Kamala Harris avoided directly answering whether she supports cross-sex medical treatments during an ABC interview released this week.

When asked this week whether she believes “transgender Americans should have access to gender-affirming care,” Harris deflected, pointing to Donald Trump’s healthcare plans. Eventually, she said “that is a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary. I’m not going to put myself in a position of a doctor.”

The response marks a major pivot for Harris, who in 2019 expressed support for taxpayer-funded sex change procedures for prisoners and illegal immigrants in detention centres. It’s part of a broader shift within the Democratic Party toward a more moderate position on transgender issues.

Significantly, the question was not about the more contentious issue of transgender children, but about transgender treatments in general. When prompted again for a direct answer, she said, “I believe that all people should be treated with dignity and respect, period, and should not be vilified for who they are, and should not be bullied for who they are.”

Weeks earlier, Colin Allred, the Texas Democratic candidate attempting to unseat Ted Cruz, broke with the Democratic mainstream on trans sports participation following related attack ads from his opponent. “I’m a dad. I’m also a Christian,” he said. “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports, or any of this ridiculous stuff Ted Cruz is saying.”

The Biden-Harris administration has also significantly softened its position on trans issues this year. Previously, the White House firmly endorsed transgender treatments for minors and led a whole-of-government promotion of trans issues, which included pressure from the Department of Justice on states restricting child transitions.

But this summer, the Biden administration announced that it opposed transgender surgeries for minors and, following complaints from trans activists, expressed support for “gender-affirming care for minors like mental health care”, declining to explicitly endorse hormones and puberty blockers.

Democrats have broadly supported cross-sex medical treatments, including for minors, for years. But the party’s position is unpopular with voters, as the majority of Americans oppose access to puberty blockers and hormones for children. Meanwhile, laws that would make these treatments illegal have been subject to attack from Democrats, who have characterised those policies as discriminatory.

As the party shifts toward the centre on trans issues, a vocal minority within the party continues to move in the opposite direction. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation this summer banning schools from disclosing children’s gender identity to parents, a bill sponsored by a number of vocal proponents of LGBT issues including state Sen. Scott Wiener.

A similar pattern played out in Minnesota, where state Rep. Leigh Finke, who is transgender, wrote a bill making the state a “refuge” for transgender medical procedures. The legislation, signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, gives Minnesota courts jurisdiction over custody cases related to cross-sex treatments, overriding custody laws of the child’s home state. Republicans have used this to attack Walz, arguing that it empowers the state to revoke child custody when parents oppose their child’s medical transition.

The Trump campaign and aligned PACs have been focusing on transgender issues in the closing weeks of the elections, targeting swing state voters with ads highlighting Harris’ various pro-trans statements throughout her career. Harris’ tone now is strikingly different even compared to this spring, when she wrote, “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.”

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is UnHerd’s US correspondent.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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