MSNBC host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki warned Democrats not to give in to the right-wing fearmongering over trans issues in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory.
“It’s important not to yield to manufactured panic and to align with the actual facts before making sweeping claims,” she told viewers on an episode of Inside with Jen Psaki.
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Democrats have been at each other’s throats over the role of trans issues in Trump’s victory. While exit polls have indicated that inflation and an unpopular incumbent president both doomed Kamala Harris’ 107-day run for president, some Democrats are blaming their party’s embrace of transgender people for Harris’ loss.
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Psaki said Republicans invested about $215 million into airing anti-trans TV ads that repeated claims about Democrats wanting “boys to play girls sports” and supporting taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for inmates. One ad — aired repeatedly during football games to reach male voters and suburban women — showed pictures of Harris next to a drag queen, a trans woman, and a nonbinary person; and ended with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Psaki said Harris’s loss means the Democrats absolutely need to do some soul searching but cautioned the party not to reach “the wrong sweeping conclusions” when it comes to trans people.
“Echoing and adopting the panic from the other side is not leading,” she said. “It’s not meeting people where they are. It’s simply falling prey to right-wing propaganda without checking the facts first.”
She explained the GOP’s fearmongering over Harris’s support for providing gender-affirming care to inmates is “a particularly obscure issue” that “applies to a tiny group of people” and was also a policy that existed during Trump’s first term as president.
She also said the GOP has completely manufactured the idea that there is some sort of national crisis around trans youth and sports.
The anti-trans ads “created this perception that the issues of trans kids playing sports was dominating schools across the country,” she said, “Which is completely false.”
“When I say few examples, I mean that if you count the examples of transgender girls playing youth sports in any single state, the number often rounds to zero.”
Utah, for example, passed an anti-trans sports ban in 2022, when there was one single trans kid in the state playing youth sports. She also cited South Dakota, which passed a ban the same year, despite how only one trans girl had competed in high school sports in the state since 2013. Psaki then pointed out that when these bills became pervasive in 2021, lawmakers in more than 20 states could not name a single instance in their state or region where trans athletes were causing a problem.
Psaki brought up comments made by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who recently blasted Democrats for being too supportive of trans rights. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton said. “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.”
Moulton later doubled down, telling CNN, that he “may not have used exactly the right words” but was “speaking authentically as a parent about one of many issues where Democrats are just out of touch with the majority of Americans.”
“We try to cancel people rather than actually having debates about issues that Americans care about,” he said.
Psaki responded to this mindset by acknowledging that “reflection is good” but that this issue is simply “not worthy of debate” because trans youth are not actually causing any problems around the country. She also added that when we do see examples of trans kids on sports teams, “there isn’t evidence those kids are a threat to safety or fairness.”
“Yet the noise on this issue has been constant,” she continued, “and according to Donald Trump that is on purpose.”
She played a 2023 clip in which Trump essentially told a crowd that the GOP plays up trans issues because they seem to rile people up.
“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that,” Trump said, clapping weakly. “I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was!” he said, calling out the Republican base for making up an issue to be mad about.
Psaki explained, “Donald Trump and the Republicans have managed to amplify their bad faith attacks to the point where people do have concerns, as misguided 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.”
Trans advocates have also been telling Democrats not to blame trans people for the election’s results.
“Please do not blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, the Harris campaign’s LGBTQ-engagement director, wrote on social media. “Trans folks have been and are going to be a primary target of Project 2025 and need us to have their backs now more than ever.”
Out Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) said, “No, we’re not going to abandon our support of all Americans, including our trans friends and neighbors and family members. Absolutely not.” Instead, Balint said that Democrats should work on strengthening their coalition of voters.
Brad Pritchett, the interim chief executive of LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Texas, cautioned, “This is something that Democrats need to stop and remember what their values are. We live and run campaigns by the values we hold dear.”
He also noted that NBC News exit polls showed that 86% of LGBTQ+ voters supported Harris and that Democrats shouldn’t be “alienating” some of their most loyal supporters.
MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown noted that Democrats only spent $9 million to refute the GOP’s anti-trans attacks, rebuffing the idea that Democrats lost for embracing trans issues too tightly. Brown noted that numerous trans and nonbinary candidates won historic races on Election Day, rebuffing the idea that voters are transphobic.
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