Activists protest Donald Trump’s policies at the Hands Off rally at the state capitol in Austin, Texas (April 5, 2025) I Vic Hinterlang / Shutterstock.com
In the opening months of the Trump administration, the full power of the state has been deployed to suppress the rights of trans people to access healthcare, play sports, change their gender marker on official documents, and use public bathrooms, among other attacks. These policies have been critiqued by LGBTQ+ advocates in press conferences, social media posts, and op-ed pages, correctly calling out the unlawful discrimination and cruelty of the Trump administration. But leftists and progressives who care about trans rights should avoid the argument that these policies are cruel because the trans community makes up such a small percentage of the population.
This line of reasoning is encapsulated in an op-ed from The New York Times editorial board: “The fearmongering is all the more disproportionate, given how few people identify as transgender. They are a minuscule less than 1 percent of the American population. And they are 0.002 percent of college athletes—a population that’s been especially incendiary in the culture wars.”
When Trump’s executive order banned transgender athletes from women’s sports, the NCAA followed suit, changing its policies for its over 500,000 student athletes. (It’s estimated that there are less than ten transgender athletes playing in the NCAA.) The LPGA instituted similar policies to disqualify Hailey Davidson, the only trans woman attempting to make the league, from competing. Rep. Nancy Mace introduced legislation to ban trans women from federal facilities’ bathrooms, two weeks after Sarah McBride became the first transgender person elected to Congress. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal funding to universities, hospitals, and entire states have been threatened due to support for, in the words of the Times, a “minuscule percentage of the American population.” So outlets like the Times are correct that a huge amount of money, time, and energy is being spent on attacking a small number of people for political gain.
The problem with an argument emphasizing that these attacks are “disproportionate” due to the trans community’s small size is that it implies there is such a thing as a proportionate attack on a vulnerable group. Would the broader LGBTQ+ community make a better target for this scale of hatred? What if trans people were a more sizable population? Would that make the Right’s assault, even if repugnant, reasonable? This is not to say that these are positions held by all commentators using words like “minuscule”; rather, the problem is that this language creates a loophole of legitimacy for the Right’s concern about trans people as a dangerous, predatory population.
Other positions that place conditions on trans people’s ability to live fall into the same trap, like the argument that trans adults have aright to medical transition but that children should be protected from learning about their existence and transitioning themselves—or that trans women should be able to play in women’s sports leagues because most trans athletes playing today do not have a discernible advantage over cisgender athletes. When a defense of a particular population’s rights rests on the condition of marginality, unobtrusiveness is written into the rules of the general population’s tolerance of difference.
A 2024 diatribe by former New York Times columnist Pamela Paul demonstrates how such right-wing moral panics have infiltrated ostensibly liberal discourse. “Why did Trump and his allies devote so much attention and resources to something that seemingly affects a small number of people compared with top voter concerns like immigration, the economy, crime, abortion, and democracy?” asked Paul. “Maybe because it worked.” According to Truthout, anti-trans network TV ads cost Republicans nearly $215 million, and Paul is correct to note that they largely got their money’s worth: Republican attack ads and culture war talking points successfully painted centrist candidates like Kamala Harris, Texas Senate candidate Colin Allred, and the incumbent Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown as left-wing radicals. (All three lost their races.) But, rather than criticizing this tactic as fearmongering, Paul suggested that Democrats who want to support trans rights should “embrace a common-sense approach.” In between a paragraph noting that she has spoken to “many” parents of trans kids who feel labelled by Democrats for failing to follow the party line and a paragraph noting that most Americans believe gender is one’s sex assigned at birth, Paul observes that “the number of people identifying as transgender is still tiny, but it is growing rapidly.” By “rapidly,” does she really mean “too fast”?
California Governor Gavin Newsom recently gave similar right-wing arguments credibility and airtime when he hosted Turning Point’s USA cofounder Charlie Kirk on his podcast and agreed with Kirk that the participation of trans women in women’s sports is “deeply unfair.” It’s politically expedient for Democratic leadership and center-left politicians to win points on the Left at large for supporting trans rights without actually relying on that “minuscule” population’s vote. While LGBTQ+ advocates have praised Newsom in the past, he has vetoed some gender-affirming legislation and carried out cruel attacks on homelessness, which disproportionately affects LGBTQ+ youth.
As trans issues have become a foundational element of the Republican agenda over the past few years, Democrats have largely turned down opportunities to vigorously defend trans people while still nominally retaining trans rights as a part of their national platform. It isn’t enough. Instead of objecting to attacks on the trans community as “disproportionate,” advocates must take up an emphatic defense of trans identity as a whole. The Democrats did not lose in 2024 because they supported trans rights, even if Republican attacks along those lines were successful. Harris and other centrist candidates lost because they failed to respond to such attacks with a full-throated defense of all people’s rights to healthcare and resources—and the policies to back it up.
Advocates for trans rights and personhood must go further. In her work on trans childhood, queer theorist and historian Jules Gill-Peterson has written about the rhetoric of inclusion. “At its best, supporting trans youth takes the form of a material politics focused on providing housing, redistributing resources, and removing the police from our communities,” she observes. “Rather than responding to the Right’s endless litany of moral panics, which sap attention and energy from the central problems facing many trans people, we need affirmative visions of a better future.”
As we suffer the consequences of Democrats’ failed strategies, it’s imperative that the Left takes a stronger stance. Perhaps small population size is part of what makes the trans population an appealing scapegoat, but we can push back on these tactics without legitimizing Republican anxieties. These numbers and percentages are not relevant to an argument about the fundamental right of trans people to live and flourish in public spaces.
Nail on the head. The zeitgeist is poisoned, it is all from a default cishet conservative perspective. Would be heros, all toothless.
Language and definitions are already surrendered and as the right redefines more Dems are compliant as though politics is a gentleman’s sport of manners.