By Editor,James Cirrone

Copyright dailymail

Former Vice President Kamala Harris has said in her new book that she has ‘concerns’ about transgender athletes playing on girls’ sports teams.

Harris largely ignored this specific issue while she was in office and on the campaign trail last year.

But now, in her memoir titled ‘107 Days’, a reference to her historically short presidential campaign following Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal, Harris has staked out a much clearer position on trans athletes.

‘I agree with the concerns expressed by parents and players that we have to take into account biological factors such as muscle mass and unfair student athletic advantage when we determine who plays on which teams, especially in contact sports,’ she wrote in an excerpt obtained by Politico ahead of its release on Tuesday.

‘With goodwill and common sense, I believe we can come up with ways to do this, without vilifying and demonizing children,’ she added.

Harris also claimed Donald Trump and the Republicans misrepresented her position on youth sports by running an ad campaign last fall with the tagline ‘Kamala is for they/them. I am for you’.

She appeared to acknowledge that her lack of a clear message on trans issues allowed Trump to define her however he wanted, even conceding that the ads he ran amounted to a ‘winning message’.

Her rhetorical pivot comes after many national Democrats, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, have said it is unfair for trans girls to play high school sports.

Harris’ approach was generally to signal that she was in favor of protecting trans rights without getting into the weeds of what that actually entailed.

On March 31, 2024, Harris made a social media post speaking directly to the community on Transgender Day of Visibility, an annual event meant to raise awareness about discrimination the group faces.

‘Every person in our nation must have the freedom to be their true self and to live free from hate,’ she wrote on X. ‘On Transgender Day of Visibility, I say to all trans and non-binary people: We see you. We love you. We will never stop fighting for you.’

In a contentious October 2024 interview with Bret Baier of Fox News, Harris defended her stance on giving gender reassignment surgeries to prisoners.

‘Are you still in support of using taxpayer dollars to help prison inmates or detained illegal aliens to transition to another gender?’ Baier asked.

‘I will follow the law. And it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,’ Harris responded.

This was in reference to a Bureau of Prisons memo from 2018, where Trump administration officials acknowledged that they were legally obligated to provide hormone therapy and even sex reassignment surgeries to federal inmates if it was deemed medically necessary.

The New York Times reported that BOP officials during Trump’s first term did provide gender-affirming care, including hormone therapy, for a small group of inmates who requested it.

Because of that, Harris argued that the GOP’s ad campaign was akin to ‘throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house’.

But on the debate about biological men competing in women’s sports, Harris was notably silent.

However, the Biden administration proposed an under-the-radar change in April 2023 to Title IX, the law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in any federally funded educational program.

The change would have have prohibited outright bans on transgender athletes but would have also allowed schools to restrict trans participation if they could prove it would harm the ‘educational objectives’ of other students.

‘The [Education] Department recognizes that prevention of sports-related injury is an important educational objective in recipients’ athletic programs and that — as courts have long recognized in cases involving sex-separate athletic teams — fairness in competition may be particularly important for recipients,’ stated a portion of the proposed regulation.

This rule change was withdrawn from the Federal Register on December 26, 2024. The Biden administration cited ongoing Title IX lawsuits and criticism that the regulation’s language was too unclear as the reasons for its withdrawal.

In the aftermath of Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 election, prominent Democrats pointed out that Biden officials, nor Biden himself, ever articulated this more nuanced position to the American people.

‘The White House could have said something in the election, they could have said Democrats want rules too,’ said Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy at Third Way, a centrist think tank.

Erickson told Vox immediately after the election that his organization’s ‘number one’ messaging advice was that ‘Democrats want sports to be fair and athletes to be safe’.