Ed Markey showed Democrats how to defend trans people and win elections

For nearly two years, Democrats have been conducting an autopsy on the 2024 election and somehow keep discovering the same convenient cause of death: transgender people.

We have been listening to versions of this argument since the morning after the election. Democrats need to stop talking about pronouns, bathrooms, transgender athletes, and “identity politics,” a sly term increasingly used to describe the apparently embarrassing act of standing up for minority groups. We’ve been urged to stop shaming voters, moderate our positions, change the subject, and move toward an imaginary political “center” that keeps moving further right, while never appearing too enthusiastic about defending the tiny minority Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars turning into a national punching bag.

Related: Pro-trans rival draws cheers after Rep. Seth Moulton booed at Boston No Kings rally

On Tuesday, Democratic voters in Massachusetts were presented with about as clean a real-world test of that theory as American politics is likely to provide. Senator Ed Markey, 80 years old and practically designed to be vulnerable to an argument about generational change, faced 47-year-old Congressman Seth Moulton, one of the most prominent Democrats arguing after Donald Trump’s victory that his party needed to rethink its approach to transgender athletes. Markey swept the floor with him, winning by nearly 30 points.

Stale, hand-wringing, right-of-center Democrats, take notice. People may finally be sick and tired of saccharine, pseudo-polite politicians willing to sacrifice minority groups in pursuit of an imaginary middle ground with a far right that has no intention of meeting them there.

Moulton entered this national conversation immediately after the 2024 election when he said he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” presenting the comment as something Democrats had become too afraid to say. He later insisted that he supported transgender civil rights and was simply urging Democrats to engage honestly with voters concerned about sports. That made him enormously useful to a party establishment desperate for permission to retreat while insisting that retreat was sophistication. And now he’s become a loser, literally and figuratively.

Related: Seth Moulton’s anti-trans rhetoric comes back to haunt him in Senate debate with Ed Markey

Markey chose another route. He confronted Moulton, defended transgender young people, accused politicians of throwing vulnerable children under the political bus, and refused to behave as though association with transgender Americans represented some embarrassing liability requiring distance between himself and the people being attacked. Democratic voters rewarded him for it, and Democrats should pay attention because I have seen a version of this happen before.

More than a decade ago, I was part of the small team at Girl Scouts of the USA that developed the organization’s transgender inclusion guidelines. Girl Scouts operated through more than 100 independent councils serving communities that were liberal and conservative, secular and deeply religious, urban and rural. If the political conventional wisdom of 2026 were correct, what we did should have been disastrous, but it wasn’t because we talked to people like rational adults. We worked with council leaders, families, medical experts, faith leaders, advocates, lawyers, and transgender people themselves, including in deeply conservative communities. We were human beings about it: humane, respectful, unafraid, and centered on a simple moral principle that the organization was not in the business of harming children.

People understood that. They had questions, and some were uncomfortable, but when we treated people like adults, they generally behaved like adults. We did not begin by conceding that transgender children represented a problem and asking communities how much inclusion they could tolerate. We established that every child in our care deserved dignity and safety, and then worked through difficult questions with people who did not necessarily start from the same place.

Republicans chose the opposite approach, identifying a population small enough to isolate, unfamiliar enough to caricature, and politically weak enough to attack without much immediate consequence, then transforming school bathrooms, doctors’ appointments, and children’s athletic events into evidence of an enormous social threat. It was an astonishingly successful exercise in political distortion, turning an issue affecting a small number of transgender athletes into a defining political crisis in a country of more than 340 million people. Instead of confronting the grotesque absurdity of that premise, too many Democrats accepted it, commissioned polling, held panels, wrote postmortems, and searched for language reassuring voters that while Republicans might be cruel, Democrats certainly weren’t going to get too weird about defending the people Republicans were being cruel to.

Related: Seth Moulton’s anti-trans shape-shifting ends in a humiliating blowout in Massachusetts

Democrats could start somewhere else by treating transgender Americans as Americans and transgender children as children, rather than campaign liabilities, messaging problems, ideological abstractions, or bargaining chips for a theoretical swing voter in Pennsylvania.

Markey could have hedged and affirmed his lifelong support for LGBTQ+ Americans before solemnly explaining that Moulton had nevertheless raised “important concerns,” — or found 17 consultants to construct a sentence containing the words nuance, common sense, and kitchen-table issues. Instead, he defended the people being attacked and won by nearly 30 points. One primary does not settle every political argument, and Massachusetts is not America in miniature, but Democrats would be foolish to ignore this result.

For years, we have been told that the pendulum has swung irreversibly against transgender rights, but I don’t believe that because I have personally watched Americans across enormous political, religious, and cultural differences find their way through this issue when leaders gave them something better than fear to follow. Political pendulums do not move by themselves. Republicans pushed this one extraordinarily hard, while some Democrats, terrified of being caught underneath it, decided their safest strategy was to stand alongside the people doing the pushing. Markey demonstrated another possibility, and voters rewarded him for it.

Democrats have spent too much of the past decade behaving as though courage is a luxury available only after polling reaches 60 percent, when leadership is how public consensus gets built in the first place. I have seen that work inside one of America’s largest and most culturally relevant institutions, and now Markey has given Democrats evidence that it can work at the ballot box too.

The pendulum can and will swing again; the question is whether Democrats intend to help move it or spend another election cycle explaining why they were too afraid to try. As for the weak Democrats still looking for another vulnerable population to sacrifice in the name of political pragmatism, it’s high time they hit the road and fucked off forever.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness.

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