On Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026, a blue tsunami swept across the nation. The midterm elections delivered generational victories for Democrats, whose performance far exceeded even the most optimistic polling expectations.
As is tradition, I tuned in to NBC’s live election coverage to watch the “sexiest nerd on TV,” political correspondent Steve Kornacki, work his magic. Thanks to the network’s new “Kornacki Cam,” he enjoyed a string of viral moments throughout the night — much to my delight as a fellow election nerd.
It was a night of historic firsts: five Black governors will serve simultaneously — including the nation’s first Black female governor; a record of seven Black senators will serve in Congress — including three Black women for the first time; the first Native American women were elected governor and U.S. senator; Texas elected its first Latina governor and California its first Latino governor; a record seventeen women will serve as governors; the first openly gay man was elected to the Senate; and five states elected their first openly transgender state lawmakers.
For the first time in my conscious memory, I came away from an election feeling hopeful — yet I couldn’t shake an unsettling doubt about whether Democrats would actually deliver on voters’ demands.
Sadly, my fear was not unfounded. For all the Republicans swept away by the blue tsunami, its most overlooked casualties may have been the transgender community.
Social media celebrated the blue tsunami with jokes about transing kids, putting pronouns back in bios, and pronouns “you xeople won’t believe.” Even Nancy Pelosi making your cat trans became a punchline. While I appreciate the humor, those jokes ring hollow when some Democrats celebrating these victories made trans people — particularly trans youth — political targets.
To these politicians, trans people have become acceptable political pawns to sacrifice in the pursuit of electoral victory. The strategy is as cynical as it is spineless — throw trans people under the bus and have the audacity to call it political pragmatism.
The writing was on the wall long before the 2026 midterms. In March 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom — a self-described champion of LGBTQ+ rights — welcomed Charlie Kirk onto his podcast and agreed that allowing trans girls to compete in girls’ sports was “deeply unfair.” Newsom even conceded that Democrats were getting “crushed” politically on the issue. Apparently, decades of LGBTQ+ advocacy weren’t enough for him to keep trans rights off the negotiating table.
By the midterms, Newsom was hardly alone. In Texas, Democratic Senator-elect James Talarico bailed on his previous opposition to restrictions on trans athletes, declaring he would oppose their participation in girls’ sports if it threatened “safety or fairness,” and expressed support for a federal ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors.
Part-time Prada runway model-turned-Iowa governor-elect Rob Sand opposed trans women competing in women’s sports in the name of “fairness,” while Ohio’s Dr. Amy Acton declared that she did not support “boys playing in girls’ sports” — conveniently adopting the very rhetoric Republicans have spent years using to attack trans youth.
Perhaps most egregious was Iowa Senator-elect Josh Turek, who released a campaign ad opposing “males competing in female sports” and “taxpayers paying for sex changes,” before calling for an end to the “nonsense from both extremes.” Meanwhile, Iowa congresswoman-elect Sarah Trone Garriott assured voters that she opposed “letting men in women’s locker rooms,” despite previously voting against restrictions on trans students.
And the list goes on. Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur boasted in a campaign ad that she had voted with Republicans to keep “transgender ideology” out of schools. North Carolina Representative Don Davis argued that states should decide how to protect “fairness” in women’s sports. Alaskan Senate candidate Mary Peltola — currently favored to win after all ballots are counted — similarly declared that she opposed gender-transition surgeries for minors and “men in girls’ bathrooms.”
In July 2026, the influential progressive Democratic think tank Center for American Progress urged Democrats to accept restrictions on trans athletes. That October, Liam Kerr, co-founder of Welcome PAC — which financially supported Sarah Trone Garriott in 2026 and Mary Peltola in 2024 — defended candidates adopting anti-trans positions, arguing that taking the “20% side of an 80/20 issue” was bad politics.
These are just a handful of the Democrats who embraced anti-trans rhetoric this election cycle. But was abandoning transgender Americans really necessary to win?
Plenty of Democrats won their elections without throwing the community under the bus — some even in longtime Republican strongholds.
Take Indiana’s first and only openly LGBTQ+ state legislator, J.D. Ford, who defied election forecasts by flipping a longtime Republican congressional district while openly defending trans youth. Ford had even publicly vowed to defend LGBTQ+ Americans — prompting his Republican opponent to attack his “Protect Trans Kids” shirt.
In deep-red Alabama, Allison Montgomery became the state’s first openly trans legislator, unseating a Republican incumbent despite attacks targeting her identity. Evidently, defending trans people was not quite the electoral death sentence some Democrats made it out to be.
In Maine, Senate candidate Troy Jackson explicitly opposed banning trans girls from school sports and declared, as reported by The Boston Globe, “I’m not going to demonize them. I’m not going to leave them behind.” He then unseated Republican Senator Susan Collins, ending her nearly 30-year reign in the Senate.
Then there’s Michigan’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who, when asked about gender-affirming care, invoked his qualification — “I went to whole-ass medical school” — before insisting that healthcare decisions belong between patients, doctors, and, when applicable, parents — not politicians.
El-Sayed prevailed in a cutthroat Democratic primary that attracted nearly $60 million in outside spending — including almost $30 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to defeat him. He endured Islamophobic attacks and even watched Haley Stevens — his former primary opponent — endorse Republican Mike Rogers just two days before the election.
And yet, he won — becoming the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. A progressive Muslim who defended trans rights and refused to abandon Palestinians won in a state Trump carried just two years earlier.
Throughout the campaign, Democrats promised to focus on the issues affecting Americans every day — healthcare costs, grocery prices, and the price at the pump. Their sweeping victories suggest that this was already a winning strategy, making the decision by some to target the trans community — roughly 1% of the population — all the more galling.
For a party so eager to celebrate breaking barriers, Democrats seem remarkably comfortable making an exception for trans people. Yet the victories of candidates who refused to make that compromise tell a different story — so spare me the insistence that throwing trans people under the bus was somehow a prerequisite for electoral victory.
Unfortunately, it gets worse. Five ballot measures restricting trans rights passed in four states on Nov. 3.
In Washington, Initiative 638 banned trans girls from participating in girls’ K-12 interscholastic sports. Every girl seeking to participate — yes, cisgender girls too — must obtain verification of her sex from a healthcare provider, potentially subjecting her to expensive and unreliable testosterone testing or invasive genital exams, with no comparable requirement for boys.
Proposition 134 in Colorado banned trans girls and women from participating on girls’ and women’s sports teams in K-12 schools and colleges, defining eligibility according to reproductive biology.
Colorado’s Proposition 135 also prevents doctors from performing surgeries on minors that alter sexual characteristics and blocks insurance coverage. Importantly, this does not restrict cisgender minors from receiving these surgeries — which according to a 2024 study, cisgender minors made up 97% of the breast reduction surgeries done on minors in their 2019 dataset.
In Nebraska, Initiative 442 enshrined a ban on trans girls and women participating in school sports into the state constitution, making a preexisting restriction significantly harder to overturn.
And finally, in Arizona, Proposition 318 expanded existing sports bans to private schools and prohibited trans students from using athletic restrooms, locker rooms, and showers that align with their gender identity.
Wow — all this in the name of protecting little girls and ensuring “fairness!”
These five measures are just a small part of a much larger legislative assault on trans rights, with 63 anti-trans bills already passed nationwide this year alone.
Swarthmore has also found itself at the center of a dispute over trans athletes’ rights. Former track captain Evie Parts ’25 sued the college after being barred from women’s competition under NCAA rules. Citing a recent Supreme Court ruling, the college has since asked a judge to dismiss her Title IX lawsuit.
At the end of the day, trans rights are not abstract political debates or harmless campaign talking points — attacks on those rights have real consequences for transgender people, whose access to healthcare, participation in school sports, and basic dignity have been reduced to political bargaining chips. Democrats cannot continue presenting themselves as champions of LGBTQ+ equality while rationalizing their abandonment of the trans community.
On election night, I was initially hopeful that the country was moving forward, and I still want to believe it is. But progress cannot come at the expense of those already most vulnerable, and Democrats must recognize that trans people — and all marginalized communities, for that matter — deserve more than conditional support. They deserve the same dignity, protections, and representation the party so proudly promises everyone else.
