"Will the Democrats finally start listening to the TERFs?"

November 27, 2024

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The article below originally appeared in the opinion pages of The Hill on November 23. The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.

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by Kara Dansky, opinion contributor - 11/23/24 1:00 PM ET

As a lifelong Democrat, staunch leftist, and radical feminist, I was not happy to see Donald Trump elected once more. But I was not surprised.

Data showed that “the most frequent criticism among swing voters who broke for Trump” was that “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” To me, this came as no shock.

Some of us have been warning the Democrats for years.

In August 2024, I published an open letter to Vice President Harris, practically begging her to say out loud at the Democratic National Convention that a woman is an adult human female. I also wrote two books warning the Democrats of what was in store.

And I’m not the only one who has been raising the alarm. Since at least 1979, when UMass-Amherst professor emerita and lesbian radical feminist Janice Raymond argued that the concept of “transsexualism” (as it was then called) reified harmful sex stereotypes, radical feminists have been speaking out against the misogyny and homophobia inherent to the idea that an individual’s personality might not match her or his sex. We have vehemently opposed efforts to end female-only spaces and services.

For that opposition, gender identity activists slurred us as “TERFs” — “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.” Recently, however, many women have reclaimed that term. Some of us say it stands for “tired of explaining real facts” or “tired of explaining reality to fools.” All it really means is that we’re women of the left, feminists, who understand that sex is real and that it matters.

For years, we TERFs have been telling elected Democrats that the movement to elevate the subjective concept of “gender identity” over the material reality of sex in law and policy is not only wrong on its merits, but also a potentially significant vote-loser at the ballot box.

Now that electoral results have borne out all of our warnings, a few Democrats, including Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), have come out in support of female-only sports. Further, Moulton told the Boston Herald, “I’m not going to refuse to have this debate, and I’m not going to apologize for bringing up the issue.”

These are welcome words to the countless rank-and-file Democrats who have told me over the last decade that their Democratic elected officials have flat-out ignored their letters, calls and emails in support of sex-based rights.

I applaud Moulton’s stance in favor of female-only sports. It accords with the report issued this year by United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, who decried “the intrusion of males who identify as female in female-only sports categories and spaces.”

It is my hope now that Moulton and other Democrats will also engage with the myriad other harms caused when society attempts to redefine the words “woman,” “girl,” “lesbian,” and “mother,” among others.

I was happy to see Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) introduce legislation excluding men from women’s bathrooms on federal property this week. I would love to see Democrats support her. I am less than optimistic, given that the Democratic Women’s Caucus, which includes every female Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, posted on X: “Instead of focusing on lowering costs and real solutions to improve the health and safety of women and families, Republicans are cruelly attacking our new member to distract from their inability to govern. We won’t stand for it.”

“Our new member” was clearly a reference to incoming transgender Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), and the post was an obvious shot at Mace from Democratic women.

Many men are being housed in women’s prisons across the country. There are hundreds of men and boys playing in sports intended for women and girls. And even if there weren’t, how many is too many? Even worse, thousands of children received “gender-affirming care” in the form of hormones or surgeries or both between 2019 and 2023 in the U.S.

The Democrats own this.

President Biden began saying that “transgender discrimination” is the “civil rights issue of our time” in 2012. In 2015, Congressional Democrats introduced the so-called Equality Act, which would redefine “sex” to include the nebulous, sexist, homophobic concept of “gender identity” for all purposes under U.S. civil rights law.

In 2016, President Barack Obama issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. schools, instructing them to interpret the word sex to include “gender identity” for all Title IX purposes. Democratic support for “trans” has continued apace since then.

Voters last week were not dis- or misinformed about the Democratic Party’s support for “gender identity” over sex. They simply rejected it.

Maud Maron is one such voter. She was a lifelong Democrat who ran for New York City Council in 2021 and for New York’s 10th Congressional District in 2022, both times as a moderate Democrat. New York’s Democratic elite essentially forced her out of the party because she refused to say that any men are women or that women are men.

Last year, Maron changed her party affiliation to Independent. This year, she changed it again to Republican and voted for Trump. I asked her why and she said, “Among other reasons, including the Democratic Party’s assaults on free speech, I am sick to death of its insistence on lying to American voters about what sex is.”

If Democrats are serious about winning back voters who didn’t turn out for Harris-Walz, they should listen to TERFs before the 2026 midterm elections.

Kara Dansky, an attorney, public speaker, writer and consultant, is the author of “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls,” and “The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls.”