A story has begun about the 2024 election, and it is likely to be perpetuated for many decades. It is the kind of plausible fallacy that gets deep traction in the discussion of electoral competition. For this reason, it will become the equivalent of a political “urban myth”: the notion that the Democrats lost the 2024 election because of their delusional militancy on the issue of transgender rights.
The reason this myth will take hold is easy to understand. The Trump campaign made one of the biggest media purchases in campaign history, to air a television ad highlighting comments that Kamala Harris had made during the 2019 Democratic primary. 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 of Harris standing with transgender (or gender-ambiguous looking) people, includes soundbites of her comments, and concludes with the trolling tagline: “Kamala is for they/them.”
The ad is grotesquely bigoted, but its callousness is only fully recognizable to someone who has some knowledge of and/or personal experience with the issue of transgender rights. Its message very effectively exploits viewers’ low-context, knee-jerk reactions to stimuli that have been extracted from an issue that remains poorly understood by most voters. Though the deliberate bigotry of the ad is entirely to the disgrace of the Republican operatives who deployed it, Democrats failed to give the ad a robust and timely response. This is why the myth will persist that “Democrats lost in 2024 because of their delusional support for transgender rights.”
On the surface, the issue of transgender rights seems to operate like other questions of civil and human rights. Even so self-righteous an opponent of transgender rights as J.K. Rowling acknowledges that transgender people (that is, people who were deemed “male” at birth but feel most natural living as “female,” and vice-versa) face tragic abuse and discrimination living in a society that makes few if any concessions to their organic identity.
But the problem of how to protect transgender rights and defend transgender citizens poses challenges that were not faced by past campaigns to defend civil and human rights. The question of interracial marriage, for example, was easier for activists in the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960’s to address, because the question 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 each other?”
Activist: “Yes.”
A simple “yes” here is of course both a statement of principle and an effective political tactic. Affirming the natural right of people to marry regardless of race is morally righteous. At the same time, refusing to pander to the sensibilities of the questioner helps to undermine the bigoted assumptions foundational to racism, and normalize perceptions of equality.
An equivalent question faced by transgender rights activists helps illustrate the unique 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 in
sports?”
Activist (in effect): “You are a bigot.”
A simple “yes” or “no” here is ineffective, as neither would undermine the assumptions at the foundation of bigotry, but to the contrary would reinforce them. The terms of the question itself attack the principle of transgender rights. 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 good faith. Thus the only choice that an activist has in the face of this kind of question is to challenge the legitimacy of the question itself, and by extension the ethical status of the questioner.
This is not to suggest that the reforms necessary to protect transgender rights do not pose legitimate policy questions for the conduct of organized sports. But in this campaign as in other struggles to defend civil rights, it is natural for the vulnerable group and its allies to insist that the onus is on anyone who would engage such questions to do so critically and in a spirit of maximum respect. If the “entry toll” of a conversation is that I must concede my own identity, I cannot be expected to respect the terms of the discussion or treat its participants as good-faith partners in dialogue.
This highly fraught communication dynamic obviously has the potential to be intensely divisive. Is the person who asks a question like the one above necessarily a “bigot,” much less a “hateful one”? The answer to that conundrum is likely to depend on whom you ask. A transgender person who has been physically assaulted by angry bigots might feel comfortable labeling the questioner “hateful.” Someone less personally close to the heart of the issue might instead call them an “insensitive bigot.” Whether the person is a bigot or not, and if so what kind, are largely academic questions. The qualifier used does not depend on some essential definition, but flows from the conscientious choices of the person using it, and what they believe will best serve the cause of transgender rights.
Much, though not all, of the myth of the “delusional militancy” of the Democratic party is rooted in these discursive dynamics of the struggle for transgender rights. Gender is much more deeply woven into the basic mechanics of our language than race or class. We do not in English, for example, have different pronouns for referring to individuals according to their race. Discussing questions raised by the issue of transgender rights in a way that respects the humanity and dignity of transgender citizens thus calls upon us to rethink words and categories that we had previously taken for granted, and to use language in ways that may seem unfamiliar. Such demands cause resentment, and the Trump campaign successfully exploited those resentments to delegitimize Kamala Harris in the eyes of many voters.
This created a dilemma for the Harris campaign that it failed to unriddle, thus contributing to the myth of “delusional militancy.” As the New York Times has reported, the Harris campaign had polling data showing that the ad blitz being conducted 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 held internal deliberations over how to respond to the ad, and ultimately decided that no direct response was possible.
Why was this? Responding to the ad effectively would not have been easy. The Harris campaign would have had to engineer a very high stakes event, a special speech dedicated to the issue of transgender rights, akin to Barack Obama’s 2008 speech on race relations in response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy. In that speech Harris would have had the opportunity to explain the principles behind transgender rights, highlighting stories about the experience of transgender people, the types of abuse they are forced to endure, and the reasons why so many Democrats feel so passionately about this issue. To substantiate such assertions, she would have had to tackle some of the most difficult questions that surround the issue of transgender rights, such as those regarding pediatric medicine, organized sports, and the housing and care of transgender prisoners.
Such a speech would have entailed profound risks. Anything Harris said would be vulnerable to distortion and demagoguery. The Trump campaign would most likely have taken soundbites from such a speech and made another “She is for they/them” advertisement. At the same time, a truly effective speech would almost certainly have drawn angry denunciation from activists and progressive Democrats. In the struggle to protect a vulnerable and abused minority, there are always voices who take a very uncompromising and maximalist stance against any suggestion of complexity or doubt (in large part out of the conviction that this is the only tactic which can stand against the demagoguery of bigots).
Despite these dangers, there is good reason to believe that such a speech would have boosted Harris’s electoral performance. Politicians are normally very averse to controversy, but Donald Trump has changed the rules of the game, if only temporarily. As long as the media was talking about him, even negatively, he was winning, since any attention helped foster the false impression that he was important, effective, and “normal.” Anything Harris could have done to turn the national conversation toward actual issues and away from stupid stunts (“He’s in a MacDonald’s! He’s in a garbage truck!”) would have aided her at the polls.
Beyond this, a candid speech would have made voters feel that they “knew” Kamala Harris in a more full-blooded and personal way. Trump gives the impression of persistent authenticity, he does nothing to hide his cretinous personality from public scrutiny. Harris was obviously advised that she could not afford to have too distinctive a personality in public. As a woman of color, so this perspective held, being candidly revealing about herself and her personal priorities would make her look too “angry” or “emotional.” She was thus advised to 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”). The result was that voters felt Trump was being “real” and Harris was hiding herself. A nuanced and candid speech on transgender rights would have provided an opportunity to fight that impression.
Finally, a high-stakes speech on transgender rights was the only chance that Harris had to fight the knee-jerk hostility to her campaign that had been aroused by Trump’s manipulative advertisements. The ads had made her a caricature. A speech would have “humanized” her, and that would have made her more appealing to voters in many dimensions beyond the specific horizon of transgender rights.
Would it have worked? We will never know. In the final analysis, voters’ anger over inflation and the policies of the Covid lockdown had much more to do with the outcome of the election than virtually any other factor in this election year. Incumbent parties around the world, whether on the political left or right, have been losing elections by much wider margins that Harris, whose defeats was among the slenderest margins of defeat in US history. But on the specific issue of transgender rights we can be certain that she had no other choice other than to do nothing, which is what she opted for, and that resulted in defeat.
Why did the Harris campaign choose inaction? There are many reasons, but none of them have 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 groupthink has settled over the leaders and elected officials of the Democratic Party in its relationship with activist groups. Anything that is likely to ignite angry rhetoric from progressive civic groups on a whole array of issues is strictly avoided, without thought for how many votes such groups can actually swing in the context of a general election. Since activist groups tend to be more uncompromising and maximalist in their approach to issues, their disproportionate influence effectively curtails the party from developing messaging that would make broader headway in the electorate at large.
This groupthink 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 the political spectrum. These include the amplifying effect of social media, the churn of 24-hour cable news, and heightened polarization in the aftermath of the Cold War.
Perhaps the single greatest factor distorting messaging on an issue like transgender rights is rising wealth inequality. Extreme pressure groups enjoy disproportionate influence because they are funded by wealthy donors. The smaller an audience that a message is crafted for, the more “purist” and uncompromising it will become. Democratic leaders are unwilling to offend extremist activist groups on the left for the same reason that Republicans fear offending extremist activist groups on the right: because they know that such groups have access to and wield great influence with the same small group of wealthy donors who increasingly control ever larger shares of wealth in the US, and whose financial support is critical to ballot box success. When a small group of donors whose wealth and lifestyle inclines them to believe that they know better than anyone else is calling the shots, political messaging is pushed ever further toward the extremes on either end of the political spectrum. Thus the same forces that restrain Democratic leaders from engaging in a robust and nuanced discourse concerning transgender rights (or immigration) have made extreme positions such as “climate denialism” and “personhood amendments” orthodoxy in the GOP.
The Democrats obviously should have responded to Republicans’ attack on transgender rights in robust and complex terms. Though the effectiveness of the Trump campaign ad depended upon the failure of millions of voters to see how grotesquely and manipulatively bigoted its message was, in a contest with such high existential stakes the onus was on the Democrats to meet the voters “where they were.” But that judgment is much more easily made in hindsight than was possible during the heat of the electoral campaign. The tone of the Trump campaign was so toxic and the threat that Trump himself posed to our democratic order was so clear (and has become clearer as Trump announces cabinet picks clearly designed to weaponize the working policy organs of the Executive for purely political ends), that it was easy to believe voters should see the need to defer the questions surrounding the issue of transgender rights for a time when our constitutional structure had been made secure from assault. Now that we are facing the potential dismantling of the Republic, the chance for reasoned debate on transgender rights or any other issue may be lost indefinitely.