Translation
Out former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg weighed in on Democratic infighting around the issue of trans athletes, emphasizing the need for the conversation to be eradicated from political discourse and returned to schools and athletic associations.
On NPR’s Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep asked Buttigieg what his “approach” is to trans issues after Democratic politico and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel admitted to conservative media that he holds anti-trans views. With the admission, Emanuel became part of a growing number of Democrats who are abandoning trans rights, with many believing supporting this tiny marginalized community lost the party both Congress and the presidency.
Related
Boston Children’s Hospital says it won’t be bullied into abandoning trans youth
The hospital has faced bomb threats, hate campaigns, and threats to funding over the years but has never wavered in supporting gender-affirming care.
“The approach starts with compassion,” Buttigieg responded. “Compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially of young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them.”
Insights for the LGBTQ+ community
Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
He said it’s essential to try to understand the perspective of parents who are worried about their children playing on sports teams with “boys” and that doing so “does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party.”
In sports, he said, “most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports.”
Asked if a parent who is worried about trans athletes “has a case,” Buttigieg responded, “Sure.”
“And that’s why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians,” he explained, “least of all politicians in Washington trying to use this as a political pawn.”
“I think that chess is different from weightlifting, and weightlifting is different from volleyball, and middle school is different from the Olympics,” he added. “So that’s exactly why I think that we shouldn’t be grandstanding on this as politicians. We should be empowering communities and organizations, and schools to make the right decisions.”
https://www.youtube.com/embed/HaIP0BvF1 ... &start=728
Buttigieg’s approach seems to echo that of trans Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), who recently spoke on Ezra Klein’s podcast about a need for the trans movement to rethink its approach to changing people’s minds. She posited that progressives could be expecting too much too quickly from Americans who are just not there yet.
“We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.”
“We became absolutist — not just on trans rights but across the progressive movement — and we forgot that in a democracy we have to grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it,” she said.
Politicians, she continued, have a duty “of walking people to a place,” rather than forcing them to catapult there.
Her comments came as many Democrats and pundits have claimed trans issues contributed to the party’s 2024 election night losses. The victories on the anti-trans right have emboldened some Democrats to begin wavering on their support for trans rights, with some – like Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Seth Moulton (D-MA) – outright coming out in favor of anti-trans sports bans.
The debate among Democrats continues despite the fact that exit polls indicated that inflation and an unpopular incumbent president are what doomed Kamala Harris’ 107-day run for president.
During campaign season, 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.”
Democrats largely avoided engaging with this issue. The Democratic National Convention didn’t have a transgender speaker and only mentioned trans issues once during a speech by Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Kelley Robinson. In one of her first TV interviews, Harris briefly said that the Constitution requires the government to provide medically necessary care, including gender-affirming care, to all inmates.
But this strategy of ignoring trans people backfired, allowing the GOP to control the narrative in its claim that the Democrats are obsessed with gender and don’t care about anything besides trans rights. In reality, 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. Additionally, numerous trans and nonbinary candidates won historic races on Election Day, rebuffing the idea that voters are transphobic.
In a recent speech, Minnesota Gov. and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz scorned anyone in the party giving up on trans rights.
“I’m just going to say it, shame on any of us who throws a trans child under the bus for thinking they’re going to get elected,” he said. “That child deserves our support. Don’t worry about the pollsters calling it distractions, because we need to be the party of human dignity.”
He emphasized that Democrats can both fight for the middle class as well as for marginalized groups and that none of this has to be mutually exclusive. “So when they try and bully us and say we shouldn’t talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, that’s what we should be talking about because that’s how we grow,” he added.
“We’ve got a problem right now with image because we’ve allowed them to control the narrative, we’ve allowed them to define what things are, we’ve allowed them to tell us some states are red and some are blue. That is crap. Our policies improve lives; our policies grow the economy; our policies make us safer; and our policies live up to our true American values.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
(new Image()).src = "https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=2 ... debce1fa0c"; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "233d5589-4c80-486d-8c38-e522bcdbc118", queryJsTargeting: {"articleId": 484474, } }).render("e999bf39de8f4df2913f690e1c50b10a"); });
Source: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/07/pet ... -athletes/