"Kara Dansky Warned Democrats About The 'Gender Identity' Reckoning"

Opposition to 'trans sports,' 'trans kids,' and 'inclusion' did not start on the right

May 10, 2025

The post below, written by historian Matt Osborne, was posted on Osborne’s Substack “OsborneInk” in April. The original is here, and I am reposting with permission. You can find him on X at @OsborneInk and his Substack is great.

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Democrats have a serious problem understanding the opposition they face on issues related to ‘gender identity.’ Their mental model of the phenomenon is broken because it ascribes all opposition to the Republican Party and evil designs drawn up in prayer-filled backrooms. This caricature is false and misleading. It does not help Democrats to understand the real world, or to win elections.

Every opponent of the state taking children away from families in the name of their ‘gender identity’ is explained away as a bigot. Every opponent of male bodies in female sports is dismissed as a right wing reactionary. Women who object to naked male bodies in their restrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, gym showers, and prisons: these women are all exactly the same as white supremacists, to Democrats.

But in reality, the opposition to ‘gender identity’ originated on the left. Kara Dansky and I have the receipts. We were warning Democrats all this time. They know we exist, but we were not supposed to exist, so Democrats still pretend we don’t exist. Until they acknowledge us, and face up to the reckoning over ‘gender identity,’ Democrats will remain out of power, no matter how bad the Republicans get.

Democrats have learned this framing of the issues from the alphabetical organizations that speak for the acronym “community” that adopted gender ideology in pursuit of progressive donor funding, and abandoned their core missions, a decade ago. Known to liberal pundits as “The Groups,” nonprofit organizations such as GLAAD, HRC, SPLC, and the ACLU act as ideological enforcers for ‘gender identity.’

This activity started to peak in 2015 as radical feminists opposed to gender identity ideology were finally pushed out of polite progressive society after a decades-long, but unheralded dispute within feminism. Kara Dansky used to work for the ACLU. A feminist, and a lifelong Democrat who always voted for the left of the party, Dansky was one of those cancelled women.

Today, “outspoken TERFs aren’t allowed to have jobs in the so-called ‘progressive left’ or sometimes, any jobs at all,” she writes. Reader, this author can corroborate the reporting. Everyone who resisted the ‘gender identity’ juggernaut was not only fired and refused further work in progressive organizing, they were doxxed, harassed, and threatened within an inch of their lives for expressing wrongthink.

Matt Walsh was not even podcasting yet when it happened. Those of us who endured it will remember forever. We will remember when it is time to vote. This is the problem Democrats have with ‘gender identity,’ that they cannot comprehend: they created a backlash on the left, and now they cannot seem to stop themselves from doubling-down on this losing issue.

In two books, The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls, published in 2021, and her 2023 follow-up The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, Dansky warned her former party that they risked losing women who understand the stakes of ‘self-ID’ policies and laws that would allow any male to declare himself female for any and all purposes.

Dansky identifies the pernicious role of Queer Theory, Gayle Rubin, and Judith Butler in the normalization among elites of the luxury belief that female bodies are somehow socially constructed. In the ivory tower of the academy, “women are not oppressed by men on the basis of sex, but on the basis of the existence of the binary category of sex,” Dansky writes. “This is fundamentally anti-feminist.”

Dansky “knew women voting Trump in 2020 because of this issue,” Dansky writes in The Abolition of Sex. And “unless Democrats change course immediately and publicly hold themselves accountable for what they have done to women and girls as a sex class, I have no plans to vote for them in 2024. And I am not alone,” she wrote in 2023.

She speaks for many opponents of ‘gender identity’ who began on the left, who mostly still hold out hope for party reform, but remain disappointed with the party. Dansky grew up believing “that the Democrats were the party that cared about the working class, feminism, free speech, gay rights, and civil rights generally.”

Today the Democrats pretend to not know what a woman even is. Democrats cannot be the party of women and also pretend that they don’t know what a woman is. Working class voters have no time for such contradictions.

“What the hell happened?” she asks, refuting the assertion that mandatory belief in magical, mystical, invisible ‘gender identities’ was ever native to “the left,” “liberals,” or “progressive” politics.

The prevailing narrative is that being “pro-trans” or “trans-inclusive” is a leftist position. But it’s not. All “gender identity” and “transgender” issues are an embrace of politically regressive, sexist, homophobic stereotypes. It is anti-speech and incredibly authoritarian. It is the most politically regressive idea the Democrats have embraced in my lifetime. TERFs see right through all of it. We aim to win, and if that means calling out our own political tribe for the atrocities it has committed at the altar of “gender identity,” then that’s what we’ll do.

Dansky resists using the language of transgender ideology or ‘preferred pronouns.’ In her radical feminist analysis, Dansky identifies the invention of the word “transgender” as the beginning of the problem, for it suggests that there is somehow a material class of human beings ‘born in the wrong body,’ as advocates of so-called “gender medicine” used to say.

(That phrase, ‘born in the wrong body,’ has been deprecated by the transgender rights lobby in recent years because it reveals too much about the fundamentally religious nature of the claim to a ‘trans’ identity. This is another problem for Democrats: ‘the left’ was full of atheists and skeptics who reject magical belief systems of any kind and now reject the party of occult genderwoo, too.)

The second waypoint of the downward spiral was “the explosion of corporate-driven technologies and medical practices,” Dansky writes. A strange thing happened on the way to the gender clinics: as soon as ‘trans identities’ became all the rage, girls suffered the social contagion most. Consequently, the demographics of the ‘trans youth’ population entirely flipped, from mostly boys to a supermajority of girls.

Cosmetic testosterone will affect a whole generation of females, while phalloplasties are some of the most gruesome, complication-ridden gender surgeries. Girls will become women who die early because of their ‘gender identity,’ or suffer as detransitioners trying to have children without breasts or sometimes wombs. The only people who ever benefit from all this are clinicians.

Dansky indicts “the thorough embrace of the sexual exploitation of women and girls on the political left” under the guise of ‘trans acceptance.’ Examining court rulings, the Equality Act now tabled in the US Senate, and proposed or enacted legislation around the world, she writes that the trans lobby is creating “preconditions for the abolition of sex,” a purely capitalist project to medicalize children and abolish womens’ rights. (UPDATE: As if to remind everyone why they are unpopular, Democratic Senators have decided to revive the Equality Act.)

Until the re-election of Donald Trump last November, the entire media establishment never even addressed these objections. “It might come as a surprise to readers that Fox has achieved a perfect score on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index for years,” Dansky writes.

She believes that “the ‘gender identity’ industry thinks that it has a better shot at beating conservatives than it has of beating the TERFs, so it pays the media to ignore us.” The entire media.

On this point, Helen Joyce, author of the 2021 book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, might offer the counter-argument that corporate media offices are exactly where one would expect to find the parents of ‘trans kids’ who are determined to change the world for their children. Joyce has encountered that very phenomenon at the BBC, for example. She explains the problem to Peter Boghossian in this one-minute clip.

However, it turns out that Dansky was on to something. She mentions the 2014 Stephen Colbert interview of Janet Mock as a key moment in the indoctrination of mainstream media. Recently, Malcolm Clark, a British documentarian, has identified Mock as the person most responsible for American media popularizing drag during the last decade.

Mock is a transgender GLAAD activist working in the actual back rooms, twisting arms and greasing palms in association with the Arcus Foundation, an extremely wealthy funder of trans ideology which Dansky also mentions. Arcus has played a key role in the ACLU setting women aside to promote the ‘trans’ agenda: men in women’s prisons, sports, and spaces.

In 2022, the ACLU promoted an openly-homophobic right wing Christian family in Texas that is castrating and mutilating their effeminate son. The organization even presented the Shappleys to Congress as the ideal family of a ‘trans child.’ During his testimony, the father of ‘Kai’ Shappley admitted to abusing his son for his girlish behavior. Nothing about this is ‘progressive’ in any way.

There is nothing ‘democratic’ about the way ‘trans’ operates within the Democratic Party, society, or government, either. It is always insidious. It is never open about its intentions. After all, if trans-identified males had to explain autogynephilia to the public, how much ‘acceptance’ would they actually receive for their paraphilia?

Shouting ‘no debate’ and talking over the women has been much easier. But those days are over, now.

Dansky has hardly transformed into a conservative. Republicans did not ride to the rescue with money or legislation. On the contrary, she complains that getting Republicans to move on ‘gender identity’ issues has been supremely difficult. Texas, a state which has banned pediatric transition, nevertheless still has a thriving gender clinic industry. (Scott Newgent, a ‘trans man’ who experienced severe complications from her medicalization, has chided the Texas GOP on this point in her memoir.)

“The Republican Party has so far failed to stop the abolition of sex, despite purporting to be against it. I know this both from my own observations and from listening to the grumblings of some Republican friends who are just as sick of their party as I am of mine,” Dansky writes.

Nor did evangelical Christianity become the saviors of women and children. Contrary to the conspiracy theories of the genderwoo lobby, no stream of right wing religious money has appeared in the bank accounts of ‘gender identity’ opponents. I should know, since I have been looking for it a long time, now.

Dansky noted in 2021 that “even many churches, some institutions that ought to be able to stand up to an industry that evangelizes that sex doesn’t exist are, for the most part, not doing that.” It is still the case today. Unitarian Universalists don’t surprise anyone with pronoun ceremonies for kids on puberty blockers, but they are happening in mainline Protestant churches, too.

Dansky describes a breakthrough moment for her outside the Supreme Court, supporting abortion access rights, when she heard abortion opponents declare that “trans rights start at conception.”

“Christians purport to hold the view that God made men and women in his image. I don’t happen to share that view, but one would think that this very basic tenet of Christianity would be upheld by the churches themselves,” Dansky observes.

It stung harder because the entire abortion rights movement has seemingly lost its mind for ‘gender identity.’ Planned Parenthood has set aside its mission, Dansky notes, and now “routinely hands out puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors without a prescription and with almost no counseling or therapy.”

Dansky remarks that the phrase “no uterus no opinion” was deprecated at some indeterminate point. I can inform her that it was 2018, for that year I was actually instructed in a Netroots Nation panel that this ancient and original feminist motto was verboten from now on, since it was not affirming of “trans identities.” The diktat was even delivered in a stern voice.

Immediately after this instruction, a six foot tall black drag queen delivered a Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I A Woman” speech, declaring that his “trans sisters of the future” will need abortion rights because of stem cells and uterus transplants. That was the moment I got up and walked out of the room — as well as the Democratic Party.

Slowly, then loudly and constantly, I started warning every Democrat that a reckoning would come. Kara Dansky is not the only other one who did. More of us exist than is generally understood.

As I gulped down the largest, highest-alcohol margarita sold in the frozen drinks bar at the mall adjacent to that conference center, I calculated that aside from radical feminists and women, three other demographics considered core to the party’s identity would also increasingly reject ‘gender identity,’ and then Democrats along with it. Dansky identifies two of them.

In The Reckoning, Dansky names state representatives Katrina Jackson, Cesar McKnight, Cynthia Johnson, Marvin Robinson, Shawn Thierry, and Val Applewhite as Democrats who had already supported state legislation to rein in ‘pediatric gender medicine’ and the abusive demands of the trans lobby by 2023.

What they all share, Dansky notes, is that they are black, which, until the arrival of ‘gender,’ was the sacred demographic to the left. As Dave Chappelle demonstrated in 2023, however, there is a new hierarchy of oppression on the left that advantages white men over black people through a religious confession of transgender faith.

Why did we lose ground with black voters? Democrats cried last November. How could we lose them to Donald Trump, of all people? Perhaps it has something to do with the cringey soft bigotry of low expectations, i.e. DEI, but I will wager any pollster willing to test the question honestly that they will find ‘gender identity’ also repels black voters from the Democratic Party as much or more than any other issue.

Black Americans see Rep. Thierry getting primaried out by the party for her crime against the new orthodoxy. (She has since become the director of Genspect USA, an organization which the SPLC absurdly calls a hate group for opposing youth medicalization.) Black Americans see New Hampshire Rep. Jonah Wheeler go through a struggle session over his principled stand for the rights of women. What do Democrats imagine that black voters do with this information?

The second demographic I expected to decline in Democratic turnout was Hispanics, or Latinos, or whatever political label the left has constructed for that diversity of nationalities and ethnicities lately. Progressive activists gave the game away with “Latinx,” a term that no one asked for. Gender ideology is also repellent to traditional cultures, as one ought to expect for an invention of western academics with white savior complexes. The issue will register in frankly-worded polling here too, I predict.

Gender gibberish is also noxious to an increasing number of those forcibly included under the Progress Flag against their will. These days, “queer” refers to spicy straight people with interesting piercings and hair colors. Where it is not a childish pastiche of pastels and rainbows and glitter, the aesthetic of ‘queerness’ ranges from the pornographic to body horror. Pride Parades are no longer about a sense of solidarity, but vengeance on the normie straights.

As a result, an increasing number of gay and lesbian people realize they have nothing in common with Drag Queen Story Hour, ‘transgender medicine,’ or the blinkered demand to let males cheat at women’s sports. They reject the new Pride, and also ‘gender identity.’

Thus the appearance of Gays Against Groomers, created by disappointed Democrats, a fact which confuses the average Democrat, who must explain it to themselves as yet another fantastical right wing conspiracy. It is simply the natural erosion of that third core demographic of Democratic Party identity which I identified in that margarita bar in 2018.

Dansky is incendiary as she defends lesbians from the erasure of their identity and spaces by men demanding ‘inclusion.’ When exactly did the LGB become this ever-expansive alphabetical monstrosity, “LGBTQ2SIA+”?

Dansky points to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would have made it illegal to fire or refuse to hire someone on the basis of their sexual orientation. Championed by Rep. Barney Frank, ENDA encountered internal opposition from the trans lobby in 2007, when Democrats held congressional majorities, forcing him to wihdraw and rewrite the bill to include prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

As memorialized at the time in a John Aravosis blog post, the trans lobby had become ascendant over the LGB. As a result of the delay, the legislation ultimately died in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives in 2011. The demands of the fringe for an abolition of sex had trumped, and consequently prevented, a breakthrough initiative to secure the employment rights of same-sex attracted people. Matters have gone downhill ever since.

Gender ideology is not a ‘new kind of gay.’ It is the enemy of gay, of single-sex spaces for gay men or lesbian women. Sooner or later, I guessed in 2018, an increasing number of them would reject the forced teaming of LGB with the blinkered demands of spicy straight QT+. This is indeed happening. Democrats are starting to lose the gays and lesbians, and again, I predict that good polling will bear this out.

In 2021, Dansky wrote at some length about Timothy Ryan McBride, now Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware. “I happened to be at the U.S. Capitol one day in early 2019 with Kellie-Jay Keen and U.K. feminist Julia Long, and he was there to lobby for the Equality Act,” legislation to enshrine ‘gender identity.’

“Keen and Long asked him to explain why he hates lesbians, and he had no answer for them.” Democrats still have no answers, at least no sensible ones, for lesbians, gay men, black Americans, or voters of any color who ask the simple question: “What is a woman?” Dansky was asking Democrats these questions long before anyone even knew who Matt Walsh is.

Also: “What is the difference between a male body cheating at women’s sports and a male body named Susan cheating at women’s sports?” Asking questions like this has gotten many feminists canceled and blacklisted, including Dansky.

Or: “Why do you treat a Skoptsy cult that cuts healthy body parts off children, who would likely grow up to be gay or lesbian if left alone, as a legitimate civil rights movement?” Asking this question results in social death among Democrats.

Yet on this, as well as every other issue related to the conflict of rights over ‘gender identity,’ Democrats find themselves on the wrong side of supermajority public opinion.

Dansky notes that according to polls available in 2021, 65 percent of very liberal people, as well as 80 percent of liberal Americans, already acknowledged that the phrase “transgender women are biological women” is false. The numbers have not improved for Democrats. They will never, ever improve.

According to Democrats, all of these very liberal and left-oriented Americans are “right wing.” Over the long run, this label wears off, and even becomes a proud moniker, which is what happened to the acronym TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). It started as an insult and became an identity.

Let this sink in, Democrats: the defensive, reflexive rhetoric of ‘gender identity’ actively promotes right wing identification in liberals. Do you want to lose an entire generation of voters? Because that is how you lose an entire generation of voters.

According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points.

“The ‘gender identity’ house of cards is crumbling and the Democrats in power know it,” Kara Dansky writes. But do they? If anything, Democrats have doubled-down on defending these policy stances in 2025. They are no longer a majority party. In fact, Democrats are now counting on low-turnout elections to hold on to their existing power in blue, urban areas.

“I think the ‘trans’ movement is banking on the idea that they have a decent shot at beating the conservatives, but no shot at beating the TERFs, and I think they are right.” Indeed, the harder Democrats fight this battle, the worse the reckoning shall be for them.