Extremist positions on both sides hurt transgender debate

With the Trump administration asking the Supreme Court to allow the enforcement of a ban on transgender people serving in the military and battling the state of Maine over allowing transgender athletes on girls’ and women’s teams in defiance of Donald Trump’s executive order, clashes over transgender rights in the administration’s second term are escalating.

This culture war is a complicated one. There is widespread agreement that positions widely perceived as extreme on such issues as transgender athletes in women’s sports and gender transition care for minors hurt the Democrats in last year’s election. But Republicans currently risk alienating the public just as much with repressive policies and gratuitous displays of nastiness.

For instance, polls show that between 66% and 80% of Americans support banning athletes who were born male from competing on women’s teams. While the number of such athletes is small, the unfairness seems obvious: In most sports, undergoing male puberty confers strong advantages in muscle mass and other physical traits even aside from differences in height. The issues are more complicated for school sports involving prepubescent children.

However, the most recent polls show that nearly 60% of Americans believe transgender people should be able to serve in the military — down from about 70% six years ago, but still a solid majority.

Trump’s executive order cites not only the medical expenses associated with transgender service members but also states that "gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex" is a "falsehood" incompatible with a soldier’s honor. This statement, which disparages transgender people en masse, reflects a view increasingly prevalent among opponents of expanded transgender rights, mostly on the right but also among some left-wing feminists: that transgender identity is a lie.

The same attitude has been reflected in some Republican Congress members’ insistence on referring to transgender House member Sarah McBride as "Mr. McBride" and "the gentleman from Delaware." Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has pushed through a bill barring McBride from using public women’s bathrooms in the Capitol, even though McBride has a bathroom in her own office. Mace has also made a habit of repeatedly using anti-transgender slurs in public. Even some conservative commentators who are not very sympathetic to transgender rights have been critical of her attention-seeking and vulgar behavior.

In the past decade, the transgender rights movement has squandered much public sympathy by taking extreme positions — that assertions of cross-sex identity by very young children should always be affirmed by parents, therapists and educators; that male-born athletes whose physical advantages have not even been reduced by hormone therapy should be able to compete against girls and women; that individuals who have legally changed their gender to female but still effectively present as male should have full access to use single-sex women’s facilities. This overreach has led to a backlash, not only in the United States but in England where the Supreme Court there has recently weighed in on the issue, that threatens to erase virtually all legal recognition of trans identities — even for people who have undergone full physical reassignment and present as the sex with which they identify. The effect would be to not only stigmatize transgender men and women but effectively banish them from public life.

It’s not too late to look for a compromise — one that, for instance, would preserve supportive therapy for gender-dysphoric children but establish better safeguards, or preserve legal gender transition but with objective requirements beyond simple self-identification. Instead, anti-trans activists are responding to overreach with more overreach and polarization.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.