Men and women are different

The case for trans rights must be grounded in freedom and equality, not bad science

Concerns about the electoral impact of issues related to trans rights have, I think, garnered somewhat more attention than they warrant, based on the available post-election data.

It’s true that the Trump campaign aired an ad that featured Kamala Harris vowing to pay for gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners. But a number of sources from different political operations tell me that while the ad did perform well, it underperformed a bunch of other Trump ads that were more straightforwardly on the theme of “Harris will continue Joe Biden’s economic policies.” I think it’s also underrated the extent to which the ad worked because it invoked themes of being soft on crime and profligate with public spending, a kind of perfect storm of lib excess.

But the past several years of trans-related discourse have shined a light on a larger and deeper problem, which is that Democrats have become uncomfortable with the fact that men and women are different. And while trans rights is a niche issue that directly impacts few people, the general fact that there are men and women and they are (on average) different is a salient and important feature of human society. These kinds of sex differences structure a lot of our interpersonal relationships, they’re relevant to how we raise our kids and relate to our parents, and they end up touching on a lot of policy issues. The question of who should play on which high school sports team is one of those issues, but it’s hardly the only one.

Which brings us to the point from our manifesto:

Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.

The aim of the Civil Rights Movement was to push back against the tendency to classify Americans by race and to try to create a society in which skin color and ancestry were not controlling legal facts. The goal was integration; the concept of “separate but equal” was the enemy. But feminist campaigning has never really been like that. There could have been a broad social movement, based on the civil rights model, demanding integration of all aspects of public life, but that’s not what the movement for women’s rights demanded.

It demanded the integration of some important aspects of public life, but not all.

Women’s colleges like Wellesley and Smith are important feminist institutions. Title IX enshrined a concept of separate but equal sports that racial justice campaigners would reject. There are lots of pro-choice men and lots of pro-life women, but the pro-choice movement is part of the feminist umbrella because women and men are, generally speaking, impacted by pregnancy quite differently, and this has broader implications for child care and health care policy as well. You can’t make sense of this, or much of human society, if you insist on treating sex as a kind of arbitrary meaningless convention.

Americans, as free and equal human beings entitled to respect and dignity, should not be forced to live within the shackles of traditional gender norms if they don’t want to. But it doesn’t work for a major political movement to pretend not to see what’s plainly visible.

Freedom and equality, not metaphysics