You’re assuming they’re cowards and not just plain old transphobes themselves. Just being Democrats doesn’t preclude them being transphobic.
I am, but I’m not an athlete or a sports fan, so I wouldn’t be making a sacrifice either…
And TBH, that probably means I shouldn’t be expressing an opinion on trans participation in sports other than “leave it up to the governing bodies”. The physiology of how testosterone and HRT affect sports-relevant traits, and the specific traits that matter in each sport, are so complex that only insiders have any hope of writing a fair policy. I’d bet I still have a pretty substantial advantage in arm wrestling, but does that translate into an advantage swinging a bat or throwing a pass? I have no idea, and neither do most people making proclamations about who belongs in which league.
That said, most trans people would surely rather live under an administration that restricted sports participation but rolled every other trans rights issue back to 2024 than under this one. But the more pertinent choice going into the primaries is between Democrats who are better on trans rights and Democrats who are worse, not between Democrats and Republicans.
If the DOJ starts floating proposals to disarm loud music listeners, and no one else, that’s a pretty good sign that a pogrom is on its way. Especially in a world where loud music listeners are already at elevated risk of becoming the victims of violent crime.
This is a very good point.
Back to the turn of this thread, I have a dream. It’s not a grand dream, or an important dream, but a dream nonetheless. And it is this: That not every discussion about trans folks ends up turning into a discussion about trans folks in sports.
Those of you who think you’re allies, but bring that shit up in every fucking trans thread, are carrying water for the transphobes. So, keep doing that, you transphobic-adjacent idiots. This thread is about fighting against the war on transgender people, not supporting it obliquely.
Hear, hear.
Pointing out a possible negative outcome of what you propose means they want to lose to the fascists?
I get why your idea can seem good on paper. You think “better to get some rights than none.” But you’re making a big assumption: that these sorts of compromises will gain more people to vote for the Democratic candidate than they will lose.
One of the main strategies of the Harris campaign was to try to appeal to this supposed middle ground voter, the disaffected Republican. And all the data show that it did not work.
And this was with the trans and ally community voting for her. These same people are sounding the alarm about Newsom. Where Harris was weak on trans rights (and mostly tried to avoid the topic) Newsom is seen as actively working against them. He is seen as a traitor, having before stood up for those rights then reneged. Prominent figures who supported Harris are saying they cannot support Newsom, arguing that he is uniquely bad among the Democratic hopefuls on this subject.
You may not like this. You may think they “should” accept things. But politics isn’t about what “should” happen. And, frankly, I’ve never seen any minority accept outsiders telling them what compromises they need to make, or what rights they need to give up “for the greater good.”
Fortunately, it is very early. I’m not sure why people are acting like we’re at the “must accept the lesser evil candidate” part when there aren’t even any candidates yet.
If we are talking “which national politician to support for president”, i think it’s way early. Honestly, I’ll probably vote for whoever i think is most charismatic, unless they are terrible on the issues.
You got a cite for that claim? The data I’ve seen showed that Kamala was generally viewed as too far left, not the other way around.
Fighting fascism by appeasing it doesn’t have a great track record, historically speaking.
What they really want is grovelling. They aren’t here to offer support, they want you to kneel and beg to treated as a human.
That’s entirely consistent with what @BigT said. She tried to appeal to the middle, and it didn’t work.
She did? In what way?
BigT said that she went too far right. If the overwhelming majority of Americans think that she went too far left, the idea that if she had only gone even further Left she’d have found an untapped source of far left voters seems completely ridiculous. What’s the evidence for all of these secret leftists existing?
Where does that appear in the post you quoted?
Here you go:
Unless you think he meant that one of the main strategies of the Harris campaign was to appeal to “disaffected Republicans” by going even further Left, in which case, sorry, I can’t help you with that level of stupidity.
The people who said that she was “too far left” do not, by and large, have any idea what “left” means. They’re just using it as a snarl-word, repeated from what they’ve heard in right-wing media. No actual positions ever had a hope of swaying those folks.
Meanwhile, I don’t think that what the American voting public, as a whole, wants is either left or right. I think that what they want is extreme. There are a lot of people who see that the status quo isn’t working for them, and so they want something completely different. Trump offers that. Trying to “appeal to the middle” with boring old inconspicuous governance will actively drive away that sort of voter. This is why, in head-to-head polls, Sanders did so much better against Trump than Clinton did.
The specific complaints I’ve heard about Harris from the left is that she was too supportive of the genocide in Palestine and that she threw trans people under the bus in order to appeal to a “middle” that doesn’t really exist.
Well, that’s certainly true online, I’ll give you that. In my experience, that just isn’t the case with anyone I’ve met in person aside from a very small handful of people.
I think these are both true. She was viewed as too left for moderates who didn’t care for Trump, and too right by core Democratic voters. And being both female and Black didn’t help her any, either. People are more likely to “fill in what they don’t know” with what they want when they are looking at a “traditional” candidate, and more likely to fill in with what they fear when looking at someone who looks different.
What’s this now? I don’t recall hearing this specific thing about her and I pay a lot of attention to the subject.
I’m leftist and I voted for her enthusiastically.
Right, the complaint from the “centrists” was that Harris didn’t do enough to actively move rightward on transgender issues. They wanted her to have some grand Sista Soulja moment where she publicly denounced support for transgender issues.