Making Room Under the Bus

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-06-making-room-under-the-bus-democrats-transgender/



In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Donald Trump pivoted from his two main issues—immigration and the economy—to go on a rhetorical assault against transgender people. He spent close to $20 million on ads. Swing-state audiences, particularly football fans, likely saw an anti-LGBTQ+ spot that focused on Kamala Harris’s record on transgender rights. The ad ends with a chilling tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.” A Gallup poll in late September found that only 18 percent of respondents viewed transgender rights as “extremely important,” while a majority, 52 percent, labeled the economy as “extremely important.” In an October Fox News interview, Bret Baier asked Harris to explain her views on transgender rights. She said that she would “follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump also followed,” a reference to the fact that the first Trump administration had also allowed transgender inmates to receive gender-affirming care.

Link to tweet

The co-director for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, Chase Strangio, told Them, an online LGBTQ+ magazine, “Courts have consistently held that blanket denials of medical care, including medical treatment related to gender dysphoria, are unconstitutional. This is a clear constitutional principle that applies in all confinement settings. The government, once it confines someone against their will, cannot deliberately withhold needed medical care.” Harris’s answer, however, may have unintentionally undercut the potential danger the new Trump administration could pose to transgender people. It was also criticized for being unusually evasive, given her long record of open support for LGBTQ+ rights throughout her political career. From her time as the district attorney for San Francisco to her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris has supported pro-LGBTQ+ policies, such as banning conversion therapy and providing affordable gender-affirming care.

Trump didn’t need to focus on LGBTQ+ issues. He was already on solid ground with his base on inflation and immigration and had made significant inroads with other groups, including Latinos, young men, and swing-state voters. But by attacking transgender Americans, Trump brought identity politics to the forefront of the 2024 election season. For some, prioritizing problems like inflation seems to require turning away from supporting the hard-won rights of people once forced to exist on the margins. In this volatile political environment, transgender Americans have become scapegoats. With the Democratic Party already engaged in rounds of finger-pointing over Harris’s brutal loss, some Democrats are ceding ground to conservatives on transgender rights, backtracking from their previous support, and repeating the anti-transgender language of Republicans.



The day after the election, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) told The New York Times that Democrats must “stop pandering to the far left” on transgender rights issues. “I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports,” Suozzi added, using language commonly employed by Republicans and other social conservatives to describe trans people. Remarkably, a day later, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA)—a two-time co-sponsor of the House’s Transgender Bill of Rights, which includes protections for transgender athletes—criticized the party on the same grounds, buying into fears of trans people dominating women’s sports, a phenomenon that has been widely debunked but, nevertheless, persists—even among once-supportive lawmakers. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” Moulton told the Times. “But as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

snip

[Vinca]

1. Guess Elon disowned his trans child so he fits into MAGA world. I don't get it. I really don't get it.

[TheProle]

2. Reason #1,000,000 on why he is a piece of shit

[CrispyQ]

3. Cognitive bias

Here's an article that needs to go viral. It was posted on DU a few weeks ago.

Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love The People.

Jonathan V. Last
Nov 22, 2024

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/americans-have-one-very-strange-cognitive

snip...

YouGov asked a series of questions on “What percentage of Americans do you think are [fill in the blank]?” with the [blank] being all sorts of qualities: black, gay, Christian, left-handed, own a passport, etc.

The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:

> Transgender: 21%
> Muslim: 27%
> Jewish: 30%
> Black: 41%
> Live in New York City: 30%
> Gay or lesbian: 30%

more...

These perceptions do not square with any version of observable reality. Here the numbers as they actually exist in the real world:

> Transgender: 1%
> Muslim: 1%
> Jewish: 2%
> Black: 12%
> Live in New York City: 2%
> Gay or lesbian: 3%

We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.

So every third person you know lives in NYC & every fifth one is trans.

Idiocracy. People have lost the ability to think, to analyze.

[Bettie]

4. At our last county Dems meeting

we had an argument...mostly me and one of the old white dudes.

He is convinced that we can win next time around if only we center our campaign around white, Christian, straight men and forget all the "special interests". Oh, and have white male candidates instead of "trying to check all the damned diversity boxes, no one wants that!".

He also said we need to stop having "colored" candidates because the majority of the country is white and they like to see white faces in congress. Have I mentioned he is a really old man?

I expect to see party leadership begin the process of jettisoning the GLBT+ community or just not talk about any of that....ads will feature the whitest people they can find.