OPINION:
Has anyone noticed that climate change alarmist Democrats no longer refer to those who don’t buy into their baseless warnings of impending eco-apocalypse as “science deniers”?
That isn’t only because their six decades of predictions of environmental doom consistently have failed to come to pass. It’s also because they themselves have become the actual science deniers.
That epithet can now be turned against Democrats because of their adamant denial of the biological science of chromosomes — XX (female) and XY (male) — in the battle over so-called transgender rights. Dismissing chromosome science as “sex assigned at birth” doesn’t change that.
The latest example of Democrats’ science denial appeared Feb. 18, when the Kansas House of Representatives voted 87-37 in favor of SB 244, which defines “gender” as biological sex, bans men and boys from using women’s and girls’ restrooms and locker rooms, and mandates accurate sex-based identification on licenses and birth certificates in the state.
Science — and common sense — notwithstanding, every Democrat in the Kansas House voted against SB 244, and the Feb. 13 veto by Gov. Laura Kelly, a liberal Democrat, was easily and rightly overridden. (Nearly three years earlier, in April 2023, state lawmakers overrode Ms. Kelly’s veto of a state law banning faux females from competing in girls’ and women’s athletics.)
“This poorly drafted bill will have numerous and significant consequences far beyond the intent to limit the right for trans people to use the appropriate bathroom,” the governor said in her latest laughable veto message. (To the contrary, the new state law will compel gender-confused people to use the appropriate bathroom — the one based on biology.)
According to Ms. Kelly, those other supposedly “significant consequences” of SB 244 include:
- “If your grandfather is in a nursing home in a shared room, as a granddaughter, you would not be able to visit him.
- “If your wife is in a shared hospital room, as a husband, you would not be able to visit her.
- “If your sister is living in a dorm at [Kansas State University], as a brother, you would not be able to visit her in her room.”
Nursing home and hospital rooms have one-at-a-time restrooms, and college dormitories have visitor bathrooms, so those are all risible red herrings.
“I believe the Legislature should stay out of the business of telling Kansans how to go to the bathroom,” Ms. Kelly concluded, “and instead stay focused on how to make life more affordable for Kansans.”
In the governor’s telling, Kansas lawmakers can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. The two issues are neither mutually exclusive nor a zero-sum game, so that too is patent nonsense.
“This bill protects girls and women, the ones feminists used to claim to stand for,” said state Rep. Carolyn Caiharr, a Republican.
“Used to” is the operative term there, insofar as most Democrats — including, inexplicably, Democratic women — now prioritize the “rights” of the estimated 0.003% (three one-thousandths of 1%) of the population who “identify” as transgender ahead of those of the 51% of the population who identify as (real) girls and women.
“Maybe this is a culture war bill,” state Sen. Cindy Holscher, a Democrat, complained. There’s no “maybe” about it, and Ms. Holscher and her fellow Democrats are all on the wrong side in that war, as is made clear by numerous polls, which consistently find this to be an 80% to 20% issue, and in some polls even more lopsided than that.
Aware of the fact that they are on the losing side of those polling numbers, Democrats and their allies on the LGBTQ left are now conferring on how best to parry anticipated Republican attacks on the transgender issue as the November congressional midterms approach.
That belies Ms. Kelly’s spurious assertion that it’s “a manufactured problem.”
In an article headlined “On trans rights, Dems prepare for 2026,” The Washington Post reported Feb. 19 that the pro-LGBTQ Human Rights Campaign confessed to having been caught flat-footed by Donald Trump’s 2024 anti-transgender “they/them” pronouns presidential campaign attack ads against Kamala Harris.
“We’ve got to be prepared for it, address it head-on, then be prepared to pivot,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said of the expectation that Republicans will reprise the attacks this fall.
“Address it head-on”? Democrats have their work cut out for them on that front. How do you make a persuasive case for allowing gender-confused males to invade females’ private spaces?
How do you defend allowing males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports when, according to SheWon.org’s meticulously documented tally, faux females have cheated 3,257 girls and women out of 4,627 records, medals, trophies and scholarships across 53 sports worldwide since 2001?
As for “pivot”? Translation: Change the subject ASAP.
“The Democrat Party is addicted to taking the wrong side of overwhelmingly popular issues just to satisfy their radical base, and it proves just how out of touch they are with the general electorate,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Mike Marinella told The Post. “Republicans will continue to draw that stark contrast and remind voters exactly who’s on their side and who isn’t.”
They are already doing that in hotly contested Senate races in North Carolina and Georgia, even as Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Washington Democrat, and Sen. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a federal “Transgender Bill of Rights” on Feb. 11.
So, like chromosome science, something else is undeniable: Democrats continue to push the transgender agenda at their own political peril.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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