Radical gender ideology suffered another setback when the American Medical Association and American Society of Plastic Surgeons declared their opposition to sex-change surgeries for minors.
But just because conservatives are winning right now doesn’t mean we can get complacent.
Just a few years ago, it looked like progressives were right about being on the “right side of history.” They had every reason to believe that their triumph was inevitable and that, as with gay marriage, even rock-ribbed conservatives would soon embrace puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-rejecting surgeries for kids.
Republicans seemed to be laying the groundwork for a full-scale retreat on the issue.
As recently as 2022, Fox News ran a puff piece about a “transgender teen.” GOP governors in the ruby-red states of Utah and Indiana vetoed bans on biological males playing women’s sports. The Republican governors of Nebraska and Ohio vetoed bills banning child sex changes in 2021 and 2023, respectively.
But there were those who resisted. Activists like Riley Gaines, Chloe Cole, and Matt Walsh refused to give up the fight.
Republicans gradually realized that trans-ing kids was an 80/20 issue — and Democrats were on the wrong side of it.
Two months before the 2024 election, President Donald Trump stood on the debate stage and accused Kamala Harris of supporting taxpayer-funded sex changes for detained illegal immigrants. Many liberals tried to laugh it off. It seemed like a delusional mash-up of right-wing boogeymen. Then fact-checkers confirmed that, yes, Harris supported the policy in her responses to a 2020 ACLU questionnaire.
Suddenly, it was Democrats who were in retreat. Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, who previously turned California into a “sanctuary state” for kids seeking sex changes without parental consent, said on his podcast that letting males play women’s sports was “deeply unfair.” Progressive darling AOC removed her pronouns from her X bio.
Republicans, meanwhile, continued racking up wins. The Supreme Court’s June 2025 ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti upheld Tennessee’s ban on child sex changes.
A few months later, the Department of Health and Human Services published a report revealing what trans activists spent years refusing to admit: that sex-rejecting interventions for kids cause enormous harm and convey no proven benefits.
Then came the statements from the American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in which the physician groups said sex-rejecting “surgical interventions” should be “deferred to adulthood.”
Does this mean we’ve won? Not yet.
At last week’s Senate hearing on Netflix’s bid to buy Warner Bros.-Discovery, Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley alluded to a study showing that 40% of Netflix children’s content featured LGBT+ messaging.
If the acquisition goes through, giving Netflix control of the HBO Max streaming service as well as popular franchises like DC comics and Harry Potter, it would supercharge the trans propaganda machine that’s already aimed at our children.
If we lose them, we’ll lose all the progress we’ve made toward defeating and discrediting the radical gender ideology that seeks to mutilate them.
Now is not the time to retreat out of complacency, but to advance in the truth. When God comes to make Ezekiel a prophet during the Israelite exile, he tells him this: “When I say to a wicked person, ‘You will surely die,’ and you do not warn them or speak out to dissuade them from their evil ways in order to save their life, that wicked person will die for their sin, and I will hold you accountable for their blood.”
God gives Ezekiel this warning and the principle remains true today. We have to speak out against evil. We can’t remain silent, or we become liable for the result. We must remain on the advance, proclaiming the truth, pushing back darkness, and fighting for our future and that of our posterity.
Fortunately, figures like Hawley, Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, and even President Trump have all raised concerns about the Netflix deal.
Conservatives should push harder for laws that keep children and young teens off social media.
These platforms distance kids from their own embodied existence. They have negative mental health impacts, and one study found that 62.5% of kids who experienced “a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria” had at least one preexisting mental health disorder. And they expose children to toxic online communities, where they’re deceived into thinking that hormones and surgeries will solve all their problems.
This is not the time for conservatives to become complacent. After all, if we allow Democrats to regain the House or Senate, radical gender ideology will be right back at the top of their agenda. It still is in every blue state. Yet another reason we have to show up and beat them at the polls.
We’ve succeeded against all odds in rolling back a cause Democrats believed was the civil rights movement of our time. But if we take our foot off the gas now, radical gender ideology could someday rise again — and we might not be able to stop it next time.
Daniel Hayworth is a conservative writer, U.S. Army veteran, and Lead Pastor of Vintage Church’s Harker Heights location in Harker Heights, Texas.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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