With Trump as president again, is gender ideology facing its end?

By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator Monday, November 11, 2024

Until the final weeks of the election cycle, gender ideology made scattered appearances on the campaign trail. But in its waning days, it rose to the fore, significantly shaping the outcome of the race.

In the last stretch before November 5, Donald Trump, now the President-elect, said repeatedly that he would ban men in women’s sports, end gender indoctrination in schools and, depending on the audience, sign a bill prohibiting the sexual mutilation of minors in all 50 states. His running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, now the Vice President-elect, also spoke about the scourge of child gender transitions on the campaign trail, most memorably during his three-hour-long interview with Joe Rogan. That they discussed it during the first portion of the podcast indicated that the subject was on many people’s minds. To date, that interview has garnered over 16 million views on YouTube.

What was deemed one of the most effective political messages of the cycle was Trump's ad showing Vice President Harris’ support for taxpayer-funded trans surgery for prisoners and detained migrants (see this 2019 ACLU questionnaire she filled out as a U.S. Senator). The ad contained the snarky line “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” and was strategically aired during football games. Cognizant of how radioactive it was for Democrats politically, Harris, for her part, mostly tried to ignore the issue or dismiss it as “remote,” most famously during her Oct 16 interview with Bret Baier on Fox News.

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According to postmortem figures from Blueprint, a Democratic opinion research initiative, the top reason for not choosing Harris among swing voters was that she “is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” Those swing voters chose Trump by a whopping 28 points, Blueprint’s analysis found.

With very few exceptions, for years the elite media chattering class has misleadingly framed what’s been happening on this front as a moral panic ginned up by the culture-warring American religious right while systematically ignoring and suppressing thoughtful left-wing critics of gender ideology, among them classical liberals, radical feminists, and dissident LGB-identified men and women.

While it’s true that in a nation of over 330 million people, the horrific medical scandal that is the hormonal and surgical trans-ing of minors and young people affects a disproportionately small percentage of people, when the larger ramifications are considered, gender ideology represents something existential: the death of material reality. Moreover, this ideology has overtaken everything from sports to vital statistics gathering, and from education to prisons. In other words, voters did not believe these issues were, as Harris put it, “remote.”

Another interesting data point that emerged is the exit polling which revealed the only age bracket where a majority voted for Trump was Gen X, those ages 45-64.

Why is this? Abigail Shrier, author of the 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, offered the best explanation I’ve seen anywhere, observing on X: “Simple. It’s because GenX are parents. Gender ideology, COVID lockdowns, campus riots, ideologically-compromised classrooms — they all hit our kids the hardest.”

Gender ideology is indeed on the minds of countless moms and dads, many of whom are left-leaning and they are alarmed about how their children are being indoctrinated into patently false absurdities about their bodies. I know this because I hear from them almost every week. Gender ideology has thrown many “normie” people, most of whom are socially moderate and not particularly religious, off their center of gravity. 

Take for example comedienne and podcaster Bridget Phetasy, who, in addition to being hilarious, routinely pens some of the most honest, thought-provoking essays about cultural issues anywhere. Phetasy, mind you, used to write for Playboy and is a far cry from a right-wing religious type. She remarked in a recent episode of her podcast that one of the main reasons she voted for Trump, despite having voted for Clinton in 2016, was in part due to the interviews she did with detransitioners that continue to haunt her. There’s something about seeing young people who are too young to vote or obtain a driver's license walking around having had their healthy body parts removed and their fertility compromised that causes people to tug on some threads, do some soul-searching, and revisit their political choices. 

The left-leaning parents of gender-confused children across the country who’ve reached out to The Christian Post have found themselves incredibly alone, scared out of their minds, pariahs in their communities, and marginalized and undermined by the institutions they thought might help them. Some of them are talking at length to socially conservative Christians for the first time in their lives. I’ll never forget the lefty mom from Connecticut whose daughter had been medicalized with cross-sex hormones against her wishes. When I asked her about the cross-partisan dynamics among the struggling parents in an online support group she's a part of, she told me: “Nobody cares about politics anymore, Brandon. We just want to save our kids.”

It’s too early to tell what might happen on this front now given how deeply embedded gender ideology has become in the federal government and major medical institutions in the past decade, but a few signs indicate that some movement may be afoot.

Last week, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Michigan) sent a letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health expressing alarm over Los Angeles pediatrician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy's words to the New York Times that she withheld the findings from her federally-funded study on puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric minors because the results were, in her estimation, politically inconvenient. Olson-Kennedy is one of the most ardent trans activist doctors in the country who, according to a progress report that was unearthed by a FOIA request, altered the protocol in said study, lowering the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria age from 13 to 8. I will always be gobsmacked by that horror. It’s beyond time for accountability for these jaw-droppingly horrendous experiments on children.

The incoming administration will likely be taking action in the early days of entering office by revoking Biden-era executive orders, scrubbing "gender identity" from Title IX regulations, and addressing other areas where gender ideology has been enshrined in policy. It will no doubt be a challenge to extricate its tentacles from the behemoth of the administrative state.

Personally, I would have preferred for so-called “gender-affirming care” and the insanity of gender ideology to have been brought to an end long before now. Time will tell, of course, but perhaps an election result of this magnitude had to happen so that it might finally face the reckoning it deserves.