It is not a stretch to look at the present state of the campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Colin Allred and conclude that they have been stalled by their opponent’s attacks on their support for the transgender agenda.
You could see the exasperation on Harris’ face last week when she was asked about the Trump attack ad against her, which reminds Americans that she boasted about helping a murderer get a sex change operation in prison and pledged to work to ensure that every man in prison who claims to be a woman can get the same operation.
In her reply, Harris tried to wave the issue away as irrelevant. She called it “very remote from the concerns of the American people.”
She is right that the transgender agenda does not rival the economy, the border and crime among voter priorities. Still, since the Trump ads started running with the tagline, “Harris is for ‘they/them,’” she has lost her slight edge in the national polls.
While the transgender issue may not be a top concern for voters, it is having an impact because it provides immediate insight on whether a candidate has common sense, supports women and families, and understands that the basic science which dictates that one’s sex is not a choice. Importantly, unlike fracking and other issues, Harris has not reversed her position on the sex change operations for prisoners or her support for the transgender issue. In the Trump ad she says, “I took the power I had and used it to push the [transgender] agenda.”
The transgender agenda includes support for boys playing in girls’ sports, pushing puberty blockers and sexual transition surgery for children, spending taxpayer dollars for sex change surgery in prisons and the military, and opening public venues for drag shows, even for children.
Harris’ failure to denounce any of this is making a dent in the massive gender gap Harris has long held with white suburban women who are among the last remaining swing voters and now must weigh whether they value unlimited access to abortion more than a candidate who supports the idea that men can get pregnant.
For mothers, the issue is not abstract, but an everyday challenge as their children come home from school with the news that a boy they’ve gone to school with for years is now a girl, or that they got in trouble for forgetting to use the right pronouns. Mothers of volleyball players on the West Coast must now worry that administrators at their daughters’ colleges will force them to play San Jose State, which has a male player who routinely out-spikes every woman on the court.
In the blur of campaign rhetoric at this point, the transgender agenda is one of the few issues where undecided or wavering voters can see a clear difference between Harris and Trump. When the candidates talk about the border, the economy, crime or supporting workers and the middle-class, it is often a waste of time because Democrats use their own phony data and they don’t back down from it, even when it is clearly detached from reality. President Joe Biden insists that, thanks to him, the economy is the best it has ever been. Border czar and Vice President Kamala Harris says 10 million illegals crossing the border is not her fault and even if it was, it’s not really a problem. As for violent crime, Democrats repeatedly tell us that that murder, robbery and assault are all down, even as the FBI quietly reported last week they have been under-reporting crime data for the past two years.
However, Harris and the Democrats have not succeeded in convincing a majority, even among people who like them, that children should be able to declare themselves members of the opposite sex, virtually as soon as they can talk, based entirely on how the child says he or she feels.
When Republicans remind voters that the Biden-Harris administration threatened to pull funding to school districts that did not push the transgender agenda including letting boys who think they are girls go into the girls restrooms and mandating that teachers not inform parents if their child is pretending to be the opposite sex while at school, it makes a difference. That’s why even Democrats admit the transgender ads against them are working.
Most Democrats don’t push back on these attacks. They know their support for men who think they are women and taxpayer funded sex change surgeries are not a winning issue, so they try to change the subject. They also don’t want to annoy their progressive base.
However, here in Texas, Democrat Colin Allred is trying to walk back U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s transgender attack ad against him and you can see his dilemma. Allred got his first campaign ads up months ago and has spent millions trying to convince voters that he is a regular Texas guy, certainly not one of those lefty, pro-trans crazies who hang out in his party. He tried to dismiss the attack ad against him on his support for the transgender agenda with his own ad saying: “I don’t want boys playing girls sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.” The “ridiculous stuff” is, of course, Allred’s record.
Allred voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act and he is a co-sponsor of the Transgender Bill of Rights. He also supported the Equality Act which would have mandated that anyone be allowed in all public facilities including bathrooms, changing rooms and locker rooms, regardless of their gender.
This is not ancient history. Late last month Allred joined a hundred Democrats who signed a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services Committee asking that they remove restrictions Republicans put in the National Defense Reauthorization Act that prohibit the military from performing sex change surgeries. The Democrats also wanted to remove prohibitions against drag shows and flying “pride flags” on military bases.
When asked why he signed the letter, Allred said he didn’t want to second guess military leaders. Instead, the Dallas congressman said he wants to make sure the military has “the tools they need to protect our country.”
It’s not exactly clear how drag shows on military bases “help protect the country,” but normalizing them and giving them government support, as the Democrats who signed this letter propose, is just one more way to attack the science that says sex is binary. It also cuts into the women’s vote because women voters know drag shows are a free space to attack and belittle them.
America doesn’t want this. The Washington Post reports that while most Americans do not believe transgender people should be discriminated against, a majority believe gender is determined at birth and an even larger percentage don’t want boys or men playing in women’s sports. Approval of the transgender agenda is declining as more Americans see and understand what it really means.
The election is fast approaching and it is clear that when the choice is the transgender agenda, he and she is winning big over “they/them.”
Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
