{"id":2581206,"date":"2026-03-18T08:27:02","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T12:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/transgender-skepticism-is-the-ultimate-bipartisan-issue\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T08:28:58","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T12:28:58","slug":"transgender-skepticism-is-the-ultimate-bipartisan-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/transgender-skepticism-is-the-ultimate-bipartisan-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"Transgender Skepticism Is The Ultimate Bipartisan Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Ftransgender-skepticism-is-the-ultimate-bipartisan-issue%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2581206&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The article argues that debates over transgender policy reveal a broader cross-partisan disagreement rather than a simple left-right divide. Focusing on a california Assembly Health Commitee hearing, it analyzes two bills-AB 1540, which would route LGBTQ+-specific youth suicide-prevention calls to a specialized subnetwork, and AB 1876, which would mandate insurance coverage for gender-affirming treatments-and how the testimony around them unfolded. The piece emphasizes that opposition to these policies came from a wide spectrum,including many who identify as left-leaning or progressive,and not only from conservatives.<\/p>\n<p>Key moments are highlighted to illustrate the complexity of the debate. It recounts the testimony of Johnny Skinner,a detransitioner who described feeling harmed by some aspects of his transition-era care and by a hotline staff response he perceived as biased toward <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/its-time-to-save-american-children-from-our-generations-mengele-experiments\/\" title=\"It\u2019s Time To Save American Children From Our Generation\u2019s Mengele Experiments\">promoting gender-affirming care<\/a>. It also covers Layla\u2019s account, a detransitioner who spoke against presurgical interventions and emphasized harms she associates with early gender-identity treatments. The narrative portrays a parade of opposition voices from LGB groups and Bay Area activists, suggesting that a sizable portion of the mainstream LGBTQ community and other progressives oppose parts of transgender ideology or policy approaches. The author argues that the hearings were tightly controlled and framed as a moral struggle between \u201ckindness\u201d and \u201chate,\u201d and concludes that the mainstream is awakening across partisan lines-contrasting this with the CA legislature\u2019s aggressive stance. The piece ends with a brief author bio for Chris Bray.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>It may not be an 80\/20 issue. It may be turning into a 90\/10 issue.<\/p>\n<p>The media depiction of the transgender debate is that it stands atop a left\/right divide: left for, right against. Democrats for, Republicans against. In Texas, the creepy fake preacher and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico keeps <a href=\"https:\/\/www.queerty.com\/james-talarico-just-pushed-back-against-the-latest-right-wing-smears-in-the-best-possible-way-20260310\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pounding the theme<\/a> of far-right hate, framing trans stuff as an us-vs.-them question, decent progressives fighting against ignorant bigots who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/JamesTalaricoTX\/videos\/texas-republicans-have-passed-their-anti-trans-billover-and-over-christians-used\/1016410325787907\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">bully trans kids<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But a remarkable debate in a California legislative committee this week over a pair of pro-transgender bills brought out a crowd of bitterly angry people who loathed the legislation and what it represented, and they weren&rsquo;t at all who you would expect. You may not read this sentence many times in your life, but far-left San Francisco lesbians agree with you.<\/p>\n<p>You can watch the March 17 meeting of the Assembly Health Committee <a href=\"https:\/\/www.assembly.ca.gov\/media\/assembly-health-committee-20260317\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">here<\/a>, though the whole hearing on a bunch of bills is just one video. To watch the two discussions I&rsquo;m about to describe, you&rsquo;ll want to fast-forward to 43:27, then to 1:22:30.<\/p>\n<p>The first of those two debates covered <a href=\"https:\/\/leginfo.legislature.ca.gov\/faces\/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1540\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AB 1540<\/a>, a bill that would require the state to bifurcate its <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >suicide-prevention telephone service<\/a> so LGBT youth who call the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.988california.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">988 crisis hotline<\/a> will be transferred to a different call center for specialized <em>gay<\/em> suicide prevention: &ldquo;a subnetwork of LGBTQ+ specialized youth suicide prevention service providers.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>At 53:30 in the hearing video, you can hear the testimony of a young man named Johnny Skinner who called an LGBT suicide hotline as a teenager. He was on puberty blockers and estrogen, his physical development halted, and you&rsquo;ll be shocked to hear that he felt like he was in crisis. &ldquo;I was having thoughts of suicide because I didn&rsquo;t like anything about my body,&rdquo; he told the committee. &ldquo;The doctors told me I was supposed to be a girl, so I viewed my male body as defective.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>But Skinner&rsquo;s discussion with the LGBT suicide prevention specialists went off the rails when he told them he hated his body and was depressed <em>because of<\/em> his gender transition treatment: &ldquo;They got very quiet, and then they hung up on me, a suicidal child.&rdquo; Here&rsquo;s a screenshot of that moment, with captions:<\/p>\n<figure><figcaption>\n<div>\n<p>         <span>Image Credit<\/span>Screenshot       <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Skinner understands what he experienced. The LGBT crisis center wasn&rsquo;t trying to get him through his crisis; they were trying to drive him forward through his transition, serving an ideology and rejecting dissenters. LGBT suicide call centers, he argued, would be staffed by &ldquo;an organization that believes children can be born wrong. An organization that doesn&rsquo;t want to hear about the harms of so-called gender-affirming care.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>The California legislature introduces over a thousand bills a year, so they slam legislation through committee hearings with a few minutes of debate. Limiting discussion, committees take a parade of &ldquo;me-toos&rdquo; after a small number of primary speakers, giving individuals and organizations a brief chance to tell legislators who they are and what position they take on the bill. The me-toos aren&rsquo;t allowed to make <em>speeches<\/em>; their abbreviated testimony is limited to name, organization, and for or against. (&ldquo;Chris Bray, The Federalist, against.&rdquo;) The opposition me-toos for AB 1540 start at 56:58, and you may want to take a few edifying minutes just to watch a long line of leftist Bay Area and Los Angeles <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/TERF_(acronym)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TERFs<\/a> who <em>loathe<\/em> transgender ideology.<\/p>\n<p>58:19: Tish Hyman on behalf of Black Lesbians of Los Angeles. &ldquo;I strongly oppose this bill.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>59:03: Arianne Geringer, from Oakland, &ldquo;on behalf of LGB,&rdquo; leaning into the microphone and <em>punching<\/em> the letters to make sure people heard the absence of the T in the name of the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alliance USA, opposed. <\/p>\n<p>1:01:10, opposition from Lesbians Advocating for a Resilient Future.<\/p>\n<p>1:01:17, a &ldquo;longtime San Francisco progressive Democrat and LGB activist, mother of a formerly trans-identified son,&rdquo; who says, &ldquo;I stand in strong opposition to this bill.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>And on and on. Is this left versus right? In increasingly obvious ways, a pro-LGB culture is deeply disturbed by the T. People you mostly wouldn&rsquo;t agree with agree with you on this.<\/p>\n<p>The debate closes at 1:06:11 with the distinctly strange author of the bill, Assemblyman Mark Gonzalez, saying that he&rsquo;s heard the opposition, &ldquo;those hateful voicemails, the ones claiming that this bill is about ideology or politics or some kind of agenda.&rdquo; But really, he says, the bill is just about helping kids. No amount of actual discussion can change his framing: good people versus bigots, kindness against being hateful. <\/p>\n<figure><figcaption>\n<div>\n<p>         <span>Image Credit<\/span>Screenshot       <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>You can see with your own eyes that he&rsquo;s lying. <\/p>\n<p>The second debate, the one that starts at 1:22:30, is about <a href=\"https:\/\/leginfo.legislature.ca.gov\/faces\/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1876\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AB 1876<\/a>, which would <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/hawaii-lawmakers-advance-bill-to-force-insurance-companies-to-provide-transgender-medical-treatment\/\" title=\"Hawaii Lawmakers Advance Bill to Force Insurance Companies to Provide \u2018Transgender\u2019 Medical Treatment\">require health insurance companies<\/a> to cover medical treatment on the basis of a person&rsquo;s declared gender identity. The parade of testimony here mirrors the last one, and I mostly won&rsquo;t dive back into the familiar details. <\/p>\n<p>But note the testimony of the person who just gives her name as Layla, at 1:32:12. A detransitioner, Layla describes &ldquo;childhoods filled with abuse&rdquo; for her and her peers, and doctors promising that surgery would fix their anxiety and pain. &ldquo;A few weeks after I turned 13, my breasts were amputated because my mother was told that I would kill myself if she didn&rsquo;t consent to the procedure. I became extremely suicidal after I was pumped with drugs and affirmed by all the trusted adults in my life that everything about my body was wrong.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Other countries, Layla adds, &ldquo;have stopped this barbarism.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>The opposition me-toos begin at 1:34:10, and it&rsquo;s the same parade of mostly Democrats and leftists. Second speaker: &ldquo;Bev Talbott, San Francisco Democrat with the Lesbian and Gay Courage Coalition.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Democrats and the media tell you that opposition to transgender ideology and transgender procedures for children is limited to a few people on the political right, extremists who live outside the American mainstream. They&rsquo;re lying.<\/p>\n<p>Both bills were successfully voted out of committee, by the way. The California legislature is on a death march to trans Jonestown, and mere reality won&rsquo;t stop them. But the rest of the country is waking up, quickly, and doing so across partisan lines. <em>This<\/em> is the mainstream, and the mainstream is rising.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at &#8220;Tell Me How This Ends,&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/chrisbray.substack.com\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8211; Trans debate framed as left-right; 90\/10 shift.<br \/>\n&#8211; Media frames trans debate as left-right; 90\/10.<br \/>\n&#8211; Trans debate now seen as left-right; 90\/10 trend<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2086,"featured_media":2581207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/trans-youth-scaled-e1773835077990.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546,33651],"tags":[3667,4326,5894,8703,4019],"class_list":["post-2581206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","category-the-western-journal","tag-bipartisan","tag-policy","tag-politics","tag-skepticism","tag-transgender"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/trans-youth-scaled-e1773835077990.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2581206"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2581210,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581206\/revisions\/2581210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2581207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2581206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2581206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2581206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}