Mick Hartley

Yesterday I wondered if gender woo was the hill that the Democrats were choosing to die on. Kara Dansky at Spiked has had the same thought – Will Democrats ever drop the ‘transgender lunacy’?

It’s difficult to know exactly when the Democratic Party began its full-throated embrace of gender-identity ideology, at the expense of women and girls as a sex class.

We know that Joe Biden was saying as early 2012 that anti-transgender discrimination is the ‘civil-rights issue of our time’. That happens to be the same year that his friend, Tim McBride, decided that he is a woman named Sarah (he has since been elected to Congress). We know that Democratic members of Congress first introduced the so-called Equality Act, which redefined sex to include ‘gender identity’ for all purposes under US civil-rights law, in 2015. We know that under President Obama, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued a joint ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to US schools in 2016, instructing them to interpret sex to include ‘gender identity’ for all purposes under Title IX, which was originally intended to prohibit sex discrimination in education. Earlier this month, during a debate on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, a perfectly sensible proposal to maintain single-sex sports in US schools, every single Democrat who spoke in opposition to the bill came off as an unhinged lunatic….

One Democratic congressman did see the light. Less than a week after the election, Seth Moulton said: ‘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.’ In response, Matt Chilliak, his campaign manager, had a temper tantrum and resigned….

Still, none of these criticisms or defections seem to have prompted any soul searching from Democratic leaders. Americans have heard nothing from Biden or Harris on this issue. We have heard nothing from senior Democrats Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer….

Sadly, things are not changing in the US Democratic Party, and it appears that the Democrats are indeed prepared to die on the hill that ‘some men are women’. … It’s still not too late for the Democrats to change course. They’d better do it soon if they hope to gain back voters.

I'm not holding my breath.