Kamala Harris’s forthcoming memoir, 107 Days, the story of her whirlwind presidential campaign, reportedly includes a concession that she has some concerns about 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,” Harris wrote in the book, according to Politico.

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“With goodwill and common sense, I believe we can come up with ways to do this, without vilifying and demonizing children.”

Throughout the campaign season, Republicans invested about $215 million into airing anti-trans TV ads that repeated claims about Democrats wanting “boys to play girls’ sports” and supporting taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for inmates. One ad — aired repeatedly during football games to reach male voters and suburban women — showed pictures of Harris next to a drag queen, a trans woman, and a nonbinary person; and ended with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

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Democrats largely avoided engaging with this issue. The Democratic National Convention didn’t have a transgender speaker and only mentioned trans issues once during a speech by Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Kelley Robinson. In one of her first TV interviews, Harris briefly said that the Constitution requires the government to provide medically necessary care, including gender-affirming care, to all inmates.

In the aftermath of the election, Harris and the Democratic Party have received flak for deciding to ignore the attacks rather than engage with them and assure the American people that liberals are not obsessed with trans people at the expense of kitchen table issues.

After Donald Trump’s victory, the Democratic Party began to feud over the role trans rights played in their loss. Some officials posited that the only way to win future elections is to throw trans people under the bus.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, for example, Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Seth Moulton (D-MA) both said that Democrats shouldn’t be defending “biological boys… playing in girls’ sports.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) also turned on trans athletes earlier this year.

In the excerpt, Harris reportedly emphasized her support for trans and all LGBTQ+ people, saying it’s “a community with which I have a deep connection.” She also defended the now-infamous 2019 clip Trump used in his attack ad that showed Harris saying trans inmates had a legal right to gender affirming care.

“There was no way I was going to go against my very nature and turn on transgender people.”

She also acknowledged that she should have given “more attention to how we might mitigate Trump’s anti-trans ads.” She called the ad a “winning message” but also said she didn’t think they were a “knockout punch.”

Out September 23, another excerpt obtained by The Atlantic showed Harris discussing how out former transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, would have been a great running mate had he been “a straight white man.”

“But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” she continued. “Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”

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