewho were deemed “male” at birth but feel most natural living as “female,” andvice-versa) face tragic abuse and discrimination living in a society that makesfew if any concessions to their organic identity.
But theproblem of how to protect transgender rights and defend transgender citizens poseschallenges that were not faced by past campaigns to defend civil and humanrights. The question of interracial marriage, for example, was easier foractivists in the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960’s to address, because thequestion itself only seemed “loaded” from the perspective of the bigot:
Bigot: “You’re telling me blacks and whites are equals?Don’t you see that will mean that blacks and whites will be able to marry eachother?”
Activist: “Yes.”
Asimple “yes” here is of course both a statement of principle and an effectivepolitical tactic. Affirming the natural right of people to marry regardless ofrace is morally righteous. At the same time, refusing to pander to thesensibilities of the questioner helps to undermine the bigoted assumptionsfoundational to racism, and normalize perceptions of equality.
Anequivalent question faced by transgender rights activists helps illustrate theunique challenges posed by the politics of this issue:
Bigot: “You’re telling me that a person born as a man can live as a woman?Don’t you understand that this will mean that men will compete against women insports?”
Activist (in effect): “You are a bigot.”
Asimple “yes” or “no” here is ineffective, as neither would undermine theassumptions at the foundation of bigotry, but to the contrary would reinforcethem. The terms of the question itself attack the principle of transgenderrights. Someone who refuses to recognize the difference between sex and gender,and to take care to speak in those terms, is not discussing the issue in goodfaith. Thus the only choice that an activist has in the face of this kind ofquestion is to challenge the legitimacy of the question itself, and byextension the ethical status of the questioner.
This isnot to suggest that the reforms necessary to protect transgender rights do notpose legitimate policy questions for the conduct of organized sports. But inthis campaign as in other struggles to defend civil rights, it is natural forthe vulnerable group and its allies to insist that the onus is on anyone whowould engage such questions to do so critically and in a spirit of maximumrespect. If the “entry toll” of a conversation is that I must concede my ownidentity, I cannot be expected to respect the terms of the discussion or treatits participants as good-faith partners in dialogue.
Thishighly fraught communication dynamic obviously has the potential to beintensely divisive. Is the person who asks a question like the one abovenecessarily a “bigot,” much less a “hateful one”? The answer to that conundrumis likely to depend on whom you ask. A transgender person who has been physicallyassaulted by angry bigots might feel comfortable labeling the questioner“hateful.” Someone less personally close to the heart of the issue might insteadcall them an “insensitive bigot.” Whether the person is a bigot or not, and ifso what kind, are largely academic questions. The qualifier used does notdepend on some essential definition, but flows from the conscientious choicesof the person using it, and what they believe will best serve the cause oftransgender rights.
Much,though not all, of the myth of the “delusional militancy” of the Democraticparty is rooted in these discursive dynamics of the struggle for transgenderrights. Gender is much more deeply woven into the basic mechanics of ourlanguage than race or class. We do not in English, for example, have differentpronouns for referring to individuals according to their race. Discussingquestions raised by the issue of transgender rights in a way that respects thehumanity and dignity of transgender citizens thus calls upon us to rethinkwords and categories that we had previously taken for granted, and to uselanguage in ways that may seem unfamiliar. Such demands cause resentment, andthe Trump campaign successfully exploited those resentments to delegitimizeKamala Harris in the eyes of many voters.
Thiscreated a dilemma for the Harris campaign that it failed to unriddle, thuscontributing to the myth of “delusional militancy.” As the New York Times hasreported, the Harris campaign had polling data showing that the ad blitz beingconducted by the Trump campaign was very effective. The ad was costing Harris support in key states, which in such a closely contested race might have changed the outcome of the election. The campaign heldinternal deliberations over how to respond to the ad, and ultimately decidedthat no direct response was possible.
Why wasthis? Responding to the ad effectively would not have been easy. The Harriscampaign would have had to engineer a very high stakes event, a special speechdedicated to the issue of transgender rights, akin to Barack Obama’s 2008speech on race relations in response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Inthat speech Harris would have had the opportunity to explain the principlesbehind transgender rights, highlighting stories about the experience oftransgender people, the types of abuse they are forced to endure, and thereasons why so many Democrats feel so passionately about this issue. Tosubstantiate such assertions, she would have had to tackle some of the mostdifficult questions that surround the issue of transgender rights, such asthose regarding pediatric medicine, organized sports, and the housing and careof transgender prisoners.
Such a speechwould have entailed profound risks. Anything Harris said would be vulnerable todistortion and demagoguery. The Trump campaign would most likely have takensoundbites from such a speech and made another “She is for they/them”advertisement. At the same time, a truly effective speech would almostcertainly have drawn angry denunciation from activists and progressiveDemocrats. In the struggle to protect a vulnerable and abused minority, thereare always voices who take a very uncompromising and maximalist stance againstany suggestion of complexity or doubt (in large part out of the conviction thatthis is the only tactic which can stand against the demagoguery of bigots).
Despitethese dangers, there is good reason to believe that such a speech would haveboosted Harris’s electoral performance. Politicians are normally very averse tocontroversy, but Donald Trump has changed the rules of the game, if onlytemporarily. As long as the media was talking about him, even negatively, hewas winning, since any attention helped foster the false impression that he wasimportant, effective, and “normal.” Anything Harris could have done to turn thenational conversation toward actual issues and away from stupid stunts (“He’sin a MacDonald’s! He’s in a garbage truck!”) would have aided her at the polls.
Beyondthis, a candid speech would have made voters feel that they “knew” KamalaHarris in a more full-blooded and personal way. Trump gives the impression ofpersistent authenticity, he does nothing to hide his cretinous personality frompublic scrutiny. Harris was obviously advised that she could not afford to havetoo distinctive a personality in public. As a woman of color, so thisperspective held, being candidly revealing about herself and her personalpriorities would make her look too “angry” or “emotional.” She was thus advisedto speak as often as possible in slogans and catch phrases (“turn the page,”“we’re not going back,” “he has an enemy’s list, I have a to-do list”). Theresult was that voters felt Trump was being “real” and Harris was hidingherself. A nuanced and candid speech on transgender rights would have providedan opportunity to fight that impression.
Finally,a high-stakes speech on transgender rights was the only chance that Harris hadto fight the knee-jerk hostility to her campaign that had been aroused byTrump’s manipulative advertisements. The ads had made her a caricature. Aspeech would have “humanized” her, and that would have made her more appealingto voters in many dimensions beyond the specific horizon of transgender rights.
Would it have worked? We will neverknow. In the final analysis, voters’ anger over inflation and the policies ofthe Covid lockdown had much more to do with the outcome of the election thanvirtually any other factor in this election year. Incumbent parties around theworld, whether on the political left or right, have been losing elections bymuch wider margins that Harris, whose defeats was among the slenderest marginsof defeat in US history. But on the specific issue of transgender rights we canbe certain that she had no other choice other than to do nothing, which is whatshe opted for, and that resulted in defeat.
Why didthe Harris campaign choose inaction? There are many reasons, but none of themhave to do with the “delusional militancy” of the party as a whole. As EzraKlein noted in a recent podcast, in the last ten or fifteen years a culture of groupthinkhas settled over the leaders and elected officials of the Democratic Party inits relationship with activist groups. Anything that is likely to ignite angryrhetoric from progressive civic groups on a whole array of issues is strictlyavoided, without thought for how many votes such groups can actually swing inthe context of a general election. Since activist groups tend to be moreuncompromising and maximalist in their approach to issues, their disproportionateinfluence effectively curtails the party from developing messaging that wouldmake broader headway in the electorate at large.
Thisgroupthink is not a product of congenital militancy on the part of Democrats,however, but is a function of many factors common to both sides of thepolitical spectrum. These include the amplifying effect of social media, thechurn of 24-hour cable news, and heightened polarization in the aftermath ofthe Cold War.
Perhaps the single greatest factordistorting messaging on an issue like transgender rights is rising wealthinequality. Extreme pressure groups enjoy disproportionate influence becausethey are funded by wealthy donors. The smaller an audience that a message iscrafted for, the more “purist” and uncompromising it will become. Democraticleaders are unwilling to offend extremist activist groups on the left for thesame reason that Republicans fear offending extremist activist groups on theright: because they know that such groups have access to and wield greatinfluence with the same small group of wealthy donors who increasingly controlever larger shares of wealth in the US, and whose financial support is criticalto ballot box success. When a small group of donors whose wealth and lifestyleinclines them to believe that they know better than anyone else is calling theshots, political messaging is pushed ever further toward the extremes on eitherend of the political spectrum. Thus the same forces that restrain Democraticleaders from engaging in a robust and nuanced discourse concerning transgenderrights (or immigration) have made extreme positions such as “climate denialism”and “personhood amendments” orthodoxy in the GOP.
The Democrats obviously should have respondedto Republicans’ attack on transgender rights in robust and complex terms. Thoughthe effectiveness of the Trump campaign ad depended upon the failure ofmillions of voters to see how grotesquely and manipulatively bigoted itsmessage was, in a contest with such high existential stakes the onus was on theDemocrats to meet the voters “where they were.” But that judgment is much moreeasily made in hindsight than was possible during the heat of the electoralcampaign. The tone of the Trump campaign was so toxic and the threat that Trumphimself posed to our democratic order was so clear (and has become clearer as Trumpannounces cabinet picks clearly designed to weaponize the working policy organsof the Executive for purely political ends), that it was easy to believe votersshould see the need to defer the questions surrounding the issue of transgenderrights for a time when our constitutional structure had been made secure fromassault. Now that we are facing the potential dismantling of the Republic, thechance for reasoned debate on transgender rights or any other issue may be lostindefinitely.
