(LifeSiteNews) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom is the smoothest political operator the Democrat Party has, and there is little doubt that he plans to run for president in 2028. Newsom’s political skills are extremely impressive – and thus, it is significant that even he has not yet found a way out of the transgender trap.
As I noted in 2024, trans activists may have won the election for Donald Trump. For the first time in a generation, the Democrats lost a culture war, with the Trump campaign unleashing devastating ads targeting the Harris-Walz ticket, most memorably the “Kamala is for they/them” ad:
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, with the GOP holding the House, the Senate, and the White House, the Democrats realized that with their embrace of transgender ideology, they had finally pushed the American people too far. But after accusing the GOP of threatening the very lives of “transgender children” for opposing the radical LGBT agenda, they could not extricate themselves from that embrace very easily, either.
Newsom has been trying to triangulate by talking like a moderate while legislating like a radical. In March 2025, he interviewed Charlie Kirk (just six months before Kirk would be murdered by a twisted young porn addict with a trans-identifying boyfriend) and appeared to agree with Kirk on banning males from female sports. “I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness,” he told Kirk. “It’s deeply unfair.” Just months later, however, Newsom was fighting the Trump administration over that very issue in court.
As Newsom attempts to repeat Trump’s electoral strategy of taking the podcast world by storm, the transgender question continues to dog him. On the Shawn Ryan Show, he stumbled, prevaricated, but ultimately would not condemn the idea of an 8-year-old getting a sex change. The same thing happened when Ben Shapiro confronted Newsom on his own podcast earlier this month; Newsom would not say whether “boys can become girls.” Newsom knows they can’t, of course. But he can’t say so.
Now, a report from Axios indicates that the transgender issue is one of the Democrats’ primary concerns heading into 2028. “Republicans already are promising to air 2028 campaign ads blasting Democrats over the party’s support for trans rights, as polls show a majority of Americans favoring the GOP’s side on key parts of the debate,” Axios noted. “GOP candidates have been particularly aggressive with ads objecting to transgender girls participating in high school girls’ sports.”
Again, Gavin Newsom is the bellwether. “That Newsom looked unprepared for a Republican ‘gotcha’ question … made some Democrats wince,” Axios reported. “‘You need a clear answer, whatever it is,’ Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist Welcome PAC, told Axios.” Axios quizzed around 20 Democrats who are potential 2028 contenders and asked them a series of transgender-related questions. Most “didn’t want to talk about trans rights.” That is a massive shift from just a few years ago, when Democrats wanted to club Republicans over the head with the issue every chance they got. According to Axios:
- We chose questions based on those that Democratic candidates up and down ballots have encountered in interviews and ads for years.
- We asked: Should transgender girls be able to participate in girls’ sports? Do you believe transgender youths under age 18 should be able to be placed on puberty blockers and hormones? And what is your response to the question: “Can a man become a woman?”
- Former Vice President Harris, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, California Rep. Ro Khanna and Newsom were among those declining to comment or not responding.
It is frankly wild that AOC, Harris, and Booker, who were once at the front of the Pride Parade, are now declining to answer questions about “trans rights.” AOC, in fact, went hard after Newsom for appearing to agree with Charlie Kirk on the “fairness” issue in sports after their interview. Now, it appears that she doesn’t want to address the issue at all.
Only Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Pete Buttigieg were willing to answer. Shapiro referred to his previous comments on the issue, saying that local sports officials rather than politicians should decide, and Emanuel said that boys shouldn’t be able to play in girls’ sports, and men can’t become women, while also claiming that parents should be able to decide whether their children undergo sex changes.
Buttigieg also ignored most of the questions, echoing Shapiro’s position on sports leagues and calling vaguely for “compassion” to buy himself more time to see which way the wind is blowing. The LGBT activist outfit the Human Rights Campaign is pointing Democrats to Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who aired pro-trans ads to rebut GOP ads calling out her support for “men in girls’ sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms.”
If Newsom can’t figure out how to extricate himself from the death grip of the transgender movement without angering them, nobody can. He has been attempting to de-transition to a position of political palatability since Trump won in 2024. Those who want to know what the next stage of this culture war will look like should be watching him very closely.
