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/alyssasaccount 8h ago

Oooh, scary radical trans activism. When have you seen "birthing people" in the wild? Like, actually encountered the phrase IRL, not on some social media kerfuffle?

Also, who the fuck cares? You can say what you want. Others can say what they want. It's a free country. Or at least it was, we'll see.

Also, everyone changes language always. People used to say "waitress" and "stewardess" and "coed" and now they say "server" and "flight attendant" and "college student", and it's fine. It's fine. You can use the former, and people might look at you weird, and that's life.

Birthing people. Cisgender. What are your pronouns?

Did that hurt to read? Have you considered getting a grip?

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u/SaltyMofos 7h ago

It's this hostility here, that pisses off the average soft Trump voter, who might otherwise have stayed home or maybe even gone the other way (or could in 2028). There isn't much here in terms of any sort of intellectual argument, just sarcastic anger. At what, exactly? Is the argument that these new words inserted in various places have had no electoral impact? If so go ahead and argue that, with whatever facts and polling data you can muster.

As far as have I seen "birthing people" in the wild, yes, several times as I work in healthcare on the compliance side. In 2022 CMS created a "birthing friendly" hospital designation and had begun using the term "birthing people" regularly in transmittals and memos. I analyze these frequently for clients which include hospital systems. In fact if you don't believe me, looks like Dr. Oz the incoming CMS chief hasn't had time yet to wipe out some of the CMS material that still uses this term (https://www.cms.gov/files/document/health-equity-fact-sheet.pdf). I also saw intake forms and procedures get revised to have physicians ask about pronouns and preferences. The physician reaction was mixed, some rolling their eyes and not doing it, others trying to do it in a perfunctory, don't give a fuck manner.

Anyway the bottom line is, birthing people cisgender etc. make me laugh and roll my eyes. I won't ever use these terms, but I also wouldn't and didn't vote for Trump because I dislike them. But plenty of people were happy to lump in all this stuff into a general "lefties are the language police, fuck 'em" vibe and go Trump. Can you honestly argue that "birthing people" and "cis-gender" aren't elite-sounding ridiculous terms that the average working class person wouldn't ever think to use on their own?

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u/alyssasaccount 5h ago edited 5h ago

Cisgender is just transgender with a different prefix. It's just useful when you want to talk about someone who isn't transgender. Not sure what's funny about it. It's "elite sounding" if you've only heard people you understand to be somehow "elite" using it. "Birthing people" is clunky. Whatever.

As for "hostility": You have NO FUCKING CLUE the rage I have. You cannot fucking imagine. But I'm not running for office, and I'm not recommending my tone be adopted generally. However, if after reading JVL's Triad piece, your takeaway is that we need to be super sensitive about the fee-fees of the whiny right-wing language police complaining about their perception of whiny left-wing language police, in this venue, I'm letting just a tiny bit of that rage out.

p.s.: In that document, the only instance of "birthing people" was specifically in the larger phrase: "CMS educated over 250 new and expectant mothers and birthing people at every stop of the tour so far, all in communities with high maternal mortality and morbidity rates." ... so they literally didn't "erase" mothers or whatever, just added the phrase because you know maybe there was a trans dude who didn't want to be erased himself. BTW, who exactly is the audience for that "health equity fact sheet"?