For over a decade now, the issue of trangenderism has gained increasing prominence in American politics, which is natural when personal choices begin to intersect with public policy, and for Kamala Harris it has risen above the surface at the worst possible time.
There have always been policy concerns around the idea that men can simply decide they are women. There were questions about women’s shelters and prisons, locker rooms and bathrooms, but nothing puts quite as fine a point on the issue as men competing in women’s sports.
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For his part, Donald Trump has a clear and concise answer to the troubling phenomenon, telling a Fox News town hall this week, "It’s such an easy question. Everybody in the room and you know that - we’re not going to let it happen."
And of course, he’s right. Very few people can see pictures of male swimmer Lea Thomas towering over her female competition, or watch men in volleyball matches slamming the ball into women’s faces without instinctively seeing that it is wrong and unfair.
But unfortunately for Kamala Harris and the Democrats, neither she nor they can say that, as glaringly obvious as it is.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board is now calling this a sleeper issue in the 2024 race, for Harris as well as senate candidates such as Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester who have voted in the past to secure transgender rights.
For her part, Vice President Harris has come under fire for her role as Attorney General of California in ensuring prisoners and illegal aliens had access to taxpayer-funded transition surgery.
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I brought that up recently to a Virginia Harris voter in his 60s in Staunton, and he was shocked, "is that true?" he asked?
Yes, it's true.
The implacable conundrum that Democrats face on this issue is that in order to come to the conclusion that men who identify as trans should not be competing against women, you have to acknowledge that they are not actually women, and according to the left, that makes one a horrible bigot.
There is no way around this. Whether gender is a decision or a biological reality is a binary choice, and Democrats made their choice at a time when they thought there was a political advantage to painting Republicans who defend biological reality as intolerant.
This ain’t fracking or Medicare for all. Harris is not in a position to "evolve" on the trans issue without alienating the left of her party irrevocably. She can’t simply say, "I was wrong, gender is determined by biology," any more than Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson can define the word woman.
With three weeks left until Election Day, Republicans up and down the ballot are inundating football games with ads showing the unfair and dangerous nature of men in women’s sports, and more and more women are speaking up.
Dan, in Fredericksburg, is in his 40s and also leans Democratic, but he told me, "Yeah, it’s obviously a problem and shouldn’t be happening."
I bring up Virginia voters in particular because that blue-bending commonwealth has a Republican governor in Glenn Youngkin, in large part because of his reasonable stances on cultural issues like this.
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The Trump campaign and Republicans writ large know they have a winner on this issue. They also know, as does the news media, that Harris has left herself no wiggle room. This is a candidate who just five years ago at a CNN town hall introduced herself by saying, "my pronouns are she, her, and hers."
It's tough to walk that back.
No, Kamala Harris and the Democrats will have to sleep in this bed that they made for themselves, even as more and more voters realize that this absurd notion that gender is a choice has serious real world implications.
The transgender charade is coming to an end. Everyone has the right to dress how they want, call themselves what they want, but they do not have the right to insist that everybody else deny reality to suit their preferences.
This issue isn’t going away, not in the next three weeks or after. The American people will protect girls and women in sports, whether Kamala Harris likes it or not.
