Yes, was it $215 million the GOP spent on ads—mainly played during televised and Internet sports events—that sold the idea “Democrats will make you be trans”? Something close to that. And it worked, if the stats on male voters are to be believed.
No, they aren’t. And as I said, the main figures (the candidates and at least their top surrogates) avoided the whole topic. But there’s still a ton of enforcement of orthodoxy going on, as we see from the case of Seth Moulton.
And the GOP are eager to use it–if needed. Frankly, they may not need it. They’ve got the power.
OTOH it is not possible to stand with trans people while running away from them and avoiding stating a position about the matter when challenged about it. What are we supposed to do, shut up and stamp down our own more activist cohort?
As just stated, the only people making it “the centerpiece” of Democratic policy and identity are the Right Wingers who wield the “you can’t even answer what is a woman” gotcha to put the Democrats in an uncomfortable position by having defined the debate in absolutist all-in or all-out terms
(Sure, there are some fringe folks who would like it to be a, if not the, centerpiece and to say that any “but we have to win the election first” out of you that gets in the way of unconditional full-throated no limits all-the-way no reservation support makes you a Hateful Bigot™, but they are not the ones with power.)
The Democrats have followed the strategy of championing oppressed minorities, focusing on ever tinier and more aberrant fringe groups, to the point of diminishing returns. First African-Americans, then women, then gays, and now various flavors of non-binaries. I’m not sure there’s anywhere left to go except for maybe incest practitioners.
I personally don’t think that “African-Americans, then women, then gays, and now various flavors of non-binaries” are aberrant and comparable to incest practitioners in any way, but perhaps I am reading this forum incorrectly and this how they are viewed here.
Yeah, I’m sorry, @Lumpy but, trying to be generous about it, that was terrible phrasing.
Look, in a sensible society/world we should have come down 50 years ago on the position of that competent consenting adults can carry out their personal lives as they may as long as they are harming nobody else, and the polite thing is to go along with it. We should NOT have needed to go step by ever harder step from access to birth control for spouses to interracial couples to reproductive health for singles to gays-sort-of-ok-but-be-discreet to gay-not-a-crime, to etc etc and in every case going from grudging tolerance to acceptance to affirmation and so forth. But we seem unable to do that.
No, it’s straight out of the anti-LGBTQQIP playbook with the accusation that the “I” stands for incest not intersex and the “P” stands for pedophile not pansexual.
Was there an instance of this in the Harris campaign? Of an explicit challenge to Harris (or Walz) to state their position on a trans issue, and a refusal to do so? (I’m not challenging you–I’m just not remembering this sort of thing happening.)
Maybe sit them down in front of a recorded sporting event, complete with dozens of GOP ‘Dems are only about trans’ ads. Ask the activists why they think the GOP spent so much money and for a practical means of countering it. No preaching allowed*: just practical, workable ideas for reaching the same audience.
It was a problem in this past election and will continue to be a problem. To be Captain Obvious: we need a strong counter. And it needs to be as pithy and immediate and visceral as their "Harris is for they/them—Trump is for YOU."
.
.
.
*This is a serious weakness of Democratic messaging: the tendency to tell people they SHOULD feel or think so-and-so (or that they MUST feel or think so-and-so). It doesn’t work; it’s resented. People vote against it.
If we did suppose that @Lumpy, @Sherrerd, and @Babale are correct and the Democratic party has gone too deep into championing aberrant groups, how do you unwind this? Have the next candidate work back up the list and repudiate trans people and other sexually non-conforming activities? I’m not sure how one could effectively repudiate that they are still championing women or African Americans.
Well, they could follow the conservative lead and start talking about repealing the 19th Amendment and singing the praises of American chattel slavery!
Aberrant? Really? No actual Democrat is going to stand for such a label for law-abiding people who live by the ‘consenting adults’ rule.
Cutting out the aforementioned preaching would do a lot to undercut the GOP attempt to characterize Democrats as being indifferent to people who lack minority status.
Republicans would still lie about Democrats, but giving them as little material as possible would help.
In any case I have my reservations that the trans issue was really that huge a deciding factor: the GOP may have significantly overspent unnecessarily on that angle. But now of course everyone who cares about that issue (and especially those who did the ad buy) will claim THAT was the clincher, won’t they? Just like immigrants or crime or Gaza or weirdness.
(And yes, it is a specific iteration of a more general line of attack that was presented in Lumpy’s post: portraying that with every go-around of the rights/benefits cycle the progressive platform becomes focused on an ever-narrower segment of society, that the mainstream wonders why they should care about.)
I don’t know how many times I need to repeat that Democrats should continue to be for trans rights: to have access to gender affirming care, to be treated as the gender they identify as in all social contexts, etc.
You are targeting a completely fabricated strawman.
This is a case of ideological purity from one of the bluest states in the country. Heavily blue and red states both do this and have basically forever. It’s not the reason why someone running in a swing state lost, on either side.
I’m not sure you meant viscous attack, unless you were planning on sliming them. Just fighting ignorance. I still think that the Harris campaign could not have done better. Carry on.
There always will be some sort of human rights issue that is getting a lot more emphasis lately than it used to. Just to guess what could move into this category in another generation or two – polyamorous marriage.
As for where center-left politicians should draw the line – this sounds terrible, but I think it has to be based on polling. The center-left politician can get out a little in front of public opinion, but not too much.
Many will remember that, at one time, Barack Obama was publicly against same-sex marriage. Then when public opinion shifted, so did he. A price is paid here for lack of authenticity, but sometimes that price has to be paid. Lincoln did some of the same kind of shifting on slavery, quickly become more of an abolitionist when public opinion allowed. If you aren’t willing to ever pay the price there, both the electoral price and the price in self-respect, you should become a professional activist instead of being a professional politician. And even the professional activist should make some allowance for democratic politicians having to do what they have to do.
Harris was hurt by having to switch from being clearly in favor of full trans medical and surgical care for prisoners to just saying it is up to judges. But if she just said that she still was in favor of full trans medical and surgical care for prisoners, her electoral loss would have been worse.
Democrats considering a 2028 presidential run have a difficult decision to make as to what they will say about this if asked, as public opinion on it in 2025 and 2028 could be a lot different.
Gender-reassignment surgery and hormonal treatment goes as far back as 1951 with Christine Jorgensen, so that’s nothing new; but I feel like in public discussions of the subject a bait-and-switch took place. We began with talking about people with gender dysphoria, a profound psychological disturbance often dating from early childhood, and somehow ended up having every conceivable flavor of genderqueer jumping on the bandwagon. I would say the line on the slope, and certainly what conservative critics of transgender most frequently point to, was the indefinite prolonging of the transition phase. Now a “woman” could retain a penis and testicles for years– they’re working on it I guess. We’re supposed to have sympathy for such people, especially if they retain mixed features indefinitely while working as career prostitutes pandering to people with that fetish, because they need the money.
Now all this would be their business and their business only, except for the continual demands on the traditional majority for them to wholeheartedly embrace all this without reservation At the end of the spectrum are radicals who fault conservatives for having any reservations or misgivings at all on the whole subject by saying that “gender is oppression”, as if we’re supposed to be living in some sort of post-humanist world where mutants of every description abound. Or even, God help us, non-binary identity as an avant garde declaration; a fashion statement.
This cartoon sums it up (blurred so I don’t trigger anyone):
