Jean Chadbourne is a registered Democrat who has donated to Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. And she lives in the Bay Area, where she is surrounded by progressives who recoil at the sound of Donald Trump’s name.
So it probably wouldn’t surprise you that she is seething at a certain political party right now. What might surprise you, though — is that that political party is her own.
As OutKick’s Jackson Thompson reported, only two Democrats showed up to Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on protecting women’s sports, and both left within an hour. The party’s leaders weren’t on hand to hear testimony from witnesses arguing the need to separate biological males and females in athletic competition, and they called no witnesses of their own.
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Some might say this was an effort to dismiss a Republican talking point designed to rile up the GOP base. But Chadbourne, who regularly attends rallies in support of girls having their own spaces, will tell you that the Democrats are alienating their own constituents.
“They’re eroding their base,” said Chadbourne, who founded Women are Real — a grassroots women’s group she says is about 65 percent Democrat. “You would think four years into this I would be prepared for them to continue to die on this hill. However, I again was just struck with how deranged this whole thing was…they didn’t even want to argue their case for why boys should be in girls sports.”
It’s no secret that Republican voters are largely against the inclusion of trans athletes in girls and women’s sports. What might be less known is that most Democrat voters are, too.
A New York Times poll from last year showed that 67 percent of people who lean Dem oppose the mixing of the two sexes in sports, while a Pew poll said 55 percent of Democrats would be “not too” or “not at all” comfortable with athletes playing on teams that don’t match their sex at birth. Yet Democrat politicians seem to disregard this substantial portion of their base. Or they do what Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger did in July, which was to roll back proposed protections for biological females sports without announcing it to the public.
It’s as though they know their actions (or lack thereof) will cause a stir among their constituents, so they navigate the issue as clandestinely as possible. But why?
Kara Dansky, another registered Democrat, has some theories. In 2023, Dansky wrote a book called “The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls.” And one point she’s made repeatedly is how there is a “multi-billion industry” motivated to make gender-transitioning as frequent as possible.
“A lot of kids are being put on a lot of drugs, which, if they go the traditional route, they will take for decades if not the rest of their lives,” said Dansky, a lawyer who also attends rallies supporting the separation of sexes in sports. “So we’re putting a large chunk of the young generation on a lifetime’s worth of hormones.”
Her point? There is a well-funded lobbying effort that could be influencing lawmakers.
This, of course, is not something that can be confirmed at the moment. What’s undeniable, though, is Trump’s opposition to trans athletes in female sports. And the President is a bit of a magician in this regard — if he’s for something, he can instantly turn the Democrats against it.
Former Democrat Jennifer Sey — the founder of XX-XY Athletics — couldn’t help but zero in on this. She is convinced that the Democrat politicians are guided not by the public, but by Trump-deranged staffers who influence their every decision.
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Part of the reason she left the party was because its leaders couldn’t define what a woman is. How many more will walk away over the same issue?
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“I think the (Democrat) politicians are old and out of touch, they’re not even reading the words given to them by the activist staffers,” said Sey, whose XX-XY shirts have become synonymous with the separation of biological males and females in sports. “They’ve completely lost touch with not just their voters, but with reality.”
Here’s something else Sey would label fiction — the idea that girls would have to undergo “inappropriate gender verification checks” if there were a national ban on biological males in female sports, as Democrat senator Dick Durbin asserted Wednesday. Sey’s counter is that there is already a ban in 27 states, and these verification checks aren’t happening.
This is unlikely to stop politicians from employing scare tactics, though. And despite the majority of Democrat voters’ feelings on the trans-athlete subject, Dansky is skeptical that it will have much of an impact on the midterms.
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She thinks the Democrats’ strategy is to simply ignore this issue and hope Trump’s unpopularity will be enough for them to flip the house and senate. Maybe that will work. But this issue isn’t going away.
Among Wednesday’s witnesses was former Australian rules football player Carly Smolak, who testified that a registered sex offender had joined her former team. At a Capitol Hill press conference after the hearing, 17-year-old high school volleyball player Briley Lehcner spoke about a biological male having entered her team’s locker room. And last year, Oregon, Washington and California all had state-champion track-and-field athletes that were born male. Whether these are common incidents is up for debate, but they aren’t isolated ones.
Democrat politicians don’t seem concerned, though.
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“I think of myself as being on the political left, but this issue is absolutely regressive,” Dansky said. “It really bothers me that people who push this get to be called progressives. It’s not progressive.”
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Perhaps there will come a day when the majority of Democrats support having biological males in women’s sports. But it won’t be because politicians persuaded people such as Dansky or Chadbourne. It will be because Dems who see this issue as they do…simply left the party.
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