Ed Markey showed Democrats how to defend trans people and win elections

For nearly two years, Democrats have been conducting an autopsy on the 2024 election and somehow keep discovering the same convenient cause of death: transgender people.We have been listening to versions of this argument since the morning after the election. Democrats need to stop talking about pronouns, bathrooms, transgender athletes, and “identity politics,” a sly term increasingly used to describe the apparently embarrassing act of standing up for minority groups. We’ve been urged to stop shaming voters, moderate our positions, change the subject, and move toward an imaginary political “center” that keeps moving further right, while never appearing too enthusiastic about defending the tiny minority Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars turning into a national punching bag.Related: Pro-trans rival draws cheers after Rep. Seth Moulton booed at Boston No Kings rallyOn Tuesday, Democratic voters in Massachusetts were presented with about as clean a real-world test of that theory as American politics is likely to provide. Senator Ed Markey, 80 years old and practically designed to be vulnerable to an argument about generational change, faced 47-year-old Congressman Seth Moulton, one of the most prominent Democrats arguing after Donald Trump’s victory that his party needed to rethink its approach to transgender athletes. Markey swept the floor with him, winning by nearly 30 points.Stale, hand-wringing, right-of-center Democrats, take notice. People may finally be sick and tired of saccharine, pseudo-polite politicians willing to sacrifice minority groups in pursuit of an imaginary middle ground with a far right that has no intention of meeting them there.Moulton entered this national conversation immediately after the 2024 election when he said he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” presenting the comment as something Democrats had become too afraid to say. He later insisted t