She hasn’t changed — she just got caught.
She hasn’t changed — she just got caught.
K amala Harris has been caught out on the trans issue, and it’s even more embarrassing to watch than her maneuvering on other questions.
To summarize, CNN unearthed a 2019 ACLU survey in which she said she favored government-funded “gender reassignment” surgery for federal prisoners and detained immigrants, the Trump campaign has been hammering her on the issue in powerful ads, and Harris has been trying to talk her way out of her problem.
In her sit-down with Bret Baier a couple of weeks ago, Harris said that she simply wanted to “follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed.”
In an interview with Hallie Jackson of MSNBC, she repeated the same thing. Asked what she herself believes in, Harris insisted, “I think we should follow the law.”
As a general matter, following the law is a good idea, but this is a new approach for Harris — or an old approach that she is readopting for political reasons after abandoning it for political reasons. Sir Walter Scott came up with the famous line about the tangled webs we weave, but surely even the great novelist and poet would be hard-pressed to follow Harris’s tangles on this issue.
Back in 2019, she decided to throw her own California attorney general’s office under the bus on the question — precisely for fulfilling its legal duty. The AG’s office had sought to deny gender-reassignment surgeries to two inmates, and Harris wanted everyone to know that she was now very regretful about it.
Asked about the case by the Washington Blade at a press conference, she said, “I was, as you are rightly pointing out, the attorney general of California for two terms and I had a host of clients that I was obligated to defend and represent and I couldn’t fire my clients, and there are unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs.”
In other words, she was saying that her office fulfilled its legal obligation, but personally and as a matter of conviction, she was in a different place.
At that 2019 press conference, she maintained that she didn’t know the legal outrages that were being perpetrated in her name. “And it was an office with a lot of people,” she continued, “who would do the work on a daily basis, and do I wish that sometimes they would have personally consulted me before they wrote the things that they wrote?”
“Yes, I do,” she answered her own question.
Harris then boasted about moving California policy toward her deep-held beliefs. As the Blade put it, “Harris indicated she also helped the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation come to an agreement to set up a process where transgender inmates could obtain transition-related care, including gender reassignment surgery.”
“On that issue I will tell you I vehemently disagree,” Harris said of her own office’s legal position, “and in fact worked behind the scenes to ensure that the Department of Corrections would allow transitioning inmates to receive the medical attention that they required, they needed and deserved.”
Asked by the Blade whether inmates across the country should have access to gender-reassignment surgery, she was a little weaselly but implied a “yes”:
“I believe that we are at a point where we have got to stop vilifying people based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and we’ve got to understand that when we are talking about a particular transgender community, for too long they have been the subject of bias, and frankly, a lack of understanding about their circumstance and their physical needs in addition to any other needs they have, and it’s about time that we have a better understanding of that.”
In its piece, the Blade upbraided Harris for not being as forthright as Elizabeth Warren, whose campaign had said that the Massachusetts senator “supports access to medically necessary services,” including “at the VA, in the military or at correctional facilities.”
Harris basically adopted the Warren view in her ACLU survey: “It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition.”
“I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained,” she continued. “Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.”
This is not a factual statement about the state of play under the law but a normative judgment about what the rules should be — note the use of the phrase, “I will direct.”
So, if we map it out, there are three distinct phases in Harris’s posture. First, her office took the position it believed was demanded by the law. Then, she distanced herself from her office’s own work but wouldn’t commit herself fully to the maximalist trans position. Finally, she embraced the maximalist position.
Now that she’s paying a price for that, she has reverted to her first posture, with a little of the rhetoric of the second mixed in.
Noting that she didn’t get a clear answer on the treatment issue, Hallie Jackson asked Harris what she’d “want the LGBTQ-plus community to know as they’re looking for a full-throated backing from you for . . . trans Americans?”
Harris gave an answer that sounded like what she said in response to the Blade at the 2019 press conference before she’d embraced the maximalist position, emphasizing “dignity and respect” without committing to anything in particular.
As for claiming that President Trump had the same position as she did in terms of applying the law, that, too, is misleading. It’s certainly true that the Trump administration could have pushed back harder against the trans agenda. But Trump never personally called for gender-transition surgeries for prisoners, and even though his Bureau of Prisons officials said the law required them, they tightened up Obama-administration regulations around trans prisoners and gender treatments. (The first instance, after litigation, of such a surgery didn’t occur until 2022.)
The fact of the matter is that the state of the law is unsettled. The Fifth Circuit said in the case of Gibson v. Collier in 2019 that it is not cruel and unusual punishment, as the trans advocates contend, to deny surgeries to trans inmates.
“Under established precedent,” the opinion said, “it can be cruel and unusual punishment to deny essential medical care to an inmate. But that does not mean prisons must provide whatever care an inmate wants. Rather, the Eighth Amendment ‘proscribes only medical care so unconscionable as to fall below society’s minimum standards of decency.’”
This is another way that it makes no sense for Harris to say she’ll simply follow the law, since it’s in flux — it matters which way an administration is pushing. Obviously, no matter what Harris is saying now, she’ll accept whatever the ACLU and other trans advocates maintain the law is.
Finally, the Harris semi-walk-back is nonsense given that she’s been a strong supporter of the Equality Act, which would give the trans radicals everything they want, not just in prisons but in other women’s spaces. Unless Harris is disavowing the Equality Act, everything she says indicating a judicious neutrality on this issue is a ridiculous charade.
As on so much else in this campaign, Harris is trying to hide what she really believes — and doing it poorly.