Trans activists pissed at Kaptur, Acton, for siding with 90% of voters

As Marcy Kaptur fights for her political life in a district explicitly drawn to turf her out of Congress, and Amy Acton continues to battle Vivek Ramaswamy for the governorship– making the race a whole lot closer than we would have expected, candidly– both of the Democratic women are taking fire from transgender rights activists who are pissed at the ladies for siding with 90 percent of voters.

From Signal Ohio:

Top Democratic candidates in Ohio are showing signs that the party is recalibrating its approach to transgender issues ahead of the November election, upsetting some party activists and leaving some transgender Ohioans feeling abandoned.

Both Amy Acton, the Democratic governor candidate, and U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a long-tenured Toledo Democrat facing a tough reelection fight in November, were the targets of separate critical op-eds last week in the Buckeye Flame, an LGBTQ-focused news outlet in Cleveland.

The reason for the criticism? Acton said she “doesn’t support boys playing in girls’ sports” in a newspaper statement in June. Acton, a first-time candidate, had not previously announced her views on transgender issues, but nonetheless disappointed LGBTQ+ activists who pointed out she’d attended Pride events earlier in the month. Kaptur, who had a record of previously voting for LGBTQ+ protections, broke from that pattern in May, voting for a Republican-backed bill requiring schools to notify parents of a child’s request to change their gender, pronouns or preferred name. The bill also would strip federal funding from schools that “teach or advance concepts related to gender identity.”

Both Buckeye Flame op-eds criticized Acton and Kaptur for not more clearly stating their overall views on transgender issues.

Ken Schneck, the Buckeye Flame’s editor, told Signal Statewide that Democrats in competitive races across the country have begun to back off transgender rights after their losses in the 2024 election.

“What we’ve heard from various elected officials is, if you’re going to try to get a statewide electorate, you’re going to have to make some compromises,” Schneck said. “But that comes at a cost at the hands of LGBTQ voters.”

Does it, though, we must ask?

Increasingly, we see evidence of gay and lesbian Americans seeking to split the “T” off from “LGB” (and “Q,” and “+”) in the proverbial “alphabet soup” identifier moniker. The desire to do this is often quietly, almost silently voiced, frequently behind closed doors and “off the record.”

But it’s real.

We’ve seen increasing concern voiced by lesbians that gay women are being pushed to reconsider whether they are actually women attracted to women, or men trapped in women’s bodies who are attracted to women. (Side note: Expect to see a lot more of this with Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” hitting theaters– it stars Elliott Page, formerly Ellen Page of “Juno” fame).

We’ve also heard not a few gay men complain that they think the majority of transgender individuals are suffering from mental illness, and don’t like the elision of “trans” with “gay” given the history of anti-gay advocates treating homosexuality as a form of mental illness.

We’ve never seen survey data on this, but our best guess is that something between 30 and 50 percent of LGB voters don’t think males who have transitioned to female should be competing in sports against biological females.

We also know a few LGBTQ+ advocates who have worried that a lack of parental notification of children’s requested gender transitions actually deprives parents who would be supportive, even if their kids or teachers or medical professionals doubt that they would be, of an opportunity to back their children while undergoing what is, by any measure, a monumental life change.

There are also prominent gay rights advocates who have opposed policies like Colorado’s now-defunct “conversion therapy gag rule” on the basis that it infringes on medical professionals’ freedom of speech. Yes, these advocates tend to be on the right. But that doesn’t mean they don’t silently exist on the left, too.

Mostly what this saga underlines is that the Democratic Party is continuing to struggle through navigating a situation in which 90 percent of voters disagree with a very vocal minority that probably actually amounts to about 5 percent of the vote (we’re prepared to concede that as crazy as it sounds, perhaps 5 percent of voters still don’t know what they think about these issues).

But it’s pretty tough to fault either Acton or Kaptur for shifting their position in the 90 percent direction given the way Kaptur’s district lines have been redrawn, and given that Ohio stopped being a swing state in the true sense of the term in 2016 and is now more plum-colored, if anything.

Ultimately, Democrats have to figure out whether they want to win elections outside blue or truly purple states, or whether they want to pass ideological purity tests and remain electorally marginal in states that have shifted red in the post-Obama era. On “trans” issues more than any others, this is true.