This is how you do it

The UK's Tom Harris’s Mea Culpa can serve as a blueprint for the US Democrats

June 12, 2025

This post is free and shareable. A paid subscription gets you regular access to much more content and the ability to comment and engage with other thoughtful people.

---

Tom Harris is a former Labour MP who now writes for The Telegraph. In 2004, he voted in favor of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act, which enshrined the concept of “gender recognition” in UK law. Earlier today, he posted a mea culpa for having done so on Substack. It’s titled, “Mea culpa: my part in the rise of the trans cult.”

The piece focuses on the UK, often with a particular focus on Scotland. However, if you swap out a few words, the exact same analysis applies in the US (though our history of enshrining “gender identity” in the law does not go back as far as 2004). All of his criticisms of the UK Labour Party apply equally to the US Democrats.

There’s too much in the piece for me to copy and paste individual paragraphs, so you will have to actually read it. Again, it’s here.

In November 2023, I published a book titled The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. I explained that as a lifelong Democrat, I am fed up with the Democrats’ insistence on shredding women’s sex-based rights and trying to abolish the material reality of sex.

The book contains an Afterword titled, “A Cautionary Tale and a Policy Prescription for Democratic Party leadership.”

This is how the Afterword begins:

Democratic Party leadership: You must change course, and you must do so immediately. You should do this because it is the right thing to do, but you should also do it for the health of the party. You only need to look at some of our allies across the pond and down under to understand why. Women all over the world are rejecting their left-of-center parties for refusing to represent our interests and for sacrificing women and children at the altar of “gender identity.” Google “Nicola Sturgeon gender recognition” if you want to understand what happens to politicians who ignore a bunch of angry Scottish feminists. At the end of this section, I’ll suggest some policy changes that you should start making immediately, but first I would like to offer a cautionary tale.

The cautionary tale was, indeed, the story of women leaving their left-leaning parties all over the world. This is how the Afterword ends:

Democrats in power: You have done wrong by American women and girls and you know it. You have betrayed us and it is time to come clean. It is time for the abolition of sex to end. The year 2024 is right around the corner and you need to right this ship. In August 2023, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution to “protect children from unsafe sex trait modification and experimentation.” The resolution states that “sex-trait modification procedures” (including puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and “gender-affirming” surgeries) are “permanent, risky, and experimental,” with potential harms including infertility, low bone density and heart disease. The stated aim of its sponsor is to incorporate this resolution into the 2024 Republican Party platform. You have allowed the Republican Party to become the party of sanity and child-safeguarding. You have allowed the Republican Party to become the party of women’s rights. You have lost the trust of millions of rank-and-file Democrats. To regain trust among Democratic voters of both sexes, you need to hold yourselves accountable and publicly concede defeat on this issue. 2024 depends on it. Good luck.

Well, they didn’t, and here we are.

In August 2024, I published an open letter asking Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris to say out loud at the DNC that a woman is an adult human female. I said:

It’s not too late. You can still prove Democrats are reality-based, not ridiculous. Stand up at the Democratic National Convention and say that a woman is an adult human female and a lesbian is a female homosexual. Say that sex is real and that it matters. Say right out loud that sex is immutable and no man is ever a woman — even if he claims to be one, even if he adopts the traditional stereotypes of femininity, and even if he has his penis surgically removed. Apologize to women and girls for that utterly embarrassing letter you sent to “transgender” activist Dylan Mulvaney celebrating his “365 days of girlhood.”

Naturally, she did not do any of this.

But it’s still not too late for the Democrats to apologize, and Harris’s mea culpa provides an excellent blueprint for how to do it.

The Democratic Women’s Declaration, inspired by and modeled on the global Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights and the Labour and Green Women’s Declarations in the UK, lays out the framework for protecting women’s sex-based rights in law, policy, and practice.

It’s time. Let’s go.