Kamala Harris speech from 2023 on transgender rights risks boomerang with American voters

A year before she pushed Joe Biden from the top of the Democrat ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a speech in which she equated the fight for equality with allowing biological males to participate in female sports, genetic boys having access to girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, and transgender surgeries for children even if their parents don’t consent.

Before a friendly audience in New York, Harris boldly promised to fight “extremist” laws from Texas to Utah and Tennessee to Idaho that sought to maintain the status quo of recognizing there are just two genders – male and female – and preserve parents’ rights to decide what is best for their children when it came to what they are taught, what they read, what pronouns they use and what medical procedures they undergo.

“These extremist so-called leaders have proposed and passed more than 75 new anti-equality bills across our country,” Harris declared in June 2023, predicting such laws would deny “life-saving gender-affirming care” to kids and “sentence medical providers to prison” if they operated on or treated children without parents’ consent.

“Friends, as we are clear-eyed about this moment, let us all see, also, the larger context in which this is happening,” the vice president added. “Because this fight is not only about teachers in Florida or young people in Tennessee. This fight is about all of us, because when you attack the rights of any American, you attack the rights of all Americans.”

The June 2023 speech made few ripples at the time for Harris, but it is the sort of policy position that will attract scrutiny in the final 60 days of a razor-close presidential race where she sits as the Democratic Party's nominee and is facing a high-stakes debate with Donald Trump in days.

The positions Harris staked out that day collided with prevailing American sentiments and conflict, in some cases, with the policies of close U.S. allies like Great Britain, whose National Health Service has stopped prescribing puberty blockers in most cases for children with gender dysphoria on grounds there is “not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness.”

Veteran pollster Scott Rasmussen says Harris risks offending strongly held American values when it comes to children and transgender ideology.

“What Vice President Harris calls anti-equality laws are seen as common sense by most Americans,” Rasmussen told Just the News on Monday. “Rather than being anti-equality, policies like letting boys play girls sports is anti-science and dangerous.”

Rasmussen’s own research from May through August of this years shows how far astray Harris’ positions in the 2023 speech fell from voters’ prevailing views:

• 62% believe it should be illegal to “provide children under 18 with puberty blockers, drugs, and/or surgery to help them transition from one gender to another.”
• 72% oppose allowing biological males into women’s sports
• 71% oppose allowing biological males into women’s bathrooms, locker rooms and showers
• 67% strongly or somewhat oppose new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance that companies should allow employees to use bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice.
• 81% oppose firing a worker who does not use the pronoun “her” to describe a biological male identifying as a female.

Trump picked up some of these sentiments during a speech Friday night to the conservative parents’ group Moms for Liberty in Washington, D.C.

“I like to say that we’re the party of common sense. I mean, we’re conservative in all of us,” he said. “Walls are common sense, right? All of the things we’re talking about, no men and women’s sports, no gender operation. I mean, there’s these operations. It’s crazy. You know, I don’t know if you know, Europe has gone totally away from it now. We’re way behind them. They don’t do it anymore. And this is just horrible.”

One of Trump’s key surrogates, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, introduced legislation in 2020 while still a Democrat to oppose biological males participating in female sports and has continued to speak out against liberal positions on the issue.

“I think the problem is that we live in a culture of fear, rather than a culture that’s based on objective reality and truth. It should not be a bold act to stand up and say there are differences between men and women,” Gabbard has said.

Harris’ 2023 speech is likely to create a boomerang in the final days of the 2024 election.