This Train Carries Transgender People
The mendacity, cowardice, and incompetence of Democrats cutting the T out of LGBTQ+
In the wake of the Democratic Party’s Election Day losses, the party is considering jettisoning transgender people.
Politico reports that some Democratic National Committee (DNC) members are looking for a DNC leader — who won’t bring those awkward transgender issues on board.
These DNC members see identity issues as zero sum: You can’t have alleged moderates and defend LGBTQ+ rights. So they’re rejecting the latter as they eye potential DNC leaders, anointing frontrunners as we speak.
“I’m going to look for a chair who’s going to be talking to the center and who’s going to be for the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day,” said DNC Committeeman Joseph Paolino, Jr., apparently unaware of transgender truck drivers who not only go home, but are finding increasing acceptance in the trucking community.
Paolino told Politico, “The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle.”
Choosing leaders averse to leading is what got us here. Not to mention the inconvenient fact that Americans — and certainly Democrats — are not in the middle on transgender people.
It’s political malpractice to assert that the country is or isn’t anything. Tons of voters and non-voters are motivated by nothing related to policy. In the past ten years we’ve flipped from Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden to back again. It’s absurd to conclude that some immovable political lodestone drove all those elections.
More to the point, what’s the point of leaders who don’t want to fight for what’s right?
If half the country really do oppose transgender rights (they don’t), helping them get over their shit and transition (har har) to a better place should be a motivating force for our future leaders.
But here’s another Democratic “leader,” too afraid to give their name to Politico:
“I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”
Another boldly anonymous DNC member said, “there’s this whole sentiment that we just went too far out there on identity, and it allowed the Republicans to really attack us at every turn as a result, and that we just essentially did not focus on just the everyday issues of Americans.” The latter part, yes. But the first part?
Who in their right mind thinks If Only Democrats Don’t Do X, Republicans Won’t Be So Mean? I thought Democrats decoded that one in the 1990s.
And whichever coward said “freak show” damn well remember we’re talking about human beings here — and might not remember that Democrats had successfully branded Republicans as the freak show, before tacking to the center.
Even though the center is where Democrats lost, some DNC members insist they can win by being more there.
Referring to the next DNC chair, Philadelphia Committee Member Cindy Bass said, “I’m not interested in anyone who is moving further away from the center … The center is where we have to be.”
(Again, the center supports transgender rights.)
But also, what if Trump pulls the center into fascism? Should the DNC still be there?
Does anyone think that Trump won in 2016 or 2024 by calculating how to mirror the specific policy positions of an electorate that’s almost entirely devoid of them? Has no one noticed Trump’s appeals to economic populism? Or the progressive referenda votes of even red states that overwhelmingly went for Trump?
These questions apply to more than just the DNC leadership battle. Congressional Democrats are urging the whole party to abandon transgender people, abandon the working class, and even abandon seasoned politicians.
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez told CNN that, “In any political landscape, we need normal [sic] people to feel a sense of agency. We need people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches to run for office.”
First of all, why didn’t I get the DNC memo about fetishizing heteronormative truck drivers? Secondly, a good politician is attuned to everyone, including disenfranchised communities.
Degrading and belittling politicians is how we got here, along with the magical-thinking fantasy that non-politicians are great at politics.
Right this moment — as Gluesenkamp Perez longs for “normal” candidates — we’re getting a rerun of the only person to enter the White House with zero relevant experience. With a vice president who became senator with zero relevant experience.
Rejecting politicians because they’re at the forefront of what is right is a roadmap for going backward, even without a truck driver at the wheel.
Other congressional Democrats also blamed the presidential loss on the party for being … I guess excessively non-evil.
“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) said. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” He added, “Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) got out front on the issue, suggesting a shift on transgender issues to the New York Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
No, as a polite person you’re supposed to be too considerate to say that.
Moulton didn’t specify who he does want running over his little girls, but the point was made. And Moulton was only articulating what Democratic leaders said privately before Election Day.
In September, Trump’s campaign put out an ad suggesting that the government ought to deny health care to some incarcerated people, in violation of U.S. law, international law, and universal concepts of human rights.
But Trump framed it as taxpayers funding gender-confirming surgery for prisoners. Since we’ve already dehumanized prisoners, providing them anything, using sacred taxpayer dollars, is already sacrilege.
But paying for surgery their medical providers have said they should have even if someone thinks it’s “weird” or their god won’t like it? Outrageous.
The ads caught on, even though the clip of then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) was from 2019 and Democrats in 2024 weren’t talking about the issue. Didn’t matter.
Former President Bill Clinton reportedly told the Harris campaign to respond. “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it,” he said at some point.
It makes sense that Clinton would say this. His famous Sister Souljah moment in 1992 was calculated to distance himself from the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Clinton was seeking an acceptable way to shit on a civil-rights leader, to assure “moderate” voters he’d oppose Black civil rights if the rhetoric got too discomfiting. Too right, too early.
Just like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., reviled and feared by most white Americans until he was safely underground.
To Harris’s credit, she didn’t act on Clinton’s cynicism.1
But she also didn’t take a stand. She didn’t frame herself as a leader on the issue. When NBC’s Hallie Jackson asked her about gender-affirming care in its most general form, Harris was apologetic:
JACKSON: …do you believe that transgender Americans should have access to gender-affirming care in this country?
HARRIS: I think we should follow the law.
It was worse than weasely, it was system-worship, which has been fucking Democrats forever. Trump attacked the media, so Democrats defended an obviously deeply flawed media. Trump attacked democracy, so Democrats defended democracy without addressing the fact that its outcomes have favored the rich.
Any political consultant worth their millions of salt would’ve armed Harris with a forceful, inspiring response. Clinton could have used his once-vaunted brain to counsel Harris on creating a Sister Souljah moment … but one that didn’t serve Satan.
There’s no evidence that transgender rights had to hurt Democrats. Pres. Joe Biden’s 2020 platform was pro-LGBTQ+ rights, including the T part.
In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, saying, “I’m running for president to stand up for the fundamental rights of LGBT Americans.”
So maybe it was Democrats’ handling of the issue that was the problem in 2024, not their position. Either way, any Democratic political consultant who can’t win doing the right thing needs a job to which they’re better suited, like being a Republican political consultant.
In fact, some Democrats have already indicated that abandoning transgender people was a panic move.
Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa responded to the election by saying, “There’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support.” He apologized the very same day: “In frustration over the GOP’s lies to incite hate for trans communities, I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity.”
One Democratic member argued that it’s ridiculous to pin Harris’s loss on transgender issues. “We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue,” said that member of Congress, who, to his credit, was Moulton.
“We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop,” Moulton said. I don’t think we can say that definitively, but there’s something to the general idea.
Let’s clarify, though, that some “opinions” are assertions of fact masquerading as opinions and some “opinions” deserve shaming. Democrats can do that without shaming people who hold such opinions. Paternalistic as it may be, leadership is about teaching, just as it is with kids.
If kids think something is “weird” or “wrong,” we explain why they’re being stupid little shits kindness is better and we model how to behave. If we otherize the people we disagree with, why shouldn’t they otherize people, too?
Democrats must learn how to do this, because “activists” will always surface new ways to expand the circle of inclusion. The politics of ensuring equal justice will become even less straightforward.
I suspect sports are especially thorny because sports are formally gendered. The Biden administration was forging a path to minimize harm on all sides. They just didn’t talk about it.
Because Democratic leaders mustn’t be too right too early; an arbitrary limit on leadership so accepted that self-styled objective media treat treat it like a Newtonian law.
“This is a case of Democrats letting activists2 set their default position without pushback, even though the electorate isn’t there,” wrote NBC News Senior National Political Reporter Sahil Kapur. “Dems took a very different approach on same-sex marriage: wait till the country evolves, then champion it. One approach worked; other is backfiring.”
It’s horrifying to see a journalist tell politicians to advocate for social justice only when people agree with it…which might be never. Good journalism challenges systems and conventional wisdom, pushing politicians to evolve. Not telling them to wait.
The “strategy” of waiting (translation: Not leading) took hundreds of years to “work,” while generations of LGBTQ+ people suffered injustice and untold cruelty.
And for what other cause would we prescribe this strategy? Black ciivil rights? Women’s rights?
Evolution is not automatic, as any reporter — especially senior and national and political — surely knows. Populations don’t magically evolve to hold “better” positions. The Dark Ages lasted almost 1,000 years.
Does anyone at this moment in time feel especially confident that progress is assured?
Because in 2021, 62% of people opposed transgender student athletes competing outside their assigned-at-birth gender. Last year that number got worse, rising — or “evolving” — to 69%.
Remember Bass, the DNC member who loves the center? In 2021, after Biden won on a pro-LGBTQ+ platform, Bass defended transgender student athletes against a proposed GOP ban: “[T]he intent behind it is clear: this is an anti-LGBTQ attack as part of a hateful Republican agenda.” She, too, evolved and now says we have to be in the center.
Democrats generally evolved backwards on this issue, highly developed positions reverting to primordial ooze. That’s despite winning the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, proudly campaigning on transgender issues. So maybe something else going on.
For one thing, voters won’t care whether a tiny fraction of their taxes funds a tiny fraction of health care for a tiny fraction of the population … if the rest of what they’re voting for is clearly better than the alternative.
And there’s another factor Democrats haven’t reckoned with. The transgender population is a lot smaller than the gay and lesbian population.
A lot of people don’t know any transgender people, making it that much easier to demonize and otherize them.
This is a real challenge for Democrats — to keep expanding the circle of justice for communities of progressively smaller size, potentially even more alien to the Heartland that political reporters and consultants obsess over.
Democrats can only win concessions for more obscure or “weird” communities by engendering trust among a bigger and bigger coalition.
The rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — spilling over into personalizing and demonizing fans of each — may have led to an exodus of the “Bernie Bros” from the party, which deemed them toxic. As Drop Site’s Murtaza Hussain notes, “A couple of years ago there was organic mass interest in the Democratic Party among young podcast-type white men which they responded to by relentlessly calling them ‘Bernie Bros’ until they successfully snuffed out any possible enthusiasm.”
Demonizing each other weakens both a country’s and a party’s ability to defend each other. We should dial that way the fuck back.
We also have to reject the apologia for inertia, the argument that leaders shouldn’t lead and politicians should turn a blind eye to injustice until society truck drivers decide it’s time for change.
Over at The Moral High Ground, Evan Hurst writes that we don’t yet have a lot of certainty about how we got here. And there’s no way to be sure about the way forward. But, Hurst says, we can be certain about some things. To wit:
“[O]ne thing that we do not have to do, and must not do, is listen to assholes telling us to move to the right to appeal to more moderate voters, to compromise our principles and values in order to somehow magically appeal to MAGA racists, sexists and anti-LGBTQ losers.
“Those critiques always come out of the woodwork at times like this. Their suggestions pretty much always just so happen to throw vulnerable people directly under the bus, and what we need to be doing right now is protecting vulnerable people.”
It’s not just altruism. If Democrats abandon LGBTQ+ voters (as they already have on some religious issues), what motive do LGBTQ+ voters have to stay with Democrats? Might as well go for the tax breaks.
Vance even predicted he and Trump would win the “normal gay guy vote.”
The reason they didn’t is that generations of Democratic politicians — some of whom never once drove a truck — fought for LGBTQ+ people even before most voters were “ready.” As a result, as Hurst noted, Harris got 86% of the LGBT vote, a lot more than even Biden did.
And this week, when Representative-elect Sarah McBride (D-DE) was asked about running on transgender rights, as she did, she pointed out that she outperformed Harris on the ballot. In fact, she also outperformed the 2020 and 2022 Democratic candidates for the seat she just won, making her the first transgender member of Congress.
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Yes, Clinton won in 1992. In a year when the Republican vote was split, Clinton made the genius decision to make a play for the center. He won with less of the popular vote, 43%, than Harris got, 48.3%.
The people most responsible for making our lives better.
The minute the Democrats jettison trans issues I will turn back my part membership, register Independent and send no more money to the party or any candidates who support this decision.
"JACKSON: …do you believe that transgender Americans should have access to gender-affirming care in this country?
HARRIS: I think we should follow the law."
This exchange was infuriating for a couple of reasons. First, VP Kamala Harris is not this stupid. Second, her handlers (looking at you, David Plough, you fucking asshole), who insisted she give a non-response/shove-under-the-bus-response should, as you say, go to work for RepubliKKKan candidates.
Harris should have responded by saying, "I believe all Americans should have access to high quality, evidence-based health care from qualified, board certified specialists who are following the standards of care established by their specialty organizations. We have seen the increased mortality and morbidity suffered by women who live in reproductive slavery states, where their providers are restricted by state laws from providing the normal standard of care. I don't want to see any other group denied health care by bigoted lawmakers who don't know anything about healthcare. Next question."