‘We looked unreasonable’: Losing credibility, trans activists employ new tactics

To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism.

After a Democratic congressman defended parents who expressed concern about transgender athletes competing against their young daughters, a local party official and ally compared him to a Nazi “cooperator” and a group called Neighbours Against Hate organised a protest outside his office.

A supporter at the annual Trans Day of Visibility in New York last year. Some trans activists are questioning the tactics used to further their cause.Credit: Bloomberg

When J.K. Rowling said that denying any relationship between sex and biology was “deeply misogynistic and regressive”, a prominent LGBTQ group accused her of betraying “real feminism”. A few angry critics posted videos of themselves burning her books.

When the Biden administration convened a call with LGBTQ allies last year to discuss new limits on the participation of transgender student athletes, one activist fumed on the call that the administration would be complicit in “genocide” of transgender youth, according to two people with knowledge of the incident.

Now, some activists say it is time to rethink and recalibrate their confrontational ways, and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition.

“We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality. “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.”

They cite tactics, especially on social media, that became routine for devoted backers of the movement: attempts to police language, such as excising the words “male” and “female” from discussions of pregnancy and abortion, decrying the misidentification of a transgender person as violence, insisting everyone declare the pronouns they use.

Some LGBTQ activists have put pressure on liberal candidates for office to take positions that align with theirs – which can backfire. Republicans pummeled Vice President Kamala Harris in ads this year over the answers she gave on a 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that has been active in the transgender cause. The questionnaire asked Harris to commit to ensuring that transgender people in federal custody, “including those in prison and immigration detention”, could receive gender-transition surgery.

Heng-Lehtinen, 38, who grew up in a prominent Republican family in Florida and came out to them as transgender after college, said that as painful as Donald Trump’s election might be for transgender people, their movement should see the benefit in treating sceptics less like enemies and more like future allies. “No one wants to feel stupid or condescended to,” Heng-Lehtinen said.

This soul-searching comes at a time when Democrats are engaging in a broader discussion of how their efforts to advance social and racial justice in recent years may have appeared to be too judgmental and helped contribute to the perception that their party had lost its understanding of the problems Americans want politicians to prioritise.

Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars on ads that accused Democrats of “wokeness” and capitalised on the unfamiliarity most Americans have with transgender people’s lives, using hyperbole and distortions that often created false impressions of schoolhouse indoctrination and locker rooms full of predators.

Sarah McBride is the first transgender member of Congress.Credit: AP

LGBTQ activists are confronting a political landscape that has grown more hostile. More than two dozen states now limit access to transition medical treatment. Last week, House Republicans vowed to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms in the Capitol, a not-so-subtle affront to Sarah McBride of Delaware, who this month became the first transgender person elected to Congress.

McBride – who has insisted that she is a voice for all her constituents, and “not a spokesperson for a movement” – said that she would follow House rules even if she disagreed with them.

It is that kind of targeting from conservatives – which transgender people say is deeply personal and far too common – that makes many activists wary of relying on a gentler, more traditional political approach. Some of them saw avoidance in McBride’s matter-of-fact response, and accused her of capitulating to the right.

If they seem impatient, activists say, it is because they are.

Protesters rally against a Kentucky bill that forbids trans and nonbinary students from using the school bathrooms they identify with among other measures.Credit: AP

“What we’re facing is fundamental unfairness – and that is not coming from people who are interested in compromise and open debate,” said Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist with the ACLU who works on transgender advocacy. “These are people who are threatened by trans people’s very existence. And, more importantly, they’re trying to scapegoat us.”

The ACLU noted in a statement, for instance, that its 2019 questionnaire asked 19 questions on a range of subjects because voters needed to be able to “draw meaningful policy distinctions among the crowded field”.

Democrats are experiencing their own disillusionment with the national conversation over transgender rights, a debate that they say can sound dogmatic and intolerant.

“Here we are calling Republicans weird, and we’re the party that makes people put pronouns in their email signature,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, who ignited fury and protests at his office after he expressed concern that transgender athletes could have an unfair advantage or hurt other athletes.

Even so, he added, Democrats – and most Americans, for that matter – still want to protect transgender people from discrimination.

“Having reasonable restrictions for safety and competitive fairness in sports seems like, well, it’s very empirically a majority opinion,” Moulton said. “But should we take civil rights away from trans people, so they can just get fired for being who they are? No.”

Transgender rights were not top of mind for most voters on election day. According to Gallup, voters asked how important each of 22 national issues were in their voting decisions ranked transgender rights lowest.

The public does not appear to be growing more empathetic to the transgender cause. Fewer Americans today than two years ago say they support some of the rights that LGBTQ activists have pushed for, like allowing children to undergo gender transition treatment, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. And multiple recent polls have found that a considerable majority of Americans believe advocacy for transgender rights has gone “too far”.

Parents protest against a Los Angeles school district ruling requiring teachers to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender.Credit: MediaNews Group via Getty Images

This trend pains many longtime LGBTQ activists, many of whom worked on the decades-long campaign to win widespread acceptance for gay and lesbian people.

In interviews, some activists stressed it was important to see the big picture: The LGBTQ movement was working through a difficult pivot, trying to apply lessons from the same-sex marriage campaign to the newer fight for transgender equality.

Evan Wolfson, founder of the pro-same-sex marriage group Freedom to Marry, said he and other activists learnt that a key to victory in the long term was accepting small, less rewarding gains at first, like civil unions.

“We always said, ‘We’re not going to ask for civil unions. But we’ll take it as a mechanism to move people along’,” Wolfson said.

Evan Wolfson says the key to victory is to accept incremental changes first.Credit: Getty Images for Lambda Legal

He received criticism from all sides, with some gay rights activists dismissing civil unions as empty half-measures and many Democrats blaming electoral losses on the perception that the party was pushing same-sex marriage on a reluctant country.

Eventually, the debate over legalising civil unions in the 1990s evolved into dialogue over full marriage rights by the 2000s, culminating in the next decade with the Supreme Court decision establishing same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.

The discussion about transgender rights is “still a relatively new one – and a growing one,” Wolfson said. “That conversation takes time.”

Mara Keisling, an activist who founded the National Centre for Transgender Equality remembered an adage she used 20 years ago about legislative priorities: “You can’t say ‘Don’t fire them’ until you can say ‘Don’t kill them’” – meaning that advocates should focus first on measures that reinforced the fundamental humanity of transgender people, such as hate-crime protections. Then, she said, you can push more effectively for laws about discrimination.

Keisling said too many activists today were distracted by counterproductive debates – boycotting Rowling’s Harry Potter series, for example, and insisting that there were no reasonable objections to allowing transgender women into high-level sports.

American transgender swimmer Lia Thomas is one of the figures at the centre of the sports debate.Credit: AP

Keisling noted that LGBTQ activists lost credibility with many Americans once they started accusing people of bigotry over sports.

“We looked unreasonable,” she said. “We should be talking about the 7-year-old who just wants to play soccer with her friends.”

(Keisling insists she is hardly naive about the animosity from the right; it has been directed at her personally. Her image was used in one of the Trump campaign ads that attacked Democrats over transgender rights this year.)

Heng-Lehtinen agreed that the movement needed a more persuasive message on sports. School districts and athletics associations, he said, have long been dealing with the issue of transgender athletes. The matter should be left to them, and not to the whims of Republican legislators, he added.

“I don’t think we are best served by imposing a one-size-fits-all solution,” he said, adding that “sweeping and crude” bans on transgender athletes were just that.

Advocates said their research found the most effective messaging considered that most Americans did not know a lot about life as a transgender person, and reinforced the basic idea that transgender people wanted what everyone else wants: fairness, respect and love.

“It is our job to break the misinformation down and to say compassionately, ‘It’s perfectly understandable that you have questions,’” Heng-Lehtinen said. Put more directly, he added, “That’s not yelling at someone.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.