How Radical Gender Ideology Became The Central Issue Of 2024 Election

As a White House lawyer during the first Trump go-round, I was awarded the “trans” portfolio in 2019, to the extent it existed. I remember one thing vividly: We maintained an Obama-era regulation that required women’s rape shelters to accommodate trans-identifying men. Why? Lots to say, but essentially, bulldozing the deep state, the media, the medical establishment, academia, and corporatism required a clearer mandate. The Trump administration wasn’t silent by any means, weighing in on the side of Connecticut runners, for example, who asserted a Title IX right to women’s sports.

Fast forward to 2024.

Americans were bombarded with advertisements against Kamala Harris, who advocated for taxpayer-funded transgender procedures for inmates, and Colin Allred (TX) and Sherrod Brown (OH), who voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. The WSJ labeled “progressive transgender coercion” the 2024 “sleeper issue.” But it wasn’t very sleepy. Instead, when anchors on the street asked black voters in Atlanta, Latino voters outside Madison Square Garden, or moms in focus groups, interviewees would frequently say they liked what Donald Trump said about getting men out of women’s sports.

Today, Americans care about my formerly quiet “trans” portfolio. And not by accident.

Independent Women’s Forum has made household names out of brave young women like Riley Gaines, whom the NCAA robbed of a trophy in favor of a male, and Payton McNabb who faces lifelong partial paralysis after a male spiked a ball at her head. The Daily Wire exposed the Loudoun County bathroom assault and the liberal school board’s refusal to care. Twitter, for its part, banned the popular Babylon Bee account after its joke that a trans-identifying male in the Biden administration, Rachel Levine, was “Man of the Year,” in part leading Elon Musk to ultimately buy Twitter to permit frank discussions of this increasingly salient issue.

This salience is somewhat head-scratching to the Left, given that many voters probably don’t think trans ideology will affect them personally. But the issue motivated me for a different reason.

Politicians who refuse to acknowledge male and female are untrustworthy. Because the sex binary is true, and treating sex as imaginary or fluid means a politician has shrugged off something we collectively value: the importance of truth. Progressives who hide the truth through deceptive language (“transgender woman”), false statistics (“testosterone suppression levels the playing field”), and bullying (“anyone who disagrees is anti-trans”) other themselves rather than using politics as a way to find common ground.

The 72 million voters who just put Trump back in the White House were not just economic voters; those voters would have created a “red wave” in 2022, after all. They were not just border security voters; same deal. There was one new, central conversation in 2024: gender identity. On election eve, Megyn Kelly powerfully explained why she changed her mind: to get men out of girls’ sports. People who have no respect for truth or the reality of women have no business steering our country.

Republicans are not the dog that caught the car, as President Trump has proposed a serious list of tasks including ending federal funding of schools that promote gender ideology; ending Medicare and Medicaid funding of hospitals that mutilate minors; and signing a bill defining sex as binary.

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Of course, it’s not all that simple. Presidents only have authority to act as granted by the Constitution or federal law, and “regulate gender ideology” is not so clearly laid out. Still, the power to protect women in schools falls under Title IX, and Medicare and Medicaid don’t fund hospitals that fall below certain standards. And there’s a lot of Obama and Biden mess to clean up. The Left will register its dissent in court, and wayward judges will issue misguided nationwide injunctions, despite conservative judges hesitating to issue them for four years.

But the difference will be the fight, thanks to the American people registering their opinion. Americans are no longer quiet as women’s rape shelters house men with fully intact genitalia. They are no longer quiet as trophies and scholarships are stripped from women, and girls must undress before towering males in small locker rooms. And come January 20, 2025, neither will the new administration be quiet in the face of the radical erasure of sex.

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May Mailman is the director of Independent Women’s Law Center (iwlc.org) and a former legal advisor to President Donald Trump during his first administration.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.