Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.
The party’s vanguard position got ahead of voters in 2024, and the internal debate now underway reveals an uncertainty on how to adapt.
July 13, 2025
A blurred photo of swimmers racing in a pool.
Many Democratic politicians had resolved to say as little as possible about transgender rights.David Walter Banks for The New York Times
Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president of the center-left think tank Third Way, has studied the politics of transgender rights for four years. But it was only this past December that she had cause to utter the phrase “genital check” in the presence of a Democratic representative.
“Now I’ve done it many times,” she said, and with many lawmakers. When she does, she added, “their faces squish up.”
At the time, Ms. Erickson was meeting with Democratic lawmakers in hopes of blocking a Republican bill to enact a blanket ban on transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports. Awkward conversations, to her mind, were a necessary first step in escaping what many in and around Democratic politics had come to see as a sort of paralysis over the issue.
Stuck in a widening gulf between the views of the party’s liberal voters and advocacy organizations on one side, and those of the broader American electorate on the other, many Democratic politicians had resolved to say as little as possible about the subject. In surveys, Ms. Erickson and other public-opinion researchers had found that this allowed Republicans, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking Democrats on transgender rights in 2024, to define voters’ perceptions of Democratic policy positions.
“What they thought, in November, was that Democrats thought there should be no rules,” Ms. Erickson said. “That’s a caricature of the position from the right.
And if you are too scared to articulate what your position is, that’s what they hear.”
Lanae Erickson sits in an armchair with her body cast half in shadow. Her head is turned to the right, looking directly at the viewer.
Lanae Erickson, of the center-left think tank Third Way, says that leaving policy on transgender athletes to schools and state athletic associations will ultimately be unconvincing to voters.Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
The dilemma is reflective of the Democratic Party’s broader struggles with identity politics as it dissects its losses in 2024. Recovering its standing with voters, many in the party believe, requires coming to terms with the party’s transformation during the Obama and first Trump presidencies, when American liberals broadly embraced what had previously been vanguard positions on a range of social and cultural issues, including gender and race, immigration and policing.
In some areas,
Democratic politicians, taking cues from liberal advocacy groups, found themselves signing onto positions about which even their own voters were uncertain, and have become more so in recent years.
This is particularly true of transgender rights, where
polls now show majority support for some restrictions that advocates have fiercely opposed, and have sought to hold politicians accountable for backing.
Support for restrictions is growing among Democrats, too. A Pew Research survey in February found that 45 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning adults favored laws requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their sex assigned at birth, up from 37 percent just three years earlier. Democratic support for restrictions on medical care for transitioning minors and on bathroom use for transgender people has grown similarly.
In Senate races last year, Republicans targeted vulnerable red- and purple-state incumbents with millions of dollars’ worth of often-misleading ads exploiting this disconnect, like one claiming that Montana’s Jon Tester had voted to allow “biological men to compete against our girls in their sports.” The Trump campaign used the issue to present Vice President Kamala Harris as out of touch, in an ad with the tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.”
Although there is no evidence that transgender rights was a top issue for most voters in 2024,
Democratic strategists believe that these attacks did have an impact. Blueprint, a post-election Democratic polling project, found that among swing voters who broke for Mr. Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, 67 percent believed Democrats were “too focused on identity politics.”
“We try so hard to represent everybody, we alienate everybody,” said Greg Schultz, the national campaign manager of former President Joseph R. Biden’s 2020 primary run.
Since November, the debate within the party over the way forward has been most visible in regards to transgender athletes’ participation in college and high school sports. Republicans from the White House to statehouses have pressed their advantage in that area, passing sweeping bans by executive order — as Mr. Trump did in February — and through state-level legislation. This month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two challenges to state bans, which have been passed in 27 states. But
recent polls show that a narrow majority of Americans approve of Mr. Trump’s handling of transgender issues.
Donald Trump sits at a small wooden desk adorned with the presidential seal. A notebook lies open on the desk, and a large group of women and girls stand around him.
President Trump signing an executive order aimed at prohibiting transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports in February.Eric Lee/The New York Times
Democrats have overwhelmingly opposed such bans at the federal and state levels. And the handful of Democratic politicians who have broken publicly on the issue since the election, like Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, both of whom expressed the view that transgender athletes’ participation in girls’ and women’s sports raised genuine concerns of fairness, have faced significant backlash and accusations of political opportunism from within the party.
But Shannon Minter, the legal director for the National Center for L.G.B.T.Q. Rights, argued for a more charitable reading of their statements, as attempts to navigate a new political reality.
“I think they were trying to say that, ‘Yeah, we recognize that there are genuine issues here that need to be addressed around fairness, and let’s do that.’ We can do that,” he said. “It wasn’t said in the most artful way possible, but not every articulation is going to be flawless.”
Others have argued that the backlash is a big part of the problem for both Democrats and the transgender rights movement: Democratic politicians’ fear of angering advocates has limited their ability to meet voters where they are.
“We haven’t been pragmatic for the last 10 or so years,” said Mara Keisling, the founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “And that’s killing us.”
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