(LifeSiteNews) — The Democrats painted themselves into a corner and the infighting on what to do next has been downright enjoyable to watch.

As I have noted before, the 2024 presidential election was the first in which the Democrats lost a culture war — and badly. The Democrats take their marching orders from the LGBT movement and thus had adopted the transgender agenda wholesale. The Biden administration handed them everything they asked for.

It cost them at the polls — big time. Trump ran ads highlighting the insanity of their positions, and even now, his transgender policies are more popular than his presidency.

The problem for the Democrats is that they went all in. They accused their opponents of “transphobia”; they claimed that opposing their agenda would mean the death of “trans kids”; they insisted that sex changes for children were suicide prevention; they claimed that “transgender women are women.”

Now, those positions are, for the moment, politically unviable. But what are they supposed to do?

That is the subject of a 2,000-word report in The New York Times on July 13 by Charles Homans titled “Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.” The subtitle sums up the dilemma: “The party’s vanguard position got ahead of voters in 2024, and the internal debate now underway reveals an uncertainty on how to adapt.” Indeed. The Democrats are trapped by their own rhetoric. As Homans put it:

In some areas, Democratic politicians, taking cues from liberal advocacy groups, found themselves signing onto positions about which even their own voters were uncertain, and have become more so in recent years. This is particularly true of transgender rights, where polls now show majority support for some restrictions that advocates have fiercely opposed, and have sought to hold politicians accountable for backing.

Support for restrictions is growing among Democrats, too. A Pew Research survey in February found that 45 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning adults favored laws requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their sex assigned at birth, up from 37 percent just three years earlier. Democratic support for restrictions on medical care for transitioning minors and on bathroom use for transgender people has grown similarly.

Many GOP politicians are following Trump’s lead and running their own ads on the transgender agenda, including recently in Montana. Democratic strategists, Homans reports, “believe that these attacks did have an impact,” with one Democratic polling project finding that “among swing voters who broke for Mr. Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, 67 percent believed Democrats were ‘too focused on identity politics.’” Interestingly, even some LGBT activists recognize the problem:

“We haven’t been pragmatic for the last 10 or so years,” said Mara Keisling, the founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “And that’s killing us.” Republican candidates and outside groups spent more than $200 million on campaign ads in 2024 attacking Kamala Harris and Democratic Senate candidates in close races, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Mr. Tester in Montana, over transgender issues.

That, for the record, is an LGBT activist admitting what some of us have been saying for years: That the transgender agenda has been a top-down imposition by those in power on the public, not pragmatic poll-following. America didn’t buy into trans. Trans was forced on America. The Democrats have paid a price for that, and now they’re scrambling.

According to Homans, some Democrats are attempting to pivot by opposing bans on trans-identifying athletes in female sports by insisting the decisions should be made locally. That is grimly funny considering that they are only making the concession because they must.

Others are insisting on an individualized approach, claiming that the issue is “complicated” and should be decided on a case-by-case basis, something they are only saying for public consumption but flies in the face of everything they pushed over the past decade. In fact, they are still essentially being held hostile by LGBT activists:

Democratic politicians still diverge from the party on the issue at their peril. In May, The Dispatch asked Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona about his views on transgender athletes’ participation in sports. “As a parent of a daughter, I think it’s legitimate that parents are worried about the safety of their daughters, and I think it’s legitimate for us to be worried also about fair competition,” he said, adding, “I think the parents of these trans children also are worried, legitimately, about the health and wellness of their kids.”

The statement earned him rapid condemnation from a raft of LGBTQ groups in Arizona that had previously endorsed him. Mr. Gallego has not spoken publicly about the subject since. Like most Democratic politicians contacted for this story, he declined to comment.

Indeed. The Democrats are trapped between the pincers of LGBT activist groups and voters who are sick and tired of being lectured to and told to believe things their eyes tell them not to. They are losing this culture war, and the GOP should continue hammering them with it constantly. For a decade, the Democrats berated, hectored, and even prosecuted anyone who opposed their agenda. Receiving a taste of their own medicine is not only good for them but also for the country.