By: Jack Butler – nationalreview.com – March 23, 2025

Any left-leaning politician who wants to moderate on trans issues will have to do so in defiance of the Left itself.

You know things are weird on the left when Gavin Newsom is seen as a right-wing sellout. For simply stating — and not acting on — his apparently long-held view that allowing men to compete against women in sports is “deeply unfair,” some leftists have turned on the California governor.

One poll found that his favorability among left-leaning Californians declined from 46 percent to 30 percent after they were made aware of his view on this subject. The Nation, which, if nothing else, is a reliable indicator of leftist sentiment, has bestowed upon him the sobriquet “Greasy Gavin Newsom.” Such reactions are not unique. Taken together, they suggest that the Left simply doesn’t want to moderate on anything related to transgenderism.

Three of the most powerful forces in human affairs provide important context: money, science, and religion.

Start with the grubbiest. There is simply a tremendous institutional and financial network in place to ensure Democrats, both aspiring and elected, yield to the utmost-left-possible iteration of transgender ideology. A huge portion of the vast Pritzker family fortune — which helped get J. B. Pritzker elected governor of Illinois and Penny Pritzker appointed Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce — has been put to this end.

Jennifer (born James) Pritzker, a father of three who pronounced himself a woman in 2013, has bankrolled a suite of organizations intended to mainstream and instantiate the latest transgender mania. And he is just one example of this extensive network. Its power may be ebbing in America at large. But it remains potent and cash-flush on the left.

Science further indicates the degree of Democratic intransigence on transgender issues. The sorts of people who put yard signs in front of their homes indicating that those inside “believe science is real” remain able to ignore the stubborn and inconvenient scientific fact, now recognized by the federal government, that there are only two sexes. They also deny another: that there are clear physical differences between men and women, differences that manifest in sports, providing an advantage to the former.

It’s not just Megan Rapinoe, the former U.S. women’s soccer player and poor role model, who recently called Donald Trump’s executive order preserving women’s sports for women “depraved.” Contributors to a symposium on the topic organized by The Nation’s sports editor baselessly assert that “trans women are not a threat to cis women or to women’s sports” and that it simply “isn’t true” that “anyone who is assigned male at birth is automatically and inherently going to be better at any sport than anyone who is assigned female at birth no matter what.”

The former assertion must overlook the many female athletes displaced by male competitors. The latter assertion must elide that athletes tend to compete against people within their age and skill range. But even if they don’t, problems can arise: Rapinoe and her teammates once lost a soccer match to a Dallas team of young teenage boys. On this subject, the so-called party of science clings to erroneous precepts with dogmatic glee.

All the while it contorts actual dogma. In Time, two Christian pastors have alleged that political efforts to push back against transgender ideology are “deeply un-Christian.” In doing so, they attempt to hold with equal weight the biblical pronunciation that God created humans male and female and metaphorical language used in the Bible that sometimes describes God with female attributes.

They invoke a classic postmodern trick by citing the existence of religious differences of opinion on the subject as proof that not just consensus but also genuine truth is impossible to divine — except, conveniently, that “virtually every religious tradition respects the sanctity of human beings in their rich diversity.” And they ignore such authorities as the Catholic Church, which as recently as last year affirmed its consistent and long-held view that “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”

All of these data indicate the extent of the Left’s stubbornness on transgender radicalism. At the root of it all, however, is a faith in progress, self-servingly defined, that for too many on the left functions as a religion. The Left’s prior victories in the culture wars affirmed its view that advancing toward its preferred social regime was inevitable, providing strong incentives to yield to the most extreme demands of the members of its coalition.

To moderate on any issue would expose fundamental weaknesses in this deterministic framework. Hence the fury at Newsom for even the slightest hint at moderation — even while he is responding to abundant signals in the country at large that voters are rejecting the Left’s posturing on this subject. Any left-leaning politician who wants to moderate on trans issues will have to do so in defiance of the Left itself.

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Source: The Left Doesn’t Want to Moderate on Transgenderism | National Review