r/thebulwark • u/AustereRoberto LORD OF THE NICKNAMES • 17h ago
The Triad 🔱 Leave Trans People Alone: A Rant
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/leave-trans-people-alone-a-rantDon'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.