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.