El-Sayed Dodges Question on Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports

However, as El-Sayed’s response suggests, although culture wars were a key part of Democratic losses in 2024, they are not the top priority for swing voters when the economy is performing poorly. They are still important, but Republicans cannot expect to win if they are failing on the economy.

Transgender Policy Madness

In June of this year, a New York bill proposed removing the words “mother” and “father” from some official language, replacing them with “gestating” and “non-gestating” parents. Just this month, Pennsylvania joined the cause of erasing mothers, with its Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro proposing to remove "mothers" and "pregnant woman" from the state's health code.

For the past few months, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has been struggling to tell what a woman is and appears to have ultimately given up. Meanwhile, various other sporting organizations have weighed in on the question, with, to say the least, mixed results and reactions.

And while this all took place at the level of policy, a shocking case is rumbling through American courts regarding the alleged sexual assault of a 15-year-old female wrestler by a biologically male transgender competitor.

The high school girl says she was not informed prior to the fight that her opponent was male and has sued the school district, state education officials and others.

It is fair to describe it as a subject of ongoing interest, a fact for which liberals have only themselves to blame, having made pro-trans policies that went against science and common sense a central plank of their platform.

Experts have argued that Trump’s relentless criticism of Kamala Harris’ views on transgenderism in the final weeks of the campaign was one of the keys to winning over the swing voters. 

Unsurprisingly, a number of Republican ad campaigns have targeted this point ahead of the midterms, trying to put the Democrats on the back foot on an issue where public opinion is against them.

Gallup polling from 2025 found that 69% of US adults believe transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth sex. Meanwhile, Pew Research Center data shows a smaller majority (56%) support a ban on minors receiving transition-related medical care. 

El-Sayed’s Trans Dodge

Knowing their weakness on this point, it is unsurprising that Democratic politicians and candidates have tried to distance themselves from what they call “Woke 1.0”. This is shorthand for political slogans like “defund the police”, “ban Thanksgiving”, “white guilt” and so forth.

The avatar of progressive Democratic politics, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), led the charge when in an interview she tried to laugh off this iteration of left-wing politics as “crazy”.

At the same time, candidates competing in the midterms have given vague, partial renunciations of their positions on one of the key issues of Woke 1.0, gender-transition surgeries and men in women’s sports.

El-Sayed made one of the more successful efforts to parry the inevitable questions on this topic, going on the offensive. The Michigan senatorial candidate is a doctor himself and has argued previously that gender-affirming care for minors should be covered under a single-payer health care system.

However, when speaking to Watters, he said the government should not be getting involved in the parent-doctor relationship.

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/2092047618562232584

Watters pressed him on the issue and asked if he supported the castration of children in the name of gender-affirming care. El-Sayed responded by attempting to draw a comparison with the practice of circumcision, stumping his interviewer.

More significantly, when asked about men in women’s sports, he argued that this was a question for sports bodies and not a US senator, whose primary concerns are health care and the cost of living. In trying to deflect attention from the questions and cast them as “insane”, El-Sayed was following the same pattern as AOC and her ilk.

The Republicans’ Weak Point

But in doing so, the progressive Democrat’s response was well suited to addressing the concerns polls suggest are top priorities for voters – the economy and the cost of living.

At a time when inflation remains high, gas prices are up by more than a dollar since January and housing seems impossibly expensive, a majority of US voters are increasingly feeling the squeeze. At the same time, a significant number of them believe President Trump does not care enough about their plight.

Overall, just 24% of US adults say that the economy is doing well – roughly the same level as at the end of Joe Biden’s term and well below Trump’s first-term high of 59% in 2018.

Republicans are struggling to find evidence that they are successfully tackling the bleak economic outlook. 

Their flagship housing bill became law with little more than a whimper after Trump refused to sign it, while championing artificial intelligence has become political suicide due to a widespread backlash against data centers and, to a lesser extent, Big Tech.

So while winning the culture wars remains important for restoring common sense to American politics as well as a sore point for Democrats, if the Republicans cannot convince voters that they know how to reverse the economic downturn, it may not matter that their opponents do not know what a woman is.