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By virtually any measure, trans activism has failed in the US. It has proven itself a decisively losing electoral issue, been repudiated by the Supreme Court, lost the culture war, alienated a majority of society, and caused public opinion to turn against trans people. Trans activism ignited a trans backlash — one whose flames now threaten to consume LGBT rights more broadly. As a result, many political moderates are now quietly backing away from trans issues. Nobody wants to be burned again. But trans activism was only a losing issue because it was pursued by extremist bullies within the framework of a radical and authoritarian far-left ideology. Critical social justice monopolized trans activism and sucked all the oxygen out of the room, giving the impression that their methods and beliefs were the only way to advocate for trans people. This is not so. A non-dogmatic, non-zero-sum, philosophically liberal approach to trans rights is not only possible, it is essential now more than ever.

At the outset, it’s worth diving into the numbers to get a sense of the damage the current model of trans activism has done. In 2010, when trans issues were still years away from becoming a major topic in political discourse, the nonprofit database Guidestar catalogued 553 active LGBT foundations in the US. Of these, most were focused on LGB rights, with trans advocacy playing a small role. In 2025, Guidestar brings up over 12,000 organizations tagged with “transgender”, and unlike in 2010, trans is not a tacked-on afterthought — it's the star of the show. In 2022, at the height of radical trans activism’s cultural influence, a report from Funders for LGBT Issues found that causes dedicated to trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people received 8.5 times more foundation grant dollars than gay-, lesbian-, and bisexual-specific causes put together. What’s so striking is that over this span, as trans activism increased, societal attitudes toward key facets of trans politics deteriorated.

When the American public was first polled about trans issues, their responses showed a remarkable open-mindedness. But the more they were exposed to trans activism, the more their opinions soured. In 2017, 44% of US adults believed that it was possible for one’s gender to be different from their biological sex, whereas 54% thought that one’s gender could not be different from their sex. In the half-decade that followed, transgender nonprofit funding increased by more than 113%. Yet by 2022, public opinion had moved in the wrong direction, with just 38% of Americans saying that one’s gender can be different from their sex, and 60% saying that being a man or a woman is determined at birth (that figure is 68% today).

We see similar results in other areas of trans politics. In 2016, 53% of Americans opposed any legislation that would force trans people to use specific public bathrooms. In 2025, that number stands at 26%. In 2017, 68% supported trans people’s right to serve in the military — by 2025, 58%. Between 2021 and 2025, the support for trans women in female sports fell 10 points to a mere 24%. A New York Times poll from this year found that 79% of voters, including two-thirds of Democrats, said that trans women must not be allowed to compete in women’s sports. The survey also found that 71% of Americans (and 54% of Dems) similarly believed that puberty-blocking drugs and hormone treatments should never be given to minors. Asked if they believed trans people had a form of mental illness, 53.5% disagreed in 2016. By 2018 and 2019, that figure had ticked down to 51%. After that, pollsters stopped asking the question. Anyone who has spent any amount of time outside of left-wing enclaves discussing trans issues with everyday Americans will not have to wonder why.

Even the support for basic legal protections has declined. In 2017, 64% supported anti-discrimination legal protections for trans people in housing, employment, and public spaces. In 2025, that number dropped to 56%. Recent surveys show that 60% believe it is immoral to transition one’s gender, and 66% oppose trans people changing their gender on driver’s licenses or passports.

The proliferation of trans activism appears to be correlated with a backlash not only against trans issues but against the LGBT community as a whole. From 2022 to 2025, Gallup polls found that support for same-sex marriage fell from 71% to 68% and Americans’ belief in the “moral acceptability” of same-sex relations fell from 71% to 64%. In 2019, 75% of US adults believed that same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children. In 2025, that’s down to 61%. Republican politicians have seized on these trends, introducing thousands of bills to crack down on trans-related policies as well as LGB issues, sex ed, and Pride events. Right-wing culture warriors also went to war against Pride month itself, effectively boycotting and bullying corporations across the country into staying silent about Pride every June. Today, the word “gay” has come back into common online parlance as a synonym for “dumb,” and presidential candidates can ride “Kamala is for they/them” ads to a 2.7 percentage point gain and electoral victory.

What went wrong? How did the left-wing trans movement squander a society’s worth of open-minded goodwill? Perhaps the biggest blunder was their refusal to compromise, especially over the most contentious policy areas, such as trans women in female-only spaces or youth gender medicine. On both of these fronts, activists steamrolled over scientific and ethical complexities, blithely dismissed or actively hid risks, and placed themselves at odds with a large majority of society. To make matters worse, they approached these issues, and all others, with an air of unassailable moral superiority and certainty that brooked no discussion. Anyone who expressed skepticism was either bombarded with alarming but misleading stats, or guilt-tripped, or screamed at, or systematically maligned, lied about, and lumped in with the far right. The movement tried to impose sweeping and unpopular changes without ever even attempting to persuade anyone. Their go-to strategy was public shaming, censorship, excommunication, and bullying. Activists behaved in a manner that made no sense unless the goal was to get people to hate them, and by extension, their cause.

The radical version of trans activism was destined to fail, and so it did. But it’s not the only approach. Rather than framing trans rights as a zero-sum fight that must be won at the expense of everyone else, we can make the liberal case, as the women’s rights, Civil Rights, and LGB rights movements have done before, that we all flourish more in a society that honors individual freedom, equality before the law, and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What does this mean specifically? It means clearly defining terms, respecting science, building consensus from the ground up, taking a broad-minded and liberal view of gender-nonconformity, orienting away from conflict and toward integration, safeguarding free expression and the right to question or disagree, and fostering good faith conversation.

Sex, Gender, and Science

First, let’s clarify a major source of confusion by defining and differentiating sex and gender. A decade or two ago, distinguishing sex from gender was a point of emphasis for early trans activists. In the past decade, however, that same claim has become controversial. Sex refers to biology and reproduction. Males produce small gametes (sex cells) known as sperm. Females produce larger gametes known as eggs. Everyone is born either male or female, and while a very small percentage of people may have ambiguous sexual characteristics due to intersex conditions, they do not produce a third and distinct type of gamete. Bodies can manifest physical attributes that are all over the map, but that does not make sex a spectrum. Sex is, in fact, a binary. While the distant day may come when medical science enables people to truly change their sex, such transformations are not presently possible.

Gender, by contrast, refers not to biology, but to cultural practices and identity. Gender represents cultural expectations for the two sexes as well as how an individual feels or identifies (or not) with their sex. While sex is a binary, gender is a spectrum because it’s a social construct that includes how we think about male-ness and female-ness. But how we think about the sexes doesn’t change the nature of our biology itself. There’s no limit to how many genders there can be in principle, because gender is a fundamentally subjective concept for every individual to decide on their own. To be transgender is to be someone who identifies with a gender different from the one culturally associated with their sex, and who usually, though not necessarily, takes steps — either socially, medically, or surgically — to express their identity.

Differentiating sex and gender is crucial for making sense of transness as a concept, as well as cutting through the noise of the surrounding discourse. Both the ardent anti- and pro-trans camps fail to make this distinction. Radical trans activists willfully conflate sex and gender in order to cast sex as a spectrum or, in some cases, even deny its existence outright. Aside from being straightforwardly unscientific, this presents obvious logistical problems. If sex is synonymous with gender, or itself made up, then what is a trans person transitioning away from? What are they transitioning toward? It’s hard to advocate for something that is incoherently defined.

Conflating sex and gender also shifts the understanding of sexual orientation away from its grounding in sex and into the amorphous realm of gender. This redefined paradigm allows radical activists to tar bisexuality as transphobic for supposedly reinforcing a gender binary. It also allows them to castigate gays and lesbians for having attractions based on sex rather than gender identity, and to label straight people as “genital fetishists” if they express sex-based attractions.

On the other end, the anti-trans coalition tends either to use “gender” purely as a synonym for “sex” or to deny that gender exists at all. This, too, presents obvious problems. To reiterate, gender is a concept that signifies how people think and feel about their sex — doing away with it does not magically abolish the wide range of feelings people have about their sex, nor how they relate to their sex. People with this “gender-critical” mindset operate under the misapprehension that they can suppress a phenomenon they find threatening — transgenderism — by simply removing the language that represents the feelings trans people have. This is the flawed logic of all language policing. The reality, of course, is that real human experiences cannot be defined out of existence, and neither can science.

The movement for gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights understood that science was on their side. Activists leveraged psychological research disproving the falsehood that homosexuality was a mental illness, used data to establish the biological basis for same-sex behavior, and cited social scientific findings demonstrating that conversion therapy was as ineffective as it was inhumane. Similarly, there is no need for trans activists to contradict the science of sex, and their messaging becomes incoherent when they try. Progress is rarely built on the denial of science.

Saying No Thanks to Old-Fashioned Gender Norms

Liberals fought for decades to broaden society’s view of gender and to deemphasize old, narrow-minded stereotypes about masculinity and femininity, and they succeeded. In 1936, 72% of Americans thought women should only be homemakers. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 25%. Gendered jobs are declining, stay-at-home dads are on the rise, and support for same-sex marriage, despite its slight dip, remains at over two-thirds. A boy is no less a boy because he plays with Barbie dolls, and a girl is no less a girl because she plays baseball. To be a tomboy was once frowned upon. Then it became normal and accepted. That was real progress. Today, a tomboy in our culture is more likely to go through childhood and adolescence being encouraged and prodded to declare that they are, in fact, a trans boy. Whether this, too, is progress is doubtful.

One reason why most people don’t believe that it is possible to even be transgender is that transness, as a concept, has been hyperinflated to the point of devaluation in many people’s minds. Trans activism has expanded “transgender” into an umbrella term that encompasses not merely people who have undergone medical or surgical transition, nor those with gender dysphoria or who identify as a gender different from their sex, but increasingly anyone who is simply gender-nonconforming. Right away, this moves us backward in time. Suggesting to gender-nonconforming people, especially children, that they may be trans or trans-adjacent because they do not conform to simplistic and old-fashioned cultural stereotypes around masculinity (if they’re male) or femininity (if they’re female) is and always has been sexist. If we are to grow the percentage of society that believes it is possible to be trans, we must set clear parameters on how we define it. For trans to become an infinite concept or a proxy for gender-nonconformity not only erodes decades of liberal progress on changing gender roles and norms, it undermines trans people and our ability to shift public opinion.

The need to set boundaries has implications that reach almost every trans-related policy controversy. For example, the ethos of self-identification (known as “self-ID”), which asserts that the only evidence needed to show that a given individual is trans is that they say they are trans, presents problems for trans advocacy.

There are people for whom profound gender distress manifests at a very young age — people who have been well-assessed by clinicians and who would convince even many trans-skeptics that they are quite plainly gender dysphoric. Then there are people who, much later in life, and with no discernible history of gender distress or transness, come out as trans. Lumping these groups together might seem inclusive, but in practice, it ends up harming the former. To say that anyone can declare themselves to be trans at any time and that their say-so is the only form of legal verification needed is politically self-defeating. To vehemently eschew any standards by which one can demonstrate that they are who they say they are renders the project of trans advocacy, especially in controversial edge cases, impossible for most people to take seriously except as a radical and threatening agenda. It also arms the transphobes on the hard right with needless political ammunition.

Trans Rights Versus Trans Acceptance

With LGB rights, attitudes changed before the laws. By 2011, a majority of US adults supported same-sex marriage, but it wasn’t until 2015 that it became the law of the land. This is the usual order of progress: change minds first, then policy will follow. With trans rights, curiously, the inverse appears to be the case.

In the landmark 2020 decision Bostock v. Clayton County, the US Supreme Court ruled that transgender people were protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against workplace discrimination. The Bostock ruling also ensured that the Fair Housing Act within the Civil Rights Act of 1968 also included transgender people in protections against housing discrimination. Even with the activist-induced backslide, a clear majority of the public is still on the same page and believes trans people should be legally protected from discrimination in housing, employment, and other areas.

Most of the hard work of establishing legal protections has already been done, which speaks to the benefits of living in a liberal society where equality under the law is an enshrined value. What remains is to convince the public that it is possible to be transgender, and to foster not merely support for basic rights, but also the social acceptance of trans people. This is best achieved not by dividing people, but by bringing them together.

Trans Equality Means Trans Integration

In the 1980s and 90s, when gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists began pushing for same-sex marriage, radicals within the LGB movement pushed back. They wanted nothing to do with mainstream society, straight people, or institutions like marriage, which they considered heteronormative, patriarchal, and oppressive. They wanted to be a separate counterculture. The result, predictably, was backlash. Gay separatists succeeded only at making it easier for the Christian right to argue that LGBT people were trying to destroy the family. But moderate activists understood that true equality could only be achieved not by existing in parallel to and separate from mainstream society, but by integrating into it. In the end, the radicals and religious fundamentalists both lost, and LGBT rights won.

We see a similar divide today within the movement for trans equality, between activists fighting for the right of trans people to join mainstream society and activists who want to remake mainstream society in the image of trans people. Whether it’s trying to overwrite sex with gender in medical schools, or erase the word “woman” from media publications, or change awards to be gender-neutral, efforts in virtually every area of society have tried to impose radical trans politics onto society. While such efforts may have been undertaken with the intention of helping trans people feel more comfortable, they created unnecessary antagonisms that make trans equality seem like a hostile cultural takeover. It underscores the arguments of anti-trans feminists that trans rights must come at the expense of women’s rights, and gives fodder to the hard right to gin up fears of social upheaval. The goal should be ensuring that trans people are accepted throughout society, rather than forcing society to upend countless conventions and traditions to cater to a very small percentage of people.

Conversation and the Centrality of Free Expression

If and when trans activism reorients its ethos, then the thornier conversations about edge cases can be most meaningfully had — and they must be conversations. Progress in a free society cannot be imposed against the will of the public by executive, institutional, or activist fiat without the public subsequently raising new leaders and institutions to undo it. Issues surrounding trans women in female sports, prisons, and rape shelters, as well as youth gender medicine, have to be openly and freely discussed without threats or stigma, and with the understanding that these conversations can take years to come to a consensus.

People must be allowed to dissent, disagree, question, think out loud, and, yes, be wrong without it ruining their life or ability to make a living. As we have seen, fostering a culture that erodes our norms around free expression will only harm trans people in the long run. Free speech is the cornerstone of all other freedoms, including LGBT rights. It’s what has enabled the incredible strides we have made over the past century. It is our most powerful weapon.

It may be that in the end, after much deliberation, debate, and compromise, a consensus forms around support for trans adults to have access to any and all medical treatments they may desire, but that teenagers below a specified age cannot give informed consent. It may be that society agrees to educate high schoolers about transgender matters but not elementary schoolers. It may be that we can agree to allow trans men in male sports but not trans women in female sports, or only in some sports. It may be that people eventually agree to allow trans women in female prisons, but only after a more rigorous standard is set for what qualifies one as a trans woman. Or we may come to a different consensus on any one of these issues.

This approach may never satisfy the hardliners in the anti-trans coalition, who are, in large part, dyed-in-the-wool zealots, but no campaign to win hearts and minds ever needs to persuade everyone. People with “fuck your pronouns” in their social media bios, or who comment on hundreds of trans-related posts calling every other person a “groomer”, are probably not reachable, and certainly not the target demographic. Political activists rarely seek to, much less succeed in, convincing their staunchest opponents. Rather, they aim their efforts at the general public, especially those on the fence or whose views are not particularly strong.

By the same token, the most extreme radicals in trans activist spaces, for whom the notion of compromise is anathema, may denounce and repudiate this whole process. They have deputized themselves as the arbiters of what constitutes being pro-trans and what constitutes transphobia, as though they alone are in possession of some received truth that only a bigot could object to. But the proof is in the pudding. As radical trans activism proliferates, public attitudes about trans people backslide. In their obsession with maximalist purity politics, these activists have become a liability to the very community they set out to champion.

* * *

It would be the understatement of the century to say that opinions differ on trans issues. The only way we can begin to close these chasms and resume progressing toward a freer and more tolerant future is by building bridges. If there is a single, overarching theme that a new iteration of trans activism should embody, it is the universalist ideal that we are all ultimately the same and that we are all in this together. We may never come to an agreement on every specific policy question in a way that fully satisfies all parties. But we can all recognize — must all recognize — that whatever our views, trans people are, first and foremost, people, and they deserve the same respect, courtesy, consideration, legal protections, and equality under the law as anyone else. “Trans women are women” has, as an organizing (and often shrieked) mantra, produced results that no one is satisfied with. Perhaps a better version would be “trans people are people.”

Published Oct 24, 2025