The Horse Race: 2024 Contenders Converge on Gender Ideology as Defining Issue

with Brittany Bernstein

Wednesday, March 08, 2023

2024 Contenders Converge on Gender Ideology as Defining Issue

After emerging from the worlds of academia and social-justice activism and finding a foothold in national politics, gender ideology is set to become one of — if not the — defining issue in a presidential race for the first time ever in 2024.

"I would be shocked if this was not a central topic of concern and that it did not loom as large as abortion and immigration did in the previous election," said Jay Richards, the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, and a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

In January, former president Donald Trump released his "plan to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth."

"On Day One, I will revoke Joe Biden's cruel policies on so-called gender-affirming care — ridiculous," Trump said in a video message.

Trump vowed to sign an executive order "instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age" and said he would ask Congress to stop the use of taxpayer dollars to promote or pay for such procedures. He also vowed to revoke Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that perform them.

In some ways, Trump is playing catch-up on the issue, according to Richards, who points out that he had a chance to establish permanent bulwarks against gender ideology in his first term — and failed to do so.

"President Trump had, in his first term, a mixed record on this," Richards said. "He slowed down some of the gender ideology stuff but frankly, didn't do what could have been done and so now he sort of issues this very strong statement . . . about what he would do if given a second term. But I'm frankly frustrated that he didn't do more on it during his first term."

Richards is skeptical that the president has unilateral authority to shut down gender-transition surgeries across the country, especially for adults. He calls Trump's proposal a "mixed bag" that should be viewed as a general sign he takes the issue seriously, or "at the very least, he realizes that it is politically advantageous."

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, by contrast, has a more established track record he could draw on during a presidential campaign.

"I honestly think Ron DeSantis has more of a clear and direct track record of actually doing this, and I think President Trump probably recognizes that and realizes that this is going to be a liability for him, so he's at least talking a very strong game about what he will do if elected president," Richards said.

DeSantis has been at the forefront of the fight. In August, the Florida governor decried "gender-affirming care," saying that "what they don't tell you is that they are giving very young girls double mastectomies, they want to castrate young boys — that's wrong."

He added: "You don't disfigure ten-, twelve-, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria."

Under DeSantis's watch, the Florida Board of Medicine and state Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted to ban puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery as treatments for transgender minors in the state. The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration in August created a rule prohibiting Medicaid coverage of gender-transition services, such as hormone therapy and surgery.

In 2021, he signed a bill into law banning biological males from participating in girls sports. In March 2022, he signed the Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits instructors from teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms.

If Florida has served as a model for other states in the fight against gender ideology, the Biden administration's work to advance it offers evidence of how much power a president has in this area.

Every expert I spoke to sounded alarms about the Biden administration's proposed Title IX rules, which are expected to effectively bar federally funded universities from maintaining women-only spaces and sports teams, among other far-reaching consequences. The Education Department, after spending months reviewing more than 238,000 public comments it received on the proposed rules, said the rules will become public in May.

Aside from undoing the Title IX changes, if they take effect as proposed, Richards suggested a future president could take action by launching investigations into federal funding of pediatric gender medicine and surgery, including expenditures by the CDC, Medicare and Medicaid, and the National Institutes of Health more broadly.

Editor's Note: This has been excerpted from a lengthier report on gender ideology and 2024. Please click here to read the rest of the article.

AROUND NR

• Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan announced he does not plan to run for president in 2024. Jeffrey Blehar calls his announcement a "dignified bowing-out that focuses on the best reasons for his not running — unnecessarily crowding the field and thus allowing Trump to triumph again in a divided race — and tactfully omits other very good but more personal reasons for not running, such as (1) he would not win, and (2) would suffer the indignity of getting thrashed in his home state's own primary provided he survived in the race until that long." Blehar thanks Hogan for his decision, writing that "presidential electoral politics, like nuclear war, is a strange game; sometimes the only winning move is not to play."

• On the topic of crowded fields, Jim Geraghty warns that presidential candidates who can't win almost never realize it until it's too late. He recaps the failed candidates of 2016, every one of whom "wanted to believe they were about to turn things around"; none of them dropped out "until at least one state later than they should have withdrawn and endorsed their preferred rival."

• Charles C. W. Cooke decodes Trump's "recipe for electoral failure," which involves dismissing any politician or candidate who may appeal to moderate voters, as Trump has recently suggested Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, and Ronald Reagan are examples of what has historically been wrong with the GOP.

As far as I can see, the argument here seems to be that if, in addition to all of the solid conservatives who are backing a given candidate, that candidate also has fans who are more politically moderate, he must, ipso facto, be a fraud. Which . . . well, which is completely backwards, isn't it?

• Hundreds of thousands of automated bot accounts have flooded Twitter in the last eleven months to boost former president Donald Trump, according to Israeli tech firm Cyabra. The firm told the Associated Press that the accounts, which appear to have been created by an unknown entity in the U.S., have gone on the attack against Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, to seed negative rhetoric about Haley and to suggest DeSantis would be more fit to serve as Trump's 2024 running mate than as president. More here.

• New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu (R.), an expected 2024 GOP presidential contender who has not yet declared his bid, said Sunday that DeSantis would win his home state if the presidential election were held today. Sununu said DeSantis is the effective, electorally competitive "alternative" to former president Trump that the GOP has been seeking to lead the party.