Rep. “Sarah” (Tim) McBride, a man who dresses as a woman and claims to be the “first transgender member of Congress,” tried to explain to The New York Times’ Ezra Klein last week why transgender ideology is so unpopular, but missed the main reason why.
“Clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working,” McBride said last week in the interview.
The failure of trans activism to work is not all due to Trump’s executive order upholding Title IX or a similar order against trans surgeries for minors. From 2022 to 2025, more Americans shifted to favor policies or laws that prevent men from playing in women’s sports (from 58 percent to 66 percent), make it illegal for minors to get surgery or hormones that unnecessarily alter their bodies (46 percent to 56 percent), require people to use same sex bathrooms (41 percent to 49 percent), and make it illegal to teach radical gender ideology in elementary schools (41 percent to 47 percent), the Pew Research Center reported in February.
McBride argued that the support for the trans movement in 2016 and 2017 was “a mirage of support” because it piggybacked off the gay marriage movement of the ’90s and 2000s. He also acknowledged leftists “overplay[ed]” their hand in terms of trans advocacy, pushing policies that were “probably premature for a lot of people.”
“[W]e as a coalition went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage,” he said, suggesting conversations around trans issues need more “nuance.”
McBride is partially right, but his argument failed to fully recognize the most notable harms brought about by radical gender ideology that the American people have already seen with their own eyes. In reality, the unpopular and dangerous extremes were always the logical conclusion trans ideology was hurtling toward.
Illusion of Acceptance, Reality of Harm
McBride said the trans movement’s momentum fizzled because its activists “lost the art of persuasion” and there was a “well-funded effort to demonize trans people” through marketing strategies and even social media campaigns. McBride also asserted that the reason they lost the “trans battle” is because trans stories stopped being told, which allowed for “misinformation.”
In reality, however, regular people saw with their own eyes that the trans movement is inherently an illusion of acceptance and a reality of great harm. As men invade women’s spaces and doctors push harmful trans procedures on children, such policies have led to countless horror stories, like that of Payton McNabb. After a volleyball spike from a male allowed to play on a high school girls’ team knocked McNabb unconscious in 2022, “she still suffers from impaired vision, partial paralysis on her right side, and anxiety and depression,” as the Washington Examiner reported in 2024.
In terms of trans procedures on minors, files leaked last year from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health exposed doctors “smashing through guardrails even though they know that the children they are chemically and surgically altering cannot really give informed consent,” as Nathanael Blake wrote in these pages. An independent review also found last year that there is “no good evidence” that life-altering opposite-sex hormones benefit children with gender dysphoria. The Supreme Court even recognized last week that laws banning trans surgeries for minors are constitutional. Nonetheless, the public health bureaucracy has been complicit in propping up the harmful procedures.
McBride also failed to mention that trans activism was also a “well-funded” effort, backed by corporations pushing the ideology onto the public. Target changed its logo to the pride flag and sold “tuck friendly” swimsuits so men pretending to be women could obscure their genitalia in a women’s swimsuit. Disney traded good storytelling for marketing LGBT ideology. Bud Light followed the money train of “pride month” by trading in its manly aura for a biological male dressing like a girl yelling from the rooftops about “womanhood.”
Blind Submission
McBride basically admitted that the trans movement was just blind submission to a cause people didn’t examine with a critical lens. He suggests that since people regretted “having been wrong” on gay marriage in the 90s, they “without understanding, support trans rights because [they] don’t want to make that same mistake again.” People committed to the fast-paced movement rode an “unending, cresting wave,” as McBride put it.
Journalist Madeleine Kearns said back in 2019 that her experience with the LGBT community “was that it wasn’t really a community so much as it was a big mishmash of people who feel they belong to a certain cause for very different reasons.” Kearns added that “they were all there at the end of the rainbow to claim their pot of gold, which they had been promised by the Human Rights Campaign.”
At the “end of the rainbow” was the commitment to the pot of trans mutilation surgeries and letting boys take over girls’ spaces. As Becket Adams reported on June 22, to continue as a “trans rights” activist, one must “believe it’s a ‘right’ to have one’s colon scooped out to be repurposed into a faux vagina. It’s a ‘right’ to undergo a procedure in which a male patient is consigned to a lifetime of dilation ‘to maintain the size and shape of [his] vaginal canal and to keep it open,’ or else his ‘vagina may [irreversibly] shrink or close.’”
But the truth broke through the oppressive censorship regime and trans activists’ flood of marketing strategies, stirring moral convictions about the dangers of the belief system, and people began to realize that the destructive trans train was never worth following. As a result many businesses have left their pride flags to get dusty on the shelves during “pride month” this year.
Yet as Blake recently noted in these pages, Americans’ willingness to favor a “mushy middle ground” means we are still on a slippery slope.
Abigail Nichols is a correspondent for The Federalist. She was previously the opinion editor for the University of South Florida’s student newspaper, The Oracle. She is now working as the business manager at the University of North Florida’s student-run media outlet, Spinnaker Media, while obtaining a Master’s Degree in Social work.
