More Polls Show Voters Will Punish Democrats For Pushing An Extreme 'Trans' Agenda

Bad ideas will fare badly in elections

Forget about all the haters in 2024. Worry about the ‘double haters.’ Americans who hated both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump broke for the latter in 2016, electing him. Then voters who hated both Trump and Joe Biden in 2020 crossed over to Biden, electing him.

Now a 6,000 person survey from the Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) shows that this same decisive demographic of swing voters is overwhelmingly opposed to men cheating at sports in the name of ‘trans inclusion.’ It is the latest evidence that Democrats are completely out of step with public opinion on transgender issues.

Political scientist Ruy Teixeira explains that “Democrats’ vulnerability is underscored by views among this group on contentious issues dividing Republicans and Democrats.” Put simply, the problem shows up most wherever the issues are most divisive, as with ‘gender identity.’

Take the issue of racism in our society. Is racism “built into our society, including into its policies and institutions”, as Democrats contend, or does racism “come from individuals who hold racist views, not from our society and institutions?” In the SCAL survey, by 64 to 34 percent, our undecided double haters chose the latter view, that racism comes from individuals, not society.

Or consider the question of transgender athletes participating in team sports. Should “transgender athletes… be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity” or should they “only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” By a staggering 75 to 20 percent, those who dislike both Trump and Biden but currently can’t choose between them, choose the second option, that sports team participation should be determined by birth gender.

Teixeira would have the Democratic Party move to the center and embrace patriotism. He advises Democrats “to defuse. This means moving aggressively to neutralize vulnerabilities in cultural areas by (a) dissociating the party from extreme positions in their own ranks; and (b) embracing a common-sense approach to these issues which typically aligns well with both Democratic values and public opinion.”

Daniel Cox, director of SCAL, points to the recent decline in public approval of same-sex relationships, a phenomenon that cannot be explained solely by Republican, conservative, or ‘right wing’ opinion.

Instead, Cox sees “an unsettled public responding to emerging policies that are extraordinarily complicated, and about which many people feel conflicted.” Same-sex marriage was a unique success that was always going to be hard to duplicate. “Americans strongly reject discrimination against transgender people,” he says, “but the lengths they think society should go to in order to accommodate transgender athletes is less clear-cut. Polling reflects this sense of conflict.”

As we have seen with Lia Thomas, forced exposure to the demands of ‘trans inclusion’ does not lead to greater acceptance. Nor can the gender ideologues depend on the rising generation to have different views from their parents, Cox says. They too have shifted the opposite direction in just the last two years.

A new poll from PRRI finds that more Americans now say that gender is binary, and the increase is especially pronounced among young adults. In fact, no generation shifted more dramatically than Generation Z. In 2021, just 43 percent of Gen Zers thought that gender was binary. Today, that number has increased to 57 percent—a 14-point increase over the last two years. It’s difficult to know what to make of this finding, other than that views are, well, fluid.

The gains made by the last generation are still not certain and the new social consensus is not complete. “Only 49 percent of Americans believe that sexual orientation is innate,” Cox observes, “while roughly as many believe it’s the result of environmental factors or some combination.”

Published on consecutive days last week, these two essays at The Liberal Patriot represent a new outspokenness on transgender issues for the website. Teixeira and Cox are both interested in the well-being of the Democratic Party. Anodyne as it is, their advice to swap progress flags for the stars and stripes, and stop caping for paraphilic sports cheats in lipstick, might as well be a declaration of war on Pride.

“My teammates and I were forced to undress in the presence of Lia, a six-feet four-inch tall biological man fully-intact with male genitalia, 18 times per week,” Paula Scanlan told a House subcommittee last Thursday, the same day that Teixeira’s essay appeared.

Some girls opted to change in bathroom stalls and others used the family bathroom to avoid this. When we tried to voice our concern to the Athletic Department, we were told that Lia swimming and being in our locker room was non-negotiable and we were offered psychological services to attempt to re-educate us to become comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male.

“The university was gaslighting and fear-mongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male,” Scanlan said.

Then she wrote an op-ed for the campus newspaper that was retracted without explanation just hours after publication. “This is representative of a greater issue, the destruction of free speech. Today any discussion of maintaining the sanctity of women’s spaces is labeled transphobic, bigoted, and hateful.”

“What’s bigoted and hateful is the discrimination against women and the efforts to erase women and our equal opportunities, dignity, and safe spaces,” Scanlan said. She speaks for a supermajority of American voters — and the key demographic that will likely determine close races in 2024. So why are Democrats apparently not listening?

Some Democrats are listening. A handful have broken with the party line and paid a price for it. Texas state representative Shawn Thierry was censured by the state party after she supported SB 14, a bill to halt the pediatric sterilization cult (“ban gender-affirming care”). Notably, the mother of a ‘trans child’ brought the motion.

Helen Joyce, the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, recently predicted exactly this kind of scenario unfolding as the public and politicians “move on” from gender identity. Some mothers of ‘trans kids’ will fight forever, Joyce said, “like the Japanese soldiers on the Pacific islands who didn’t know the war was over.”

The trans fight also seems to bring out the worst activist behavior. In her speech casting that vote during May, Thierry wrote that while “many of my constituents encouraged me to vote in favor of this legislation,” she had been subject to “personal, and even racist, attacks on me as an African American woman” for taking her stand.

Thierry was describing a split within Democratic Party voters. A Marist poll of 1,377 Americans last September found that 45 percent of Democrats surveyed were in favor of children waiting until adulthood to transition. Just 34 percent of respondents supported children accessing hormones and surgeries — and only with parental consent. Coercive trans advocacy thus runs the risk of splitting the party. In other words, it is a wedge issue, and a sharp one.

Rep. Marvin Robinson, a Democratic state representative from Kansas City, endured similar attacks after he supported a veto override to protect women’s sports from male cheaters.

Robinson, a Kansas City Democrat, said a colleague had told him transgender teens would kill themselves if the legislation were to become law. The unnamed legislator asked Robinson if he would feel blame and guilt for their deaths.

“I had to gasp. I was like, God, how cruel of a question,” Robinson told host Pete Mundo on Thursday on KCMO-FM.

Like Thierry, Robinson is black. Of the three Texas Democrats who joined Thierry in voting for SB 14, Rep. Harold Dutton of Houston is black, Rep. Abel Herrero of Robstown is Latino, and Tracy King of Batesville is white. This still-small sample group is beginning to resemble the expected demographics of Democratic opposition to ‘gender identity’ extremism. The irony of mostly-white ‘trans’ advocates forming an outrage mob against mostly-black and brown Democrats is striking and sooner or later it will crystallize as public debate. Not by coincidence, the era of ‘woke’ has seen both demographics deteriorate as reliable Democratic bases.

These are of course red states. But what happens to Democrats outside of California when Sacramento passes ‘sanctuary’ legislation that would empower Munchausen moms? Or when Democrats in Oregon and Pennsylvania target bills that would just provide insurance coverage for detransitioners, a mean-spirited denialism of their existence? Democrats of blue states either do not understand that compulsory pronouns and secret school transition closets are political poison outside of their wealthy enclaves, or they do not care. Either way, it is deleterious to their wider prospects.

Voting profiles that Democrats were depending on for their electoral future — young people, minorities, women, lesbian and gay Americans — do not share the same interests as the elite caste which demands ideological fealty to the cult of trans. Small changes add up. Americans increasingly feel confronted by gender ideology and reactive to it.

Right now, Democrats are the husband married to the Munchausen mom. Ruy Teixeira and Daniel Cox are friends telling the dad to get a divorce, but he can’t listen, can’t let himself think about it too much, can’t say anything, for fear that his wife will take the kids to California and let Scott Wiener cut their bits off.

Democrats will have to figure it out. They will have to hold the debate, and prepare to debate Republicans, because the science is coming quite unsettled and the voters are not down with the Pride clowns.