This is an adapted excerpt from the November 17 episode of “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
There’s clearly a lot of scrutiny going on within the Democratic Party right now — and that’s a good thing. However, I do fear that some Democrats will come to the wrong, far-reaching conclusions in the course of that investigation. There are many issues that could fall into this category, but one of them concerns the rights of transgender people.
Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads this election cycle, including one in which Vice President Kamala Harris spoke about government funding for gender-affirming care for prisoners and detainees. If that sounds like a particularly obscure problem, that’s because it is. It only applies to a small group of people. It is also a policy that was implemented during Trump’s first presidency.
Another phrase that came up again and again in advertisements and in right-wing media is the idea that America is facing a crisis of boys playing girls’ sports. These ads created the perception that the issues of trans children playing sports dominated schools across the country. Although that is completely incorrect, some people still got involved in the discussion.
Immediately after the election, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times, “Democrats spend far too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.”
“I have two little girls, I don’t want them to get run over on a playing field by a male or former male athlete,” he said. “But as a Democrat, I should be afraid to say that.”
Last weekend, Moulton came on this network to discuss these comments. “I was just speaking authentically as a father on one of the many issues where I think we are out of touch with the majority of voters,” he told Alex Witt on Sunday. “I stick to my position. Maybe I didn’t hear all the words exactly right, but the point is that the responses I received prove my point that we can’t even have these discussions as a party.”
Look, if that were actually a problem in thousands of schools across the country, then it would be worth a debate. But there are incredibly few examples of transgender girls playing in youth sports. And when we see these examples, there is no evidence that these children pose a threat to safety or fairness. When I say some examples, I mean that if you were to count the examples of transgender girls playing youth sports in a given state, the number would usually be rounded to zero.
Take Utah: When a ban on transgender athletes was passed there in 2022, there was a total of one transgender girl playing in youth sports. When South Dakota passed a ban, only one transgender girl had participated in high school sports since 2013.
As the bans made their way through Republican statehouses in 2021, lawmakers in more than two dozen states could not even cite a single case in their own state or region in which a transgender athlete competing was an issue. And yet there is constant fuss about this issue.
And according to Donald Trump, that is on purpose.
“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about this,” Trump said at an event in North Carolina in 2023. “I talk about transgender, everyone is going crazy, who would have thought five years ago that you didn’t know what the hell it was. ”
Trump and the Republicans have managed to amplify their bad-faith attacks to the point that people are concerned, no matter how misplaced and ill-informed those concerns may be.
So is this a good time for Democrats to reflect on what went wrong and what they can do better in the future? Of course it is. But during that process, it’s important not to give in to manufactured panic and align yourself with the facts before making sweeping claims.
Repeating and copying the panic from the other side is not leading. It’s not meeting people where they are. It is simply falling prey to right-wing propaganda without checking the facts first.
Allison Detzel contributed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
