Transitioning Toward Solutions
Newsom’s New Transgender Athlete Stance Opens Important Conversation About Liberal Orthodoxy Harming Democrats and Enabling Trump
California Gov. Gavin Newsom faced a barrage of criticism from his fellow Democrats last week for voicing opposition to transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. He called it “deeply unfair” for cisgender female athletes to face competitors born male, who are generally considered bigger, stronger and faster.
But tough conversations like this — and tolerance for different political views — is just what the Democratic Party needs to regain its relevance, grow its support, and defeat right-wing extremism.
This isn’t just about politicians, or the transgender community, it’s about all of us. After some friends made online posts echoing Newsom’s point, they were called transphobic and ignorant, even by friends and even after qualifying their narrow point by declaring full support for trans rights.
This rigid liberal orthodoxy on controversial issues is a huge problem for Democrats and the larger left. From “defund the police” to “Genocide Joe” to opposing any limits on immigration and transgendered athletes, insisting on the maximalist stance alienates voters in the middle, bringing Trump’s very real and dangerous extremism back into power.
Newsom raised a very narrow issue, given that there are only about 10 transgender women competing in women’s collegiate sports in this country. But the issue is having outsized political impacts as it’s been weaponized by the Republican Party, most notably in the effective ads Trump ran against Kamala Harris, with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.”
The ads were effective precisely because they reflected public opinion: 79% of Americans — including 67% of Democrats — say transgender women shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s professional sports, according to a recent New York Times poll. That poll and others also found that a narrow majority of Americans generally support policies protecting transgendered people from discrimination.
But Trump took narrow points of public agreement — focusing his ads on transgender women’s athletic advantage and a position Harris once took supporting taxpayer-funded gender transition surgery for prisoners — to stoke fears and win the election. Then he issued executive orders broadly attacking and denigrating transgendered Americans and banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
That’s the danger and the urgency here. Whether you agree with Newsom and the stance he took, or you think giving an inch on transgender discrimination encourages more hate, or you want to defer to sports governing bodies, or you think it’s just a nonissue — these should all be reasonable positions for Democrats to hold in a big tent political party.
Personally, I understand Newsom’s point, but I would tend to defer to sports governing bodies that already regulate performance-enhancing drugs and hormones. It’s a complicated issue that depends on when a person transitioned and other factors to determine if there’s a significant athletic advantage.
Public policy is often complicated, far more so than the sloganeering of either political pole. Democrats should be willing to consider nuanced details and public opinion, and be willing to sometimes challenge the hopes and desires of our allies, including marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants and transgender athletes.
But that’s not what’s been happening on the left over the last decade — and it’s a big reason why Democrats are having such a hard time countering the MAGA movement and its culture of fear and grievance.
Too Far, Too Fast: I support transgender individuals and I admire the courage and clarity that it takes to make such a monumental change in one’s life. The trans community suffers high rates of depression, suicide and drug abuse — much of that tied to the judgment, discrimination and violence inflicted by the larger society, particularly their conservative critics.
Newsom offered similar concerns and support for the trans community on the “This is Gavin Newsom” podcast where he made his controversial comment while interviewing conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “The way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with,” Newsom said. “So, both things I can hold in my hand.”
Frankly, it doesn’t make sense that a MAGA movement that Kirk described as “pro-freedom, pro-liberty” would have such a huge problem with transgender people’s freedom. So I’m more critical than Newsom about right-wing motives for weaponizing the transgender issue for political gain, just as they’ve been doing with sexism, racism, and anti-urbanism for generations.
But we shouldn’t fall into their trap — or get too far ahead of public opinion and try to shame or hector people into fully accepting parts of a rapidly changing world with which they aren’t yet totally comfortable.
Over the last 10 years or so, liberals and minority identity groups began to make many demands on American society and the universal values of classical liberalism. Not coincidentally, there was also a strong conservative and populist backlash during those same years that elevated Trump to power — twice. So it’s worth exploring.
At my last job for an environmental nonprofit, we are told to state our pronouns in the signature line of our emails and when introducing ourselves in meetings or conference calls with coalition partners. Many American workers in various industries faced similar requirements or recommendations.
I sort of understand the rationale, which is to let transgender individuals or their allies make clear how they want to be addressed, and to create an opportunity to do so. It also helped introduce the concept of “they/them” as gender neutral first person pronouns into our collective lexicon.
Yet it seemed strange to make everyone do this, all the time, when the trans community is only about 1% of the population. I also didn’t understand the logic of making everyone declare their gender when the trans community actually argues that gender is a social construct and that we should embrace more gender fluidity.
And I can imagine that what seemed strange to me — a proudly progressive metrosexual — might seem threatening or offensive to more traditional Americans.
But I couldn’t challenge this liberal orthodoxy without social and maybe professional consequences. Just like I couldn’t do much about announcements that we were on “stolen Native lands” or challenge lessons from our days and days and days worth of DEI trainings, such as being told reliance on the written word is a trait of white supremacy culture (even though my job was to be a writer).
Meanwhile, in the larger American culture, Trump’s shocking 2016 presidential victory was followed by:
#MeToo movement, which outed and ostracized sexual predators, but also used a broad brush to condemn insensitive male behavior and seemed to embrace a mob mentality without clear processes or consequences.
COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, where low-paid workers deemed “essential” risked their lives while most of us stayed home, and where sometimes overreaching emergency public health measures turned many people against government, science, and one another.
Black Lives Matter protests, which started as a primal scream against the murder of George Floyd and other innocent Black men by police officers, but evolved into the occupation of urban spaces, wanton property crime, and the silly demand to defund the police.
Brutal and intractable wars in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, where wartime propaganda sometimes got elevated into liberal orthodoxy that roiled college campuses, fed hatred, and further polarized an already polarized American populace.
This was the climate and chaos that Trump exploited to seize power again. And then he turned those small wedge issues into an unprecedented and vengeful assault on the federal workforce, women, people of color, the trans community, immigrants, America’s allies, and his political enemies.
We’re paying a heavy price for being out-of-step with American voters.
New Immigration Stance: So how do we find our way back? I don’t agree with the path Newsom is pursuing with his new podcast, where he’s interviewing the most loathsome figures of the far-right, ostensibly to challenge and debate them and “stress test some of the fault lines in our party.”
But as Mark Barabak wrote this week in the Los Angeles Times, Newsom’s self-promotional gimmick actually comes off as obsequious promotion of MAGA lies and divisiveness. “Congeniality is one thing,” Barabak wrote. “It’s another to sound as though you’ve been co-opted, yukking it up and nodding along to Kirk’s worshipful treatment of Trump, his anti-public health views and expressions of right-wing victimhood.”
Rather than legitimizing MAGA and its many calculated grievances, Newsom and other aspirational Democratic politicians would be better off engaging with innovative policymakers here and abroad to create better models for Democratic governance, particularly on divisive issues.
For example, The New York Times Magazine just ran a great article on Denmark and its center-left Social Democrats party, which has bucked the global trend of rising right-wing populism with electoral victories and expanded social welfare programs — by restricting immigration.
Ten years ago, new Social Democrats leaders flipped the party’s stance on immigration, citing studies that it worsens income inequality, hurts social cohesion, and hinders adoption of progressive social policies, such as welfare benefits.
“Many social scientists believe this relationship is one reason that the United States, which accepted large numbers of immigrants long before Europe did, has a weaker safety net,” the article said. “A 2006 headline in the British publication The Economist tartly summarized the conclusion from this research as, ‘Diversity or the welfare state: Choose one.’”
The change was not without controversy and difficulty, but it had some significant progressive benefits. Right-wing populist parties got marginalized by the loss of their most salient issue, while the Social Democrats were able to build on that political advantage by adopting popular progressive reforms and more generous foreign aid.
Until the mid-1960s, our Democrats generally opposed high levels of immigration because it undermined their social welfare programs and labor union allies. But business leaders have always wanted cheap labor, so as Democrats grew closer to corporate America — and felt bad about refugees from our Cold War militarism — they began to tacitly support unfettered immigration, ignoring its cost and growing unpopularity (even among Latinos, which swung toward Trump last year).
Given Trump’s racist rhetoric, demonizing of immigrants, and deportation crackdown, Democrats will be inclined to stand with recent immigrant communities without question or nuance, just as they do to the transgender community and advocates for DEI programs.
But rather than ignoring public opinion and writing off more than half the country as irredeemably hateful, stupid and/or selfish, it’s time for Democrats to bravely confront the most vexing and controversial issues of our day. If we set aside our slogans and biases, maybe we can find a better, smarter and more inclusive path forward.
Took a lot of guts to write this, Steven. And you are spot on. Good work.