Historically, the Alaska Democratic Party has tried to ensure that party delegates for the Democratic National Convention are evenly divided between males and females.

Due to a concern about delegate applicants who don’t personally identify as either male or female, state party leaders are now faced with a much more difficult challenge when attempting to equitably divide limited seats between men and women.

The 2024 delegate selection plan states that the number of male delegates and the number female delegates shall not vary by more than one.

If there are only nine members for a committee, for example, and all identify as either male or female, there can only be five members of one sex and four of the other.

With the introduction of “non-binary” or transgender delegates, the process is much more convoluted.

For starters, the party will accept – without question – the personal gender identification a delegate applicant claims. If a male identifies as female, for example, he would be included among the total number of female delegates.

When applicants identify as “non-binary,” they are counted as neither male nor female, and therefore do not count for either sex’s total number of delegates. If, for example, a nine-member committee had two people who identified as male and two who identified as female, while the other five claimed “non-binary” status, this would satisfy the requirement that the committee be evenly divided between males and females. In this case two apiece, with five others who are “non-binary.”

In theory, a committee could now be comprised entirely of biological males, whether actual men, men who identify as women or men who do not identify with either sex.

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