So what are we disagreeing on?
… I was surprised when I read it because I was like, ‘Why aren’t you talking about this?’
You tell me.
Who pays attention to the offical platform? A political platform has nothing in particular in common with what a party actually intends to do. It’s mainly just a sop to tradition; parties write up a platform because they are traditionally supposed to, and then they and everyone else ignores it.
On the specific question of trans kids (or adults) participating in sports, why don’t we just do what we do with literally every other sports-related issue and let the people who run sports leagues decide who is eligible to participate? Can’t we just call out the ridiculous presumption that this is something the Federal government needs to have a policy on? Next we’re going to have Presidential debates about how many pitches middle school kids should be allowed to throw in a game?
I agree with BB that if we give in on this, the transphobes will just move on to other attacks. But that doesn’t mean that those other attacks will be exactly as difficult to rebut. For most Americans, it’s a pretty huge leap from “This person shouldn’t be allowed to play on the girl’s basketball team” to “this person should be prevented from getting medical care”.
That seems like the most sensible position, but some here have called that an abandonment of trans people and trans rights.
It would be a different story if Republicans weren’t trying to prevent that very thing. Of course.
Right. The big issue was Inflation, and unless Harris used the Big Lie tactic of trump, who basically claimed he could fix inflation at the stroke of a pen- there was little she could do. Explaining how inflation works doesnt cut it with most voters. Voters believe the president can do almost anything- and there was trump making that exact promiser.
Yep. I despair sometimes.
Not sure if he said that, but some have.
Right.
Having read through all 287 posts (so far), I, a straight, white, cis male, am ready to throw in my two cents.
The bigots are using fear as a weapon. And the “them” they’re using against the entire LGBTQ+ population to stoke that fear is specifically the transwoman athlete. Why transwomen athletes? Because the bigots are stoking fears that our precious daughters will be raped in the locker room or at summer camp by some man who got in there by calling himself a woman, and the libruls are standing by and letting it happen.
Fear is a much better motivator than bigotry. Take a look next door at The Male Inequality Problem thread, where women are voicing their very legitimate fear of being alone with men they don’t know.
Are we calling those posters bigots? Of course not, we’re giving them space to vent, reassuring them.
So when we run up against someone who starts in parroting the transwoman athlete argument, let’s answer them with, “What are you REALLY afraid about?” Because it sure ain’t that a transwoman is going outrebound their daughter.
Unwind that, separate the fearful from the bigots, reassure the fearful, and then we can target our rage at the bigots and demogogues.
I question this. I think they mostly knew that the Biden administration couldn’t set price levels. But they nonetheless think that when something bad happens, that’s a good reason to make a substantial leadership change. In poly sci land, this is called blind retrospection. Here’s an article describing it:
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Vanderbilt University)
…we did.
This was the default. For decades.
Then people started to lose their minds. Literally.
JK Rowling is representative of that. One minute she was a run-of-the-mill children’s book author with relatively left-wing political views. Nek minnit: she is funding anti-trans campaigns and using her platform to express the most appalling, transphobic rhetoric.
I’m not going to name them but we had a couple of people posting here who were two of my favourite posters. Then they fell down the rabbit-hole. Being anti-trans became a core part of their identity.
And a lot of these people had influence. They are on school boards. Sports organisations. And over in the UK for example they managed to ban transgender women from most sports without any help from the government or otherwise.
That’s the inherent problem now with “leaving it to the sports organisations”. Back before a lot of people started to lose their collective minds, this wasn’t a problem. The world isn’t the same any more. I’ll point again to the 200 million dollar anti-trans campaign. I have no doubt this helped push the discourse and had an impact on polling.
The thing is, I don’t think the 67% of Democrats who think “men should be barred from competing in women’s sports” are hateful bigots. I think they got push-polled. I think all of the polling in this area is problematic to a degree. I think that it would be relatively easy to turn this around. But it would take a co-ordinated effort to counter the propaganda and to reset the narrative.
Not any more. Not if you want to protect the right of trans women to participate in sports to any significant degree. The bigots are extremely well funded and have control and influence over the media and social media ecosystem. People are getting lost in disinformation spheres and silos. You need to counter that.
If you don’t want “federal government involvement”, then you need to win the propaganda war and push out the bigots and those that have fallen for the bigots’ propaganda. That won’t be easy. Again, points to the UK.
And because it won’t be easy, then (worldwide) it is likely the only way to protect trans rights to access sports will be at the central government level.
I’m not sure its a huge leap. Trans kids healthcare is practically banned in the UK now. Just googling quickly and this just happened in Texas.
It escalating pretty quickly. And some parts in America (just like abortion) will be worse than other parts. But it’s all part of the ongoing balkanisation of the US. There will be immigrant sanctuary cities. Trans sanctuary cities. Abortion sanctuary cities. Places where it will be relatively safe to be trans in public. And places where it will not.
I can’t see how you deal with that in any other way but at the federal level. But I don’t see that happening UNLESS the dems start to actually take this seriously. I always call out the dems and the “left-wing” parties more than MAGA for a reason. You can’t control what they do. But we do have an influence on the “left” and “centre” parties in our respective homelands. So it all starts there.
I may add something later but I just want to say that @Banquet_Bear is killing it. I’m glad you’re on my side.
I got the impression from reading the DMN article that it’s a condition of their settlement with the state about breaking their absurd laws about providing gender-affirming care. It’s not so much the hospital gleefully signing on to do that, it’s more that they were caught breaking the law, no matter how absurd or hateful the law is, and this was part of the agreement to settle.
…I mean, that’s bad, right?
And it materially doesn’t matter how we ended up with detransition clinics, but now we have detransition clinics. It’s a very clear signal. Trans kids won’t get the healthcare they need in this state.
The options are detransition, defy state law, hide, or escape.
Some won’t take these options. In the UK since they banned trans healthcare for kids there has been a documented surge in (trigger warning)
…
…
The reason why many trans people are calling these policies genocidal is because they are. The goal here, if successful, is the deliberate, systematic destruction of an identity, in whole or in part. Detransition, hide or run.
Thank you.
Unfortunately most people unfortunately cannot see how bad it already is, and how quickly it will get orders of magnitude worse. They don’t want to talk about sports because if we don’t talk about it, the problem goes away.
Yet meanwhile…in Texas, detransition clinics. That are forced to pay the state 10 million dollars. Free for all patients. With a promise to do that to every single hospital that offers trans affirming care for kids.
I mean seriously. Jesus fucking christ. It isn’t going to just stop at sports. You’ve got to hold the line at sports. You’ve got to freaking talk about it.
OK, fine, but that still doesn’t mean the Democrats really did anything wrong, something that they’re still beating themselves up with two years later. The electorate was hungry for change. The UK and the German incumbent parties also got smoked, and Canada’s incumbents were at risk of no longer being a national party until Trump helped them with his talk of annexing the Nordentenland.
The US public shifted dramatically in the last 20 years on gay rights mainly on the angle that the laws we had restricted freedom and got the government involved in a lifestyle that didn’t hurt anyone. This is how a lot of public opinion has shifted o civil rights throughout American historyn. Obviously there is a ceiling to this - gay people don’t just have a lifestyle and the government actually does need to intervene to prevent discrimination in all other aspects of society.
However, a huge number of Americans have different views depending on whether they interpret the issue of civil rights as freedom vs forced acceptance, and the strategy to try to maximize acceptance of trans rights doesn’t have to be maximalist one size fits all. In my extremely blue state of Massachusetts we absolutely should have a state guarantee for trans people to be allowed to play sports based on self id. In more conservative states and on the federal level, the case is a lot easier that laws against trans healthcare take away freedom and should be opposed.
Of course it is. My point was that the hospital didn’t come up with it out of craven obsequiousness, but rather were compelled in court to do so.
Its the state legislature and their awful laws that are at fault here, not the hospital or the courts.
I think one thing that works against this sort of thing for trans people is the perception that they’re deceiving people - that they’re really just transvestites and/or have something seriously wrong going on mental health wise.
We know there’s more to it than that, but to many, their gender identity and biological gender are so tightly coupled that they literally can’t imagine how else things might be for others.
So with that failure of imagination in mind, they start trying to fill in the gaps in ways that make sense to them. Like the way dementia patients assume people are stealing from them because they don’t remember where things go, put them up somewhere weird and then can’t find it. There isn’t any other explanation for them other than the nurse or whoever must have stolen it because they don’t recall getting the item out or putting it up, and it’s not in it’s assigned place.
People do the same with trans people I suspect - they can’t conceive of being a biological male but being a woman otherwise, so they come up with explanations that fit what they understand.
I feel like maybe approaching the issues with less strident calls of bigotry and maybe more “What’s it to you if someone wants to live like that? How does it hurt anyone?” would be more effective.
The other issue is that there is a pressing need for trans minors to be able to get puberty blockers and Americans are comfortable being extremely paternalistic to kids. Still of course a hill worth dying on.
I think on the bathroom stuff the conservatives just have no hope in the court of public opinion. Americans don’t like to think of ourselves as paternalistic the way Brits are more ok with.
That’s the position taken by Pete Buttigieg:
The argument that letting sports organizations make rules for participation inevitably leads to putting trans people into concentration camps, is well-represented in this thread. Most voters will not, however, find that position to be convincing. I’d guess that the position Buttigieg expresses above would be more in line with what most Democrats believe—not the ‘inevitable slide’ theory.
I agree with that (and of course several here will violently disagree).
For most Americans there’s a recognition that some people are genuinely transgender and deserve good medical care and full civil rights—but also a recognition that a 15-year-old who went through full male puberty has an unfair advantage when playing most girls’ sports.
The argument that believing the latter is exactly equal to wanting trans people to be put to death, has not been made convincingly in this thread.
Barney Frank, for all his flaws, does recognize that ‘having concerns about fairness in sports’ is not the same thing as ‘wanting the slaughter of trans people.’
I don’t think that many will disagree, even here. I think you can make a robust case for trans people having basic human rights, including medical care, and believe that they ought be able to play sports, without believing that every women’s sport needs to accept every trans woman as a player.
I strongly oppose laws forbidding trans girls from playing in girls sports. I have no objection to a particular league deciding it’s not going to work. And i think each league will likely draw a different line, with some saying “no problem” and others saying “not if you’ve gone through male puberty” and most somewhere in between.
Huh, that’s weird- that is pretty much the same thing Newsom said, but Newsom was loudly and widely-even here- denounced as being anti-trans and a bigot for saying it. I am waiting for the same thing to be said about Mayor Pete- but I bet I have a very long time to wait.
It is a totally bogus position, IMHO.
Mind you- I do not think there is any “unfair advantage”, unless one considers- girl who is well over 6 feet tall or girl whose family can afford a sports coach or…or…