"Echoing and adopting the panic from the other side is not leading. It’s not meeting people where they are. It’s simply falling prey to right-wing propaganda without checking the facts first," she said.
JEN PSAKI: There's obviously a lot of soul-searching right now going on within the Democratic Party, and that's a good thing. However, what I worry about is that during this process, some Democrats might reach the wrong sweeping conclusions. There are many issues that fall into that bucket, but one in particular that stands out is transgender rights.
Republicans spent hundreds of millions on anti-trans ads this election cycle, including one that showed Vice President Harris talking about government funding for gender re-affirming care for prisoners and detainees. If that sounds like a particularly obscure issue, it's because it applies to a tiny group of people, and it’s also a policy that was in place during the first Trump presidency.
Another repeated line in the ads and throughout right-wing media is the idea that America is faced with a crisis of boys playing in girls' sports. These ads created the perception that the issue of boys playing in girls' sports was dominating the country, which is completely false.
Some people got pulled into the argument. Immediately after the election, Congressman Seth Moulton told the New York Times that, "Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face." He remarked, "I have two little girls, and 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." And then last week, Congressman Moulton appeared on this network to discuss those comments.
He said, "I was just speaking authentically as a dad about one of the many issues where I think we’re just out of touch with the majority of voters, and I stand by my position. Maybe I didn’t get all the words exactly right, but the point is that the backlash I've received proves my point: we can’t even have these discussions as a party."
Look, reflection is good, but if this were actually an issue at thousands of schools across the country, it would be worthy of a debate. However, there are incredibly few examples of transgender girls playing in youth sports, and when we do see these examples, there is no evidence that these kids are a threat to safety or fairness. When I say few examples, I mean that if you count the instances of transgender girls playing youth sports in any single state, the number often rounds to zero.
Take Utah: when a transgender athlete ban was passed in 2022, there was a grand total of one -- one transgender girl playing in youth sports. When South Dakota passed a ban, only one transgender girl had competed in high school sports since 2013. In fact, when these bans were making their way through Republican state houses in 2021, legislators in more than 20 states could not cite a single instance in their own state or region where a transgender athlete competing was a problem.
And yet the noise on this issue has been constant, and according to Donald Trump, that is on purpose.
"It's amazing how strongly people feel about that," Trump said. "You see, I'm talking about cutting taxes, and people go like that. I talk about transgender, and everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you wouldn’t know what the hell it was."
See, Donald Trump and the Republicans have managed to amplify their bad-faith attacks to the point where people do have concerns, as misguided and misinformed though those concerns may be.
so this is a good time for Democrats to self-reflect about what went wrong and what to do better moving forward. Of course, it absolutely is, but during that process, it’s important not to yield to manufactured panic and to align with the actual facts before making sweeping claims. Echoing and adopting the panic from the other side is not leading. It’s not meeting people where they are. It’s simply falling prey to right-wing propaganda without checking the facts first.
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