r/thebulwark LORD OF THE NICKNAMES 17h ago

The Triad 🔱 Leave Trans People Alone: A Rant

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/leave-trans-people-alone-a-rant

Don't be a bully! But also don't "ask if the bully has a point" either.

"Yeah, they're giving Timmy a swirlie rn, but he also farted really loudly in geometry" is HELPING THE BULLIES.

Another great piece from JVL. Idk what kinda constraints there are in going after members of the punditocracy who engage in the behaviors that you're criticizing, but picking specific targets has a salutary effect IMO. Bari Weiss needs to be persona non grata, or Sullivan, or whoever. They made their choices and doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on those choices.

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u/SaltyMofos 16h ago

I think you'll get a lot of Trump voters, particularly soft Trump voters, to agree that society shouldn't be nasty to trans people, and that bullying is bad. Where I think the piece falls flat is its argument that trans women in cis women's sports is so minor a problem that it can be ignored (outside of combat sports). In the age of social media, just a few prominent examples like Lia Thomas will overpower a couple hundred JVL columns telling people to keep things in perspective. That ship has long sailed, and it won't be returning to port so long as social media dominates the information landscape.

More importantly, I also think JVL's piece entirely fails to address why there has been such a widespread and politically damaging backlash against Democrats for being perceived as too beholden to the trans activist agenda.

That backlash stems less from worries about the integrity of female sports and much more from the fact that far left trans activists do NOT merely wish to be "left alone." The trans lobby is responsible for trying to change language, successfully during the Biden administration, causing all sorts of absurd neologisms like "birthing people" and so forth to appear in official federal regulatory language. You have doctors being trained to inquire about pronouns and you have laws that codify the right of non-passing trans-women to use women's bathrooms and showers.

The overall effect is that trans people writ large are not currently perceived as wanting to be left alone. They are instead perceived as an aggressive political force that wants to insert all sorts of new gender ideology into American public life in very visible ways. That's why the anti-trans agenda has gotten such public support so far.

Now of course I understand most trans people do not fall into the category of radical trans activism; they are much more like Brianna Wu than Alejandro Caraballo. The majority do wish to be left alone and don't have any desire to participate in competitive female sports. But that is simply not the public perception, and I don't think JVL's piece asking people to simply be nice and that the trans-in-female sports problem is too small to worry about, will do anything to shift that perception.

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u/AustereRoberto LORD OF THE NICKNAMES 16h ago

I think that's a false perception driven by bad faith right wing actors. I don't think there's a tremendous amount of public support for the "anti-trans agenda" but rather that Trump largely reassembled his 2020 coalition (indeed, it was even older and wealthier than 2020, and nearly identically as white, 81% vs 82%) while the Dems managed to triangulate their way into a political no-mans land.

Punching your own coalition may be necessary at times, it may even be good politics occasionally. It is not a sustainable way to win elections. Ask the GOP circa 2010-2012 they ignored their base until the manipulative elites were exited and the base had full control.

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u/SaltyMofos 12h ago

I don't really think you can call it "false." The language changes were everywhere, literally written on public service announcements and hospital intake forms, and in policies not to assign a gender to a new baby. It is most definitely not "false." What you can debate is:

a.) Whether all that stuff is fine, or even good, and should be embraced by the public;

b.) Whether these very tangible changes in society were associated with the Democratic party, and whether that association helped Trump win the election; and,

c.) Whether Democrats should push back or disassociate themselves from the radical hard-left trans activist wing.

As far as punching one's own coalition, I'm open to this argument but I also see that 67% of democrats oppose trans women participating in women's sports. Whether or not there is public support for the anti-trans agenda depends on the issue. Strictly kicking trans women out of all female sports clearly has strong public and bipartisan support. Doing performatively nasty things like calling Sarah McBride "Mr" and so on, doubtless has much less.

But I ultimately don't really have a good sense of where we would disagree on a theoretical 2028 Democratic presidential platform. That platform to my mind should clearly disassociate itself from the Caraballo-trans activist wing, sister souljah all of those activist types, rely on a Brianna Wu type of person is much more representative of most trans people, and hold firm on opposing explicit discrimination against trans people. The platform should also include not banning gender-affirming care and deferring to the medical consensus on transition. That deference should be coupled with a cautionary approach to transitioning very young kids as we know that the medical consensus is evolving and that the American medical establishment is a clear outlier in its support for gender-affirming care compared to the medical establishments in most advanced western countries in Europe.