In this year’s elections, the Democrats ran on women’s rights. They just picked the wrong right to run on. All they talked about was abortion, as if that is the only right women care about.
In the end, it was gender ideology that broke through as the force animating women. As it turns out, women don’t like being told that men can just say they are women and take away women’s rights and opportunities in doing so.
The Democratic Party made transgender policy a defining issue from day one of the Biden administration. On Jan. 20, 2021, Biden signed an executive order gutting women’s sports. The order mandated that any educational institution receiving federal funding must admit biological males into girls’ and women’s sports, if they say they are females. This was further enshrined with the rewrite of Title IX issued in April.
The Trump campaign spent $37 million on ads focusing on the harms of transgender ideology as a response to the Left’s obsession with it. And it resonated. While regular people, both Democratic and Republican, have been concerned with basic topics such as the economy and immigration, the Democrats have been droning on about letting boys compete in girls’ sports — and calling anyone who disagrees a bigot.
The Democrats were certain that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was going to bring women to the polls as it did during the midterm elections in 2022. They were certain that with enough fearmongering, women would be convinced that they’d be forced to don red handmaiden robes and be legally reduced to nothing more than birthing people — which is, ironically, what Democrats call women.
But they pushed it too far. Women do care about abortion. But the number of abortions has gone up since Dobbs, and the vast majority of people believe in safe, legal, and rare and are disgusted by the “shout your abortion” crew.
And the fact is: Women actually care about other issues when it comes to their own rights. They most definitely care about the protection of women’s sports and spaces, and they know if Democrats can’t define what a woman is, they can’t protect women’s rights.
Women don’t want their daughters to have to compete against males. Generation X and millennials’ lives were changed for the better by Title IX, which enshrined women’s sex-based rights in the education system, and they don’t want to go backward.
Meanwhile, the Democrats refuse to acknowledge women as a biological reality and definable class. In 2022, at the Supreme Court justice confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked Jackson to define what a woman is. Jackson’s extremely cringeworthy response: “I’m not a biologist.”
Jackson refused to answer a simple question because she didn’t want to agitate the “progressive” camp of the Democratic Party. If she had responded with “adult human female,” she would have unleashed the wrath of the LGBT activist class with its fits of “trans women are women.”
Nope, they’re not. They are male. And women recognize that if you can’t say these specific people with XX chromosomes are women and they deserve these specific sex-based rights, then men get to steal some of those rights away.
There’s a lot of cope happening right now among the leftie pundits. Joe Scarborough, of “best Biden ever” fame, is insisting he had always said this subject was a loser for the Democrats. On Morning Joe, he said: “[A]s we’ve said on this show a thousand times, Democrats should be smarter on the women’s athletics thing. 85% of Americans oppose men transitioning after puberty and competing against women. And I’m not just saying this the day after the election. I’ve been saying this for years.”
And he did say it back in March. But to pretend now that this has been the drum he has been beating is an absurd attempt at face-saving when everyone knows his relentless focus has been on Trump is Hitler.
And for the record, Scarborough also said in March that while no one wants men in women’s sports, no one will care enough to vote on it either. He called it “sound and fury” on the part of Republicans and then said, “The social issues that matter the most for people: abortion and guns.”
He was wrong.
And some in the party are coming to terms with that now. Post-election, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) said: “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) said: “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.” His implication: I’m not afraid to say it!
But both Suozzi and Moulton voted against passing the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would have changed Title IX to recognize sex as based on biology. They are running for cover now that the people have spoken in favor of fairness and women’s rights.
Democratic pundits and legislators bowed to woke activists and sold women out in the process. Then they added insult to injury and smeared dissenting women as bigots.
As Trump campaign comanager Chris Cilita said, “The Democrats made this the defining cultural battle for the last five years. We finished it in this campaign.” While this is true as far as the election goes, something tells me we are going to watch the Democrats slug this one out for some time. Voters rejected their actual message, not just the “messaging.” And they still haven’t figured that out.
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Jennifer Sey is a USA champion gymnast, the producer of the 2020 Emmy-winning documentary Athlete A on Netflix, and the founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics.