Opinion: Abandoning Trans People Would Be Costly For the Democratic Party: Here's the Simple Math

Our votes cannot be taken for granted.

Democrats have been trying to blame everyone but themselves for their devastating loss to Donald Trump last week. But perhaps the most atrocious argument being made by some prominent Democrats is that Kamala Harris lost because of the Democrats’ support for LGBT people, especially trans people.

Let’s forget the fact that openly calling trans girls “boys” in the current political environment approaches the level of cynical bigotry of the MAGA camp—calls to the Trevor Project suicide hotline have already skyrocketed over 125% in the last few days, and you are not helping if you go on national television to misgender the children calling these hotlines. Instead, I will just focus this article on how Democrats cannot afford to lose LGBT people if they want to ever win national elections going forwards.

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LGBT people are one of the very few demographics that Kamala Harris gained strength in over Biden’s performance in 2020, with exit polls showing 86% of LGBT people voted for her this year, an improvement of 22 points. This means that not only are LGBT people now the most solidly blue demographic in the country (yes, even more democratic than Black people), Democrats cannot hope to ever win an election without our support.

The math proving this is actually really simple—at least 8% of the population is LGBT, which means that with 86% voting for Kamala Harris, and 13% voting for Donald Trump, LGBT people overall represent a ~6% swing towards the Democratic party on average across the country. When you shift the vote totals of each state in the 2024 election towards the GOP by 6 points, the map looks like a 359-179 win for Trump—the biggest landslide of any candidate since Obama’s win in 2008 (the current map is on track to look more like 312-226). This map is likely a conservative estimate, considering that LGBT people are more enthusiastic to vote than the average American due to the large impact politics has on our daily lives.

Democrats also likely would have lost even more senate seats in Wisconsin and Michigan and possibly elsewhere, and any remaining chances of either flipping the house or keeping the margins close would be completely lost. Trump and the GOP would have a nearly unstoppable majority across all 3 branches of government, only a few seats away from even having enough senate seats to surpass the filibuster. In other words, the Democratic party would be completely unable to win in any election if it lost the support of the LGBT community. Any small gains among swing voters who are duped by hateful attacks on trans people would be completely canceled out by the massive size of the LGBT voting bloc.

And I know the immediate response from many so-called “moderates” will be that not all LGBT people are trans, so why would abandoning “just trans people” hurt their ability to win with LGBT people in general? Well, the truth is, if you are asking this, you simply do not understand the LGBT community. The fact that LGBT people as a whole swung much more democratic this year despite the fact that 99% of GOP attacks on LGBT people this cycle focused only on trans people concretely exemplifies the fact that LGBT people stick together and protect every single person, not just themselves. And we also know that they won’t stop at trans people—transphobia has always been a funnel for homophobia and misogyny as well.

During HIV/AIDS, lesbian women were some of the only people who stuck around to care for gay and trans people who were dying of AIDS as the Reagan administration sat and did nothing. Black trans women threw the first bricks during Stonewall, one of the most pivotal moments in LGBT rights history. The legalization of gay marriage paved the way for higher levels of acceptance for trans people in society compared to decades past. I have no doubt that cisgender queer people will continue to have complete solidarity with trans people on our basic human rights.

To reiterate the point, Democrats would lose nearly as much support by abandoning trans people to please transphobes as they would gain from abandoning black people to appease racists. It’s a completely suicidal political strategy that will be impossible to profit from in a national political environment which doesn’t afford Democrats the ability to lose a single demographic of voters—such as young men.

And we have seen the electoral consequences of what happens when Democrats are perceived to have abandoned other groups—Joe Biden won over 68% of Muslims in 2020 in places like Dearborn, and Kamala Harris is likely to undershoot that performance by 30 points. And unlike Muslims who only constitute around 1% of the population, LGBT people are far more evenly spread across the country and far more numerous, meaning our political impact cannot be understated, and our votes cannot be taken for granted. We will mobilize to punish Democrats who try to turn on us at this very difficult moment, whether it’s through primaries or even general elections.

The majority of voters believe the GOP is much more extreme on trans rights, and most people in general including Republicans do not agree with the most extreme policies of Trump on trans people that exclude us from healthcare access and daily public life.

However, I acknowledge that we need to do better on educating people on trans issues. Most people understand why gay marriage is important today, thanks to decades of campaigning from gay rights activists. We will need to undergo a similar national education campaign to help people understand why gender affirming care and social acceptance are so important to the basic humanity of trans people.

But we do not need to abandon our basic moral values as a country by throwing a group of people that already faces existential threats to the wolves desperate to tear them apart. The Democratic party deserves a lot of criticism from many angles as an institution, but I firmly do not believe it will ever turn into a party that abandons its basic core values for the sake of political expediency.