RICH LOWRY: The GOP makes Democrats pay the price for trans insanity

There used to be a time when Republican elected officials and candidates shied away from talking about trans issues. They didn’t want to appear extreme or intolerant. Why bother wading into a fraught cultural issue when there were so many other things to talk about? Deferring to “medical professionals” or “the experts” seemed the easy way out.

Now, though, Republicans have emphatically found their voice.

Across the political landscape, GOP Senate candidates are hitting their Democratic opponents on their trans-radicalism and have them on the run, while the Trump campaign is pounding Kamala Harris on the issue with perhaps the most prominent ad of this election cycle. The chickens have come home to roost, and they are apparently all cisgender.

For the longest time, Democrats have gone along with the steadily evolving trans-orthodoxy as established by the cultural left. Existing in a bubble, they assumed that doubters could be isolated or embarrassed into going along and didn’t realize just how wildly out of touch they’d become.

It’s one thing to say people should be tolerant of the choices of consenting adults; it’s another to say that minors must have access to life-altering so-called “gender-affirming” treatments. It’s one thing to say everyone should live and let live; it’s another to say that biological males must participate in female sports, no matter how manifestly unfair it is to the girls and women.

There were plenty of flashing red lights for Democrats to heed. A Washington Post poll last year found that 57 percent of people say that gender is determined at birth. Roughly two-thirds of people said biological males shouldn’t compete in girls’ and women’s sports. And 68 percent opposed giving children ages 10-14 access to puberty-blocking medication, and 58 percent opposed teens age 15-17 having access to hormonal treatments.

It’s only now, when they are getting punished on the issue, that Democrats are coming out and saying, in effect, that they’ve favored the gender binary all along. Fighting off a challenge from Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has targeted the congressman for his opposition to a bill called the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. In a sign that the attack was working, Allred responded in his own ad: “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.”

This led to denunciations of Allred from the left. According to the LGBT publication The Advocate, he “embraced far-right language around gender identity in a new ad” — the offending words presumably being “boys” and “girls.”

Similar ads have run wherever there is a competitive Senate race, many of them from the Mitch McConnell campaign outfit, the Senate Leadership Fund. In Ohio, the embattled incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown has also responded with an ad calling the idea that he supports males competing against females in sports “a complete lie.” The spot points out that Ohio has already prohibited such intrusions.

But in an interview with the aforementioned Advocate last year, Brown harshly denounced such laws. “I think all this shows is that there’s still so much hate in this country,” he said, “and by extension hate in politics. Politicians who introduce and support these prohibitive bills should be ashamed of themselves, and it’s my hope that their constituents see through these ugly efforts.” Brown wants us to believe that he’s had a sudden — and surely instantly revocable, if he survives — conversion.

For his part, Donald Trump is airing an ad during football games highlighting how Harris said in 2019 that she supported government-funded transition surgery for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. As the ad notes, it’s hard to believe that anyone seriously seeking office would advocate such a thing.

Now, in the final weeks of an extremely tight election, Harris and her Democratic colleagues are being held to account for their ideological excesses. They can cry foul, but they brought it on themselves.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.