Political leaders in Illinois are speaking out against some Democrats who have backtracked on their transgender support since President Donald Trump’s election win.
Among the Democrats who have recently made statements breaking from the party on transgender issues are California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Newsom, who has long been considered an LGBTQ+ ally since he became the first U.S. mayor to recognize same-sex marriages in 2004, recently said in the debut episode of his new podcast that transgender girls and women participating in female sports leagues is “deeply unfair.”
Emanuel, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Japan during former president Joe Biden’s administration and has reportedly been eyeing his own run for president, also chimed in on transgender issues during a recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. During this episode, Emanuel suggested Democratic leaders have been too fixated on transgender policies instead of issues like education.
“Look, in seventh grade, if I had known that I could have said the word ‘they’ and got in the girls’ bathroom, I would have done it,” Emanuel said.
Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who succeeded Emanuel in 2019, called Emanuel and Newsom’s comments “despicable.”
“And that’s probably the kindest word that I can use,” Lightfoot told Windy City Times.
Newsom and Emanuel join a handful of Democratic leaders who have joined Republicans in scapegoating transgender people since Kamala Harris’ election loss. Others include Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who suggested in 2024 that Harris’ loss had to do with the Democratic party’s embrace of transgender rights.
Lightfoot, along with a handful of other political leaders in Illinois, have rebuked this idea.
“We did not lose the November election or any other election because of trans kids participating in sports or over a bathroom bill—we just did not,” Lightfoot said. “There are a lot of other factors that went into this.”
Lightfoot said she felt impassioned as a Black lesbian woman to speak out on this issue because it reminds her of the kinds of attacks she faced growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“It conjures up all the hateful rhetoric and tropes that have been used for decades to deny a vulnerable minority the full rights of citizenship, and it’s appalling that Democrats would walk in the exact same hateful footsteps as Republicans on this issue,” Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot suggested that some Democrats are playing into culture wars at the expense of transgender people in order to gain easy political points, and she said people should take note of which politicians are playing into Republican’s hands.
“It’s high time that we raise our voices and, frankly, take names of the people who aspire to higher office or aspire to get back into the game, but are doing it by taking this awful tactic of the Republicans,” Lightfoot said. “I’m deeply offended by it.”
Brian Johnson, CEO of Equality Illinois, accused those Democratic leaders of “bullying trans people” and “doing the Republicans’ dirty work.”
“When Democratic leaders echo Republican talking points on trans issues, they fail in two ways,” Johnson said. “First, they reinforce harmful rhetoric that has real-life consequences—studies show a 72% rise in trans suicides in states that attempted to pass anti-trans laws. Second, they betray Democratic values.”
Additionally, Democrats who are backtracking on their support for transgender people are doing harm to the party as a whole by turning voters away from them, Johnson said.
“Trans people are not the reason 3 million fewer Americans showed up to the polls in 2024 compared to 2020,” Johnson said. “If Democrats want to win voters back, they must focus on the issues that matter—like the economy, healthcare and Supreme Court appointments—instead of attacking a vulnerable group they should be protecting.”
Transgender people are estimated to make up just .6% of Americans aged 13 and older, but they have become one of the Republican party’s main targets, with Republicans spending nearly $215 million on anti-trans ads during the 2024 election cycle. This accounted for 41% of TV ads in the weeks leading up to the election.
Since Trump’s win, the president has signed a fury of anti-trans executive orders attempting to erase their recognition from public life, prevent trans-affirming healthcare, ban transgender people from the military and limit trans participation in sports. Meanwhile, Republican-led states continue to push anti-trans legislation fueling such discrimination.
But polling suggests these anti-trans attacks are not effective in motivating voters, Johnson said.
One poll released in October 2024 by Data for Progress found that 61% of Democrats and 58% of Independents described these ads as “sad and shameful.” Even 41% of Republicans agreed with this sentiment, while the majority of voters said the ads were “mean-spirited” and “out of hand.”
Additionally, 85% of Republicans said candidates should back away from transgender-related messaging, with 75% of Democratic voters and 82% of Independents agreeing.
“The data is clear,” Johnson said. “Attacking trans folks and their rights is not a winning issue.”
Caius Willingham, policy analyst at Advocates for Trans Equality, echoed Johnson’s comments, saying “although President Trump indisputably has made attacks against our community central to his campaign, it’s unwise to attribute his success to his fearmongering.”
“Regardless of how one interprets the election results, nothing supports abandoning an entire community as its civil rights face dire threats—that calculus is morally indefensible,” Willingham said.
Whether the Democratic Party as a whole will shift toward the right on transgender issues remains to be seen, but Senate Democrats were unified in a March 3 vote that blocked a Republican-led bill that would ban transgender girls from girls’ sports in federally funded schools. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) spoke on the Senate floor condemning the bill as a “dangerous use of the powers of government to target student athletes of all ages.”
A number of other party leaders in Illinois have also indicated they will not back down from supporting the transgender community.
U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) also reaffirmed his support for the trans community during a virtual town hall he hosted March 5, where the congressman said he wants to “make it clear that we should never abandon our friends, and that’s not how you succeed.”
State Sen. Mike Simmons (7th District), the first openly gay member of the Illinois Senate, said the trend of Democrats turning on trans people is “disgraceful.”
“I don’t think there’s any excuse for any politician to blame and impugn trans people for any election results, period,” Simmons said. “You’re either for human rights or you’re not.”
State Rep. Kelly Cassidy (14th District) told Windy City Times Democrats who are breaking from the party on supporting transgender rights are “falling for the oldest trick in the book.”
“The entire goal of this administration and their politics is to divide, and believing that by tossing this small segment of our base under the bus is going to save anyone else is about the dumbest thing I can imagine,” Cassidy said.
The issue came up recently at a town hall she hosted, where somebody asked Cassidy if she thought transgender issues were the reason Democrats lost the 2024 election, she said.
“At that point, I said that what we’re not going to do is throw anybody in the base under the bus,” Cassidy said. “We didn’t lose because of this. We lost because we failed to work together. I’m happy to engage in good-faith conversations to compromise on policies, but what I will never do is compromise on people.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has passed a handful of bills supporting transgender people, also discussed the impact of identity politics on the election during his recent appearance on The View, where he said his experience going to protests, including some supporting LGBTQ+ people, with his mother “taught me to stand up for people who sometimes don’t have any power.”
Current Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office did not return requests for comment, but Johnson has also signaled continued support for the transgender community by signing an executive order in December 2024 to address fatal violence against transgender people in the city.
Abandoning the trans community is not the right path forward for the Democratic Party as it looks to recover from its 2024 election loss, many of Illinois’s leaders said.
“We’ve got to be the party that continues to have a heart for working people [and the] underdog,” Lightfoot said. “And we’ve got to stand up and support the minorities in number, minorities in other definitions and demographics, and for people who need advocates.”