CV NEWS FEED // Shortly following his party’s loss in the 2024 presidential election, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democrat, came out against men competing in women’s sports. His about-face came after years of asserting that keeping men out of women’s sports was a violation of “transgender rights.”
However, following days of backlash from fellow Democrats, the lawmaker has continued to stand by his new position. In return, he blasted the hard-left wing of his party for “shaming” him and other dissenting voices on the issue.
Speaking to The New York Times last week, Moulton suggested that the Democratic Party must support womens’ sports or risk continuing to lose elections.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told the Times on Thursday, two days after Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to President-elect Donald Trump in a rout.
“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” the congressman added, “but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Moulton’s comments to the Times led to the resignation of Moulton’s campaign manager, and LGBTQ activists called for the congressman himself to resign from office.
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Instead, Moulton doubled down on his remarks during a Sunday MSNBC interview, affirming that he will remain in office.
“I was just speaking authentically as a dad about one of many issues where I think we’re just out of touch with the majority of voters,” the lawmaker told hostess Alex Witt.
He indicated that he stands by his remarks to the Times, though “maybe I didn’t get all the words exactly right.”
“But the point is,” Moulton continued, “the backlash I’ve received proves my point that we can’t even have these discussions as a party.”
He noted that Massachusetts Democratic Party Chairman Steve Kerrigan “wouldn’t even return my phone call.”
“And we’ve got to be able to have these debates,” Moulton stressed. “But there’s a wing of our party that shames us, that tries to cancel people who even bring up these difficult topics, and frankly shames voters.”
The congressman went on:
This is the same group of people who told us to defund the police, who told us there wasn’t a problem at the southern border, who told us that inflation was transient – whatever that means – and who told us that Biden was just fine. And they’re out of touch with voters.
“If we just listened to voters on all of these issues, they were telling us the truth,” he emphasized.
He argued that the Democratic Party needs to formulate a “winning strategy” and come up with “a reasonable position that’s appealing to most Americans” in order to “be totally united to defeat the Trump agenda.”
A retired Marine Corps captain and Iraq War veteran, Moulton has served in Congress since 2015, after upsetting a longtime incumbent in the 2014 Democratic primary. He represents Massachusetts’ 6th congressional district, a mostly affluent area in the northeastern part of the state.
From April to August 2019, Moulton had briefly mounted a longshot bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
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During his almost ten years in office, the lawmaker has compiled a consistently pro-LGBTQ voting record.
The Hill reported that “in 2022 and again in 2023, he cosponsored House Democrats’ Transgender Bill of Rights,” which allows men to join womens’ sports teams and competitions.
Moulton also voted against HR 734, a bill sponsored by Rep. Greg Steube, R-FL, also known as the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. Every single House Democrat opposed the bill in a strict party-line vote.
Steube’s bill “had sought to change Title IX to recognize sex as ‘based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth,’” The Hill noted.
Republican communicator Matt Whitlock pointed out that fact in an X (formerly Twitter) post Monday afternoon.
“Not only did Seth Moulton vote AGAINST the ‘Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act’ just one year ago, he called protecting women’s sports ‘part of a broader Republican attack on the rights of transgender people,’” Whitlock wrote.
“He doesn’t get credit for only learning after a beating,” the former Republican spokesman added, referring to the Democratic Party’s loss of both the presidency and Senate and likely failure to regain the House during the 2024 election cycle.
During the MSNBC interview, Moulton told Witt that he voted against the bill “because it went way too far.”
“But the problem is we don’t have an alternative,” he added. “We’re just ceding this issue and so many other issues, Alex.”
“Anyone who tries to have the debate as I just did, literally they tell you to resign,” Moulton said. “I mean, it’s insane.”
“We get innovation through debates and disagreement,” he stated. “That should be a hallmark of our party, because it’s a fundamental American value.”
Moulton is not the only Democratic member of Congress to call for the party to moderate its support for “transgenderism” in relation to women’s sports following Harris’ decisive loss.
In comments to the Times, Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-NY, said “Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left.”
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“I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports,” the Long Island lawmaker continued. “Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”
Suozzi, a self-professed Catholic, like almost all Democrats has also consistently voted in line with the LGBTQ movement throughout his congressional tenure. He also voted against HB 734.
Throughout Trump’s successful 2024 candidacy, he campaigned on prohibiting males from women’s sports competitions. Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration had pursued policies to undermine female sports at the behest of the “transgender” movement.
Trump ended up winning the vote of parents with minor children at home by nine points – after losing the group to the Biden-Harris ticket by six points in 2020.
A post-election survey conducted by Democratic research initiative Blueprint found that voters ranked “Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” as the third most important reason why they did not vote for her – following inflation and the border crisis.
