This discussion is heated because we are talking about the continued existence of trans people. There are a group of people who want them to no longer participate in society. They want to ban trans women from womens sports. They want to ban trans women from womens bathrooms. They want to ban trans kids and trans people from accessing the healthcare they need.
And as you know, some of them are using the law to set up literal detransition clinics.
And…you don’t seem to care?
Which is fine, because we can’t force you to care.
But if I want to fight for trans rights, and if I want to be loud and vocal about it, and if so-called “allies” don’t do the bare minimum to fight for trans rights, what possible reason would you have to object to me calling them out?
And what is it going to take before you finally decide to join the fight?
Not easily. I mean, picking somewhat arbitrary landmarks, lesbian and gay rights took decades from Stonewall to Obergefell, rights for Black Americans is the fucking Civil War in 1865 to 1965 and the Voting Rights Act, which Republicans are busy trying their best to repeal. It might give folks reason to pause when they see an electorate that wants one of the fundamental sources of rights, the fucking post Civil fucking War, Fourteenth Amendment removed from the Constitution and consider that things we take, or took, for granted as settled law and protected rights are as solid as a Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization away.
But this is the second or third time I’m making this point and I don’t think it will get any traction this time either.
Thankfully no, despite actually living here, I benefit from a political class that understands that voting for things that the country isn’t ready for and will be repealed by the next Congress, or worse, ruled unconstitutional so you have to go back to square one and start over just isn’t exactly the best way to stay in power or use that power when you, fleetingly, have it.
Unlike me, who would throw the dice on White, conservative, Christian Americans not wanting to continue to live in a, far from nascent, Christo-fascist America, despite knowing just how popular going “all in” on that is with them.
But who am I to chide my fellow Americans over little things like the end of what’s left of our democracy at the hands of Republicans when there are Democrats to criticize because they can’t do the currently impossible.
My takeaway from this is that you and others are saying this small group isn’t representative of the party as whole (fair) and doesn’t matter. It’s the latter point I’d like to object to.
It’s helpful to think about it by analogy. If just eight Democrats voted in a way that was anti-Black or anti-Jewish, would they still get a pass? It’s okay that the Democrats are such a big tent that they welcome such people?
What matters, and what I don’t know, is how the party as a whole reacted to this vote. Did anyone stand up for LGBT people, and address them directly? Or, as is likely, did they just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next thing?
It’s a fairly short item (https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20260427/RCP_H2616_H2617_xml.pdf), whose key phrase is that no funds may be used “to teach or advance concepts related to gender ideology… relating to defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government.” I will also note that six Democrats didn’t vote; had they bothered, and had the party pulled together, the vote would have been 212 (D) – 209 (R). That, of course, assumes the Republicans who didn’t bother to vote still stayed away, so it’s not really so simple.
I’m not Trans. I barely know anyone Trans. But for purely selfish reasons, it really bothers me that eight Democrats are so foolish as to believe the lie that Trans people (trans women, specifically) are a threat to non-trans women. What else are they going to believe about LGBT people? What else will they vote against?
The problem is the country just isn’t ready for civil rights for Black people. Rather than demonize people who want to repeal the 14th amendment, we should do more to understand where they’re coming from. Consider the housewife who doesn’t hate black people, she just thinks they’re scary and weird. What do we gain by calling her a bigot?
We should really consider repealing the 14th amendment just a little bit, otherwise, she might vote Republican!
Hey, I’m very soft these days on mass arrests and reeducation camps to teach them that the right to live your lives as you see fit isn’t reserved to them with a heapin’ helpin’ of reading and understanding the fucking Book they want to impose on everyone else.
They’re in for a big surprise when they learn that Jesus can not be the Messiah.
But, as with John Brown and Sherman’s March to the Sea, people think that’s a little extreme.
MAGA isn’t a thing that existed in the past. The disinfo silos that we have to live with didn’t exist in the past. We now live in a dystopian present. The lessons of the past will only take you so far.
Because we are regressing. Stonewall wasn’t just a landmark for lesbian and gay rights; it was also a landmark for trans people. I wonder why you didn’t mention that.
You underestimate the stakes here.
This is an existential threat. There is no going back to the times when the Republicans and the Democrats kept to the established norms. MAGA is not going away. They will use every single lever of power to steal all the money, take all the power, and the only way you win is to bring the people onto your side.
There are more of you than there are them. There are more good people in America than bad. You can shut them down. You can push them back into the margins.
But what it takes is leadership.
And that leadership has to come from the Dems. Because there is nobody else.
And that leadership has to take the form of integrity. Because it needs to be the inverse MAGA. It needs to cut through the crap. It needs to stand for something.
So why do I criticise the dems more than the Republicans, Starmers Labour over the Conservatives, and Hipkin’s Labour over the Nats?
Because they aren’t doing their jobs. All over the world the “centre-left” parties are failing to recognise the existential threat that exists. They are all acting like it’s business as normal.
And the trans issue is the exemplar of that. As I just said: they want to ban trans women from sports. Ban trans women from women’s bathrooms. They want to ban access to trans healthcare. They want to ban trans kids being called any other pronoun except for what they were given at birth. They are setting up detransition clinics.
They are doing their damndest to remove trans people from society. And they are succeeding. The news from the UK today is just devastating. It started with sports.
The same will happen in the US. Just this week our government announced they were supporting at first reading our own versions of anti-trans bills. This is a global coordinated effort to eliminate trans people from society.
And y’all are chiding us for even suggesting that politicians just talk about this.
I’m sorry I don’t “live in your country”, but I’m not going to stop defending trans people no matter where they live in the world.
PC = political correctness. Nitpickery about terminology in this case, about a gay man using outdated terminology (“transsexual” I assume) that you censored. It wasn’t meant as a slur, it was probably just someone whose terminology was out of date. Give him some grace.
And while I’m not trans-unfriendly, I don’t think this is the hill Democrats should choose to die on in today’s America. It’s politically a losing fight in my opinion. Most people are barely gay-tolerant, never mind friendly, and trans people are a step too far right now.
Better to hammer the Republicans on the economic and environmental issues. That’s stuff that most people DO care about and where the Democrats are unequivocally on the winning side.
That’s not to say that they shouldn’t continue to push for trans rights, just that it shouldn’t be a major or specific plank in their platform, or a big issue in their messaging. The country’s not ready as a whole, and it comes across as offputting to the electorate if the Democrats emphasize it too much.
To much of the country, trans people are extremely strange and unsettling. It’s a big uphill fight, and pragmatically speaking, I don’t think it’s a smart thing for the Democrats to emphasize at the moment, even if it’s the morally right thing to do.
America has never been “ready” for civil rights, civil rights have always had to be forced into reality against the adamant, lifelong resistance of the right wing. If the people who wanted civil rights waited until the nation was “ready” we’d still have slavery, women wouldn’t be allowed to vote and even talking about LGTBQ people would be outright illegal. America is at its core a nation built on a foundation of undying hatred, and that hatred never goes away; waiting for it to do so is futile. It has to be overcome or fled.
Yes. (ETA: Sorry, that’s a trans boy who wanted to wrestle boys but wasn’t allowed to. Not exactly what you meant, I guess) (ETA2: People say that anyone can compete on the boys side, but that’s clearly not true, at least in TX, because of anti-trans legislation).
Yes. (ETA3: No, I guess? They are requiring women who look like this to use the men’s room and men who look like this to use the women’s room)
This is an immense letdown. To the point that I wonder what’s actually going on, at least with Fields.
For consideration: Anti-trans bills that Cleo Fields opposed in recent years as a Louisiana state senator:
SB156: Fairness in Women’s Sports Act: Prohibits a team designated for females, girls, or women from being open to students who are not biologically female.
… House Bill 81, would require parents to submit a form in order for public school teachers and employees to use a name that is not on the student’s birth certificate or to use pronouns that are not in accordance with the student’s sex …
[House Bill 81 advanced out of the Senate Education Committee] 3-1. Three Republicans– Sen. Mark Abraham, R-Lake Charles; and Sen. Robert Mills, R-Minden; and Sen. Beth Mizell, R-Franklinton—voted for the bill. The committee’s chairman, Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, opposed it. (The Times of Houma/Thibodaux, June 2, 2023)
… [The Senate Education Committee] advanced two pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation [June 1, 2023].
House Bill 81 by Rep. Raymond Crews, R-Bossier City, would prohibit school employees from using transgender students’ preferred names or pronouns unless they have parental approval (see above - b). House Bill 466 by Rep. Dodie Horton, R-Haughton, would prohibit the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in public schools.
Both were reported favorably from the Senate Education Committee on a 3-1 vote, with committee Chairman Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, being the sole member opposed. (Louisiana Illuminator, June 1, 2023)
Fair enough, but I’m pretty sure no politician in the 1950s or 1960s got elected on a platform of civil rights or social change. I’d guess Johnson got elected in spite of his support in those areas, and probably was a big cause of the migration of southern Democrats to the Republican party right around that time.
Social acceptance of stuff like this isn’t something you can force, not in a democracy anyway. At best you can make certain guarantees of rights and set up protected classes.
And I feel like pushing it as a primary issue is spending political capital that could better be used elsewhere.
In the UK, the labor government just made a guideline saying that trans people must be excluded from both the bathroom of their gender identity and the gender assigned at birth. The delusional rationale (which is from a supreme court interpretation of an equality law passed by a previous labour government) is that trans women could be biological males invading women’s restrooms and that trans people may look pass to the point that they would make people uncomfortable in the bathroom of their assigned gender.
Social acceptance is not the goal in this context. It is simply achieving trans rights, and such rights are broadly supported. Figures are between 71–85% for the statement “Trans people should have the same rights as everyone else.” There is broad support for access to healthcare, schools, and antidiscrimination laws in businesses and jobs. All of them in the 70s.
The issue isn’t lack of support. It’s that it’s not a priority for them. But that is exactly the window that makes it possible to go hard on it. The downsides are minimal, but the upsides are great.
There is nothing about any of those other issues that requires going soft on trans rights. We already see what has happened. We have 8 Democrats who for some fucking reason that it’s better go against the consensus. This wasn’t some bill that had other stuff along with trans stuff. They chose to say “We don’t support trans rights,” loud and clear. This will harm them.
Oh, and while BB censoring “transsexual” wasn’t required (it’s not that kind of slur), it was appreciated because it shows the poster cares. “Giv[ing] him grace” makes no sense: he’s not here, and he is very much not the priority. It’s perfectly fine to err on the side of caution. The type of PC that can be harmful is the purity test stuff, not simply conscientious use of language.
(The use of “transsexual” is complex and beyond the purview of this thread. I will point out a minority do identify as such, but unless you know for sure everyone is okay with it, simply “trans” is much safer.)
The majority of people when asked that question will think, yes they should have the same rights as everyone else. That doesn’t mean they should get privileges though.