A ridiculous but revealing argument

This June, during the 62nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, a coalition of transgender advocacy organizations called Trans Europe and Central Asia (TGEU) brought fourteen participants from around the world to make a specific and revealing argument: That opposition to gender ideology is not simply discrimination against a vulnerable minority. It is evidence of democratic backsliding.

The official agenda for this year’s Trans Advocacy Week lists among its central themes: “Analyzing how the instrumentalization of trans and gender diverse people and attacks on gender equality function as a gateway to wider assaults on democratic governance and multilateral human rights systems.”

In short, if you don’t believe boys can become girls, you are endangering all human rights.

The hysterical nature of the argument suggests panic, and there’s a good reason. The global tide has shifted. The United Kingdom’s landmark 2024 Cass Review—a four-year, NHS-commissioned investigation—found the evidence base for medical interventions in gender-dysphoric youth to be deeply inadequate and recommended halting surgical interventions on children, which the National Health Service in England did. Similarly, Sweden and Finland have effectively ended the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors outside of clinical studies. This is not the American Bible belt. They are the some of the very countries that pioneered gender medicine in the first place but are concluding the scientific and medical evidence doesn’t support what they were doing to children.

Meanwhile, opposition to men competing in women’s sports and occupying women’s spaces has proven stubbornly bipartisan. A YouGov survey found that 74% of Britons opposed men identifying as women competing in women’s sporting events. President Trump’s successful closing argument against Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. presidential election was her statements indicating support for taxpayer funded sex-change operations for prisoners. Since then, even left-wing standard bearers like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have distanced themselves from positions that were, only five years ago, mandatory progressive orthodoxy.

But true believers do not care if forcing boys into girls’ sports is a political liability, because for them it simply must be done. Upon learning that the public does not agree with them about the beauty of a genderless world, they appeal to our moral sensibilities by suggesting a retreat on gender ideology is a retreat from human rights more broadly. TGEU’s own Trans Rights Index, published this month, states explicitly: “Attacks on trans people are never only about trans people. They signal a broader erosion of democratic safeguards: When governments decide whose dignity and rights are negotiable, they weaken the democratic system.”

They want you to believe that if boys can’t compete with girls or use the girls’ restroom, then democracy simply collapses. The LGBTQ revolutionaries deploy the same rhetorical maneuvers over and over again. The left has long used “threat to democracy” as a synonym for “threat to our power.” Voter ID laws are not a threat to democracy, but leftists say they are because voter ID laws are a threat to shenanigans. Packing the Supreme Court is not necessary for the preservation of “democracy,” but leftists say it is because it’s necessary for them to consolidate their political power. For the same reason, gerrymandering is a threat to “democracy” in red states but not in blue states.

So, when transgender activists go to the UN and claim that threats to transgender rights are a threat to democracy itself, it’s force of habit. In their world, democracy doesn’t mean majority rule; democracy means they win. And if they aren’t winning, then democracy is failing. Once we understand the cynical linguistic games they’re playing, the games become less effective.

The majority isn’t always right, but the fact that the gender revolution is losing momentum around the world isn’t happening because democracy is failing—it’s happening because democracy is prevailing.