Mick Hartley

Helen Lewis at The Atlantic acknowledges the Dem's gender problem:

One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion—nor prepared to disown….

Biden’s administration has long pushed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters—or, more crucially, what it actually involves. His officials have advocated for removing lower age limits for gender surgeries for minors, and in January 2022, his nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, refused to define the word woman, telling Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, “I’m not a biologist.”

On sports—an issue seized on by the Trump campaign—Biden’s White House has consistently prioritized gender identity over sex. Last year, the Department of Education proposed regulations establishing “that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.” Schools were, however, allowed to limit participation in specific situations. (In April, with the election looming, this part of the Title IX revision was put on hold.) Harris went into the campaign tied to the Biden administration’s positions, and did not have the courage, or strategic sense, to reject them publicly. Nor did she defend them.

The fundamental issue is that athletes who have gone through male puberty are typically stronger and faster than biological females. Rather than contend with that fact, many on the left have retreated to a comfort zone of claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is driven principally by transphobia. But it isn’t: When trans men or nonbinary people who were born female have competed in women’s sports against other biological females, no one has objected. The same season that Lia Thomas, a trans woman, caused controversy by swimming in the women’s division, a trans man named Iszac Henig did so without any protests. (He was not taking testosterone and so did not have an unfair advantage.) Yet even talking about this issue in language that regular Americans can understand is difficult: On CNN Friday, when the conservative political strategist Shermichael Singleton said that “there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe that boys should play girls’ sports,” he was immediately shouted down by another panelist, Jay Michaelson, who said that the word boy was a “slur,” and he “was not going to listen to transphobia at this table.” The moderator, Abby Phillips, also rebuked Singleton, telling him to “talk about this in a way that is respectful.”…

The tragedy of this subject is that compromise positions are available that would please most voters, and would stop a wider backlash against gender nonconformity that manifests as punitive laws in red states. America is a more open-minded country than its toughest critics believe—the latest research shows that about as many people believe that society has not gone far enough in accepting trans people as think that it has gone too far. Delaware has just elected the first transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride. But most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.

As Leor Sapir points out – while acknowledging that this is generally "a good and important piece" – that last paragraph misleads with its talk of "a wider backlash against gender nonconformity":

…it's a profound mischaracterization to say that there is a "backlash against gender nonconformity" among Republicans and non-progressive voters. Just the opposite is true. The "backlash" is in favor of gender non-conformity, over and against the rigid stereotyping of "gender identity" theory. Boys who like to play with dolls and dance ballet are not "trans girls." They're effeminate–i.e., gender nonconforming–boys.

This point has been made ad nauseum in the gender culture wars, and I've yet to read a persuasive rebuttal to it. There is no definition of gender identity that isn't either circular or reliant on stereotypes. Typically, it is both. There is no secular ideology more hostile to gender non-conformity in our day than gender identity theory. None.

This is a key point and any effort to understand where Democrats went wrong and what they need to do to fix it must begin from a correct understanding of what critics of gender identity theory actually think and say.