Why The Left Can’t Let The Transgender Debate Go

The following is an edited transcript from The Michael Knowles Show.

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The Left can’t let the transgender issue go away.

They were clobbered on it last November. They’ve been losing on it for years. Conservatives won the argument, decisively — and yet the Left keeps dragging it back into the spotlight. Now they’re pushing cases all the way to the Supreme Court under the guise of “defending girls’ sports,” even as the Court is actively weighing a major transgender-related case.

That context matters, because it’s why a recent Senate hearing landed the way it did.

During a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) hearing focused on abortion drugs, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), one of the best to ever do it, grilled Democrat witness Dr. Nisha Verma, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, on the question that has dominated American politics for the past five years.

The exchange, which quickly went viral, revolved around a simple inquiry: “Can men get pregnant?”

SPOILER ALERT: Men cannot get pregnant pic.twitter.com/08JwHUlxIj

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) January 14, 2026

Hawley is so good at this.

This question is just another version of “What is a Woman?” It’s another way of asking whether men can become women. It should be a layup for the Left. All they have to say is: “No, men cannot become pregnant.”

They could even try to weasel out of it. They could say something about “trans men” or redefine terms in the usual bureaucratic way. Any halfway competent liberal operative would recognize that this issue is pure political poison and dodge it immediately. 

But they can’t.

The transgender issue may be the single biggest loser for the Left in my lifetime — possibly even more damaging than their insistence on flooding the country with foreign criminals. And yet they refuse to abandon it. Not because it’s culturally edgy or titillating, but because it represents the inescapable conclusion of their entire political project.

Conservatives sometimes understate what’s actually going on here. We describe transgenderism as a natural outgrowth of gay marriage, gay rights, or feminism — movements that insist men and women are fundamentally the same. That’s part of the story, but it doesn’t go deep enough.

The reason Republicans and conservatives keep hammering this issue — and the reason the Left cannot give it up — is because it strikes at the core of liberalism itself.

At its heart, liberalism is about maximizing individual autonomy. That idea goes back centuries. The seed of liberalism says: I am primarily an individual, and I will control everything. I will control my destiny, my traditions, my morality, my religion, my history, and even my country. And eventually, I will liberate myself from my own body.

That is the culmination.

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It took centuries to get here. First, we had to liberate ourselves from the king. Then from the Church. Then from the family, through the liberalization of divorce. Then from history, through radical revisionism. Then from the nation, through the collapse of patriotism. Then from the moral order, especially in matters of sex.

And finally, liberation from biological reality itself.

Liberalism is not complete until the body is treated as irrelevant.

Which brings us, inevitably, to St. Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas identified the idea underlying transgenderism — that the body has nothing to do with who we really are — as one of the oldest and most dangerous heresies. The belief that I am born male but am really female, and therefore my body is wrong or bad, is not new. It appears in ancient heresies like Gnosticism and Docetism, which treated matter as corrupt and the physical world as a mistake.

Aquinas argued that these were the worst heresies of all, because they directly deny the central truth of Christianity: the Incarnation — that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

So it should not surprise us that modern liberalism, which often functions as an inversion of Christianity, would culminate in precisely this heresy. A political philosophy built on autonomy over reality eventually arrives at the rejection of the body itself.

That’s why the Left can’t walk away from this issue, no matter how badly it hurts them politically.

It isn’t just another policy debate.

It’s the logical endpoint of their worldview.