Powerful Democratic think tank's reset on transgender rights alarms advocates

A leading Democratic-aligned think tank is urging political leaders to defend transgender people from discrimination while accepting that restrictions on their participation in sports “may be appropriate under some circumstances,” a proposed political reset that is already drawing criticism from within the LGBTQ+ community.The Center for American Progress published the six-page report, “Ending the Backlash on LGBTQI+ Issues,” on Thursday. Written by Caleb Smith, CAP’s director of LGBTQI+ health policy, and Winnie Stachelberg, a longtime LGBTQ+ policy strategist who founded the organization’s LGBTQI+ policy program, the document offers Democrats a framework for responding to Republican attacks on transgender health care, athletics and military service.Smith, who is trans, said the paper is intended to give leaders a clear, accessible way to discuss issues that the political right has saturated with misinformation.The goal, he told The Advocate, is to “turn down the temperature” while “aggressively holding the line” on civil rights for transgender people and the broader LGBTQ+ community. The paper is not meant to prescribe every policy, Smith said, but to establish principles that remain unchanged by elections or polling.Stachelberg said the report is also designed to prevent Republicans from continuing to define the debate. Republicans around the country have focused their attention on stripping rights from transgender people, a group that represents less than 2 percent of the U.S. population.“The backlash here, the attacks by the far right, the hundreds of millions of dollars of ads fueled by the far right are threatening hard-won civil rights protections and really some of the most vulnerable in our society,” she said. Its purpose, she added, is partly to “take the issue off the table as a Republican attack line.”A reset shaped by political headwindsThe report declares that civil rights are inalienable and should not depend on “shiftin