Democrat Presidential Wannabees Trip Over Trans Issues

Trying to appear moderate in a party that's parted ways with common sense

Updated on August 1, 2025

The 2028 presidential race may be three years away, but it’s not too earlier for Democratic party hopefuls to start testing the waters. A few potential candidates have recently tried to navigate the challenge of trying to appeal to centrists on transgender issues involving minors while not provoking too negative a response from the party’s increasingly gender-extreme activist “base.”

I’ll leave aside those Democrats weighing a presidential run who are clearly on the left end of their party, and who have shown little or no nuance regarding their embrace of extreme gender ideology around medical procedures for confused children and female-identifying boys competing in girls’ sports.

Instead, here’s a look at the views of Democrats who are clearly vying to run as centrist alternatives in the belief that most Democratic voters have more sense than the activists dominating social media: Rahm Emanuel, formerly a Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. [Update: after the original posting, I’ve added in recent comments by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shaprio and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.]

I’ll also discuss the somersaults recently performed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is by no means a centrist but made a brief feint at playing one.

Rahm Emmanual Commits Gender Heresy—Up to a Point

Emanuel, widely believed to be a possible presidential contender, broke with his party’s transgender orthodoxy on a few points during a July 21 interview with Megyn Kelly.

When asked if boys should be able to compete in girls’ sports, he answered “no,” prefacing it with “as a father of both a son and two girls, they are fundamentally physically different.”

When asked by Kelly whether a man can become a woman, he repeated the question, responding:

“Can a man become a women? Not — no.”

But while saying minors shouldn’t be able to decide on their own to receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, he held that parents can make that choice, saying:

“I think parents have to make that decision themselves. … A child is too young at 18 to make that decision has to be made with a family … I think and before somebody makes a life decision they have to think twice about that. … Two parents have to be involved in that.”

To which Osborne Ink responds:

“Rahm Emanuel is still fighting a rearguard battle to let parents trans their children as if this has always been a private family decision rather than a form of extortion by self-interested clinicians. Parents are regularly told their children will unalive themselves without dangerous and harmful ‘treatments’, making a joke out of informed consent and medical ethics.”

Or, as Sex Reality Bites recently posted:

“I don’t want to be a part of a belief system where everyone is okay with everyone cutting their genitals off as a form of mental health treatment, including those of their own children.”

Emanuel clearly didn't want to grapple with the real-world implications of his position on child transitioning, while providing a sound bite that would sound reasonable and moderate to less-informed listeners. But as Kelly remarked on the podcast after the interview (at 1:02:52): “They lose sexual function as long as their parents agree, which is not what the side of reason believes at all.”

Still, in Democrat World, Emanuel’s views are heretical enough for provoke outrage among the base. When Kelly asked him, “Why don't more people in your party just say [men can’t become women]?,” he quipped: “Because I'm now going to go into a witness protection plan.”

Given the way the progressive left responds to dissenters from gender ideology, his need to do so may not be so far-fetched.

Andy Beshear’s ‘Kindness’

Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, a two-term moderate Democratic governor of an otherwise deeply conservative Republican state, is also considered a likely presidential hopeful.

But how has this “centrist” dealt with gender issues? In April 2022, he vetoed a bill passed by his state's Republican-led legislature that sought to ban biological males who identify as female from competing in school sports designated for girls, from sixth grade through college. Said Beshear:

"Transgender children deserve public officials' efforts to demonstrate that they are valued members of our communities through compassion, kindness and empathy, even if not understanding."

The governor, however, made no mention of fairness and kindness to female athletes deprived of winning competitive titles due the physical advantages enjoyed by biological males — including those who undergo hormone therapy after puberty to minimize, but not eliminate, gender-related advantages — nor to the physical injuries, including concussions, that female student athletes can suffer when competing against biological males.

Whether Beshear will take bolder stands against his party’s gender ideologues or not will be telling as to whether he’s genuinely a moderate alternative, or just more of the same.

Josh Shapiro's Strained 'Logic'

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another supposed “moderate” by Democratic party standards, recently labeled as “extremist” supporters of a state bill that would ban males from women’s sporting competitions in public schools and universities, reported PBS affiliate WITF.

“What we do not need in Pennsylvania are politicians — extremist politicians like Donald Trump, [State Senator] Doug Mastriano, and these others — trying to legislate a student’s participation and legislate the restriction on freedom,” Shapiro said on July 22, “the way they’ve tried to do on many other things, like on abortion rights or marriage equality.”

Apparently, not allowing males who identify as female to compete against female students is just like rolling back marriage equality for gays, if you follow his logic. That's right out of the LGBTQ+ activists' playbook, but you might have hoped Shapiro would have been willing to think this issue through on his own.

Gavin Newsom’s Two-Step

Gavin Newsom, as Governor of California, is considered by many to be a current front-runner in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes. He’s no moderate, to be sure, but at least briefly he seemed to consider running closer to the center than his record would suggest.

And what is that record? Tellingly, he signed legislation in September 2022 that designated California as a sanctuary state for transgender minors seeking what progressives call “gender-affirming healthcare.”

California Senate Bill 107 prohibits restricting access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and presumably surgeries including double mastectomies (for girls) and genital amputations and not-quite-real “reconstructions” (for boys and girls) for minors within the state, and for those who travel to California from other states for these treatments and procedures.

On the sports front, Newsome has been all talk, and all over the place, in an attempt to seem more centrist to moderates while not doing anything that might offend gender radicals.

In a March 2025 podcast with conversative influencer Charlie Kirk, Newsome agreed it's wrong for transgender athletes to compete in girls' sports.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair,” Newsom told Kirk. “I’m not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.”

And yet, Newsom’s administration and the California Department of Education have opposed attempts to roll back existing state anti-discrimination policies related to trans-identified male athletes.

In April 2025, for instance, California’s legislature, dominated by Democrats, rejected two Republican-sponsored bills that aimed to ban or restrict the participation of males who identify as female in girls’ and women’s sports. Newsom refused to support those measures.

In May 2025, however, Newsom come out in favor of a convoluted set of rules put forth by the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs high school sports in the state. Under this purported solution, as a Politico reporter put it using progressive-speak:

“…athletes who were identified at birth as female and fell one spot short of making the cut for the upcoming statewide championship at qualifying meets around the state will now be allowed to compete.”

The rule change was proposed shortly after a trans-identified male high school athlete from Riverside County won regional competitions in track and field and was headed for the girls’ state championships, having taken a place that would otherwise have gone to a female student.

While Newsom might be content with this limited effort to not-quite-so-severely penalize female athletes, the Trump administration seems to be having none of it.

In June, the U.S. Department of Education said California continued to violate Title IX by allowing male athletes to compete in girls’ sports, and U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon warned the agency may pull federal funding if the state does not comply with its interpretation of Title IX.

Pete Buttigieg's Soft Shoe

Although often described as more centrist than other leading Democrats, Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is decidedly not a moderate but a proud progressive who, as Biden's Transportation Secretary, spent excessively on DEI grants while the air traffic control system was crumbling (and has faced scrutiny over how the department's focus on DEI potentially impacted the hiring of new air traffic controllers). 

Nevertheless, he has gingerly suggested that perhaps, although it’s a complicated issue, parents and school boards maybe should be able to decide not to allow boys to play on girls’ sport teams at the local high school.

“Your approach starts with compassion — compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them,” Buttigieg told NPR’s “Morning Edition” on July 28. “And I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party, for example, around sports, where I think 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.”

The possible presidential contender still managed to make this about bad Republicans in Congress and the evil Trump administration, however, telling NPR’s Steve Inskeep: “And that’s why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians. Least of all, politicians in Washington trying to use this as a political pawn.”

Because clearly, defending the civil rights of female athletes should be left up to local school boards, just like desegregation...oh, never mind.

And yet, the gender-identity left has now accused Buttigieg of "throwing trans people under the bus."

The Base vs. the Voters

Whether Newsom’s attempts to appear moderate while not actually changing anything will help or hurt him with Democrat primary voters remains to be determined, as do the prospects for Emanuel, Buttigieg and other Democrats trying to differentiate themselves from a party whose extreme gender positions have energized hard-core ideologues but alienated average voters.

It’s all a sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party, now beholden to an increasingly extremist base organized around the activist groups of the left, “informed” by social and legacy media, and funded by very “progressive” billionaires.

Overall, the Democrats have become a party of the highly credentialed professional-managerial classes that use gender woo and other elite cultural ideologies to signal their virtue and in-group status, and (at the other end of the barbell) of those dependent on government jobs or assistance.

That leaves out, for the most part, the middle/working classes — those who don’t earn exorbitant salaries, don’t rely on government subsidies, and haven’t abandoned common sense.

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