It's Not Just Trump: The Jig Is Up For 'Gender Identity' In 2025
How hard will Democrats fight for lost causes?
An old Democratic Party acquaintance reconnected with me yesterday to admit I had been right. “Well you said the trans thing would be an issue, when you were right,” they said. “I can’t even say publicly how much I think it was really a factor but I saw right here … how much it was.” Sports were the topic most commonly raised in his everyday conversations. Turns out that Americans do not enjoy watching sports cheats, just as I had warned Democrats years ago.
Donald Trump will not fix this all by himself. Holding his feet to the fire will be essential. We want swift executive action to protect female sports categories, regulatory action to shut down the child-sterilizing medical cult, and policy action to remove pronouns and Queer Theory indoctrination from the federal bureaucracy. We want our single-sex and same-sex rights back.
There are many battles to fight. Somewhere in all those asks, for example, someone must convince the Trump 47 administration to care about men being housed in prisons with women. We who opposed these developments in the first place must now ensure follow-through, expanding on our historic opportunity to roll back the constitutional abuses of genderwoo, one by one, using all three branches of government. We have our work cut out for us.
On 4 December, the United States Supreme Court will hear the Skrmetti case. This is the challenge to Tennessee’s ban on pediatric transition. Chase Strangio is scheduled to argue against the law. Nothing is for certain in the Supreme Court, but analysts we trust here at The Distance do generally expect them to uphold the state’s right to pass such legislation.
It is also likely that the Court will decide whether the ‘trans child’ is a quasi-suspect class, that is, a discrete population deserving an increased level of protection by federal courts. The election of Trump does nothing to alter the outcome of this case. As the court regularly hears cases and issues decisions months later, we should expect a landmark opinion of some sort during 2025.
As we have written on the Skrmetti case before, an adverse ruling will likely have secondary effects on the entire legal project of ‘gender identity.’ Biglaw does not like to lose, so if this area of law becomes a loser, there will be less interest in taking on such cases. Future litigation by the gender lobby might be more narrowly-focused on questions of discrimination against ‘transgender’ Americans.
For example, the Bostock decision was simply about letting a man wear a dress to work. Most Americans just shrug at this sort of accommodation, but the activists behind Skrmetti are asking the court to stop states from regulating a group of clinicians doing irreversible harm to children.
Evidence obtained by the Alabama attorney general in discovery related to that state’s pediatric transition ban appears in an amicus curiae brief to the Court. However, the politics of the so-called “settled science” will not be settled in a courtroom. Rather, we should expect the decisive actions against the political project of “trans kids” to take place in congressional hearings.
According to a study that cost taxpayers almost $10 million, puberty blockers did not increase mental health in 95 percent of children to whom they were administered. Activist-clinician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy refused to publish the study, fearing the results would be “weaponized” against her profession. The Trans Youth Care (TYC) study she buried has drawn the attention of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
In a letter sent this Monday to the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the committee calls it “an irrefutable example of politicization of scientific research to further an ideological agenda.” At the moment, Democrats are married to this ideological agenda that inscribes itself on the bodies and minds of children. One wonders how spirited a defense some of them will mount as the house of cards comes down.
“Deliberately mischaracterizing and withholding the results of the TYC study has serious implications for the health and safety of children who are subjected to ‘gender affirming’ medical procedures, many of which are irreversible and hold lifelong implications despite lacking adequate scientific support for their efficacy and safety,” the letter reads.
The committee notes that “a 2020 paper authored by the TYC researchers” showed that test subjects “did experience troubling mental health symptoms when the study began.” The supposed cure was in fact the disease: the definition of iatrogenic harm. For “in addition to gender dysphoria, 51 percent of the TYC cohort reported elevated depression symptoms and 57 percent reported clinicially significant anxiety.”
Contrary to the myth of the ‘trans child,’ according to the authors of the quashed study medical intervention increased suicide risk. “Two-thirds of the children reported suicidal ideations and one fourth of those with suicidal ideations reported at least one past suicide attempt.” We hope the committee will thoroughly debunk and rebuke the use of suicide blackmail by clinicians: Would you rather have a live ‘trans kid’ or a dead son/daughter? This very thought, expressed in words to any parent, ought to be considered medical malpractice.
Here at The Distance, we are confident that the Republican representatives in charge of the committee will receive good advice from the parents in the counter-movement to gender ideology. Though informal and internally vexatious at times, the ‘gender critical’ (we prefer sex realist) coalition half-consists of parents with a child who “identifies,” or has identified as, “trans.” Most of these parents that we have talked to are former Democrats disappointed by their party’s advocacy for this ideological abuse of their families. Many of these parents have experienced intense social pressure and ostracism for refusing to “affirm” a child.
But this election result should prove to Democrats that their ideological coalition has reached the limits of gaslighting and cancel culture and name-calling to silence Americans anymore whenever they object to the obscene demands of ‘gender identity.’ The words “misinformation” and “hate” have lost their magic power. The fear of being called -ist or -phobe or “toxic” is gone, now. Our words will hurt Democrats, who nevertheless will be forced to listen to us.
If Republicans are smart, they will follow up on J.D. Vance’s observation that his ticket was winning “the normal gay guy vote.” Gay and lesbian Americans understand their own “gay shame” and its role in cross-sex identification. Across the history of longitudinal studies, a supermajority of “gender nonconforming” children grow out of cross-sex ideation during puberty, the process by which most of this population figures out that they are in fact same-sex attracted people, not the opposite sex.
In politics, this is called ‘a wedge issue.’ It can be used to divide political opponents from one another. Republicans have an opportunity to splinter the “LGBTQ+ community” and break the united front of progressive organizing. “Save the trans kids” has been a homophobic hate crime. It is gay conversion therapy under the rubric of ‘gender identities’ that do not objectively exist and cannot be defined in non-circular language.
Legislation and punishing publicity must ensue. The legacy progressive alphabetical institutions (ACLU, GLAD, SPLC, etc) that have championed this travesty cannot be allowed to get away with it. We should not expect Nuremberg trials, of course, just hearings. With enough public, political, and judicial pressure, 2025 can be the year that Democrats have to start ditching the demands of the gender lobby, thus disappointing their activist wing, or else die on this metaphorical hill.
In the final weeks of the race, Trump ran ads about women’s sports and they/them pronouns. Democrats clucked; media heads shook. But voters evidently responded positively to the ads, ignoring elite opinion to express in the privacy of the ballot box what they dared not say at work, or in school, or among friends. Everyone who thought they were on ‘the right side of history’ Tuesday morning had a rude awakening on Wednesday: ‘gender identity’ is an historic political loser for Democrats. The more they fight for it, the more they will lose.
