Some Democrats Still Think Americans Will Accept Transgender Sports Cheats

Because they still don't understand why it hurts them with voters

Only a dedicated Democrat can look at this photo and say they don’t see a cheat. The reason the public supports Trump forcing UPenn to apologize and erase his ‘records’ is that most people see a man cheating at sports. They do not see a woman

Human brains have evolved heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, that improve our chances of survival as individuals and then as a species. For example, people with working eyeballs and brain cells can tell that William ‘Lia’ Thomas is a man. Importantly, they understand this fact before they ever even think about it. No one has to actually think, ‘Is that a man?’ because they already know. This is called the sex recognition heuristic.

We also have a fairness heuristic that alerts us to any mismatch between athletic or combat opponents. This is why normal humans instantly recognize that the other two people in the photo above are mismatched females. We do not even have to think about it. Thinking takes far longer than sensing, and uses much more energy, than the heuristic. One glance, and you already know that what you are seeing is morally wrong.

You know this for a fraction of a second before you remember that booing ‘Lia’ has become a hate crime. In the ‘trans-affirming’ person, cognitive dissonance expresses as anger towards anyone who refers to Thomas with male pronouns. For everyone else, the realization that a man is being privileged to cheat at women’s sports, and that we are not allowed to boo him as we instinctively wish to do, is followed by stress, which turns into resentment.

Suppressing our natural reactions to Lia Thomas does not actually create social acceptance for him. Quite the contrary, as polling data shows. Still, there are Democrats who think they can change everyone’s mind by cheering on sports cheats here and there, locally, occasionally, wherever they control the levers of power over a school district or a sports association. Like the strategy that got them here, it is bound to backfire. Democrats will continue to lose the voters until they abandon this cause.

In 2023, one year after William Thomas received oozing sympathetic coverage from mainstream media outlets, a Gallup poll found that “a larger majority of Americans now (69%) than in 2021 (62%) say transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender. Likewise, fewer endorse transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity, 26%, down from 34%.”

So-called ‘transphobia’ was not involved. “Thirty-nine percent of Americans, up from 31% in 2021, say someone they know personally has told them they are transgender.” The more Americans saw, the less they liked. The public approval trend regarding transgender sports cheating only ever goes down.

Just before the inauguration this January, the New York Times released Ipsos poll results showing that 79 percent of 2,128 respondents oppose ‘trans’-identified males in female sports. Democratic voters were almost evenly divided in the issue in 2023, but this January, 67 percent of the Democrats surveyed also opposed ‘trans’-identified males in female sports. A Pew survey in February reported that Democratic voter opposition to males in female sports has risen from 37 percent to 45 percent over the last three years. There is no poll that shows increasing support anywhere. But these surveys test the opinions of voters, not elected officials.

Yesterday in The New York Times, Charles Homans reported that many elected Democrats have “resolved to say as little as possible about transgender rights” because of the pickle they are in. “The dilemma is reflective of the Democratic Party’s broader struggles with identity politics as it dissects its losses in 2024,” Homans writes. Because “American liberals broadly embraced what had previously been vanguard positions on a range of social and cultural issues, including gender and race, immigration and policing,” they are out of step with the voting majority at large.

Homans does not explore the effects of silencing and intimidation here. He should, because the same rabid activist faction that disciplines Democrats for offending their gender gods is also repelling voters all the time with their illiberal shrieking and blinkered demands for validation. When the response to a voter using male pronouns for ‘Lia’, or ‘deadnaming’ him as William, is scolding and gaslighting, that voter is lost to Democrats. Cancel mobs do not produce new Democratic voters out of the witches they burn. On the contrary, the age of cancel culture has been a complete disaster for the Democratic Party.

And because the party allows no debate whatsoever on so-called ‘trans rights,’ they continue to fail at even understanding what is going wrong. “Although there is no evidence that transgender rights was a top issue for most voters in 2024, Democratic strategists believe that these attacks did have an impact,” Homans writes. That, right there, is how Democrats fool themselves into thinking there is hope.

Be honest. Do you really think a woman riding her crotch on a man’s neck like that would be acceptable in Algerian society? Of course it would not be. They all knew he was a man the whole time. They are laughing at stupid westerners who fell for it

While the article is downbeat on the future of ‘transgender sports inclusion,’ that Orwellian phrase used to sell male sports cheats in female sports, Homans cannot help but frame the issue as a ‘win’ for Republicans, the ‘wrong’ political party in the minds of most New York Times readers. Democrats quoted in the article are mainly concerned that they keep getting beaten on the issue. They do not seem to comprehend that voters do not consider this a political issue the way Democrats do. It is not a policy fight at all, but a simple, reality-based perception of fairness that no amount of policy wonkery will ever overcome. Homans:

Some in the party see the beginnings of a way forward in polling conducted shortly after the election. Change Research, a progressive public opinion firm, polled voters in the eight states where Republicans spent heavily on transgender-themed ads and found that 55 percent of those voters agreed that transgender athletes’ participation in sports should be regulated by local schools and sports associations, not politicians.

Again, this completely misunderstands the voter. Democrats think that Republicans are the “politicians” that voters do not want deciding the issue. In reality, Democrats themselves are forcing the issue in the first place, so they are the “politicians” most voters are thinking about. Change Research polled right after the election, when Joe Biden was still president and the federal government was still perceived as “the politicans” telling localities and sporting associations what to do. As Homans notes, a “narrow majority” of Americans supports all of Trump’s transgender policies — and as noted above, a supermajority of voters is enthusiastic about this specific policy. Change Research and Blueprint are selling snake oil and Democrats keep drinking their poison.

Among Democrats, Third Way is considered a bunch of sellouts. Progressive activist types universally loathe Third Way because its “center-left” mission is to enlarge the Democratic Party tent by appealing to conservatives. Visit any shitlib website that is still on the internet, type the name of this think tank into the search bar, and there will be examples of the genre. So it should be surprising to many that Lanae Erickson, senior vice president of Third Way, opens the New York Times article with an anecdote about her lobbying Democrats to support transgender sports cheats with falsity and fearmongering about “genital checks” of athletes.

Let us dispose of this incredibly stupid attack line: NO GENITAL EXAMS ARE EVER NECESSARY TO PREVENT CHEATING. The actual, real, not-imaginary ‘gender test’ is a buccal cheek swab to detect a Y chromosome. Any athlete only has to be tested one time, ever, for their sex to be determined forever. It is fast, easy, painless, and smart, which is why the activists have always hated it and still pretend it doesn’t exist, necessitating genital exams. Erickson is simply lying to elected Democrats because she likes the way “their faces squish up.”

The Olympics prevented male sports cheating with this method until after 1996, when it was abandoned because (A) transgender activists were working behind the scenes to secure the ‘right’ to cheat at women’s sports, and (B) coaches in Africa wanted to recruit men with DSDs to cheat at women’s sports. All three medalists in the women’s 800-meter dash at the 2016 Rio Olympics were males with DSDs. No actual women were awarded a medal in the event. More recently, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, both male, got to punch actual women in the face at the 2024 Olympics while the global left cheered them on and media outlets obediently used female pronouns. Erickson probably knows this history, but doesn’t care.

Admit it, you can tell they are men at a glance. Caster Semenya (center) has fathered two children with sperm from his internal testicles because he is in fact a man

Erickson “argues that punting the issue to other authorities is ultimately unconvincing to voters,” and on this score she is correct. Not only is it a political loser, it is unconstitutional. For unlike ‘transgender people,’ women are already recognized as a ‘quasi-suspect class’ in law by the Supreme Court, as well as the plain language of Title IX, so that any locality or organization which allows males to cheat at female sports will inevitably run headlong into a clash of rights that women must eventually win. The Court has already taken up a case in this domain for next year and the conservative majority will likely uphold state bans on transgender sports cheating.

But Erickson still thinks that Democrats can talk Americans into accepting the unacceptable. This is her ‘centrist’ position. “If you can persuade people that this will impact every girl who wants to play sports, or every girl who wants to play sports who doesn’t look like a stereotypical feminine girl, then they turn against it,” she told Homans. This argument that some females will be excluded because of their looks is tedious because the buccal cheek swab eliminates any question about whether someone is a girl. It is yet more fearmongering from a ‘rights’ movement that organizes the entire world through the lens of sexist stereotypes.

More to the point, it is a kind of activism more commonly associated with the ‘far left’ than the ‘sensible center’ of Third Way and Lanae Erickson. But labels are misleading here. Transgender ideology is in fact an elite preoccupation. It has no resonance with the ‘working class,’ defined as Americans with jobs. Across the world, transgender policy capture has taken place at the elite, metropolitan center of politics rather than the fringe.

Erickson has a long career as an LGBTQAlphabetical lobbyist. She belongs in the same category as Ruth Hunt at Stonewall, the gay rights org in the UK, or Anthony Romero, head of the ACLU. ‘Trans rights’ simply became her job because that is where the money was, and now she gives out terrible advice. Everyone telling Democrats that there is a way around the evolved human heuristics of voters is lying, full stop. The party will probably never win another presidency until Democrats stop listening to her and anyone like her. They are promoting a political suicide pact.