The Democratic Party has typically used Supreme Court rulings as galvanizing moments for its base, using favorable and unfavorable decisions alike to rally supporters around the country.
But that has not happened in the aftermath of the U.S. v. Skrmetti ruling, which declared that bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors are constitutional. The ruling will likely now be a precedent for bans on transgender care more broadly.
National Democrats — who have long been the party to push LGBTQ+ rights forward — have been grappling with how to handle issues around transgender people since the 2024 elections when, by their own admission, they were caught flat-footed on the topic as President Donald Trump and Republicans made opposition to trans rights a key part of their campaigns.
The Dobbs decision, which struck down Roe v. Wade — and uses similar language to the Skrmetti opinion to leave abortion up to “the people and their elected representatives” — prompted Democrats to hold press events, hearings and rallies in support of abortion and women’s rights. Those issues were a key part of their election messaging — and the party continues to highlight Republican restrictions on abortion.
The same cannot be said for transgender rights.
Rep. Julie Johnson, a co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said that she believes the court “should have had a different decision … because I believe that health care should be at the right and the role of the parent.”
But when asked if the Skrmetti decision should push Democrats to rally more around the trans community, Johnson said there was not much they should do.
“The Supreme Court has ruled,” she said. “We’re either a party that supports the rule of law or not.”
“As it stands right now, what [the justices] are saying is states that choose to ban trans-affirming health care for minors have the right to do that, and states that choose to affirm health care opportunities for trans youth have the right to do that,” she added. “So, it’s pretty much kicked the can to say it’s a states’ rights issue.”
Some Democrats admit that they personally support health care for transgender people but they have to make a political calculation. A February Gallup survey found that 56% of Americans believe that health providers should be banned “from providing care related to gender transitions for minors.”
What “Democrats need to understand — when it comes to this issue — is that there’s a general lack of understanding by the public, and instead of telling people, ‘You’re dumb and you don’t understand,’ to accept that right now and then communicate within those parameters,” one senior House Democrat told NOTUS.
Rep. Lori Trahan, co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee — House Democratic leadership’s messaging arm — told NOTUS that Democrats won’t “walk away from the trans community or from carrying the mantle for LGBTQ rights,” but it would be in conjunction with other messaging.
“I think you’ll see a commitment from the Democratic Caucus, and then I also think you’ll see people who have to prioritize messages differently because they want to hear people speak to their top three concerns, whether it’s health care and the fact that that’s getting ripped away, whatever it might be,” Trahan said. “I think you’re going to see that sort of balance as we head into the next election.”
Another House Democrat said members have to juggle how the issue polls and how they communicate if they want to take back the House — the only way they could possibly make a difference.
“At the end of the day, Democrats cannot make progress in any of these issues if we’re not here to do it — if we don’t take back the majority,” the lawmaker said.
That Democrat added that the party should “worry about promoting those issues that are touching Americans every single day in mass, right? The economy, right?”
“If we get to a point where the issues that we’re promoting as the priorities of the party are not those issues that are touching the masses of people or that people feel impacted by directly, then I think you get in a position where we saw some evidence in this last presidential cycle of people feeling like you’re not prioritizing issues that matter the most to them,” the lawmaker continued.
Shortly after the 2024 election, conservatives elevated a poll from the Democratic pollster Blueprint that found that the top three reasons to vote against former Vice President Kamala Harris were high inflation, immigration and that Harris was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
Charlotte Clymer, a trans activist and Democratic strategist, had told NOTUS in January that “life and death issues” for trans people are “non-negotiable,” and Democrats should not ignore them.
In the aftermath of Skrmetti, Clymer struck a different chord.
“We’ve been largely abandoned by the Democratic Party,” Clymer said. “Looking at the past six months or so, it’s become pretty clear that most federal Democratic lawmakers have no clear or obvious intention in standing besides trans people in this critical moment.”
In a recent New York Times interview, conducted before the Skrmetti opinion was released, Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, said that Democrats “have to negotiate with public opinion, and we shouldn’t treat the public like they’re Republican politicians.”
“The best thing for trans people in this moment is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we have to grapple with the world as it is, that we have to grapple with where public opinion is right now, and that we need all of the allies that we can get,” McBride said, explaining that Democrats need to create “room for disagreement.”
Rep. Becca Balint, another co-chair of the Equality Caucus and one of the most outspoken supporters of transgender rights in Congress, told NOTUS she “sure as hell” hopes that the Supreme Court’s decision is a wake-up call for Democrats.
“I get it. Not everybody is comfortable talking about these issues,” the Vermont Democrat continued. “This job is not supposed to be calm. It’s not supposed to be comfortable. Do the work. … It doesn’t really serve the greater good if there’s just a handful of us who feel comfortable talking about these things.”
Democrats, at the national level, do not have concrete messaging around trans rights and have avoided the issues since the start of Trump’s second term.
Clymer said that her “most sincere and respectful warning to the Democratic Party in general right now is that if we ignore trans issues, they’re going to come back to haunt us next year before the midterms. Republicans are shameless.”
Some Democrats said that their messaging around transgender rights needs to be done alongside their overall messaging against Republicans and the Trump administration.
“I think what we can do better at, especially as progressives, is make sure that we’re not just talking about the rights of a smaller group and connecting those rights to the rights of everybody,” said Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If they’re willing to attack somebody that needs health care because they’re trans, that’s not the only thing that Republicans are up to on health care, and we should tell that story.”
House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark told NOTUS, “We are listening very closely to what the American people are telling us, and they’re telling us they’re in an affordability crisis — and we never help people afford housing or health care or child care by taking away rights from a very, very small group of people.”
“Republicans continue to push this issue as one to divide us,” she said.
Democrats currently have not been putting up much of a fight, at least publicly, when it comes to anti-trans legislation.
During a committee mark-up, House Democrats did not contest a provision in the Republicans’ reconciliation bill that bans Medicaid funds from being used on gender-affirming care for trans youth. (The ban was later expanded to impact trans people of all ages in the House leadership’s last-minute managers amendment, with Senate Republicans’ reconciliation bill also using that language).
Democrats “didn’t offer an amendment to strike it,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who led the Medicaid gender-affirming care ban provision, told NOTUS. “They offered an amendment for practically every provision, so this was telling. I think deep down they know they’ve lost the issue.”
A May AP-NORC poll found that most adults oppose “public health insurance programs like Medicare or Medicaid from covering gender-affirming medical treatment.”
A third House Democrat said that the party needs to put the issue “to bed, and if you put it to bed, then you can move on and talk about other stuff.” They added that the way to do that was “essentially by having reasonable positions on it, not being an absolutist in a way that only benefits the extremes.”
That lawmaker also pointed to the Cass report, a study out of the U.K. that concluded, “we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.” (The study has been criticized by trans activists and other legal and medical experts.)
The strategy to pivot and avoid the topic “reveals a level of trans antagonism,” said Raquel Willis, a transgender activist and co-founder of the group Gender Liberation Movement.
Willis organized a protest in front of the Supreme Court in the days after the Skrmetti decision, where she and other activists took hormone replacement therapy in an effort to “demystify what gender-affirming care looks like,” she told NOTUS.
“No one expects a politician to understand the ins and outs of every experience,” Willis said. “I think that it is a cop out to say you just don’t know how to approach this. That means you’re not doing the work. That means you are ineffective in the position of power that you’re in, because it’s just simply common sense [that] if you don’t understand something, you go out and you get the information and the data. … You figure it the hell out.”
The Equality Caucus, of which 191 Democrats are members, has “held meetings between Members of Congress, transgender people, and policy experts in order to better educate members on issues impacting the trans community and answer any questions they may have had,” a spokesperson for the caucus confirmed to NOTUS.
A source familiar with the meetings said the caucus holds “a range of events” that are normally reserved for caucus members, with some open to all House Democrats to help refine talking points on a range of issues.
Balint said attendance at these meetings varies, but most of the House Democratic Caucus does not attend.
“If the only people who are speaking for trans people are trans people, they’re really fucking outnumbered,” Balint said. So we all got to do our part.”
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Oriana González is a reporter at NOTUS.