In a parallel universe, progressives would be rallying around Democratic congressman Seth Moulton. They would respect his courage for saying what so many of them have been thinking since Donald Trump thumped Kamala Harris in the presidential election. They would be urging him—publicly—to run for president. A billionaire, probably in Silicon Valley or New York, would have launched a super PAC called “Moulton 2028,” calling the congressman “the voice America needs.” They would love him.
But in this universe, the one we actually inhabit, they hate him.
“We’ve worked so hard at becoming tolerant that we’ve become intolerant,” Moulton, who represents the suburbs north of Boston, told me Wednesday.
The hate started exactly two weeks ago, when Moulton told The New York Times, in an article explaining why Kamala Harris lost, that the Democratic Party had become overly focused on trans issues.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told the Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Moulton’s daughters are 6 and 3, and he told me he was talking about team sports they might play when they’re older. When I asked what prompted him to make comments that he must have known would antagonize his fellow Democrats—who have long adhered to the orthodoxy that trans women are women who should be able to compete in women’s sports—he replied: “I was speaking authentically as a dad about a concern that I know other dads share, and we just ought to be able to debate it.”
Since then, progressives have called him a “Nazi cooperator,” “transphobic,” and “offensive.” Democrats have said he should resign. His campaign manager has stepped down. Massachusetts Democratic governor Maura Healey, who is gay, attacked Moulton for “playing politics.” Even Jake Auchincloss, who, like Moulton, is a former Marine and now a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, has distanced himself from Moulton’s trans remarks. (Moulton declined to comment on Auchincloss.)
Meanwhile, the chair of Tufts University’s political science department threatened to bar students from interning in Moulton’s office, which prompted the college’s high command to assure the congressman they still like him (Tufts is a major recipient of National Institutes of Health grants; probably not wise to lash out at a member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation.) Which prompted the editorial board at The Tufts Daily, predictably, to condemn Moulton.
“[W]e believe that cutting ties with Moulton’s office is not a suppression of speech,” the board wrote. “In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is our way of expressing our disgust with Moulton’s brazen scapegoating of an already oppressed community.”
All this despite the fact that 66 percent of Americans oppose trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams, and that Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you” campaign ad was one of the most widely watched (and effective) of his reelection bid.
Watch Trump’s campaign ad here:
Moulton, 46, who led a platoon in Iraq as a Marine, has been pushing Democrats to embrace younger leaders since at least 2018. That’s when he spearheaded an unsuccessful effort to deny Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi the speakership—angering many progressives who dubbed him a sexist. (There was even a hashtag dedicated to Moulton and his co-conspirators, #FiveWhiteGuys.) In 2019, he briefly ran for president in the Democratic primaries. The highlight of Moulton’s campaign was an evocative speech he gave in which he revealed his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.
But until now, Moulton has never been anything but 100 percent supportive of trans rights. He backed the Equality Act, meant to bar discrimination against transgender people and others. Last year, he co-sponsored the national Transgender Bill of Rights, which ensured “access to medical care, shelter, safety, and economic security” for transgender people.
On top of that, until recently, he actually supported trans girls competing athletically with girls, signing a November 1, 2023 letter with other House Democrats that called on President Joe Biden and Democratic congressional leaders to reject any “anti-LGBTQI+ provisions” in the budget. One of those anti-LGBTQI+ provisions would have barred federal funds from being used to help team sports make room for transgender athletes.
When I asked Moulton about this apparent contradiction—supporting trans girls competing in girls’ sports and then, more recently, reversing course—he replied: “Look, when letters come across your desk, you don’t necessarily agree with every single word in the letter.”
Moulton insisted that his views on trans rights have not changed in the past year. “I have nuanced views on these issues, and that’s exactly what we need,” he said. “What we don’t need is people like you trying to crucify me over one word.”
Moulton’s concerns about Democrats going too far extends to other issues as well.
“Certain members of our party preached defunding the police, and it turns out a lot of Americans want the police well funded to keep them safe,” he said. “There were members of our party saying there were no problems at our southern border when, in fact, there was. Trying to wish it away wasn’t effective either.”
Referring to the ongoing kerfuffle around his remarks about trans athletes, Moulton added: “There are obviously fellow Democrats who want to shut down this debate. But I think that a lot of Democrats, including key leaders like Hakeem Jeffries”—the House Democratic leader—“recognize the inherent problem in that approach and want to have these debates. Hakeem himself has repeatedly assured me that we need to have these debates.”
Moulton rejected the view that Democrats, in the 2024 election, had backed the wrong women’s rights issue—abortion access—while neglecting the more popular one: the right to women’s-only spaces, which Republicans ran on. In the 2022–2023 school year, more than 3.3 million high school girls played a team sport. By contrast, in 2023, a little more than 1 million abortions were performed.
“I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment, because most of the ads, including the most famous or infamous Trump ad, depending on how people look at it, focused on transgender surgeries for prisoners,” he said, referring to the “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you” video.
Moulton noted it had been Trump administration policy to offer transgender prisoners surgery. “It’s an example of how difficult it is for Democrats to even talk about this, because we couldn’t even simply say, loud and clear, that this was Trump administration policy,” he said. Moulton did not expand upon why Democrats did not bring that up on the campaign trail—maybe because it would undermine their message that Trump’s real goal, once he’s back in the White House, is “a broader assault” on the LGBTQ+ community.
The Moulton hullabaloo comes at the same time that Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace has introduced a resolution barring transgender women from women’s restrooms in the Capitol, prompting outrage from progressives. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for one, called Mace “disgusting,” adding that the South Carolina Republican is “endangering all women and girls.”
On Tuesday, Mace posted a video on X of her walking and talking straight to camera. “If being a feminist makes me an extremist or a bigot or a monster, I am totally here for it,” Mace says in the video.
“She’s trying to become the J.K. Rowling of the Republican Party,” Brianna Wu, a prominent transgender blogger and podcaster, told me, comparing Mace to the feminist Harry Potter author who has spoken out against trans rights supplanting women’s rights.
When I asked Moulton whether he and Mace are fighting for the same thing—girls or women holding on to traditionally female-only spaces—he said absolutely not. “Mace and I are on different planets when it comes to trans people,” Moulton said. “She essentially says they don’t exist, the way people fifty years ago called gays deviants who just needed to be reeducated.”
He added: “My point is that many Democrats, out of fear of offending people, are afraid to even discuss this and other contentious issues, and just try to cancel those who do.”
Moulton is part of a bigger conversation taking place on the left, Wu said. “He is certainly not the only Democrat in the country looking at the trans issue, particularly in sports,” said Wu, who knows Moulton and has extensive experience in Massachusetts progressive politics, having unsuccessfully run for Congress in a nearby district in 2018. “He is not the only one thinking, ‘This is crazy.’ ”
Nor is that conversation limited to trans issues. Since the November 5 election, the parameters of acceptable discourse seem to have expanded: Democratic congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, who recently won a Senate seat in Michigan at the same time Trump carried the state, said identity politics should “go the way of the dodo.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd railed against Democrats’ “hyper-political correctness” and “condescension.” Even well-known brands that embraced progressive identitarianism are now getting clobbered. Case in point: Jaguar’s recent rebrand video, which features a gaggle of super-woke, gender-fluid, multiracial actors—none of whom resemble the mostly white, older, decidedly male customers who actually drive Jaguars—as well as no actual Jaguars. Social media posts slammed the video, saying it had “killed a British icon.”
James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist, called identity politics “one of the great self-inflicted wounds of the century.”
Carville told me that, in the past week or so, progressives had pushed back against this idea that the nation was turning its back on wokeness. “The new point they make is, ‘Well, look, no one ran on that in 2024’ ”—meaning the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, didn’t lose because she was too woke. Maybe she wasn’t woke enough.
“That’s not true,” Carville went on. “The Democrats didn’t run on it. The Republicans ran on it. See, in politics, the other side gets to play. It’s not just you. Mistakes in politics stick with you.”
Moulton agrees there is a disconnect between the party’s activist base and the tens of millions of voters it counts on to win national elections. “I think a lot of elected Democrats recognize that our ideological straitjacket on certain issues hurt our appeal to many Americans, because it makes us seem arrogant,” he said. “ ‘If you don’t agree with me on every issue and every word choice, then you’re not only wrong, you’re a bad person,’ and that attitude is really bad.”
The only way forward now, Moulton said, is for the Democratic Party to reclaim its liberal soul—its appetite for arguments and ideas.
“I do know that women’s rights are important and trans women’s rights are important, so we have to find a balance that makes sense,” he said. “And if we can find that balance as a party, I think we can turn this around and actually win on this issue.”
He added: “Right now, the Republicans are clobbering us with it.”
Peter Savodnik is a senior editor for The Free Press. Read his piece “John Fetterman Has No Regrets,” and follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @petersavodnik.
And for more about the Democrats’ postelection reckoning, read Neetu Arnold’s piece “Why Asian Americans Are Moving Right.”
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