By Marta Illyich
In a February 23 interview California Governor Newsom offered advice for the Democratic Party. Newsom, a Democrat who is simultaneously underwater in national favorability polling and a top contender for the 2026 Democratic Party Presidental nomination, said, “…there’s no doubt that the Democratic Party needs to be, dare I say, more culturally normal.” He went on to immediately sort discussions about pronouns into the abnormal category.
Newsom is a striking example of the Democratic Party’s pivot on trans rights since the 2024 election. In 2022 he signed a bill prohibiting release of information regarding a minor’s gender affirming care in response to legal actions from other states. The bill prohibited the state from arresting and extraditing providers of gender affirming care.
This ‘transgender sanctuary state’ bill was hard won by trans activists who had for decades applied unyielding pressure. From a risk-vs-reward analysis, Newsom saw it as a safe bet. It had been passed by a legislature with a Democratic supermajority and represented what was considered ‘California values.’ In other words he could hold it up as emblematic of his political identity. This was a branding moment the politically savvy Governor saw as electorally viable.
We saw this performance of allyship on display in 2023’s Fox News debate against hardline Republican Governor Ron Desantis of Florida. In it, Newsom positioned himself as a champion of blue state values. This was at a time when the perceived weakness of the Republican Party was a favored talking point by Democratic aligned pundits who saw the 2020 election as a vindication of a return to pre-Trump norms and status quo.
Democrats were blinkered to the reality that Biden won not because his platform was embraced but because he was the candidate not currently holding the reins in a time of a catastrophic global pandemic and spiraling economic hardship. The Fox debate was a calculated move by Newsom to be seen as wading into enemy territory and facing right wing interlocutors in the hope of winning over disillusioned centrist Republicans.
But then, in 2024, it was Biden holding the reins as the economy continued to spiral for poor and working people. A desperate electorate again rolled the dice on the notion that Trump would disrupt a system bleeding credibility and finally deliver to them material relief. Democrats were staggered when he was reelected and faced with this reality Newsom, with the backbone of a jellyfish, pivoted.
He signaled his about face in the first of his podcasts. The choice of his initial guests represented a scramble to achieve legitimacy with Republican voters after years of calculated positioning as the standard bearer for ‘progressive politics.’ His first guest was Charlie Kirk, the far right provocateur who held similar talking points as David Duke but without Duke’s history of Klan membership. Kirk’s entire career was built, in large part, on attacking queer rights and dignity.
Newsom’s podcast was posted on March 6, 2025 in the wake of the Dems’ catastrophic 2025 performance. For many it was the first moment of alarm in the shifting winds of Newsom’s allyship as he said he ‘fully agreed’ with Kirk’s positioning in regards to trans athletes. It is unfeasible to suggest that Newsom was uneducated on the sports issue. He had walked into the Fox debate thoroughly prepared to confront hardline Republican Ron Desantis in a discussion moderated by staunch conservative Sean Hannedy.
Newsom was aware that hormone replacement therapy is required as a condition of trans women’s participation in sports in order to keep their testosterone levels within a range that is typical for cisgender women. In fact, high testosterone cisgender women such as South African Olympic runner Caster Semenya have for years been forced to use testosterone blockers.
Newsom, with access to the best information, knew this and was fully aware that trans athletes…. the few that exist… do not disproportionately win athletic competitions. He understood that the required hormone blockers mean that an athlete’s muscle mass is consistent with what typical cisgender women can achieve and that no fairness issues exist. In 2014, as Lieutenant Governor, he cheered a bill barring discrimination against trans athletes, and celebrated the defeat of a Republican attempt to repeal it.
Well informed on the issue, Newsom took the occasion of talking with Charlie Kirk to abandon transgender people. He leapt proudly into scapegoating and fearmongering, affirming points he knew to be based on lies.
The trans sports issue serves the function of being a foot in the door for further transphobia. Democrats concede this ground because concession is believed to be a safer position than holding to principles originally adopted for utility’s sake.
Tellingly, this was not the only lie in the Kirk interview. The Governor claimed that nobody in his office had ever used the term ‘Latinx’ when he himself had repeatedly used the term in press briefings and on social media. He wanted to express fealty to so- called ‘culturally normal’ white supremacist and patriarchal views, so he lied in the most baldfaced way he could. These reversals were no matter of conviction, but a repositioning in service of his ambitions on the national stage.
Newsom is far from alone in his abrupt about face. The Democratic Party began scapegoating trans people for their loss in ‘24 immediately after the election. An example of this is Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts. On two separate occasions, in both ‘22 and ‘23, Moulton co-sponsored House Democrats’ Transgender Bill of Rights which included protections for trans athletes. In the ‘23 instance, he said:
In a time when Trump and his Republican enablers act purely out of hatred that further marginalizes and discriminates against transgender Americans, it is more important than ever to reaffirm that transgender Americans deserve the same basic rights and liberties as everyone else.
In spring of 2024, he voted against a GOP bill to bar trans athletes from competing in the appropriate gender category according to their identification. Two days after the 2024 election, the New York Times published an interview in which he had turned around in a whiplash-inducing way, saying,
Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.
So desperate is the party to move the needle back on trans issues that they sunk lower than expected and pulled out Barney Frank, the gay congressional democrat who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s more than three decades ago. Frank has been living out his final days in hospice care. Frank, the first out gay member of congress, spent his career cynically trying to bargain for gay rights through trans scapegoating by invoking locker room and restroom panic. With no respect for a dying man’s dignity, Frank was called before CNN cameras. The man spoke with a voice that had been robbed of vigor and was often difficult to comprehend in order to perform one final duty to the party: he begged Democrats to cast away support for transgender rights.
Democrats used the living memory of a man who long invoked the idea of gay inclusion. They used feigned queer allyship credentials in order to carve away any expectation that they should defend the rights transgender people, a small group that can’t deliver electoral wins on their own.
Democrats have long earned their notoriety as the graveyard of social movements. During the Great Depression they were happy to reap the support of militant labor, but in ‘47 the anti-union Taft-Hawley act passed with enthusiastic veto-proof bipartisan support. This vote included a majority of both parties’ membership in both legislative chambers. While Truman vetoed the act, this was understood to be political theater by a first term president who needed to rely on the labor vote for re-election. There was never a chance the veto would stand, and it was easily overturned due to a massive Democrat buy-in. The party outright refused to break ranks with the capitalist class whose servants they are.
Not only did this vote hobble union organizing, it excised militancy from within the union’s ranks. Section 9(H), supported by Dems, required union officers to sign loyalty oaths declaring that they were not communists. Labor organizations were given the choice to either cut out their strongest organizers or be left without the status of recognition with the NLRB and their legal right to collective bargaining. The CIO complied, and this left a landscape of union leadership that was overall more conservative, whiter, and more comfortable with Jim Crow.
As a result the locals declined in size and influence. Democrats were happy to absorb the energy of the movement when it was to their advantage, and were just as happy to defang the movement to serve capital. The same dynamic has played out over the years: absorbing movement energy, cutting said movements off at the knees, and channeling that which remained into electoral fealty. Anti-war activists were famously beaten in the streets during the ‘68 Democratic convention in Chicago, under Democrat mayor Daly. The party then attempted to sell anti-war elements on seeking wins ‘within the system’ via the candidacy of McGovern. The doomed McGovern campaign lost 49 states and the war lasted until ‘75, but the Democrats were thrilled to steal valor and position themselves as an anti-war party.
Stunningly, due to the primacy of the Zionist lobby in U.S. politics, the discredited DNC was unable to leech the energies of the anti-genocide pro-Palestine masses in ‘24. The genocide was live-streamed on the ground and impossible to credibly deny. Unable to even acknowledge the genocide lest the party lose AIPAC and its hefty donations, they did their best to ignore the genocide altogether. When that didn’t work, they did the predictable and consistent thing: turn on a successfully absorbed movement and cut out the least enfranchised (and often most militant) segment.
The Harris campaign was targeted by transphobic attack ads but the Human Rights Campaign’s exit poll revealed that only 4% of voters were motivated by anti-trans policy. Because of their fealty to the Zionist entity, any self-aware Dems could not admit that it was the genocide they were arming that cost them the election. The obvious was in plain view, best exemplified by Harris placing third in Dearborn, Michigan and losing that pivotal state. But Dems had to draw attention away from ‘Israel’ and ran with a narrative that support for trans rights was the culprit for their loss. Many blinkered Democratic officials probably even believed it. This excuse neatly allows the Dems to cut away a tiny section of their coalition that was never a particular asset anyway.
Today’s right dives headlong into conspiracy theories and howl for transgender blood in increasingly eliminationist ways. Recently Trump issued an executive order saying he would ‘find and kill’ an enemy that was pro-transgender, antifa and anarchistic. In such fascistic times there needs to be a principled, militant opposition to protect the vulnerable. The Democratic Party is not that. It refuses the call on every meaningful
front. Democrats use the language of moderation to cast the transgender community to the wolves as they flail in search of electoral viability. They do their best to hold on to the energy they had once taken from queer advocates hoping to secure electoral devotion.
In the final analysis, Democrats are servants of the same empire as their Republican “opposition”. Their only true pitch is ‘competent custodians of the empire’s status quo’ but the empire they serve is crumbling. As Dems beg their base to abandon trans rights we see a growing weakness. You don’t beg when you’re winning, indicating that a sizable portion of the multinational working class in the U.S is beginning to prioritize trans rights over loyalty to a party that pays them only lip service.
Many voters who came their way looking for progress are now demanding it and finding the Democratic Party not up to the task. They need a better, revolutionary program that aligns with their values, and more and more, they’re receptive.
The U.S. government faces a crisis of legitimacy after decades of austerity, stagnant wages, suppression of labor, and tripping from one monstrous imperialist military quagmire to the next. The Democratic Party is flailing for a winning message. The left has that message- liberation for the poor, working class, and oppressed peoples of the world. We need only to spread that message and organize around it. Abandon the Democrats, and choose liberation. Together we have the power. United we are invincible.
