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🧵 US Democrats are being tempted by right-leaning consultants to waffle on trans rights. The data and the recent drop in support for the UK Labour Party tell us that standing up for equality works much better.

Join me for a deep dive into the data about why left-wing parties gain little by becoming anti-trans while risking quite a bit.

Read along for the summary or click through for the entire 4,000 word analysis:

https://plus.flux.community/p/standing-up-for-trans-people-isnt

#lgbtq #TransRights

Let me pause briefly to say that if you would like the Patreon link to this analysis, you can use this URL:

https://www.patreon.com/discoverflux/posts/standing-up-for-173809046

Some people only use Substack whereas some people don't want to use it. I am trying to make a living so try to make things accessible to everyone.

In 2024, 89% of Kamala Harris's policies were found to have majority support while only 48% of Trump's did.

On average, Trump's positions had only 51% support while Harris's had 67%.

Policies are important to some voters, but very clearly they are not to many others. Candidates changing to policies that they think are more popular will not necessarily earn them more public support.

https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/50802-harris-vs-trump-on-the-issues-whose-policies-do-voters-prefer

The other data problem w/ abandoning trans people is that the issue itself is not important to most people.

And no wonder: People who identify as trans make up less than 1% of the population.

Before they were banned by the NCAA, there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of more than 510,000.

Gender equality won't impact almost anyone. Cisgender people subconsciously or consciously know this.

https://plus.flux.community/p/standing-up-for-trans-people-isnt

Despite knowing all of this, however, some Democrats have gotten spooked on trans issues because they have mistaken correlation for causation.

After Glenn Youngkin won the VA governor race in 2021, the fact that he made anti-trans bigotry a key message was wrongly assumed to be causation.

The much more likely reason Youngkin won was that he was from the opposing party to the then-president, and those candidates always do much better since people often vote against rather than for parties.

But once Youngkin won, the narrative in the political class became fixed: He did it by bashing trans people.

Believing this to be true, Republicans began making anti-trans bigotry the primary message of their campaigns.

Trump cranked up the transphobia in 2024 and once again, people credited it for his victory. In reality, most incumbents across the world were thrown out due to post-pandemic inflation:

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/11/14/incumbents-are-losing-around-the-world-not-just-the-u-s

Some political consulting organizations have claimed that they have research showing that Trump's ad campaign was effective. But they won't share their methods.

The only publicly available study with a sound methodology of the Trump ads agreed with the political science consensus: it had essentially no effect.

We've seen in subsequent elections that bashing trans people cannot protect a candidate from losing as well...

Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican running in 2025 to succeed Youngkin spent the majority of her campaign ad budget on anti-trans ads. She lost by 15 points.

In all the major races that year, anti-trans ads failed to move candidates past the finish line. They cannot save a candidate from losing.

Left-wing parties have little to gain by abandoning trans people, but they do have a lot to lose if they do.

A YouGov survey conducted earlier this year in the UK found that the Labour Party lost many of its voters because it was seen as anti-trans and too right-wing.

#ukpol

Of course, the UK and US are different, but the findings are statistically significant and certainly merit duplication within the US.

Think about it: The number of people who are trans or have family members or close friends who are trans has been estimated to be between 11 and 21 percent according to PRRI and KFF.

Of course, one need not know any trans people to be a very strong ally, so the percentage of Americans who have very strong pro-trans views could be quite considerable.

All of that said, while there is no proof that supporting gender equality is harmful to Democrats by itself, it is possible that the issue is pumped up by right-wing media and candidates to make people think Democrats prioritize the issue like crazy.

And indeed, a November 2024 study by More in Common found that while only 9 percent of Democratic respondents listed LGBT or transgender policies as a top-three issue for them, the larger public sample believed that trans rights were Democrats' second-highest priority.

While the cost of living was far and away the top issue for Democratic voters at 40 percent, only 19 percent of the public said that it was.

In other words: Somehow, the public views of Democratic party and of trans rights have been grossly distorted.

Gender equality will affect almost no one, so of course it's reasonable to enact.

And while Democrats have largely supported trans equality, they absolutely have never made it a top priority.

So what is it that's causing the public to have horribly wrong views of trans rights as a policy priority for Democrats? It's right-wing media, not some annoying ads repeating far too many times on TV.

While TV ads at the presidential level have no real effect, being surrounded by far-right media does.

A study published in Nature found that people using Xitter's "For You" feed were more likely to develop policy views more similar to the Republican Party: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2

Shockingly, when experiment participants were switched back to the old chronological feed, their increased right-wing views did not disappear(!).

-----

What all of this suggests that Democrats' problem on trans issues has not been due to standing up for trans rights, it's a problem of Democrats not being able to communicate well or have anyone hear it.

And indeed, there is evidence for this.

Another YouGov survey found that Democratic-leaning voters who vastly overestimated the number of trans people in America were much more likely to hold restrictive views regarding trans rights, whereas those who had more accurate views supported trans rights.

What a complete look at the data on trans rights as a policy topic suggests is that Democrats who explain the facts and the moral arguments for supporting them are on very firm ground.

Abdul El-Sayed is a candidate who understands how to do it: https://pridesource.com/article/abdul-el-sayed-2026-primary-election-interview

In fairness, while I have engaged w/ the full dataset and the popularists have not, my interpretation of it & the correlations I develop do not establish causation.

The upcoming elections will also not be definitive for either side of this debate. We need more research.

Nonetheless, I think that it's critical for trans rights advocates to have access to a complete interpretation of the data which can enable them to push back vigorously against small-bore analysis urging caving to bigotry.

That's it for the thread! If you liked it, please consider following me and @discoverflux.

You can subscribe via email on Patreon here:

There's much, much more to the article actually so please read and share that as well.

Trans rights are human rights! ❤️

/end

https://www.patreon.com/cw/discoverflux

@mattsheffield the vast majority of those opposed to trans rights are men who are scared to death they'll accidentally flirt with one.

@carfreesince93 @mattsheffield in the UK it's often women who've drunk JKR's mold-brewed kool-aid, and men who've finally found an excuse to hate women and have some other women cheer them on.
A more socially-acceptable misogyny, at least in transphobic spaces.

@mattsheffield I just quit the UK Labour Party, support Green now, and told them that Trans rights was one of the reasons along with drilling and criminalizing protests.

@adrianco Good for you.

As I discuss in a post lower down in the thread, YouGov found that there are a lot of people who share your reasons for departing Labour.

In the US, going to smaller party is much more difficult because it often leads to Republican wins, which are never good. In the UK, you have more freedom to choose parties, which is nice.

@mattsheffield The mistake is thinking voters care about any of this. I want to be able to afford groceries and rent. If you're talking about gender stuff you're completely lost.

@jdread Republicans are the ones that talk about gender non-stop. As I note in the thread, one candidate spent the majority of her ad dollars on anti-trans fear-mongering.