In the old “Uncle Remus” stories the “tar baby” was a decoy, a doll made from a mixture of tar and turpentine by the crafty Br’er Fox to catch the elusive Br’er Rabbit. Once the doll was touched, Br’er Rabbit couldn’t let go.

Transgenderism has become the tar baby for the Democrats: a thing they can’t let go, can’t help promoting and defending even when it costs them dearly. In the presidential election of 2024, the issue worked with an unanticipated power for the Republicans: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

A super PAC supporting Vice President Harris estimated that ad had swung the race about 2.7 points toward Mr. Trump among voters who saw it. The unaccountable luck for the Democrats is that this issue has been curiously muted this electoral season. Yet there is every reason to believe that this question has a resonance for many people that easily rivals—or even overrides—the concern for “affordability.”David Crawford and Michael Hanby have argued in these pages that the political drive for transgenderism demands that we absorb a new metaphysics, a radically new understanding of the way we are constituted as human beings.

What is a young boy compelled to ask himself when he is told he must respect his father’s judgment that he is now a woman, or his sister’s claim to be a boy? Can the boy be sure he wasn’t born into the wrong body?

In 2024 the California Legislature permitted schools not to notify parents that their children had decided to “transition” into a new “gender.”The U.S. Supreme Court enjoined such policies in a March 2026 emergency ruling (Mirabelli v. Bonta). The teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, have come out firmly in defense of the “privacy interests” of children and against parents’ rights to know what the schools are doing to their children.

It’s easy for voters to tune out complicated policy issues like deregulation, healthcare financing and antitrust law. In contrast, transgenderism can’t help but draw the concern of ordinary people once attention is paid: disfiguring surgeries and hormones with lifelong effects; males easily defeating or injuring women on the sports field; invasions of privacy and sexual assault in women’s bathrooms, locker rooms and prisons. And only an intellectual can deny the obvious truth that sex is immutable; it isn’t “assigned at birth” but intrinsic to one’s body, with the differences penetrating to the cellular level.

And no issue has drawn out as fully the differences that separate a conservative administration from its opposition on the left. The Biden administration at nearly every turn sought to sweep away any barriers in federal policy to the promotion of transgenderism. In striking resistance, the Trump administration has sought to counter and reverse these policies across a broad front.

In a stream of executive orders and regulatory actions, the administration has defined sex as strictly binary, male and female; required newly issued passports to reflect the holder’s actual sex, with no “X” option for “unspecified or another gender identity”; restricted the use of public money for “transitioning” surgery; overturned the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX, which prohibited schools from restricting bathrooms and locker rooms to actual males and females; and has brought lawsuits against states that allow men to participate in women’s sports.

An executive order issued on Inauguration Day even requires federal agencies to use the word “sex” rather than the euphemism or equivocation “gender.”The knock on the Trump administration is that it has sought to do so much through executive orders, which could be overturned when the Democrats next control Congress or the White House. Yet the administration has sought to work through the Congress to change the laws, only to find those moves thwarted by Democrats in the Senate.

In December 2025, the House voted 215-201 to block federal reimbursements for Medicaid and for state funding of transgender surgeries and hormone treatments for minors. In March 2026, the administration backed an amendment to penalize educational institutions that allowed males to participate in female sports. Democrats in the Senate kept the amendment from overcoming the filibuster and getting a final vote. In May, the House voted 217-198 to bar schools from confirming in their records the transgendered identity declared by children without parental consent. All votes in opposition to both House measures came from Democrats.

To sum it up, the Democrats can’t help themselves. No matter how much the broad public abhors the promotion of transgenderism in all of its forms, the Democrats resist even the simplest moves to scale it back. The passion for sexual liberation, with no constraints of nature, is baked into the Democratic DNA. And so the issue is teed up with perfect aptness for the midterm election.

The question may be posed with a practical relevance to James Talarico in Texas, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and every other Democrat running for Congress: Will they join the Democratic caucus in their near-unanimity on this issue if their party gains control in Congress? For it is virtually certain that the party would move at once against every one of these initiatives from the Trump administration. Nothing in heaven or earth will overcome the willingness of the Democrats to fall on their swords on this issue.

Mr. Arkes is founder and a co-director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding and a professor emeritus of jurisprudence at Amherst College. [video] WSJ Opinion: The Transgender Movement Is in Retreat