“It’s almost like the government’s imposing its will on its residents,” Trayon White, the D.C. councilmember for Ward 8, said at the council’s June 6 legislative meeting. He wasn’t talking about a proposed highway, a subway station, a power plant, or—perish the thought—an apartment building. He was talking about trees: specifically, three linden trees on Xenia Street planted a few years ago by D.C.’s Urban Forestry Division. To my surprise, the legislative body of a major American city experiencing escalating homelessness and a serious spike in violent crime dedicated a quarter of its time that day to discussing three trees.

White said he was concerned about the potential risk to property values and what he sees as a “reasonable fear” that once mature, the trees would “be large enough to make it difficult to see through and around the walkway, which is a public-safety concern.” He asked his colleagues to support an emergency resolution to remove them before this happened.  

For a while, the members carried on as though this were a perfectly normal matter for their attention. A few suggested that perhaps expanding the tree canopy was good, actually. But no one really questioned the underlying premise of White’s proposal: that the community had risen up in dendrophobic opposition.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: A better way to look at trees]

“We want to note that these are homeowners who are worried about the value of their homes,” White said. “I just believe that [the District Department of Transportation, or DDOT] can be more friendly in responding to the needs of the community with their request, and if they’re requesting different trees, I don’t see what the big problem is.”

The council went on to debate the merits of the public-safety question. Councilman Kenyan McDuffie recalled that in his ward the city had planted trees in parking spaces so as not to encroach on the already narrow sidewalks. “I still question whether there is the appropriate level of consultation and engagement in the impacted communities,” he said, backing White.

After more than 20 minutes, the chair of the council noted with surprise that “we spent this much time on the issue of removing three trees.” White, recognizing the lack of sufficient support from his colleagues, withdrew the matter from the agenda, allowing the trees to grow another day.

What initially drew me to this story was the obvious mismatch between the rhetoric at the council meeting and the subject at hand. How could a few trees constitute a threat to public safety or property values? Were these trees particularly ugly? And who was behind White’s push to get them removed? Like many stories about government, this seemingly trivial drama turned out to be about power, and how people justify using it.

Xenia Street is in Ward 8, physically separated from most of D.C. by the Anacostia River. That’s not the only thing that sets it apart. This side of the river is overwhelmingly Black and has had a higher unemployment rate, a lower labor-force-participation rate, and a higher poverty rate than the rest of the city. The census tract that contains Xenia Street is one of the most heat sensitive in the city, a metric that reflects the prevalence of asthma, coronary heart disease, and disability, as well as race and income demographics. D.C.’s Urban Forestry Department, a division of DDOT, planted the trees after a beetle infestation harmed several local ash trees. A senior official told me the department is generally concerned about the unequal distribution of tree canopy across wards: At the end of June, Ward 8 had roughly 500 open requests for new plantings; the higher-income Ward 4 had nearly 6,000.

Tree planting doesn’t meet the bar for more serious types of notification and community-input processes that a new road or train station might. But according to Kay Armstead, a former member of the advisory neighborhood commission—an elected body meant to serve as a hyperlocal voice on zoning, bike lanes, liquor licenses—the city did inform the commission of a plan to bring more trees to the neighborhood. In the fall of 2020, it planted 35 trees, some American linden, some apple, on a publicly owned lot between two condo buildings, 450 Xenia Street and 450 Condon Terrace.

I wanted to see the trees for myself. In the weeks following White’s proposed emergency resolution, I visited the quiet residential street on three separate occasions, asking people if they had any thoughts about the trees. No one I interviewed registered strong opinions, or had even heard of the controversy.

One resident of 450 Condon Terrace immediately redirected my attention to a massive hole in the ground of her parking lot, which she said had been caused by a garbage truck. Another told me he hadn’t heard about the controversy but wanted to talk about trash pickup. “I mean, look at this shit,” he said, pointing to a pile of trash on the sidewalk. Trees? Low on the list of priorities. Another man found my line of questioning confusing, to say the least. “They’re oxygen!” When I said some people worried the trees could encourage crime, he laughed at me. “Now, you know that’s crazy. Who’s going to hide underneath these trees?”

[James Fallows: Start planting trees]

So who forms “the community” so opposed to the trees? His name is Darryl Ross.

Ross has been active in local politics for decades. He is treasurer of the Ward 8 Democrats and of White’s constituent-services fund, a controversial purse that some critics have called a “slush fund.” When White refers to constituent outreach to his office over this issue, he’s talking about Ross. (White and his chief of staff both declined to be interviewed for this story.) Ross doesn’t live at 450 Xenia Street, but he used to. He still owns a unit in the building, which he rents out, and is the president of the Xenia Condominium Owners Association.

Ross has been angry about the trees since the day they were planted. He told me he saw workers digging and began calling around, furious that no one had informed the neighborhood about the project, astounded that the city thought 35 trees (“a forest!”) made sense on the street; and frustrated by hypothetical future private costs that the trees would impose on residents.

His 311 requests to remove the trees went nowhere. So he tried officials at DDOT and the Urban Forestry Department, White and several other members of the city council, the office of the inspector general, and current and former members of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission. He knows he wouldn’t have been able to get so much attention without his connections: “Believe me, I’m using all the leverage I can to get the desired result,” he told me.

After months of effort, in August of 2021, representatives from DDOT, White’s chief of staff, and a senior staffer for at-large Councilmember Anita Bonds met with Ross and a couple of area residents on the site to discuss the problem. The officials agreed to remove 14 of the 35 newly planted trees. The agency also promised to complete a lighting survey, which resulted in the installation of three large streetlights, a data-driven approach to reducing crime.

The “desire to compromise for this individual is because we want to make sure we’re doing this for people, not to them,” a senior official in the urban forestry department (who requested anonymity to speak freely) told me. “If we can mollify someone, engender a sense of ownership … You take someone and make them more of an ally.”

Ross was not mollified. He continued his crusade to have three more trees removed—the ones closest to his condo building’s walkway. He lodged a complaint with D.C.’s Office of the Inspector General, which led to a formal response from DDOT Director Everett Lott, who argued that the department had broken no laws in planting the trees and had in fact exceeded the mandate for public notification. Undeterred, Ross continued his advocacy, which culminated with White’s proposed emergency resolution at the city-council meeting in June.

Ross put me in touch with a few of his allies, most of whom sounded only slightly more informed about the situation than the residents I randomly encountered on my visits. Some had no idea that many trees had already been removed; others were just vaguely aware that at one point the trees had seemed like a problem. One woman told me she thought children might throw fallen apples at cars or building windows. (The trees at issue in the emergency legislation are linden, not apple.)

According to Ross, the condo association was united in opposition. He called the vice president, Hazel Farmer, on speaker in my presence.

“You remember there were four [trees] that were too close to the walkway?” he asked.

“I thought we had finished that,” she said, sounding confused.

“No, no, we are still battling,” Ross replied quickly.

After Ross refreshed her memory, Farmer said she worried that the trees would one day push up the concrete sidewalk, impeding residents’ ability to walk in and out of the building. Ross later clarified that Farmer had already moved out because the steps on the walkway were too difficult for her to navigate.

Xenia Street in 2019 (left) and 2023 (right) (Courtesy of Jerusalem Demsas)

In a July legislative meeting, White withdrew the emergency resolution, citing a compromise reached by the chairman of the D.C. council and DDOT to apply a growth regulator to the offending saplings. This outcome infuriates Ross, who is seeking a meeting with Mayor Muriel Bowser: “At the end of the day we voted for her, we didn’t vote for [DDOT officials], and we had faith in her to do what’s best for the people.”

Ross still has options. If the worst happens and these trees end up extending over the sidewalk, he can call 311 to request tree pruning. According to the Urban Forestry Department, these requests are resolved, on average, within 20 days.

But the more I talked with Ross and his allies, the more I realized the trees were also stand-ins for their broader unhappiness with DDOT, which they see as not acting for them but doing things to them: bike racks “just dropped” in front of some businesses, bike lanes constructed over their objections, and traffic-safety infrastructure—in D.C.’s highest traffic-fatality ward—installed without their consent. This is why Ross was able to enlist supporters in the first place—by tapping into existing anger some residents have with the city’s transportation agency. Anger that, in a ward of nearly 90,000 people, a few individuals do not have the final say.

This is a classic story of local government and its discontents. Government takes action. Angry, well-connected local fights back, annoyed that they weren’t consulted. But when they fight back, claiming the will of the “people,” how do we know if they’re right? Backing up a bit: How do we even decide who the people are?

[From the July/August 2023 Issue: Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis]

In the Xenia Street episode, is it the people who live right next to the trees? How about one street over? Just property owners like Ross? Because the trees are on public land, should all D.C. residents have a say? Is it all Americans? Addressing the reforestation backlog is a national priority. Or, given that trees help mitigate climate change, should all people have a voice? This is the so-called boundary problem, which the political scientist Robert Dahl once quipped has “no theoretical solution,” only pragmatic ones. Even if surveying all of humanity were theoretically desirable, it’s a practical impossibility. One has to draw the line somewhere and delegate representatives or spokespersons.

Arguably the best delegates in this matter are local elected officials, who get their authority from voters. The problem is that, at the local and especially hyperlocal levels, nobody’s voting. In 2018, two-thirds of advisory-neighborhood-commission races were uncontested. Even when these contests are competitive, only a handful of people show up to cast a ballot. In the single-member district that includes Xenia Street, Armstead, one of Ross’s allies, lost her election 137–91. Last year, two ANC races were tied following Election Day; in one of them each candidate had garnered 12 votes apiece, while in the other each candidate had claimed just one (presumably their own). Vox populi indeed.

If the ANC can’t quite speak for the people, what about the D.C. council, and specifically Councilmember White? Council voting rates are also dismal: About 8,700 people total voted in the 2020 primary contest that secured White’s reelection, out of roughly 57,000 citizens of voting age in Ward 8.

How about DDOT? As an agency housed in the executive branch, DDOT gains its authority from the mayor. In 2022, Mayor Bowser received fewer than 4,000 votes from Ward 8 during the primary (the true election in this heavily Democratic city). Only about 10,000 people in the ward voted at all in this contest.

There’s no magical threshold at which elected officials become democratically legitimate. But more than half of eligible voters routinely show up for federal and state contests while our municipal elections struggle to top 15 percent. What we’re seeing in local governments is a crisis of democracy unparalleled at other levels of government.

“It’s not the trees; it’s the disrespect,” Armstead told me. She called tree removal a top priority because “when you come to a community and you don’t listen, then [we’re] being disrespected and disregarded.” Ross made a similar point: “It makes me angry because, like I said, we’re the stakeholders. We’re the taxpayers. We fund the salaries for the D.C. government employees, council … This is our money!”

When we collectively feel entitled to hold the government accountable, that’s democracy. But when individuals do, that’s something else: institutional capture.

Because so few people vote in local elections, the power of those who speak up and claim to speak for their neighborhoods is hard to challenge. If a homeowner’s association headed by the neighborhood busybody says he speaks for you, are you showing up to contest that claim? What’s obvious about Ross’s perseverance is that its effectiveness is largely due to its singularity. If everyone engaged as he did, called and emailed and attended meeting after meeting, filing complaints with everyone from the office of the inspector general on down, his power would dilute instantly. No one can claim to speak for a community if everyone’s speaking for themselves.

Democracy is about feedback loops. We elect people. If they do poorly, we choose alternatives. But when the election system falters from disuse, other feedback loops take root. Elected officials at the local level become accountable to the unrepresentative handful of voters who do engage; and public servants become preemptively sensitive to well-connected people who have the time and energy to demand disproportionate focus.

People like Ross may not get everything they want, but they know how to command attention. No fewer than four D.C. councilmembers have become personally involved in the matter of the trees on Xenia Street. Meanwhile, that massive hole in the ground? It’s still there.

When Keir Starmer wanted to change the Labour Party’s stance on sex and gender, he didn’t give a set-piece speech or hold a press conference. Instead, the leader of Britain’s main opposition party stayed in the background, leaving Anneliese Dodds, a shadow minister with a low public profile, to announce the shift in a short opinion column in The Guardian. In just over 800 words, she made three big declarations. One was that “sex and gender are different.” Another was that, although Labour continues to believe in the right to change one’s legal gender, safeguards are needed to “protect women and girls from predators who might abuse the system.” Finally, Labour was therefore dropping its commitment to self-ID—the idea that a simple online declaration is enough to change someone’s legal gender for all purposes—and would retain the current requirement of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Dodds supplemented her article with a few explanatory tweets, but didn’t go on television to reiterate the message. The next day, Labour declined to provide a spokesperson for comment on the BBC’s flagship radio news show. Although Starmer did eventually answer questions on the subject, as part of a wider interview two days later, the overall effect was that of a man who had chucked a hand grenade over his shoulder and walked away, whistling.

To anyone not following the turbulent and sometimes arcane debate that has been raging in Britain, Dodds’s statements might sound uncontroversial, but they are not. Since 2015, when the Conservative politician Maria Miller first proposed self-ID in Britain, the idea that such a system might be abused has been called a transphobic myth by LGBTQ campaigners. Demands for single-sex sports teams, locker rooms, and prisons were thus “exclusionary” and analogous to whites-only buses, schools, and water fountains under apartheid and Jim Crow. Labour, the main party of the British left, has now declared that these arguments are unfair and untrue. The internal dissent has been notably muted.

[Helen Lewis: What happens when politicians brush off hard questions about gender]

That shift has broader implications, not least in America, where combatants on both sides of the gender war closely follow the debates in Britain. (Queer activists in the U.S. dismissively call the country “TERF Island.”) Labour’s new stance shows how the left can simultaneously acknowledge the needs of an embattled transgender minority, accept the importance of biological sex to public policy, and look for political and social compromises. Admittedly, huge questions remain about how the party’s proposals will work in practice and whether its Welsh and Scottish branches will fall in line. But Labour has signaled the beginning of a serious democratic conversation, after years of implicitly agreeing with the LGBTQ activists who insisted that no debate was acceptable.

As a leader of a left-wing party, Starmer has sent an important sign by disassociating himself from the radical postmodern idea that the distinction between males and females is a social construct, and that biology has nothing to do with women’s historical oppression. (“Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies,” the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon wrote recently. “We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.”)

Labour’s new position represents a big ideological shift, but it wasn’t presented as one. That is typical of Starmer’s personality, which is unshowy but ruthless. Unlike many American politicians on either side of the spectrum, he has tried to find a position that will make the debate less inflammatory, and to appeal to the wider country rather than his activist base.

In the three years since the Conservatives dropped their commitment to self-ID, some of their politicians have gleefully seized on the vote-winning potential of gender as a culture-war issue. By contrast, during that time, Starmer and his ministers have been fumbling over their answer to the question What is a woman?, talking about cervices far more than anyone outside a gynecology department would wish to. A desire to stick to the progressive line has meant that Labour politicians have ended up saying baffling things like “A child is born without sex.” Some have attacked interviewers for even bringing up the subject, which just drew more attention to their tortured answers. Stuck arguing about the exact percentage of women who have a penis, Labour couldn’t talk about Britain’s housing crisis, high energy costs, crumbling infrastructure, poor economic growth, and high inflation.

That era is now over, if rank-and-file Labour politicians want it to be. Two days after the Dodds column appeared, Starmer was asked to define woman. He responded simply, “An adult female.” If that answer is permissible in left-wing circles, interviewers have been deprived of an easy gotcha question, and Labour can go back to talking about economics and trying to win over the median voter.

For fear of harming trans people or aligning with outright bigots, some on the left have avoided voicing misgivings about policies such as self-ID, and over the past decade Labour activists have vilified feminist commentators who did speak up. Starmer has now broadened the limits of the discussion. Across Europe, medical associations are recommending caution over so-called affirmative models of gender care for minors. The possibility that social contagion may affect teenagers’ professed identities is being discussed among doctors, as is the suggestion that, at least in some cases, puberty itself can resolve gender dysphoria. The lack of evidence for the safety or effectiveness of puberty blockers is becoming sayable.

[Helen Lewis: The only way out of the child-gender culture war]

In sports, international bodies are undoing previous policies that put trans women in competition with natal-female athletes. The latest organization to change its rules is British Rowing, which has restricted women’s events to biological females, while also creating categories for transgender participation. Two weeks before that, cycling’s world governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, restricted the female category to individuals born female who have never taken testosterone, while also creating an “open” competition for anyone who has been through male puberty or has taken male hormones.

In the United States, though, political polarization is freezing a highly unproductive discussion in place. One of the most frustrating aspects of writing on this subject is that many liberals don’t know what they don’t know. Punitive red-state bans, coupled with overtly anti-LGBTQ rhetoric by Republicans, have made Democrats instinctively defensive of puberty blockers and gender surgery for minors even as European experts grow warier. A proper, evidence-based debate about child transition in America is inhibited by the fact that medical groups are wedded to the affirmative model, despite their overseas colleagues’ qualms about the evidence base. The board of the American Academy of Pediatrics just voted unanimously to continue backing the affirmative approach for now.

Clearly, a broad middle ground exists. About three-quarters of Americans are opposed to discrimination against transgender people in housing, colleges, the workplace, and obtaining health insurance, according to polling conducted late last year. But more than 60 percent of American adults also believe that trans women and girls should not compete in female sports at any level, and solid majorities also oppose hormone treatments for under-18s. Even among trans adults themselves, the same poll found that three in 10 support sex-based restrictions in sports, and the same number said it was inappropriate for younger children to receive puberty blockers. (The Washington Post, which published the polling, notes that it was conducted before the introduction of hundreds of red-state bills restricting medical care and sports participation.) It seems as though most Americans are happy to support trans people in everyday life, while also believing that trans women are not identical to other women, with all that implies. But this position is rarely articulated among elites on either side. “It’s not just tribalism; it’s extremism,” the writer Lisa Selin Davis told me. “It’s the two-party system, and it’s each party catering to its most radical constituents. And of course, that’s the story of social media too.”

Davis came to the American gender debate as the parent of a masculine daughter. When she wrote about that experience in The New York Times, she received letters urging her to let her “son” transition and warning that “he” might die by suicide otherwise. She still considers herself to be on the left but believes that her natural allies have lost perspective. “When it comes to the Democrats, they have invested so much political capital in supporting things that not only probably don’t matter to most Democratic voters, but I think probably are a bit of a turnoff,” she told me. “Staking your claim on supporting drag-queen story hour, as opposed to a $25 minimum wage, is really silly.”

Davis is particularly dispirited that Democrats do not make life easy for lawmakers who depart from the party’s orthodoxy on gender issues. Shawn Thierry, a Black female Democratic state representative in Texas, faced censure motions and a primary challenge after supporting a Republican bill to limit gender-related hormone therapies to people over 18. Her Democratic colleagues accused her of parroting GOP talking points, but she insisted that she had looked at the evidence and found it wanting. Her detractors were also unhappy that she met with two detransitioners ahead of the vote. Imagine that—a lawmaker being criticized for listening to people with personal experience of the issue under discussion.

[Daniela Valdes and Kinnon MacKinnon: Take detransitioners seriously]

Deviations from the Republican Party line also attract ferocious pushback. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor of Arkansas, vetoed a child-gender-care bill, drawing criticism from Tucker Carlson and the state party. But Hutchinson gave a compelling rationale: He opposed surgeries on minors but felt the bill was unconstitutional and deprived parents of their rights. (His veto was overturned, but the law has since been struck down by a judge.) Earlier this year, Utah Governor Spencer Cox approved restrictions on transition care in his state only after meeting with families affected by the change, telling reporters: “If you’re not willing to sit down and listen to transgender kids and their families, then you’re probably doing policy the wrong way.” Cox is now using his year as chair of the National Governors Association to promote an initiative called Disagree Better.

Here in Britain, Starmer is betting that most voters will gratefully accept his proposed compromise—one that both assuages their concerns and takes some of the heat out of the debate. Labour has made concessions to trans activists, too, by proposing a system that will allow patients to receive a dysphoria diagnosis from their family doctor, rather than having to apply to an anonymous panel. Starmer has so far declined to apologize on the party’s behalf to feminists who were harassed for views that Labour now officially shares.

Frankly, treating this as a tough but mundane problem to be solved rather than an emotive means of attacking the opposition is what is needed. It’s the only way to make the American conversation around gender more like the British one. Democrats need to meet detransitioners, and Republicans need to meet transgender activists. Both sides need to hear the best version of their opponents’ arguments—and ensure that the debate is being conducted on the basis of the best available evidence. Alongside any evidence reviews, Davis wants a bipartisan commission on child gender care. “The best thing to do would be to stop fighting and get the data,” she said.

Until then, the left must be able to defend trans rights without denying the meaningful differences between males and females. The right must be able to air concerns without demonizing trans people. Both liberals and conservatives should stop throwing around accusations of child abuse toward parents doing their best. The gender war can end—if the broad, tolerant middle asserts itself.