On Monday, the US Department of Education announced it was terminating resolution agreements made under the Obama and Biden administrations with five school districts and a college over past Title IX complaints. Those administrations interpreted Title IX’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination to include gender identity. As a result, when a transgender student filed a discrimination complaint — for example, after being denied access to a bathroom — the Department deemed it a Title IX violation. This then required the school to allow the student to use whichever bathroom he or she preferred.

“Today, the Trump Administration is removing the unnecessary and unlawful burdens that prior Administrations imposed on schools in [their] relentless pursuit of a radical transgender agenda,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a press release.

The Trump administration doesn’t need to use this incendiary rhetoric — such as “radical transgender agenda” — when discussing rollbacks of policies that most Americans believe Democrats got wrong. Such language only energizes a stubborn minority determined to die on this hill, and lends credence to the misguided claim that these rollbacks are hateful and cruel.

Then again, that may be the point. If the Trump administration can coax Democrats into doubling down on unpopular positions, the GOP may improve its chances of retaining control of Congress in November.

If the past 17 months are any indication, Democrats seem destined to keep falling for Trump’s ploy. Following the 2024 election, there was a brief period of hope that they might take an honest inventory of where they had gone wrong. But that moment quickly passed. Like clockwork, their judgment became clouded by moral outrage as they reacted to the “cruelty” of the Trump administration. Instead of meaningful opposition, the party lumped Trump’s defensible transgender-related policies together with his more debatable decisions about the economy, foreign policy, and immigration enforcement.

What makes all of this so frustrating is that it shuts down any honest conversation about a rather straightforward issue. Questions around fairness in women’s sports and privacy in sex-segregated spaces are not all that complicated. But when one side treats any disagreement as cruelty, and the other side responds with over-the-top rhetoric, there’s no room for a sane discussion. Voters are left feeling like they have to choose between two extremes.

There’s also a more basic political mistake here. By turning these issues into moral tests, Democrats risk alienating voters who might otherwise agree with them on other important issues.

For those in the Democratic Party who see this as an issue, gaining a platform to push back has not been easy. Since November 2024, very few Democrats have been willing to publicly question the rationale behind the party’s stance on transgender issues; for those who have, retribution has been swift. Most recently, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff and a possible 2028 presidential candidate, stated unequivocally that “I don’t think men should be playing women’s sports.” He has also expressed disbelief that his party has undermined Title IX, once seen as a major civil rights achievement for Democrats. If he holds firm on this position, it could show others that it’s possible to resist party pressure and emerge intact.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter who breaks the cycle, so long as someone does. Until that happens, Republicans will keep provoking, Democrats will keep reacting, and the country will remain mired in chaos and outrage.

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Ben Appel is the author of Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.

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