President Trump used his State of the Union address to call for a nationwide ban on transgender youth socially transitioning in schools, using a tragic individual case to advocate for policies that would force schools to out transgender students to their parents. In response, Republican lawmakers gave a standing ovation while Democrats remained seated, highlighting the stark partisan divide on the issue.
The article criticizes Democratic leaders for failing to robustly oppose a wave of anti-trans legislation and for sometimes adopting rhetoric that frames support for transgender rights as conflicting with economic issues. It argues that such a false dichotomy is harmful and that policies targeting transgender youth make it impossible for them to live safely.
The main topics covered are the political attack on transgender youth, proposed anti-trans legislation, the partisan response, and the criticism of the Democratic Party's failure to adequately defend transgender rights.
“These people are crazy! I’m telling ya — they’re crazy,” President Donald Trump exclaimed, pointing to Democratic members of Congress near the start of his lengthy and lie-drenched State of the Union speech.
At that particular moment, the Democrats in question were doing the right thing: refusing to stand and applaud when Trump called for a nationwide ban on the ability for trans kids to exist in public.
“We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately,” the president said.
The “it” here did not refer only to gender-affirming health care for trans youth, which is already banned or restricted in at least 27 states. Trump appeared to be going even further: The thing he wants banned would be the ability for trans kids to socially transition safely in school.
“Surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will,” said Trump, whose administration has a standing policy of ripping children from their parents’ arms.
In response, Republican members of Congress — supporters of industrial-scale family separations — rose in a standing ovation.
Democrats sat still in their benches.
Line of Attack
With midterm elections approaching, Trump will inevitably escalate these attacks on trans kids.
Democrats should refuse to take the bait. They should stay, at least metaphorically, seated. They don’t need to prove to some imagined anti-trans majority that they are not “crazy” for refusing to support persecution of a vulnerable minority.
On Tuesday, the president’s vehicle for attacking trans kids was the story of Virginia teen Sage Blair, a student at Liberty University, whose mother Michele is suing the Appomattox County School Board.
According to reports, Michele is accusing members of the school district of failing to disclose to the family that Sage was identifying as male; she claims this contributed to the teen running away and subsequently facing sexual abuse. Both Sage and Michele attended the State of the Union as Trump’s special guests.
Sage’s tragic story is now being used as the basis for Virginia legislation aimed at forcing schools to notify parents should a student identify with a gender other than their sex as assigned at birth and requiring parental consent to allow a student to use a new name or pronoun in school.
Such a law — essentially mandating forced outing — would put thousands of trans kids at risk. Republican claims to parental rights in such cases are, of course, a laughable fig leaf when the same anti-trans politicians are pushing for laws to prosecute parents as child abusers if they support their children transitioning.
How Democrats Are Failing
Health care bans, school sports bans, bathroom bans, bans on obtaining the correct identification, and bans on socially transitioning at school – these astroturfed anti-trans policies all come together to make it impossible to safely live as a trans kid and flourish into a trans adult.
Democratic leaders to date have failed to robustly oppose these eliminationist efforts, again and again ceding dangerous rhetorical ground to the anti-trans right.
A false dichotomy has emerged in which supporting trans people is deemed at odds with a focus on key economic, so-called kitchen-table issues.
Just last week, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has a grim record of entertaining anti-trans positions, told CNN that he wants his party to be “less prone to spending disproportionate amounts of time on pronouns, identity politics. More focused on tabletop issues, things that really matter — the stacking of stress in terms of the electricity bills and childcare costs and health care and obviously housing costs.”
Newsom wants, he said, Democrats to be more “culturally normal.”
The idea that establishment Democrats have failed to support policies for the working class because they have been too focused on supporting trans people and minorities is laughable. In response to such a claim, a diligent journalist should surely ask, “When?”
Aside from a few shallow and embarrassing performances, when have Democratic leaders given significant time to advocating for oppressed minorities, in particular trans people? They haven’t — with a few pitiful, symbolic exceptions, such as when they knelt in Kente cloth in 2020 during the George Floyd uprisings.
What we have seen, though, is Democrats like Newsom dedicating airtime to urging other Democrats to throw trans people under the bus. It is a perverse performance of his own criticism — spending disproportionate amounts of time talking about trans people for all the wrong reasons.
None of this, of course, is to say that Democrats have not failed the working class. Of course they have! But it’s not because of trans kids: It is fealty to wealthy donors, Wall Street, and industry lobbies.
In addition to this vile scapegoating of their own shortcomings, Newsom raises another offensive proposition: What constitutes “culturally normal” for his ilk? The ability to remove whole groups of people from access to necessary health care and public life?
Democrats should absolutely run on campaigns that center wages, working conditions, housing, and health care — and they should insist on these being essential issues for all people, including trans people.
Good Politics
Not only is including trans rights in your platform a morally sound position, it can also be good electoral politics: Numerous 2025 election victories — from New York to Pennsylvania to Virginia — saw wins for Democrats who refused to throw people under the bus.
In the months ahead, we can expect more of the same from Trump and his party. They are going to attack trans people, particular trans kids, as a means of cynical fearmongering.
Trump’s anti-trans onslaught is a transparent effort to rally support around a conjured scapegoat as his approval ratings continue to tank. Yet the elimination of trans people, the removal of health care provisions, and attacks on people’s bodily autonomy are not incidental to the Republican project — they are central to it.
Trans people’s survival is not just a distraction and shouldn’t be treated that way. Instead, Democrats need to reject far-right frameworks of “crazy” and “normal” from the jump. They do not need to abandon trans rights to defeat Republicans. And if they pretend otherwise — endangering a vulnerable population in a naked and ill-thought attempt to save their own political hides — they’re not worthy of winning our votes in the first place.
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.
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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?
We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?
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