Opponents of gender ideology have achieved a series of wins over the past year securing youth gender-medicine bans and safeguarding girls’ sports that codify such protections and legally recognize states’ authority to enforce their own transgender regulations.
The movement picked up major electoral victories on Tuesday with the passage of five ballot initiatives across four states, including restrictive measures in progressive strongholds such as Colorado and Washington, that will ban biological males in female sports at the state level and prohibit transgender surgical procedures for minors.
As the election results came in, sex-realism activists expressed cautious optimism about the future of the movement in interviews this week with the Washington Examiner at an annual conference hosted by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine in Washington, D.C.
The conference’s theme, “Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine: Charting a Path Forward,” focused on where gender-critical minds go from here.
For feminist organizer Lierre Keith, founder of the Women’s Liberation Front, a major hope is that the Supreme Court will finally issue a universally applicable ruling spelling out the biological definitions of sex.
“We need the big one at the Supreme Court,” she said. “We haven’t had that yet. We need them to act like the U.K.’s high court, where they finally just said a man is a man and a woman is a woman. And we all know what this means: adult human female, adult human male. It’s not complicated.”
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The Supreme Court has expressly ruled that “sex” means biological sex, but only in certain legal contexts, particularly school athletics.
In June, the justices upheld in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, two transgender school sports cases, that “sex” under Title IX of the Education Amendments refers to biological sex rather than “gender identity.” As a result, the pair of decisions permitted states to separate male and female athletic programs based on biological sex.
However, the Supreme Court has yet to hand down a comprehensive ruling establishing universal biological definitions of male and female for all purposes of civil rights law.
“We need the Supreme Court to finally take up that case,” Keith told the Washington Examiner. “They keep kicking the can down the road, and they’re not going to be able to do it forever. We don’t know which case it’s going to be, but hopefully it happens soon because it’s exhausting having to fight this state by state and locality by locality. So it would be huge to have it finally be decided and get some guidance from the top.”
San Francisco Bay Area activist Amanda Kovattana identified women’s prisons as a possible next front for the movement.
She said the media’s reluctance to cover transgender prison separation cases, some involving violent men placed in the same cell as biological women at female detention facilities, has greatly hindered the cause’s visibility.
“It’s hard to advance the prisons issue because the press refuses to touch it,” Kovattana said between the conference’s panel discussions. “We have to push the press, the journalists, to get on top of it. That was so difficult in California. We couldn’t even get press coverage on a terrible murder case out of Oakland. It was a mass murder committed by a man identifying as a woman, who killed his own best friend and that friend’s wife and child all in one night.”
Kovattana, a member of the advocacy group Women Are Real, said legacy outlets have been adhering to activist style guides instructing editorial offices to use “proper pronouns” and preferred names when mentioning a transgender-identifying subject, even in crime stories.
“The newspapers are now lying in favor of the trans individual,” Kovattana said. “They don’t want any stories attached to trans people that might make them look bad. So any criminal that claims to identify as transgender, they will not report on it. They can’t say, ‘Oh, this is a story about a woman mass murderer,’ and then they show the picture — obviously of a man, sometimes a black man at that. Then they decide, ‘This is too much trouble. We are going to get in so much trouble by every minority group.’ So the media doesn’t cover it at all.”
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Keith, whose organization is suing California over its law allowing men to self-identify as women and accordingly be housed in women’s state prisons, said it has been difficult to get the general public to care about incarcerated women’s situations unless people are personally affected by transgender accommodation policies.
“People don’t pay attention until it’s your daughter who’s suddenly taking testosterone or your sister who’s in prison put in a cell with a rapist,” Keith said.
“They are literally putting serial sex killers, rapists, men who have killed babies in jail cells with women, 8-by-10 prison cells. These women live in terror, but people don’t believe us because it’s so insane. ‘There’s no way people are doing this,’ they think,” she said. “Well, my organization is suing the state of California. That’s how real it is.”
Building bipartisan agreement
Other conference attendees said the movement should concentrate on reaching people across the political spectrum and reframing the fight as party-agnostic, instead of a cause exclusively taken up by Republicans.
Lawyer and advocate Glenna Goldis said the ballot measures passing by popular vote in deep-blue Colorado and Washington indicate that the movement is building a coalition that rises above party politics.
“That really flips things upside down,” Goldis told the Washington Examiner. “I’m hoping that the polarization will die down. I knew a lot of liberals in New York City who were very open to discussing this issue before the 2024 election, and they did not have a black-and-white view of it. They knew it wasn’t political. After President [Donald] Trump came to office, people really backed into their corners. They were more defensive, and everything was politics to their eyes.”
Keith, who has spent her whole life on the political Left, emphasized that “reality is not a blue-red issue.”
“People have tried to turn this into a culture war issue. But it’s basic reality, it’s basic fairness, and it’s basic respect for women and girls,” Keith said. “So it means people have to get over their Trump derangement syndrome, where anything Trump says, they believe the absolute opposite. You got to think a little deeper here, because he may be right about two or three things. No matter how much you might hate him, he breathes oxygen, and so do you. Like there’s going to be a few things you have in common.”
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Goldis said she hopes that Democrats, now that they have won control of Congress, feel less under siege and will potentially be more receptive to engaging with sex realist activists, especially after observing the broad public support of sex-based statutory protections for women and young girls.
“I’m hoping that Democratic politicians are going to see how many voters support the gender-critical position, even in blue states like Colorado and Washington,” she said.
Goldis recalled how staunch Democratic supporters of the transgender movement would in the past insult skeptics, including their potential voters, but said the latest ballot outcomes reflect that a majority of voters believe in the material reality of sex.
“In the past, we saw them say that if you oppose so-called transgender girls in girls’ sports, that means you are bigot or you’re bullying or you’re hateful,” Goldis said. “And now, hopefully they’ll have to have a more generous attitude toward those who they disagree with as well as people of all sorts of views on this issue, rather than painting it as good guys versus bad guys.”
With the political temperature lowered, she said the movement could build on this momentum to foster productive conversations and connect with people who were unwilling to engage beforehand.
“If we can have Democratic politicians tone down their rhetoric or take a more neutral approach to trans issues, once our voices can be heard, then we are in a much better position to persuade people,” Goldis said.
Goldis, a former consumer fraud attorney, also credited advancements brought about by the “hard power” of the Trump administration, citing federal investigations into hospitals’ pediatric gender-medicine practices.
Major hospital systems have since entered into settlements with the Justice Department, agreeing to shut down their youth gender clinics and pay millions of dollars in financial penalties as part of the resolution deals.
“We had this great effect from the hard power of the federal government, a show of force, and now I think it’s going to be a time for soft power,” Goldis said.