A matter of conscience

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Voters dumping their party.

For years, the Democratic party has supported laws allowing men to use women’s bathrooms and play on women’s sports teams, pretending there are no differences between the two sexes.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: WORLD’s Juliana Chan Erikson spoke with several Democratic voters who say that’s become enough to change their vote. Here’s the story.

KARA DANSKY: I have been a registered Democrat since 1990.

JULIANA CHAN ERIKSON: Kara Dansky is your typical liberal Democrat. She’s a writer and feminist who supports abortion and same-sex marriage. But over the last few years she’s noticed a concerning trend.

DANSKY: For those of us who are on the political left, who are used to thinking of the political left as championing women and girls, gay rights, free speech, traditional liberal values, what the Democratic Party has done on all of those issues is utterly appalling.

A growing number of Democratic leaders support allowing males in female-only spaces, including restrooms, school locker rooms, and sports teams. Most Democrat-led states have passed laws allowing gender-confused minors to receive cross-sex hormones. Dansky says she’s written letters to newspapers, and even a book, pleading for her party to stop.

DANSKY: And so I published that in November 2023 as kind of a warning to say, Listen, Democrats, it is time to reverse course, drop this agenda, renounce what you've done, renounce the policies that allow men to be held in women's prisons, renounce the policies that are harming children.

But the Democratic Party has stayed its new course. And so Dansky will likely stay home on Election Day.

DANSKY: I have no plans to vote for Kamala Harris in November.

Vice President Kamala Harris has not spoken on the topic of gender identity since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. But as a presidential candidate in the last election cycle, she expressed support for taxpayer-funded body-altering surgeries for inmates in California prisons. Here she is in an October 2019 interview with the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund.

KAMALA HARRIS: I worked behind the scenes to not only make sure that transgender woman got the services she was deserving. So it wasn't only about that case, I made sure that they changed the policy in the State of California so that every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desired and need.

At this point, Harris has not said anything to suggest her position has changed.

Former President Donald Trump, on the other hand, says he would pass laws doing the exact opposite, making it more difficult for adults to receive such treatments and impossible for children. Here he is in a campaign video from last year.

DONALD TRUMP: I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United State government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.

Other Democrats I spoke with say they dismissed Trump’s concerns…until the gender issue struck close to home.

AMANDA ERICSSON: I just got fed up with listening to Trump, and I voted for Biden, and then I had my eyes, like, opened by this whole gender thing. It just, like, attacked our house.

Amanda Ericsson—no relation to me—is a California mom whose teenage daughter began identifying as gender fluid in 2019. Ericsson bought pronoun pins and called her daughter by the name she requested. But when the teenager grew more belligerent and depressed, Ericsson realized affirming her daughter’s gender identity wasn’t working. Even so, everyone around her, the school teachers, the staff at child protective services, the therapists, and other parents believed it would.

ERICSSON: As I've watched this take hold of our society, I'm seeing the consequences of not saying, No, this is not okay. Like, this is too far, and I have reverted so far back, and now it's just to the point where, like, I can't even vote Democrat.

Ericsson told me she will vote for Donald Trump this year.

In all, I spoke with 10 longtime Democrats. Each expressed deep concerns that their party would undermine protections for women and children. Here are a few of them.

JOEY BRITE: This is Kamala Harris putting boys in high school in the girls teams in 2019 here in California…

ANNA HINRICHSEN: …And I can't say anything without being called a bigot, you know, like you're not allowed to say anything, you’re not allowed to oppose these people.

SELIN DAVIS: The majority of Americans feel pretty uncomfortable with this gender stuff and children.

Some Democrats keep their concerns secret. One parent said she didn’t want to lose custody of a gender-confused stepchild. Another parent told me he feared cross-sex hormones would shorten his son’s life and harm their father-son relationship. A public teacher in San Francisco says she risks getting fired if she challenges her school’s policy on pronouns.

These voices are likely a minority in the Democratic party as most Democrats plan to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. But Dansky hopes more come to see that the party needs to rethink its priorities.

DANSKY: This whole issue is the most important issue facing American voters today.

Back in California, Amanda Ericsson said she’s changed her political affiliation after her bad experience with state gender policies. But interestingly, the change didn’t end there.

ERICSSON: With that destroying our household and everything, I ended up like going to church. I'm like, I just feel like I'm under attack by evil because there just feels like there’s such an agenda behind it.

In her search for answers, Ericsson came across YouTube videos of former atheists seeing God’s design in the universe, and she came to the realization that they were right.

ERICSSON: Yeah, I think God's real. And then I was like, but which one? So then I started studying all the different gods and religions and stuff, and I'm like, the only one that makes sense is the Bible.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Juliana Chan Erikson.

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