One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion—nor prepared to disown.

Although most Americans agree that transgender people should not face discrimination in housing and employment, there is nowhere near the same level of support for allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports—which is why Donald Trump kept bringing up the issue. His campaign also barraged swing-state voters and sports fans with ads reminding them that Kamala Harris had previously supported taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners. The commercials were effective: The New York Times reported that Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, found that one ad “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The Harris campaign mostly avoided the subject.

Since the election, reports of dissent from this strategy have begun to trickle out. Bill Clinton reportedly raised the alarm about letting the attacks go unanswered, but was ignored. After Harris’s loss, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts went on the record with his concerns. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he told the Times. The recriminations go as far as the White House, where allies of Joe Biden told my colleague Franklin Foer that the current president would have countered Trump’s ads more aggressively, and “clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports.”

One problem: Biden’s administration has long pushed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters—or, more crucially, what it actually involves. His officials have advocated for removing lower age limits for gender surgeries for minors, and in January 2022, his nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, refused to define the word woman, telling Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, “I’m not a biologist.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

On sports—an issue seized on by the Trump campaign—Biden’s White House has consistently prioritized gender identity over sex. Last year, the Department of Education proposed regulations establishing “that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.” Schools were, however, allowed to limit participation in specific situations. (In April, with the election looming, this part of the Title IX revision was put on hold.) Harris went into the campaign tied to the Biden administration’s positions, and did not have the courage, or strategic sense, to reject them publicly. Nor did she defend them.  

The fundamental issue is that athletes who have gone through male puberty are typically stronger and faster than biological females. Rather than contend with that fact, many on the left have retreated to a comfort zone of claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is driven principally by transphobia. But it isn’t: When trans men or nonbinary people who were born female have competed in women’s sports against other biological females, no one has objected. The same season that Lia Thomas, a trans woman, caused controversy by swimming in the women’s division, a trans man named Iszac Henig did so without any protests. (He was not taking testosterone and so did not have an unfair advantage.) Yet even talking about this issue in language that regular Americans can understand is difficult: On CNN Friday, when the conservative political strategist Shermichael Singleton said that “there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe that boys should play girls’ sports,” he was immediately shouted down by another panelist, Jay Michaelson, who said that the word boy was a “slur,” and he “was not going to listen to transphobia at this table.” The moderator, Abby Phillips, also rebuked Singleton, telling him to “talk about this in a way that is respectful.”

A few Democrats, such as Colin Allred, a Senate candidate in Texas, attempted to counter Republicans’ ads by forcefully supporting women’s right to compete in single-sex sports—and not only lost their races anyway, but were attacked from the left for doing so. In states such as Texas and Missouri, the political right is surveilling and threatening to prosecute parents whose children seek medical treatments for gender dysphoria, or restricting transgender adults’ access to Medicaid. In this climate, activists believe, the Democrats should not further jeopardize the rights of a vulnerable minority by legitimizing voters’ concerns. “Please do not blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, the Harris campaign’s LBGTQ-engagement director, wrote on X. “Trans folks have been and are going to be a primary target of Project 2025 and need us to have their backs now more than ever.”

During the race, many journalists wrote about the ubiquity—and the grimness—of the Trump ads on trans issues, notably Semafor’s David Weigel. But at the time, I was surprised how dismissive many commentators were about their potential effect, given the enormous sums of money involved. My theory was that these ads tapped into a larger concern about Democrats: that they were elitists who ruled by fiat, declined to defend their unpopular positions, and treated skeptics as bigots. Gender might not have been high on voters’ list of concerns, but immigration and the border were—and all the same criticisms of Democratic messaging apply to those subjects, too.

Not wishing to engage in a losing issue, Harris eventually noted blandly that the Democrats were following the law on providing medical care to inmates, as Trump had done during his own time in office. On the integrity of women’s sports, she said nothing.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

How did we get here? At the end of Barack Obama’s second term, gay marriage was extended to all 50 states, an achievement for which LGBTQ groups had spent decades campaigning. In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County found that, in the words of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” Those advances meant that activist organizations, with large staffs and existing donor networks, had to go looking for the next big progressive cause. Since Trump came to power, they have stayed relevant and well funded by taking maximalist positions on gender—partly in reaction to divisive red-state laws, such as complete bans on gender medicine for minors. The ACLU, GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and other similar groups have done so safe in the knowledge that they answer to their (mostly wealthy, well-educated) donors, rather than a more diverse and skeptical electorate. “The fundamental lesson I hope Dem politicians take from this election is that they should not adopt positions unless they can defend them, honestly, in a one-on-one conversation with the median American voter, who is a white, non-college 50-yr-old living in a small-city suburb,” the author (and Atlantic contributing writer) James Surowiecki argued last week on X.

Even now, though, many Democrats are reluctant to discuss the party’s positions on trans issues. The day after Moulton made his comments, his campaign manager resigned in protest, and the Massachusetts state-party chair weighed in to say that they “do not represent the broad view of our party.” But Moulton did not back down, saying in a statement that although he had been accused of failing “the unspoken Democratic Party purity test,” he was committed to defending the rights of all Americans. “We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop.”

Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democrats, faced a similar backlash. He initially told reporters, “There’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” but he quickly walked back the comments. “I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today,” Hinojosa said. “In frustration over the GOP’s lies to incite hate for trans communities, I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity.” (On Friday, he resigned, citing the party’s “devastating” election results in the state.)

The tragedy of this subject is that compromise positions are available that would please most voters, and would stop a wider backlash against gender nonconformity that manifests as punitive laws in red states. America is a more open-minded country than its toughest critics believe—the latest research shows that about as many people believe that society has not gone far enough in accepting trans people as think that it has gone too far. Delaware has just elected the first transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride. But most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.