Ezra Klein has an interview with Rep. Sarah McBride, the first trans congressperson, about why Democrats are losing on these issues. I don't know who wrote the headline for this but it's currently titled "Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights." That seems a bit too final and definitive for me, or maybe just misleading. The left hasn't lost on trans rights, at least not for the most part. What they have done is lost the public's favor by doubling down on a few narrow issues where they have little support. We'll come back to that, but for now, Klein starts the discussion with polling. (Klein's comments are in bold.)

I want to begin with some polling. Pew asked the same set of questions in 2022 and 2025, and what it found was this collapse in what I would call persuasion.

They polled the popularity of protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces. That had lost eight points in those three years. Requiring health insurance companies to cover gender transition lost five points. Requiring trans people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex gained eight points.

When you hear those results, what, to you, happened there?

By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago. And that’s not isolated to just trans issues. I think if you look across issues of gender right now, you have seen a regression. Marriage equality support is actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago in a recent poll. We also see a regression around support for whether women should have the same opportunities as men compared to five, 10, 15 years ago.

So there’s a larger regression from a gender perspective that I think is impacting this regression on trans rights. But I think it has been more acute, more significant in the trans-rights space.

Candidly, I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion. We’ve lost the art of change-making over the last couple of years. We’re not in this position because of trans people. There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds — rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support. We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.

McBride is doing what every Democrat does on culture war issues: Ignore the initial ideological assault on the public by the far left and then deem any negative reaction part of a far-right plot to drive an issue.

No, no, no. This is not what has happened.

Ten years ago, trans issues were barely a blip for most people. But then it became widespread among children in public schools and the left celebrated this and pushed to medicalize these kids with gender affirming care and to isolate them from their parents at the same time. 

Parents rightly pushed back on this and other things including the closing of schools because of the pandemic and the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools. When they started to do that the left rallied and suggested the parents were a dangerous cabal of extremists who needed to be watched by the FBI. The National School Boards Association called on the Biden DOJ to investigate them. And instead of telling them to blow it out their ear, AG Merrick Garland ordered the FBI and various U.S. Attorney’s Offices to investigate the parents.

This is the background to what has happened over the past five years. Parents are fed up with the experts in Washington messing with their kids and threatening to investigate them if they push back.

Meanwhile, the trans activists had decided to go scorched earth on anyone who dared to question the wisdom of, say, having boys compete in track events with girls or putting male rapists in female prisons. Klein made this point in reference to Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton who made some comments about trans issues after the 2024 election loss.

One of the comments that got a lot of attention came right after the election when your colleague Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, said: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

What did you think when you heard that?

One, that it wasn’t the language that I would use.

But I think it came from a larger belief that the Democratic Party needed to start to have an open conversation about our illiberalism. That we needed to recognize that we were talking to ourselves. We were fighting fights that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, or fighting fights in a way that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, rather than maintaining proximity to the public and being normal people. [Chuckle.]

Yes! This is correct. Democrats were way out beyond most Americans and despite that they were arrogant and rude about it. This is not a way to form a big tent. As McBride goes on to point out, it's how you convince people to join the other political team.

The sports conversation is a good one because there is a big difference between banning trans young people from extracurricular programs consistent with their gender identity and recognizing that there’s room for nuance in this conversation. The notion that we created this “all-on” or “all-off” mentality, that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, use exactly the right language, and unless you do that, you are a bigot, you’re an enemy. When you create a binary all-on or all-off option for people, you’re going to have a lot of imperfect allies who are going to inevitably choose the all-off option...

And look, Seth is not going anywhere, but for a lot of everyday folks, if they think how Seth thinks or if they think that there’s room for nuance in this conversation and we tell them: You’re a bigot, you’re not welcome here, you’re not part of our coalition, we will not consider you an ally? The right has done a very good job of saying: Listen, you have violated the illiberalism of the left, you have been cast aside for your common sense — welcome into our club.

And then once you get welcomed into that club, human nature is: Well, I was with the Democratic Party on 90 percent of things, maybe against them on 10 percent of things or sort of in the middle on 10 percent. Once you get welcomed into that other club, human psychology is that you start to adopt those positions. And instead of being with us on 90 percent of things and against us on 10 percent of things, that person, now welcomed into the far-right club, starts to be against us on 90 percent of things and with us on only 10 percent of things.

That dynamic is part of the regression that we have seen. Not only that, but the hardening of the opposition that we’ve seen on trans issues.

Everything McBride just said is correct. If you excommunicate people over every disagreement, they will eventually leave. And yes, I think it's fair to say the right has tried to capitalize on that leftist intolerance. That's where the Trump ads that said "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" came from.

But, again, those ads weren't the start of this, they were the response to it. And they worked because people could see it was true. The far left had gone too far and was too dogmatic. 

The "hardening of the opposition" McBride mentions in passing is the real reason the polling on broader issues has shifted. The left has presented every new issue as part of an indivisible whole, i.e. you must accept boys in girls sports or you're a bigot. At a certain point some people believe these things really are indivisible and if they are going to be against one, they might as well reject them all. If gay marriage is not distinct from teaching kindergartners about the gender unicorn then maybe it's time to rethink gay marriage.

To be clear, that's not my view. I think these issues are distinct and different and should be treated differently. Specifically, gay marriage is an issue that involves adults. Adults should have maximum freedom for consensual relationships. But kids are different. Gender affirming care, trans athletes—these things belong in a different category. McBride even makes the same distinction.

Everybody knows that the sports issue is tough in the polling, but banning people under 18 from attending drag shows — that’s popular. Banning youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormones — that’s very popular. Banning public schools from teaching lessons on transgender issues — that’s popular. Requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex — that is popular.

When you look at these lists of issues, what do you see as dividing them? What cuts the issues that you could win on now from those that have heavy disapproval?

Well, I think that there’s very clearly a distinction that the public makes between young people and adults.

Unfortunately, McBride breezes past that answer and moves on to "allowing trans people to live their lives" which again is fine (with me, anyway) for adults. But it's not fine for six-year-olds. That's the issue. You can libertarian this all you want but not with kids, especially young kids. We don't allow kids to drink or smoke or get tattoos. You have to be an adult to make those choices. The same should be true here. 

And there are also issues where trans acceptance tramples on the safety of women, i.e. male rapists in women's prisons or trans women at women's shelters. Until the left is willing to flex on these points, people will keep moving away from their views on a wide range of issues.