Three weeks prior to the election, the Wall Street Journal editorial board called transgender sports a “sleeper issue” for voters, highlighting the mismatch between the Democratic party line and voter opinion.  “Media conformity is one reason the transgender sports issue is catching Democrats by surprise,” the board warned. “The press portrays any dissent on the issue as out of political bounds and … dismisses as benighted bias what millions of Americans view as common sense.”  Now, a month after the editorial and a week after the election, the sleeper issue has become a wake-up call for Left and Right alike.  Ads Exposing Kamala’s Extremism Shifted Momentum to Trump  After side-stepping growing LGBTQ culture war issues in 2016 and 2020, President-elect Donald Trump joined the fray this election cycle. This time, his platform included promises to “keep men out of women’s sports” and keep gender ideology out of the classroom.” The grassroots and activist-led movement finally went mainstream.  Trump embraced the issues and went on the offense. His campaign spent more than $65 million on ads attacking Kamala Harris for her support of taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners — a position she articulated in response to an ACLU questionnaire during her short-lived audition for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2019. Each ad ended with a version of the refrain, “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”  The ad rapidly gained momentum, with a Harris super PAC reporting that one 30-second version of the spot shifted the race in Trump’s favor by 2.7 points after viewers watched the ad. While the Harris campaign was courting women with pro-abortion messaging, the Trump campaign was trying to reach suburban women by keeping women’s sports in the spotlight. (RELATED: Meta’s Oversight Board Threatens Women’s Right to Sex-Based Protections) The strategy was simple and effective: show just how out-of-step radical Democrats are with the average voter.  Post-Election Postmortems  Trump’s definitive victory on Election Day left some Democrats feeling betrayed by their party’s hardline embrace of pro-LGBTQ politics. When discussing the election results, MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski identified transgender issues as a key progressive position that may have ostracized voters.  Polling shows that nearly 70 percent of Americans believe that transgender-identifying athletes should “only be allowed to compete on sports teams that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth.”  In the aftermath of a significant electoral defeat, some Democrat politicians are hoping for a realignment with voter values. Democrat Seth Moulton, a representative from Massachusetts, made headlines last week for expressing frustration with his party’s out-of-touch stance:  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. Fellow Democrat Tom Suozzi made similar comments, remarking, “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” (RELATED: Men in Women’s Sports Is Becoming a Major Political Issue) While Republicans welcome these admissions, Democrats find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Admitting defeat on the issue of transgender athletes pits Democrats like Moulton and Suozzi against the far-left progressive base and betrays the party’s ideological project. On the other hand, standing by “trans rights” could exacerbate the party’s failure to win over moderate voters in future elections.  But some progressives are searching for a middle ground between the binary. New York Times columnist Pamela Paul articulated this desire in her recent article, “On Transgender Issues, Voters Want Common Sense.”  Democrats Aren’t All-In on Transgender Issues Despite her progressive persuasions, Paul has written several columns for the New York Times that challenge elite opinion about so-called “gender affirming care.” She writes openly about the contradictions between evolving European standards of care for transgender-identifying patients and America’s politicized insistence on pushing hormones and irreversible surgeries.  Reflecting on the results of last week’s election, Paul believes that Democrats should not “try to push Americans in a direction they clearly oppose.” Rather, “on transgender issues specifically, one way to make clear that Democrats are listening to their constituencies would be to accept a broader range of perspectives.”  Paul calls upon Democrats and other supporters of “transgender rights” to “embrace a common-sense approach from their government, their schools, their mental health care workers and their doctors.”  “As those of us who opposed Trump lick our wounds and take stock, it’s worth considering why these ads and rally cries [about transgender athletes] resonated,” she writes. “It is not because most Americans are bigots or haters or anti-L.G.B.T.Q. people. But many voters, including liberals and Democrats, disagree with positions Harris and the Democratic Party have taken on transgender issues.” She might be reading the electorate correctly, but Paul doesn’t understand the party she’s addressing. Anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly embrace the progressive stance on transgenderism is, by their definition, a bigot and a hater — just look at J.K. Rowling.  Ironically, the movement working to destroy binaries is caught in an inevitable binary. Either “trans women” are real women — and therefore deserve all the rights, protection, and access afforded to biological females — or they’re not, and vice versa. The Left’s progressive vanguard would say the former, and Paul doesn’t seem willing to articulate the latter.  Nevertheless, Paul’s skepticism of reigning liberal opinion combined with the frustrations of politicians like Moulton and Suozzi signal an emerging struggle on the left. The Israel-Gaza war revealed the cracks in the progressive coalition, and the transgender sports issue could be another flash point for intra-party conflict as Democrats set their sights on 2026 and beyond. Mary Frances (Myler) Devlin is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.  READ MORE by Mary Frances Devlin:  Florida Turns the Tide for Social Conservatism Despite Massive Spending Gaps  Tuning In to the Gender Gap Election California Redefines ‘Infertility,’ Paves Way for More Abuses The post Dissatisfied Democrats Voice Frustrations With Party Line on Transgender Issues appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.