SAUNDERS: Boys in girls’ locker rooms, not a winning campaign

There’s been a change in Washington since Donald Trump won the election. Democrats have begun to wonder about some of their more extreme messages.

The New York Times reported Tuesday on regrets among transgender activists who now question the movement’s confrontational approach — as they realize their overboard rhetoric helped sink Kamala Harris’ bid to win the White House.

Transgender activists, for example, called Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a “Nazi cooperator” after he told the New York Times, “Democrats spend way 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 getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Activists burned the books of J.K. Rowling after the Harry Potter creator declared the obvious — that letting biological males play on female teams is “deeply misogynistic and regressive.”

Other critics are accused of being guilty of “genocide.”

Here are some overboard tactics that activists, who are seeing the light now, see as undermining the cause, according to the Times: “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 that everyone declare whether they prefer to be referred to as he, she or other pronouns.”

At a 2022 event, Harris announced that her pronouns were “she and her.”

In 2024, Team Trump responded: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

It’s ironic how activists who start out as champions of tolerance often turn into the most intolerant people in the arena.

But I don’t think the big issue is language, I think it’s the numbers and the eruption of young people who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

As Reuters reported, diagnoses for gender dysphoria for children aged 6 to 17 nearly tripled from 2017 to 2021.

De-transitioned activists like Chloe Cole give a mournful testimony to the damage done to their bodies. “When I was 12 years old, doctors led me to believe that I was transgender,” Cole noted in remarks she posted on X. “I was told that puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries were my only options. They were wrong. Now I suffer from irreversible changes to my body and mind that I will live with for the rest of my life.”

Cole then endorsed Trump after arguing that Harris pushed children into unnecessary transgender procedures.

I have a lot of empathy for transgender individuals. I used to believe that no one would choose to be transgender. But in the last couple of years I’ve seen a world in which common sense took a holiday and health-care professionals at times nudged confused children into treatments that were not right for them.

It was a political hysteria — and somehow Biden, Harris and other top Democrats didn’t see the damage their agenda caused. But Trump did.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.