Opinion | The Secret Behind America’s Moral Panic

In the wake of an election in which Donald Trump stoked fear about trans people — as in the much-discussed ad that warned “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — Democrats are now debating how much the issue of trans rights hurt them and how fast they should retreat from it. Which is remarkable, because throughout her brief campaign, Kamala Harris was all but silent on the subject. It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.

The party’s decision to focus on the issues that matter to most voters, especially reproductive rights, and set trans rights aside is based on a misconception. The two issues can’t be separated, because trans rights don’t just resemble reproductive rights; trans rights are reproductive rights.

In the last couple of years, as the right wing in the United States has stepped up its attacks on trans people, it has devoted tremendous energy to curbing access to gender-affirming care for minors (and in some cases adults). Supporters of such legislation argue that young people are not qualified to make — or even participate in — decisions they may regret later in life.

Of course, young people make all kinds of decisions they may later regret. But opponents of trans rights argue that there is an area in which the consequences can be nothing short of catastrophic, and that area is reproduction. Whether the focus is gender-affirming care, sports teams or bathrooms, the mission is, invariably, to protect women and girls from trans people. Two stars of the campaign to limit access to care are Chloe Cole in the United States and Keira Bell in the United Kingdom, girls who transitioned to being boys and later detransitioned to being young women. Both of them have repeatedly expressed fear that the treatment they received as teenagers could have rendered them infertile. It may or may not have; the long-term effects of puberty blockers followed by hormone therapy aren’t well known, though many trans men who started hormone treatment as adults have been able to get pregnant.

Still, infertility seems to inhabit its own special category of cultural anxiety. One influential voice sounding an alarm about gender-affirming care is Abigail Shrier, whose 2020 book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” advanced a view of transness as a social contagion endangering America’s children. Its cover features a picture of a little girl with a perfect round cutout where her reproductive organs would have been.

I am trans and I am a parent of three children, one of whom I carried. Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself. I also have many friends (none of them trans, as it happens) who never had children. I occasionally envy their freedom. They may occasionally envy me my sprawling family. In neither case is the feeling of regret — if it can even be called that — significant or particularly long-lasting. It is, rather, an awareness that life is a series of choices, all of which are made with incomplete information.