If the Democrats lose the upcoming midterm elections, our path out of
competitive authoritarianism gets a lot longer, or disappears altogether. The
political winds are at the Democrats’ backs, but the structure of our electoral
system cuts against them. It could come down to a few close races. So the party
is—very understandably—anxious to get its strategy right and not to leave
gettable votes on the table.

And many centrist think tanks,
columnists, and pundits have a pitch for an easy way to win more support:
“Moderate” on trans rights.

This has been a perennial concern
of the chattering classes for the entire Trump era, and the offer they put to Democrats
is a seemingly attractive one: Remain supportive of a small and vulnerable
segment of the population without seeming out of touch with much of America, in
the words
of Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way. This was echoed more recently by
Thomas Edsall, writing
in The New York Times, who argued that Democrats voting to bar trans
women from women’s sports would help them reconnect with the median voter.

And some Democrats are listening.
California Governor (and possible presidential candidate) Gavin Newsom has had several stabs at
“moderating” on trans rights. More recently, Representative Seth Moulton,
running in a competitive primary against Ed Markey, argued
that many Americans believe “that trans people should be protected,” but “when
it comes to competitive sports, they feel uncomfortable.”

Overall, however, the party has not
gone as far as the moderators feel is necessary. If they’re selling a train
ride, Democrats will go a stop or two but then get off. They’ll mention the
issue less, drop overtly “woke” language (if they ever used it at all), maybe
even say something about women’s sports or young children medically
transitioning and then backtrack, or partially backtrack. That’s it. 

Perhaps that’s as far as they’re
willing to go. Perhaps they get pushback from progressives who have no interest
in getting on the train at all. Newsom dropped the centrist shtick and
rebranded himself as an anti-Trump firebreather. Moulton lost
his primary in no small part because liberal voters are currently in no
mood to compromise with the right. Centrists, of course, have bemoaned
this—with constant Republican attacks, Democrats, it’s claimed, risk
looking out of touch if they don’t stay on the train and moderate
further. 

And with the pressure this high,
they keep finding the odd Democrat who’ll listen, particularly those in
front-line races. James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, recently
reversed his position on trans participation in girls’ sports. This may not
sound like that big a deal; the exact sort of compromise centrists are selling.
Surely this is a fair trade for a red-state senator.

Just about every trans person I
know thinks concerns about sports are misleadingly
presented and vastly
overblown. They also would trade restrictions here for broader social
acceptance and inclusion in a heartbeat if they thought that was a deal that
was on the table. They just don’t think that it is. And I think they’re
correct to think that.

What centrists never mention is
that we have a highly relevant case study, playing out in real time, of a major
center-left party following their advice. The U.K. Labour Party is almost a “sliding doors” alternative timeline where democrats stay on the train. There
are differences, of course, but both are the main center-left party in a
historically two-party system and have had to grapple with a radicalizing
right. Given our shared language and culture, they
have often looked to the other for ideas on how to campaign or
govern. 

And yet, the centrist advocates in
the United States of moderation never, ever, ever mention the Labour Party. Perhaps
they’re just not familiar; Americans can be insular like that. But I suspect
the elite ones are. People who read news every day will have followed the key
test case for their strategy. But you’d never know it. The below may explain
why.

As someone who’s been politically
active in LGBT rights in both countries, let me tell you what happens if you
stay on the train to its terminus, i.e., to caving in to the right on this
issue. First, in today’s
environment, where fascism has largely
captured the right, once you show a willingness to back down, the pressure
on you will increase, not decrease. 

Trans rights didn’t use to be an
issue at all in the U.K. In 2012, just 60 articles relating to trans people were
published in the U.K. media. But our campaigning right-wing press (most notably The
Times, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail) saw an opening. While
both main parties were nominally pro-trans rights, the conservatives were
increasingly picking up American new-right rhetoric. Meanwhile, Labour,
starting in 2019 under new leader Keir Starmer, pursued a strategy of affecting
a more moderate image. Right-wing writers had already started anti-trans
fearmongering, and after Starmer’s ascent, they massively ramped it up,
averaging 20
articles a day on the topic by 2022, with even purportedly
liberal outlets like The Guardian joining in.

“Can a woman have a penis?” became
a favorite question
of journalists to ask Labour leaders. Having already decided not to go too hard
on “culture war” issues, they didn’t have the courage to just say “yes” or
“that’s an ugly gotcha remark,” so they stalled and waffled. You could tell
they hated the question. So interviewers kept asking it. Hardly responsible
behavior from the media, but Labour had basically invited it by showing
weakness, by flinching before they got hit.

Next, small compromises will become
big ones, and far
more quickly than you thought possible. The urge to moderate is
unfalsifiable and insatiable. If it doesn’t work, you’re told to moderate more.
The train stops will start racing past. Two years ago, Labour won an election
on a moderately pro-trans platform, but the subsequent cave was fast: First,
youth trans health care was criminalized;
in time, adult
care was being withdrawn. Destinations you were explicitly promised the
train would not go begin to blur past before most people even have a sense of what’s
happening.

A month ago, the Labour government’s
Equality and Human Rights Commission, or EHRC, officially implemented a revised
Statutory
Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions, and Associations. The backstory
and legal
mechanics of this are complicated, but functionally
it is one of the most authoritarian bathroom bans in the developed world. All
institutions, public or private, must exclude trans people from
single-sex spaces of their gender (a trans woman cannot use the women’s toilet)
and may also exclude them from the spaces of their sex at birth (a trans
woman also cannot use the men’s). 

In addition to bars, coffee shops,
restaurants, gyms, schools, universities, charities, and so on, this also
applies to venues like hospitals.
An oncology
department that has men’ s and women’s wards will be forced to bar trans
people from both—they should be put in a “side room,” said Mary-Ann
Stephenson, the Labour-appointed chair of the EHRC, which wrote the Code of
Practice. But these are in short supply and used for more rational purposes
like severely immunocompromised patients. This is acknowledged
by Labour members of Parliament, such as Kevin McKenna, to be unworkable and
dangerous, but they’re doing it anyway.

There is good reason to worry that
these changing rules will act as a green light to violent bigots across the
country. In the U.K., both trans people and cis people who don’t fully meet their
gender stereotype (for instance cis female cancer survivors who may have short
hair or mastectomies) have reported a massive increase in abuse
and harassment.

There is a human cost to all this.
U.K. suicide hotlines are reporting a big
spike in (adult) trans callers. Trans children are estimated to be taking
their own lives at seven
times the rate of their peers. Campaigners describe regularly
hearing from parents sleeping at the bottom of their children’s beds,
terrified of what they might do if left alone. 

The train will never reach its
advertised destination. At no point will there be any political payoff for any
of this. How could there be? Centrists are right to say that the median voter
has mixed views on trans rights. But they’re also not
deeply considered views or high-salience ones. The trans panic is an elite
fixation. Most mechanics in Ohio, or football fans in Wallsend, know very
little about it and care even less. Centrists imagine swing voters who are
deeply invested in “trans issues,” with nuanced, nonpartisan positions, and who
are informed enough to respond to subtle changes in policy. There are not many
people like this. Indeed, I’m not sure there are any. 

Yes, Labour and the Democrats are
both negatively defined as effeminate and queer—think of insults like “soy boy”
or “cuck.”
And yes, the attacks on trans people are part of this. But if centrists wanted
to help, they could use their considerable media power to debunk right-wing
lies or expose the gendered double standards in our politics. They don’t. 

Labour’s strategy was one of
compromise on culture-war issues to pull votes from Reform (the
U.K.’s main fascist party). This was personified
by the former chief of staff to the prime minister, Morgan McSweeny, who
was generally
thought to have dictated strategy during the Starmer years. The party
should, he argued, focus on “hero voters”—white, working-class, social
conservatives in “red wall” (think Rust Belt as an inexact analogy) areas of the
country.

So far, they have attracted 0 percent
of those voters (yes, zero, that’s the actual statistic). Meanwhile their
share of gay and bisexual voters has plunged from
42 percent last election (itself arguably an underperformance) to 18 percent
following their “moderation” on trans rights. There isn’t data specifically
for trans people, but I assume it’s even worse. Not the only reason for Starmer’s apocalyptic
unpopularity, but a clear contributing factor. So it doesn’t even work
politically.

But the longer you stay on the
train, the harder it is to get off. Starmer was recently forced out and
replaced with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. Yet even as this was
happening, Labour pushed through the EHRC code described above. Their
political strategy was obviously not working, but they remained locked into
forcing trans people out of public life.

This has less to do with formal
powers—Burnham could reverse all of this if he chose to—and is more a matter of
psychology: Getting off the train and catching a return journey would require
an admission that you fell for a very
obvious con. People whose identity is rooted in being clever,
savvy operators just can’t do that.

It would also require an admission
that you brutalized a vulnerable minority for no good reason. And most people
don’t want to think of themselves that way, so they just … keep going.
Britain has gone from being one of the better developed countries for trans rights to being one of the very worst (currently ranked
by ILGA World’s rainbow map with Russia and Hungary), yet Labour still blathers
on about progress and equality and presents what it is doing as a
careful balancing of rights.

Also, the U.K. has seen a wave
of institutions rapidly fold in a way that will be difficult to reverse. On a
battlefield of war, if the unit next to yours ran away, yours would too. No one
wants to get shot at if the battle’s lost. And so, when the main center-left
party fled the field, many other institutions decided they weren’t going to
stand up to the anti-trans campaign’s considerable media and legal firepower.
Even the largest British LGBT charity, Stonewall, signaled surrender, with its new chair expressing
admiration for, and apologizing to, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling—one
of the figureheads and primary funders of the anti-trans side. 

As you ride the train, at each
progressively more indefensible stop, you’ll be told it’s the last one. But it
won’t be. Labour thinks moving to the right on social issues takes them “off
the table.” And this is at the heart of the centrist con: You can do this,
they say, and still be a good person. You’ll make a few compromises, but you’ll
“remain supportive,” and trans people will continue to be “protected,” as Jon Cowan
and Seth Moulton respectively put it.

What will actually happen is you’ll
do horrific things while delusionally maintaining the fiction of yourself as a
good person. Labourites have not carefully balanced rights, they have not made
an ugly compromise to defeat the fascist threat, or even cynically cemented
their own hold on power. They have, in fact, just viciously attacked the
rights, safety, and dignity of a minority group. And for the right, it
will never, ever, ever be enough. 

Bridget Philipson, the Labour minister
who implemented the bathroom ban, said she was doing so, in part, because she
didn’t “want trans people to be constantly on the front pages of newspapers” or
“pilloried on social media.” Giving anti-trans campaigners what they wanted
would, the logic goes, make them disappear. Feeding
the wolf would starve it. Just do this, she effectively said, and the whole
debate will be over.

It wasn’t, of course. Since then, the
small but powerful anti-trans lobby has been emboldened to call for everyone in
the country to need a digital
ID stating their “biological sex” to access changing rooms, health care, and
single-sex services and associations. It seems like every week we see another
institution cave; Amnesty International withdrew a report on anti-trans groups under
legal pressure, the Welsh health service abruptly stopped all adult
gender-affirming operations, and new guidance was rolled out in U.K. schools
that campaigners
describe as segregation, as it will effectively prevent trans children from
accessing toilets and changing rooms of either gender. It makes social
transition much harder and more regulated and implies that such students are a
safeguarding risk to their peers. 

Much of the American progressive
commentary
in the U.K. (including
my
own) has focused on
Labour as an exemplar of a poor political strategy, which it assuredly is. What
I want to highlight here is the profound failing of moral wisdom: We are in a
fight for free societies, for the rights of everyone to live as they wish—our
goal is to win the battle, not make difficult issues go away. 

Many readers, I suspect, will have
a sense of just how
dangerous the modern right has become. What I think is less understood is
the enormous harm center-left elites can do when they adopt the wrong strategy
for dealing with this unprecedented threat. You do not want to get on this
train, be left on a battlefield when the general flees, or live in a country where
the main center-left party suddenly starts persecuting minorities.

I’m not saying we should stop voting for Democrats. Much of the online
discussion of Talarico’s comments centered around whether trans people and
allies should abstain from voting (or vote third party) to pressure Democrats
not to go down this track. My own view is that this is a mistake, at least in
present circumstances. Not because we shouldn’t pressure the party—we
absolutely need to—but because this is an ineffective tool for doing so.

Beyond the incredible harms of
allowing Republicans to maintain congressional control, it just hasn’t ever
worked. The main consequences of the left withdrawing support historically—from
ditching Al Gore for Ralph Nader in 2000 to going “Bernie-or-Bust” in 2016—have
been bitterness
and mistrust that have made it harder for progressives to achieve
their goals. We have a much better model of how to fight for a trans-inclusive
party in Ed Markey’s recent primary victory.

And I think the direction of the Democratic
Party is worth fighting for. They’re not Labour. Not even close. No national
candidate supports a bathroom ban, and even those like Talarico who have
moderated are a minority. The map of trans legal rights in the United States is
a
map of partisan control. When Democrats hold power, they protect or enhance
trans rights. As I was writing this, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger reversed
Republican restrictions on trans people’s participation in sports. Overall,
weak-willed centrists are slowly losing the intraparty debate. 

This analysis might seem strange to
many on the American left who are used to thinking of the Democrats as
centrist, weak, and feckless. But on this issue, they’ve managed—more or less—to
hold the line where their international peers have not. Indeed, the party is
now generally both more aggressive
and more progressive than many of its international counterparts (center-left
parties in two-party systems, center-to-left coalitions in multiparty ones). Back
in March, every Senate Democrat—a group that to be sure includes several
moderates—voted
against a GOP amendment to prohibit transgender athletes from participating
in girls’ or women’s sports.

This was not guaranteed to be the
case in advance. Not turning on trans people was a choice party leadership,
primary voters, and mid-level institutions made—and must continue to make. As
long as the threat of fascism persists, there will be those urging us to run,
to forget our values, and abandon our friends. And they will make it sound like
reasonable pragmatism.

Hold the line, and have faith. We
are in this together, and we will get through this together.