VACPUSA

by worker-correspondent Gaia Willis
Broad Street Workers’ Club

Pete Buttigieg’s recent comments on transgender athletes were delivered with a “polished” and “composed” tone, using the language of balance, empathy, and moderation. He spoke of fairness, compassion, and the importance of leaving decision-making to local sports leagues and school boards. On the surface level, it seems almost reasonable and maybe even thoughtful, but if you peel back the carefully constructed framing, what you have is not moderation or compassion; it’s abandonment. 

At a time when the far-right is waging all-out legislative, cultural, and physical attacks on trans life, Buttigieg’s position amounts to nothing less than a quiet surrender. By deferring to local control and by echoing the far-right’s concerns regarding trans participation in sports as a matter of fairness, Buttigieg legitimizes their framing while retreating from the federal responsibility to protect marginalized communities. Worse still, this approach is years out of step with the political reality. In 2020 or 2021, calls for local decision-making by state legislatures, sports leagues, schoolboards, etc, might have been a reasonable strategy. However, in 2025, when dozens of state legislatures have already passed sweeping bans on trans participation in sports and restrictions on gender-affirming care, it is not neutrality; it is complicity. 

To abdicate and refuse federal responsibility now is to abandon trans people to a patchwork of hostile local governments. Many of which are openly motivated by far-right ideology. These comments do not exist in isolation; they are part of a broader pattern of liberal institutional retreat across the country, from the democratic party to the country’s universities and schools. In all cases, we see liberal institutions caving under pressure from a resurgent fascist movement. Whether it’s university presidents resigning under fascist political pressure or democratic officials hedging their support for trans rights, the logic is the same: withdraw from confrontation, preserve institutional stability, and sacrifice marginalized people in the process.

The rhetoric of “compassion,” “fairness,” and “balance” deployed by Buttigieg is not neutral; it is ideological. These words are chosen precisely because they obscure the power dynamics at play. By framing the issue as one of competing interests, trans women’s inclusion vs. “fairness” toward cis women, Buttigieg normalizes the idea that trans existence is something that must be weighed, negotiated, and possibly even curtailed for the sake of others. This is not a defense of trans people; it is a management strategy. It treats trans life not as something to be defended unconditionally, but as a disruption to be politely regulated. In this way, Buttigieg’s language parallels that of university administrators who speak of restoring order and maintaining open dialogue as they crack down on student protesters, fire staff, and dismantle DEI programs. In both cases, liberal institutions offer soothing rhetoric while carrying out the demands of the reactionary project. Their words say “compassion,” but their actions show containment, the maintenance of the status quo, and prevarication.

The insistence on local control is not simply a policy preference; it is a strategic retreat that has become dangerously outdated. In the early years of the trans rights movement, when opposition was scattered and diffuse, and state governments were not as explicitly hostile, this form of deference could be in line with the aims of local autonomy and trans rights. However, that moment has passed; by 2025, dozens of state legislatures have enacted sweeping bans on trans participation in sports, attacks against trans students, and restrictions on gender-affirming care. For example, Arkansas’s, now overturned, 2021 anti-trans healthcare law, Act 626, which banned gender affirming care for minors, set a dangerous precedent followed by states like Texas, which went on to investigate the parents of trans youth for child abuse, Florida, which passed a ban on trans girls participating in school sports, or Virginia, which replaced its model policies for the treatment of transgender students in public schools, with an explicitly transphobic set of policies that include, revealing a students gender identity to their parents, and the redefining of terms relating to sex and gender in a way that is designed to be trans exclusionary. Many of these local authorities are openly hostile to trans existence, wielding their power to enforce systemic exclusion and violence. To now devolve responsibility to these hostile local governments is to abandon any pretense of protection and instead actively subject trans people, particularly trans youth, to further social and legal precarity.

This pattern of retreat is not limited to federal officials like Buttigieg; it is playing out across a multitude of liberal institutions, most notably the education sector. Universities, once framed as bastions of progress and critical thought, have now increasingly capitulated to far-right pressure campaigns. Administrators have dismantled DEI programs, criminalized protests, and publicly distanced themselves from even tepid expressions of solidarity. The resignations of university presidents following presidential pressure, the censorship of pro-Palestine speech, the purge of ethnic and gender studies programs, and Buttigieg’s recent comments are all symptoms of the same fundamental issue: liberal institutions prioritizing reputation management and capital interests over the defense of marginalized people. Just like Buttigieg, university leadership deploys the language of “balance”, “compassion”, and “fairness” to obfuscate the violence that their concessions produce. In both cases, liberalism responds to reaction and fascism, not with resistance, but with negotiation, and in doing so, it further enables the rightward shift in the political terrain.

There is historical precedent for this kind of institutional retreat. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, liberal forces believed they could contain the rising tide of fascism through moderation, institutionalism, and compromise. Rather than mobilizing against reaction, they sought to preserve social order and the interests of capital, even if it meant conceding power to those who openly desired the destruction of liberal democracy. That strategy did not produce stability or a liberal victory; it produced catastrophe. Today we see the same process unfolding: a resurgent far-right advances an agenda of repression and social cleansing, while liberal institutions respond, not with resistance but with capitulation. Buttigieg’s statements, like the dismantling of DEI in universities or the criminalization of protest, are not aberrations; they are the logical outcome of a political class whose primary function is to maintain the capitalist order, even at the expense of the oppressed. 

As in Weimar Germany, liberalism today reveals itself to be not a bulwark against fascism, but its midwife. If we are to halt the far-right’s advance, it will not be done through appeals to civility or balance; it will be through organized collective resistance that rejects the false “neutrality” of liberal institutions and fights for the collective liberation of all. 

That means: standing in unapologetic defense of trans lives, organizing with tenants and workers to build material power and solidarity outside of the bounds of institutional respectability, voting in candidates that support the movement for trans rights, particularly in local and state elections, donating to and showing up for queer civil rights and mutual aid organizations. It means actively disrupting the narratives that normalize transphobia, everywhere that they appear, whether they come from a school-board meeting, a press conference, or the governor of your state. And it means refusing to sit idly, and instead constructing new forms of power and solidarity in the shell of a dying order. Liberalism will not save us; we must organize to save each other