The Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday to uphold restrictions on transgender female athletes drew a largely muted reaction, with Democrats mostly staying silent on an issue about which the vast majority of Americans agree.
Republicans celebrated the ruling, which upheld state bans on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. But few Democrats seemed eager to wade back into an issue that proved divisive in the last campaign cycle.
None of the Democrats most often mentioned as potential presidential contenders in 2028 reacted publicly to the Supreme Court ruling. Most Democrats competing for key congressional seats stayed similarly quiet.
The few who did speak out against the ruling are progressive Democrats who represent deep-blue districts or states. They include Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first openly trans member of Congress.
Most other Democrats stopped talking about trans politics long before the court’s ruling this week. In June, which is L.G.B.T.Q. Pride month, no Democratic candidate mentioned the word “transgender” in their TV ads, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking firm.
Their silence may be an attempt to deprive Republicans of campaign-trail ammunition, which might otherwise have helped the G.O.P. keep the issue in front of voters during this year’s highly competitive midterm election, in which control of Congress is at stake.
Two years ago, Republicans — led by President Trump — seized on the issue of trans athletes competing in women’s sports to cast Democrats as valuing what they described as unnatural behavior over fairness and even safety.
The fairness issue resonated with so many Americans that most Democrats simply stopped talking about it. A New York Times/Ipsos poll conducted in January 2025 showed that nearly 80 percent of Americans opposed allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports.
That didn’t stop some Republicans from trying to bring attention to it again this week.
“BIG WIN: The United States Supreme Court just RULED AGAINST MEN PLAYING IN WOMEN’S SPORTS,” Mr. Trump posted on social media. “Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!”
Representative Ashley Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa, sought to use the silence of her opponent, State Representative Josh Turek, to question his stance on the issue.
“Everybody should be out celebrating this decision, and I think the fact that he is not publicly saying something says a lot,” Ms. Hinson said in an interview.
Mr. Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist on the U.S. men’s wheelchair basketball team, told reporters at a campaign event on Wednesday that he supported the court’s decision.
“As someone that spent a lot of my life in high-level sports, I don’t believe that biological males should compete against females in sports,” he said.
May Mailman, director of the conservative legal organization Independent Women’s Law Center, said the ruling was less animating than it might have been a few years ago, because transgender advocacy feels “less in your face” now, particularly in red states.
Ms. Mailman recalled walking into retail stores across the country back when gender was one of the party’s most galvanizing topics and seeing mannequins of transgender people. That sort of display has become less prevalent, she said, as the opinion of most Americans has become clearer.
By winning in the court of public opinion, Republicans in some ways lost ground on a potent political issue, she said.
“It’s not a win in the sense that you’ve gained something new,” Ms. Mailman, who served as deputy assistant to the president and senior policy strategist in the Trump White House last year, said of this week’s decision. “Instead, they are affirming something that everyone now knows to be true.”
One explanation for the lack of focus on the trans decision could be that it landed on the same day as rulings rejecting an effort to end birthright citizenship and loosening campaign finance restrictions.
Still, a small number of liberal Democrats did not shy away from the issue.
And Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who is challenging Senator Ed Markey in a primary election, seized the ruling to appeal to progressives. Mr. Markey also spoke out against the decision on Tuesday.
But it was Mr. Moulton who faced a backlash two years ago, after telling The New York Times that he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”
He adopted a starkly different tone on Tuesday.
“These blanket bans go way too far, targeting recreational athletes who just want to play with their friends, invading their privacy, and letting the government micromanage local schools,” Mr. Moulton wrote on X.
Most other Democrats, however, seem to have taken their cues from an entirely different kind of backlash, notably former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat to Mr. Trump in 2024. The Democratic Party concluded in a report this year that Ms. Harris’s loss was partly fueled by Mr. Trump’s “highly effective” attacks on her comments defending transgender rights.
The report urged Democrats running for office to avoid “identity politics” in favor of cost-of-living concerns.
Some in the G.O.P. are betting that the issue will resurface with renewed intensity if Democrats retake power.
“It’s kind of like D.E.I.,” Ms. Mailman said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that the Trump administration has sought to eliminate. “Is D.E.I. gone, or is it hibernating?”
Matt Zdun contributed reporting.
