Not necessarily. You’re assuming that the objections to trans athletes are driven by competition results. I don’t think that’s the case.
At my town’s high school, the main objection was that the MtF athlete wanted to use the girl’s locker room. Parents weren’t at the school board meetings because of the team’s record.
Edit: @Der_Trihs beat me to it.
Right.
That is the correct position. As we have seen here, Liberals and Democrats can have polarizing positions on the subject, thus no matter which way you go- you lose support from your base. And, in the big picture of LGBT+ rights, it is a minor issue.
Right. Cover the general, big picture element, not drill down until you find something divisive.
Yes, but then you said-
That is the sticking point here.
…it isn’t reasonable to talk about redlines when many trans kids aren’t able to access healthcare, which means as adults they will never ever be able to participate in sports in a meaningful way. You are condemning people to having to abandon ever being able to do certain activities because of decisions (often out of their control) made at childhood. That isn’t right.
This is all connected. You can’t silo this debate. We can’t talk about going through male puberty as a redline when trans kids cannot access the healthcare they need.
This has nothing to do with “competitive advantage”. If anything, it’s about perceived competitive advantage, not real-world competitive advantage.
As I said from the start, the reason why progressives are so militant on these issues is because of the readiness of the middle to concede ground. No we shouldn’t compromise here. No we shouldn’t moderate our language.
And no I don’t think you have a winning strategy because the people who are running with it are also the same people who lost the house, the senate, the executive and the supremes for a generation.
In the big picture of trans rights, it isn’t a minor issue. It’s a pillar that, once it falls, will be difficult to ever get back. It largely hasn’t been an issue for decades. But now that it is, we should be fighting like hell to protect trans people, their rights and their dignity.
Because as we’ve seen in the UK, once that pillar falls everything else collapses.
You can only call it a “minor issue” if it doesn’t personally affect you. Because for trans people you’ve got sports, you’ve got bathroom access, you’ve got access to healthcare, and all three of them are under attack.
The goal is to force trans people out of society. If they want to participate, they either have to detransition or hide. This is what they want, and they are making no secret about it. So we either fight them and tell our politicians that we want them to fight them, or we let it happen. We can’t compromise on sports.
Read what other SDMB posters have said about this issue. Those are not the “they” you are talking about. Those posters are liberal Democrats.
…the “they” I was talking about in the quote are trans people.
As for what other SDMB posters have to say on the issue, we disagree. That’s kinda the point of discussions like this. We won’t always agree.
The goal is to force trans people out of society. And the people wanting to force them out are doing it one pillar at a time. So why should we let them? This isn’t a minor issue.
Democrats need to be unwavering in support of trans rights, as well as the rest of LGTBQ people. It’s the right thing to do. Abandoning their principles would gain them nothing. The anti-trans people are a lost cause- catering to them is a loser’s strategy. Those people who are convinced that kids are getting reassignment surgery without their parents’ consent, those who believe that high school boys come out as trans just so they can get in the girls’ bathrooms, those who clutch their pearls and head to the fainting couch at the thought of little Emily having to compete with one of the very few trans athletes- they’re all lost causes. They are locked into voting red for the rest of their lives. If Democratic Jesus ran against Republican Satan, they’d crawl over hot coals to vote for Satan. Stand strong, Democrats.
You’re not wrong, but the emphasis should be on getting elected and getting into power, not virtue signaling to the LGBTQ community or the Democratic base.
That’s the mistake, I think. Who cares what the Democratic base thinks? It’s not like they’re going to go vote Republican. Maybe they won’t vote at all, which is detestably petulant. But ultimately assuming you don’t offend their prissy asses so much that they stay home out of some kind of self-rigteous fit of pique, the people who need to be courted for elections are those people who are still undecided (somehow). To use a church metaphor, you don’t preach to the choir or the people who come every single Sunday; you preach to those who show up intermittently or only on holidays. They’re the ones who need churching up. Same goes for the electorate.
Ultimately the rest doesn’t matter at all if you’re not in power and can’t actually enact any positive policies or even delay unpopular/odious ones.
I’m not saying that anyone should jettison any policies or abandon any groups, but the emphasis should be tailored to those people you’re trying to get to vote for you. If they’re struggling economically, you concentrate on economic stuff, for example.
That’s how we got Trump 47.
If you’re not saying that, what are you saying? Because if you’re not saying that the Dems need to stop defending LGBT people, I genuinely don’t understand what you’re asking Dems to do.
That certainly seems to be how the Democrats are thinking.
But I will remind you that human rights are not virtue signalling. If you’re only in support of gay rights because it makes you look good in certain circles, kindly go [checks forum and redacts].
But that’s exactly what you are saying, that the Democrats should abandon their base to pander to the bigots.
Which I’ll point never works, no matter how many times the Democrats do it. All that happens is that they lose when their base stays home and the people they were pandering to ignore them.
That kind of thinking is a mistake. Not just a potentially moral mistake (debatable of course), but a cold, pragmatic, realpolitik mistake. Democrats as a group seem to be considerably more prone to ‘self-righteous fits of pique’ than Republicans. Considerably more prone. It’s the nature of the party that includes more idealists and forward thinkers. You can decide that ultimately you’d rather do without some progressive votes if you can thereby capture more centrist ones. But you better be prepared to reap the whirlwind if you guess wrong.
Assuming the “base” will always vote for you when there are some in the base that might decide disgusted abstention or even active accelerationism is the better path is just whistling past the graveyard.
I’m curious: do you see all drug-testing in sports as arising from bigotry?
No? But the worry about trans people in sports is almost entirely driven by bigotry, not sports.
…why do you think my emphasis isn’t on “getting elected”?
There is no “virtue signalling” going on here. This isn’t performative.
The Democratic base does.
And this says it all really.
This is exactly why the Democrats lost to Donald Trump.
It’s the complete and utter disregard and disrespect for the people who are suffering, who have turned out election after election, often facing difficulties and voter suppression, just to have the establishment spit in their face.
You can only take people’s votes for granted for so long before it all blows up in their faces. And at the last election, probably the most consequential election of our lifetimes, they lost the lot.
And here’s the point.
The Democrats have lost the house.
And the senate.
The executive.
And the supremes for a generation.
They are a bunch of losers.
They did exactly as you suggest. Despite over 70% of Democrats wanting to end the funding of what is happening in Gaza they were completely ignored at the election. Uncommitted weren’t allowed to speak at the convention. They sent Liz Cheney and Bill Clinton to Muslim strongholds to preach propaganda. The word “trans” was only ever mentioned once at the convention. They lurched to the right on immigration, running on a platform that they were going to be even tougher than Donald Trump on the border.
It was a campaign run by consultants and pundits and people like Barney Frank who are completely out-of-touch with the base. They take the base for granted and talk about them with contempt. “They always vote for us regardless of what we do, so we won’t even attempt to court their vote. But how dare some of them not vote for us. How ungrateful!!!”
The Dems lost the house. The senate. The executive. The supremes for a generation.
Again I’m going to point to the UK and point out the absurdity of this position. Labour used to be the “union” party. The party of the left. The “working man’s party”. Before Starmer the leader was Corbyn: someone who could not be mistaken for a centrist.
Then there was an internal coup. Starmer took over the leadership, and there was a purge of left-wing voices within the party.
Labour won the election, largely not on the strength of their policy but as a backlash to years of Conservative rule. But it turned out, the people ended up voting for more of the same. UK Labour is the austerity party now. Spews right-wing immigration rhetoric. And the UK Labour Party now is viciously anti-trans.
Reform are leading the polling now in the UK, a terrible, anti-immigration party, MAGA by any other name, and Labour is languishing in 2nd, 3rd and sometimes even in 4th place in the polling.
And the Greens are doing better than they ever have. They are not the “Greens” in the US sense but much closer in terms of economic pragmatism to the likes of the NZ Greens Party. Under Polanski they are unapologetic fighters for social justice and aren’t afraid to say it.
The lesson here is a simple one: if you don’t give people something to vote for, they are going to look somewhere else. In America, where you only really have, realistically, two options, that means they either vote for MAGA or they stay home.
At some point you have to stop treating this like a “video game”. The American political and economic system is so fundamentally corrupted that the entire point of elections seems to have been forgotten. It all operates at a higher level of abstraction now. “Think tanks” and oligarchs spend millions shaping public opinion through advertising, social media, and outright propaganda. That reshaping of public opinion gets reflected through (often-biased) polling. That polling is used to shape the messaging and policy.
And so everything lurches to the right. Which is partly how we ended up here.
There is a very good chance that the Dems might be able to pull something out of the bag at the upcoming elections. But that will likely, just like in the UK or after Trump’s first term, be a one-term thing. Because it will be driven by a backlash, not by policy.
Mamdani was successful in New York not just for his policies. But because he was a breath of fresh air. His predecessor was corrupt. Arguably corruption is core to the process. And people get sick and tired of that.
Mamdani radiates honesty. He says things because he believes them. It’s very much the inverse of what draws people to Trump. It’s the “plain speak”. Neither gets lost in the talking points. Polanski is the same. Every single GOP or establishment Dem sounds like ChatGPT. They go straight to the talking points.
And I think that if you want to win elections, you need to stop listening to the pundits, stop listening to the “polling” and the media and the big donors and the consultants and just start fighting for what you believe and give the people something to vote for. Trump broke all of the “establishment” rules. Mamdani fought the establishment and won. That’s the lesson here.
Saying you will fight for trans rights isn’t “virtue signalling”; it’s a statement of intent. It isn’t a “focus-tested message” that “hits all the right target demographics”. It’s the plain truth. And people can see that.
So even if people are confused about what this “trans thing” is all about, or all they’ve seen is a deluge of anti-trans propaganda and have been convinced that we “need to protect women’s sports”, they can be turned around if enough people just start saying that there is nothing to be scared of.
Truth. Honesty. Compassion. Looking after each other, especially the marginalised. That’s the antidote to MAGA’s message of lies and hate and fear and “othering”. Everybody is in informational silos. And the “right” have control over practically the entire media AND social media. So you need to cut through it. The Dems have shunned the people at the grassroots who do much of the effective organisation that helps at the margins and need to bring them back on board. They need to step up their ground game.
But I don’t think that they can. I think at best the Dems might get a “technical” win at the midterms and maybe even the next election. But it will just be more of the same. They won’t actually do anything with that power. They will lean more and more to the right. They will do exactly as bump suggests and ignore their base, forget who they actually serve, not get anything done and face the inevitable backlash.
I think this cycle is going to continue for years. I don’t think history is illustrative of what’s to come. I think we are carving out a very 21st-century version of a dystopia, one that is unique to this generation. In America that version plays out with basically two “bad” political parties dominating, and when the “less bad” political party holds power, things are only slightly better for the people at the bottom.
And that won’t ever change unless either the dem establishment falls or a viable third party rises. And neither of those things are going to happen, IMHO, in the next ten years. So just be prepared for more of the same.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The problem with Democrats is the voters. Too many Democratic voters seem to look for reasons to stay home if they find any fault whatsoever with the candidate.
Democratic Politician: “Here are the 10 things I stand for and want to accomplish if I’m elected!”
Democratic Voters: “WAAAAH! I don’t agree with one of the ten things on the list! I’m not voting!”
Republican Politician: “I’m not going to do shit for you but I promise to really make the lives of people that you hate as miserable as I possibly can.”
Republican Voters: “YEAH! THAT’S OUR MAN!”
This thread illustrates that. But that is mostly the progressive and “Indy but votes dem” crowd.
“And what I am gonna do for you is all lies!”
…the problem with the Democrats is that they think the problem is with the voters.
…it’s more like:
"Here are the 10 focus-tested things that the pundits and the consultants say are popular at the moment. They aren’t things that I actually stand for. But I’m going to speak very narrowly to the approved talking points and I promise, I won’t sound like a robot.
So what do I think about trans rights? I think we should follow the law."
The problem is the voters. 77 million people voluntarily voted for Trump in 2024. Even if there was voter fraud, it was likely only at the edges and thats about the correct number of votes Trump got.
Trump has so many flaws and failings. People elected him in part to ‘improve the economy’ and things are much worse now on multiple levels.
A democracy is only as good as the voters. The voters have to take the blame sometimes, like they should in Gaza when they democratically elected Hamas in 2006, or in Germany in the 1930s when they elected the Nazis, or in Venezuela when they elected Chavez and passed his constitutional reform measure.
The only reason the US has anything resembling a social safety net is due to FDR and LBJ. They only got these passed because southern whites used to vote democratic because the democratic party was the party that oppresses black people. Now that the GOP oppresses black people, its impossible for the democrats to get the majorities necessary for meaningful social safety net reform.
Also a lot of the reason our social safety net is so sparse is due to fear that POC will benefit. Latino immigrants and black people in the inner city are the universal boogiemen to scare people away from social safety nets. Social security was originally designed to exclude black people. The reason we don’t have UHC is because FDR and Truman tried to pass it, but southern democrats were afraid it would lead to integration in hospitals and health care for black people.
But even with all that, it only takes ~3 million voters to switch sides. If 3 million Trump voters in 2016 had voted for Clinton (probably only 1 million), then Clinton would’ve won. If 3 million GOP voters had voted Dem in 2024 then Harris would’ve won and the democrats would’ve won the house.
The democrats have their issues, but the US is a deeply tribal nation obsessed with race and maintaining the racial social hierarchy. We are still paying for slavery 160 years after the civil war.