Generally speaking, anyone who crosses a trans activist in public gets attacked without mercy.

After a Democratic congressman defended parents who expressed concern about transgender athletes competing against their young daughters, a local party official and ally compared him to a Nazi “cooperator” and a group called “Neighbors Against Hate” organized a protest outside his office.

When J.K. Rowling said that denying any relationship between sex and biology was “deeply misogynistic and regressive,” a prominent L.G.B.T.Q. group accused her of betraying “real feminism.” A few angry critics posted videos of themselves burning her books.

He's actually downplaying the reality a bit. JK Rowling has received at two public death wishes /threats this month from angry trans activists. Remember this guy?

“I condone m*rder!”

Trans activist calls to ass*ss*nate @jk_rowling and for the LGBTQ community to m*rder other politicians. @FBI pic.twitter.com/LdV7npLR6a

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 19, 2024

She's been getting these for a while now. But the real twist in this article is that the 2024 results are making some activists think maybe it's time to change tactics.

Now, some activists say it is time to rethink and recalibrate their confrontational ways, and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition.

“We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality. “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.”

It's not true that no one wants to join that team. There is an army of people online policing every utterance about this topic for wrong-think. Nearly all of them are volunteers. So they have attracted people, it's just that those people seem to include a large number of psychopaths who see trans rights as a great excuse to unleash their id on strangers. But it is true that most normal people don't want to join that team.

The public does not appear to be growing more empathetic to the transgender cause. Fewer Americans today than two years ago say they support some of the rights that L.G.B.T.Q. activists have pushed for, like allowing children to undergo gender transition treatment, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. And multiple recent polls have found that a considerable majority of Americans believe advocacy for transgender rights has gone “too far.”

The far left is doing what it always does and demanding 100% compliance from people who have already given 75%. It's already illegal to fire people for being trans but they have to insist that trans women belong in women's prisons and on women's sports teams and that 14-year-olds can decide to change sex even though those same kids can't drink, drive or get a tattoo.

It's clear from the article that even as they try to recalibrate the message, all of the activists still believe they are going to win this debate eventually, just as they did when it came to gay marriage. I don't think that's how this is going to go. 

Most Americans eventually accepted gay marriage because it was an arrangement between consenting adults. The same is true with most trans issues involving adults. Where a majority of Americans draw the line is at medical intervention for children or teaching kids as young as 1st grade that boys can grow to be girls and vice versa, as if the trans experience is something every child needs to be alerted to before they even know what men and women are. Americans also increasingly draw the line at putting trans people in women's spaces without the consent (or knowledge) of the women in those spaces. That includes prisons, abuse shelters and locker rooms. Women fleeing an abusive relationship don't want to hear that trans women are women as a man in a dress walks into the room.

I think this is more likely to go the way that Roe v. Wade went, which is to say Democrats will control the public conversation and have their talking points echoing from friendly media everywhere, but the actual fight will never end. People on the right will continue to fight the most extreme positions no matter how popular or unpopular they are and no matter what the medical groups say. In the long run efforts to make this a federal issue, in the courts or in Congress, will fail or be reversed. The equivalent of the Dobbs decision is waiting out there in the future even if the left succeeds temporarily in forcing the issue.

In any case, trans activists should be nicer because their only hope now is persuasion, not bullying and threats.