Vermont Democrats have picked a man who is living as a woman to run for governor in November against incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott.

The nomination was won by Christine Hallquist, a former utility executive, and it marks the growing willingness by progressives to endorse the transgender ideology’s claim that law and society should suppress legal, civic and biological distinctions between men and women, girls and boys.

Hallquist told the Associated Press that the local Democrats’ pro-transgender choice shows “We can be a beacon for the rest of the world.”

But for Vermont voters, Hallquist downplayed the Democrats’ endorsement of the ideology, saying:

The whole world is looking at this as a historic moment for a transgender candidate, but that’s not what Vermont looked at. Vermonters looked at “What’s Christine and her team going to do for Vermont?”

Vermont has a GOP governor but is a mostly small-government, left-leaning electorate that may wish to ignore the political implications of the transgender ideology.

However, there is some local opposition to the ideology. In 2016, students at Green Mountain Union High School in Chester, Vermont, protested the school’s transgender policy which allowed a single female student who claimed to be a boy to use the boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms at the school.

According to a report by the New York Times:

“I just want to be clear: I accept everybody being proud,” said Daniel Baldwin, a 17-year-old junior. Sitting at a table in the school hallway, a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” open in front of him, he wore a “Straight Pride” shirt pulled over a shirt dedicated to Slayer, a thrash-metal band. “Everybody has the right to be who they are.” Mr. Baldwin said he thought people should use male or female bathrooms depending on what was written on their birth certificates. But he also said he would defend A J [the transgender girl] if someone tried to bully him for being transgender, or even for using the boys’ bathroom. “I would step up for A J,” he said. “We’re Americans. We’re supposed to be civil.”

Nationwide, the transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents.

In practice, the transgender ideology requires women to silently accept men who claim to have a female “gender identity” in the women’s bathrooms, showers, and sports clubs. It also requires parents to stand aside when their children decide to begin a lifetime of risky and self-sterilizing medical treatments to help them pretend they are members of the opposite sex.

While multiple polls also show that most Americans wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex, Americans also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that a person’s legal sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by their biology.

Despite the huge expense, conflict, and damage to young people, the gender ideology is rapidly gaining power, aided by huge donations from wealthy individuals and medical companies. In Ohio, for example, in February, a judge forced parents of a teenage girl to give up custody so she can begin a lifetime of drug treatments and surgery that will allow her to appear as a male. Also, officials in New York and various universities have threatened to penalize people who do not refer to men as if they are women, and several judges have declared that Pentagon officials must accept recruits who want to change their sex.

Activists who support the transgender ideology claim that 0.35 percent of Americans are transgender. But a study of the 2010 Census reported that only 1-in-2,300 adult Americans had changed their name from one sex to the other.

The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of “gender” has already attacked and cracked many of the popular social rules which help Americans manage the cooperation and competition among and between complementary, different and equal men and women.

These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, practices to help teenagers, women’s expectations of beauty, culture and civic society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, and children’s sexual privacy.