Former Biden White House press secretary MSNBC host Jen Psaki said Sunday on “Inside” that after their election loss, Democrats should double down on supporting transgender rights because laws limiting transgender athletes in women’s sports is “right-wing propaganda.”
There’s obviously a lot of soul searching right now going on within the Democratic Party and that’s a good thing. But what I worry about is that in the course of all that soul-searching, some Democrats might reach the wrong sweeping conclusions. And there are a lot of issues that fall into that bucket.
But one in particular that stuck out to me is transgender rights. Republicans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads this election cycle, including one that showed Vice President Harris talking about government funding for gender reaffirming care for prisoners and detainees. If that sounds like a particularly obscure issue, it is, because it applies to a tiny group of people, and it’s also a policy that, by the way, was in place during the first Trump presidency.
Another one of the lines that ran over and over again in those ads and throughout right-wing media is this idea that America is faced with a crisis of boys playing in girls sports. Now, these ads created this perception that the issues of trans kids playing sports was dominating schools across the country, which is completely false. Some people got pulled into that argument.
I mean, immediately after the election, Congressman Seth Moulton told The New York Times that, quote, 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.
And then last weekend, Congressman Moulton came on this network to discuss those comments.
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REP. SETH MOULTON (D-MA): I was just speaking authentically as a dad about one of many issues where I think we’re just out of touch with the majority of voters. And I stand my by my position. You know maybe I didn’t get all the words exactly right, but the point is that the backlash I’ve received proves my point that we can’t even have these discussions as a party.
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PSAKI: Look, reflection is good, but if that were actually an issue at thousands of schools across the country, it would be worthy of a debate. But there are just incredibly few examples of transgender girls playing in youth sports. And when we see those examples, there isn’t evidence that these kids are a threat to safety or fairness. When I say few examples, I mean that if you were to count the examples of transgender girls playing youth sports in any single state, the number often rounds to zero.
Take Utah. When a transgender athlete ban was passed there in 2022, there was a grand total of one, one transgender girl playing in youth sports. When South Dakota passed the ban, only one transgender girl had competed in high school sports since 2013. In fact, when these bans were making their way through Republican state houses in 2021, legislators in more than 20 states could not say a single instance in their own state or region where a transgender athlete competing was a problem.
And yet, the noise on this issue has been constant. And according to Donald Trump, that is on purpose.
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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that, talking about — talk about transgender. Everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.
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PSAKI: See, Donald Trump and Republicans have managed to amplify their bad faith attacks to the point that people do have concerns as misguided and misinformed as those concerns may be.
So this is a good time for Democrats to self-reflect about what went wrong and what to do better moving forward. Of course, it absolutely is.
But during that process, it’s important not to yield to manufactured panic and to align with the actual facts before making sweeping claims. Echoing and adopting the panic from the other side is not leading, it’s not meeting people where they are, it’s simply falling prey to right-wing propaganda without checking the facts first.
