If the Democrats lose the upcoming midterm elections, our path out of competitive authoritarianism gets a lot longer, or disappears altogether. The political winds are at the Democrats’ backs, but the structure of our electoral system cuts against them. It could come down to a few close races. So the party is—very understandably—anxious to get its strategy right and not to leave gettable votes on the table.
And many centrist think tanks, columnists, and pundits have a pitch for an easy way to win more support: “Moderate” on trans rights.
This has been a perennial concern of the chattering classes for the entire Trump era, and the offer they put to Democrats is a seemingly attractive one: Remain supportive of a small and vulnerable segment of the population without seeming out of touch with much of America, in the words of Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way. This was echoed more recently by Thomas Edsall, writing in The New York Times, who argued that Democrats voting to bar trans women from women’s sports would help them reconnect with the median voter.
And some Democrats are listening. California Governor (and possible presidential candidate) Gavin Newsom has had several stabs at “moderating” on trans rights. More recently, Representative Seth Moulton, running in a competitive primary against Ed Markey, argued that many Americans believe “that trans people should be protected,” but “when it comes to competitive sports, they feel uncomfortable.”
Overall, however, the party has not gone as far as the moderators feel is necessary. If they’re selling a train ride, Democrats will go a stop or two but then get off. They’ll mention the issue less, drop overtly “woke” language (if they ever used it at all), maybe even say something about women’s sports or young children medically transitioning and then backtrack, or partially backtrack. That’s it.
Perhaps that’s as far as they’re willing to go. Perhaps they get pushback from progressives who have no interest in getting on the train at all. Newsom dropped the centrist shtick and rebranded himself as an anti-Trump firebreather. Moulton lost his primary in no small part because liberal voters are currently in no mood to compromise with the right. Centrists, of course, have bemoaned this—with constant Republican attacks, Democrats, it’s claimed, risk looking out of touch if they don’t stay on the train and moderate further.
And with the pressure this high, they keep finding the odd Democrat who’ll listen, particularly those in front-line races. James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, recently reversed his position on trans participation in girls’ sports. This may not sound like that big a deal; the exact sort of compromise centrists are selling. Surely this is a fair trade for a red-state senator.
Just about every trans person I know thinks concerns about sports are misleadingly presented and vastly overblown. They also would trade restrictions here for broader social acceptance and inclusion in a heartbeat if they thought that was a deal that was on the table. They just don’t think that it is. And I think they’re correct to think that.
What centrists never mention is that we have a highly relevant case study, playing out in real time, of a major center-left party following their advice. The U.K. Labour Party is almost a “sliding doors” alternative timeline where democrats stay on the train. There are differences, of course, but both are the main center-left party in a historically two-party system and have had to grapple with a radicalizing right. Given our shared language and culture, they have often looked to the other for ideas on how to campaign or govern.
And yet, the centrist advocates in the United States of moderation never, ever, ever mention the Labour Party. Perhaps they’re just not familiar; Americans can be insular like that. But I suspect the elite ones are. People who read news every day will have followed the key test case for their strategy. But you’d never know it. The below may explain why.
As someone who’s been politically active in LGBT rights in both countries, let me tell you what happens if you stay on the train to its terminus, i.e., to caving in to the right on this issue. First, in today’s environment, where fascism has largely captured the right, once you show a willingness to back down, the pressure on you will increase, not decrease.
Trans rights didn’t use to be an issue at all in the U.K. In 2012, just 60 articles relating to trans people were published in the U.K. media. But our campaigning right-wing press (most notably The Times, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail) saw an opening. While both main parties were nominally pro-trans rights, the conservatives were increasingly picking up American new-right rhetoric. Meanwhile, Labour, starting in 2019 under new leader Keir Starmer, pursued a strategy of affecting a more moderate image. Right-wing writers had already started anti-trans fearmongering, and after Starmer’s ascent, they massively ramped it up, averaging 20 articles a day on the topic by 2022, with even purportedly liberal outlets like The Guardian joining in.
“Can a woman have a penis?” became a favorite question of journalists to ask Labour leaders. Having already decided not to go too hard on “culture war” issues, they didn’t have the courage to just say “yes” or “that’s an ugly gotcha remark,” so they stalled and waffled. You could tell they hated the question. So interviewers kept asking it. Hardly responsible behavior from the media, but Labour had basically invited it by showing weakness, by flinching before they got hit.
Next, small compromises will become big ones, and far more quickly than you thought possible. The urge to moderate is unfalsifiable and insatiable. If it doesn’t work, you’re told to moderate more. The train stops will start racing past. Two years ago, Labour won an election on a moderately pro-trans platform, but the subsequent cave was fast: First, youth trans health care was criminalized; in time, adult care was being withdrawn. Destinations you were explicitly promised the train would not go begin to blur past before most people even have a sense of what’s happening.
A month ago, the Labour government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, or EHRC, officially implemented a revised Statutory Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions, and Associations. The backstory and legal mechanics of this are complicated, but functionally it is one of the most authoritarian bathroom bans in the developed world. All institutions, public or private, must exclude trans people from single-sex spaces of their gender (a trans woman cannot use the women’s toilet) and may also exclude them from the spaces of their sex at birth (a trans woman also cannot use the men’s).
In addition to bars, coffee shops, restaurants, gyms, schools, universities, charities, and so on, this also applies to venues like hospitals. An oncology department that has men’ s and women’s wards will be forced to bar trans people from both—they should be put in a “side room,” said Mary-Ann Stephenson, the Labour-appointed chair of the EHRC, which wrote the Code of Practice. But these are in short supply and used for more rational purposes like severely immunocompromised patients. This is acknowledged by Labour members of Parliament, such as Kevin McKenna, to be unworkable and dangerous, but they’re doing it anyway.
There is good reason to worry that these changing rules will act as a green light to violent bigots across the country. In the U.K., both trans people and cis people who don’t fully meet their gender stereotype (for instance cis female cancer survivors who may have short hair or mastectomies) have reported a massive increase in abuse and harassment.
There is a human cost to all this. U.K. suicide hotlines are reporting a big spike in (adult) trans callers. Trans children are estimated to be taking their own lives at seven times the rate of their peers. Campaigners describe regularly hearing from parents sleeping at the bottom of their children’s beds, terrified of what they might do if left alone.
The train will never reach its advertised destination. At no point will there be any political payoff for any of this. How could there be? Centrists are right to say that the median voter has mixed views on trans rights. But they’re also not deeply considered views or high-salience ones. The trans panic is an elite fixation. Most mechanics in Ohio, or football fans in Wallsend, know very little about it and care even less. Centrists imagine swing voters who are deeply invested in “trans issues,” with nuanced, nonpartisan positions, and who are informed enough to respond to subtle changes in policy. There are not many people like this. Indeed, I’m not sure there are any.
Yes, Labour and the Democrats are both negatively defined as effeminate and queer—think of insults like “soy boy” or “cuck.” And yes, the attacks on trans people are part of this. But if centrists wanted to help, they could use their considerable media power to debunk right-wing lies or expose the gendered double standards in our politics. They don’t.
Labour’s strategy was one of compromise on culture-war issues to pull votes from Reform (the U.K.’s main fascist party). This was personified by the former chief of staff to the prime minister, Morgan McSweeny, who was generally thought to have dictated strategy during the Starmer years. The party should, he argued, focus on “hero voters”—white, working-class, social conservatives in “red wall” (think Rust Belt as an inexact analogy) areas of the country.
So far, they have attracted 0 percent of those voters (yes, zero, that’s the actual statistic). Meanwhile their share of gay and bisexual voters has plunged from 42 percent last election (itself arguably an underperformance) to 18 percent following their “moderation” on trans rights. There isn’t data specifically for trans people, but I assume it’s even worse. Not the only reason for Starmer’s apocalyptic unpopularity, but a clear contributing factor. So it doesn’t even work politically.
But the longer you stay on the train, the harder it is to get off. Starmer was recently forced out and replaced with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. Yet even as this was happening, Labour pushed through the EHRC code described above. Their political strategy was obviously not working, but they remained locked into forcing trans people out of public life.
This has less to do with formal powers—Burnham could reverse all of this if he chose to—and is more a matter of psychology: Getting off the train and catching a return journey would require an admission that you fell for a very obvious con. People whose identity is rooted in being clever, savvy operators just can’t do that.
It would also require an admission that you brutalized a vulnerable minority for no good reason. And most people don’t want to think of themselves that way, so they just … keep going. Britain has gone from being one of the better developed countries for trans rights to being one of the very worst (currently ranked by ILGA World’s rainbow map with Russia and Hungary), yet Labour still blathers on about progress and equality and presents what it is doing as a careful balancing of rights.
Also, the U.K. has seen a wave of institutions rapidly fold in a way that will be difficult to reverse. On a battlefield of war, if the unit next to yours ran away, yours would too. No one wants to get shot at if the battle’s lost. And so, when the main center-left party fled the field, many other institutions decided they weren’t going to stand up to the anti-trans campaign’s considerable media and legal firepower. Even the largest British LGBT charity, Stonewall, signaled surrender, with its new chair expressing admiration for, and apologizing to, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling—one of the figureheads and primary funders of the anti-trans side.
As you ride the train, at each progressively more indefensible stop, you’ll be told it’s the last one. But it won’t be. Labour thinks moving to the right on social issues takes them “off the table.” And this is at the heart of the centrist con: You can do this, they say, and still be a good person. You’ll make a few compromises, but you’ll “remain supportive,” and trans people will continue to be “protected,” as Jon Cowan and Seth Moulton respectively put it.
What will actually happen is you’ll do horrific things while delusionally maintaining the fiction of yourself as a good person. Labourites have not carefully balanced rights, they have not made an ugly compromise to defeat the fascist threat, or even cynically cemented their own hold on power. They have, in fact, just viciously attacked the rights, safety, and dignity of a minority group. And for the right, it will never, ever, ever be enough.
Bridget Philipson, the Labour minister who implemented the bathroom ban, said she was doing so, in part, because she didn’t “want trans people to be constantly on the front pages of newspapers” or “pilloried on social media.” Giving anti-trans campaigners what they wanted would, the logic goes, make them disappear. Feeding the wolf would starve it. Just do this, she effectively said, and the whole debate will be over.
It wasn’t, of course. Since then, the small but powerful anti-trans lobby has been emboldened to call for everyone in the country to need a digital ID stating their “biological sex” to access changing rooms, health care, and single-sex services and associations. It seems like every week we see another institution cave; Amnesty International withdrew a report on anti-trans groups under legal pressure, the Welsh health service abruptly stopped all adult gender-affirming operations, and new guidance was rolled out in U.K. schools that campaigners describe as segregation, as it will effectively prevent trans children from accessing toilets and changing rooms of either gender. It makes social transition much harder and more regulated and implies that such students are a safeguarding risk to their peers.
Much of the American progressive commentary in the U.K. (including my own) has focused on Labour as an exemplar of a poor political strategy, which it assuredly is. What I want to highlight here is the profound failing of moral wisdom: We are in a fight for free societies, for the rights of everyone to live as they wish—our goal is to win the battle, not make difficult issues go away.
Many readers, I suspect, will have a sense of just how dangerous the modern right has become. What I think is less understood is the enormous harm center-left elites can do when they adopt the wrong strategy for dealing with this unprecedented threat. You do not want to get on this train, be left on a battlefield when the general flees, or live in a country where the main center-left party suddenly starts persecuting minorities.
I’m not saying we should stop voting for Democrats. Much of the online discussion of Talarico’s comments centered around whether trans people and allies should abstain from voting (or vote third party) to pressure Democrats not to go down this track. My own view is that this is a mistake, at least in present circumstances. Not because we shouldn’t pressure the party—we absolutely need to—but because this is an ineffective tool for doing so.
Beyond the incredible harms of allowing Republicans to maintain congressional control, it just hasn’t ever worked. The main consequences of the left withdrawing support historically—from ditching Al Gore for Ralph Nader in 2000 to going “Bernie-or-Bust” in 2016—have been bitterness and mistrust that have made it harder for progressives to achieve their goals. We have a much better model of how to fight for a trans-inclusive party in Ed Markey’s recent primary victory.
And I think the direction of the Democratic Party is worth fighting for. They’re not Labour. Not even close. No national candidate supports a bathroom ban, and even those like Talarico who have moderated are a minority. The map of trans legal rights in the United States is a map of partisan control. When Democrats hold power, they protect or enhance trans rights. As I was writing this, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger reversed Republican restrictions on trans people’s participation in sports. Overall, weak-willed centrists are slowly losing the intraparty debate.
This analysis might seem strange to many on the American left who are used to thinking of the Democrats as centrist, weak, and feckless. But on this issue, they’ve managed—more or less—to hold the line where their international peers have not. Indeed, the party is now generally both more aggressive and more progressive than many of its international counterparts (center-left parties in two-party systems, center-to-left coalitions in multiparty ones). Back in March, every Senate Democrat—a group that to be sure includes several moderates—voted against a GOP amendment to prohibit transgender athletes from participating in girls’ or women’s sports.
This was not guaranteed to be the case in advance. Not turning on trans people was a choice party leadership, primary voters, and mid-level institutions made—and must continue to make. As long as the threat of fascism persists, there will be those urging us to run, to forget our values, and abandon our friends. And they will make it sound like reasonable pragmatism.
Hold the line, and have faith. We are in this together, and we will get through this together.
