If the Nazis are siding with you, rethink your position.
Shut up, Stephen. You’re out of your element.
Not sure how this is a problem with the Dem party?
Smith’s not a party official or elected. He’s not even a registered Democrat.
Sarah McBride did a 90 minute interview with Ezra Klein (NYT) on trans rights.
I’m only partway in, but she’s already spent most of the time saying we should compromise with the far right and lecturing trans activists for talking too much about the material harms facing our communities.
I’m going to have to listen to this soon.
I am so disappointed in her… I get she’s in a tough place, but giving up rights is NOT and option.
Ugh… I’m reading it now… So this is thinking out out about her points she’s making and how to counter the far right that is in the mainstream… half-formed angry thoughts mostly…
I have to say I disagree with what she says about Civil rights movement history…
It also misunderstands the history of civil rights in this country. “You can’t compromise on civil rights” is a great tweet. But tell me: Which civil rights act delivered all progress and all civil rights for people of color in this country? The Civil Rights Act of 1957? The Civil Rights Act of 1960? The Civil Rights Act of 1964? The Voting Rights Act of 1965? The Civil Rights Act of 1968? Or any of the civil rights acts that have been passed since the 1960s?
That movement was disciplined, it was strategic, it picked its battles, it picked its fights, and it compromised to move the ball forward. And right now, that compromise would be deemed unprincipled, weak, and throwing everyone under the bus.
Yeah, there were major set backs and incremental improvement over period from the 1890s to the 60s, but the result was thousands of dead people who got lynched or expelled out of their homes. Many people took serious issue with the incremental approach some took, and they were right. It was the bolder, postwar action that got shit done… It became far less incremental AFTER the war, and the visuals being broadcast so that most of America could actually SEE the inhumane way that Black Americans were treated, AFTER many of them saw what the Nazis did to the Jews, Romani, the LGBQT+ community, Communists, etc, was the critical thing.
I don’t believe that demanding equal treatment for every single soul inside these borders is a “maximalist” position, and I do not think giving ground on something so fundamental will result in anything other than retrograde motion on civil rights, starting with the trans community (which is what we’re actually seeing play out in real time right now).
And Klein asked her this…
I think all the time about the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that asked candidates, and in this case Kamala Harris, whether she would support the government paying for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. Even if your whole position in life is to make that possible, the last thing you’d want is for anybody to claim it out in public. You would want nobody to ever think about that question ever at all.
But I see it as all that the same slippery slope of “well, someone people don’t deserve the same human rights” and if we start giving away to these goal posts, at some point, none of us have human rights… If I maybe be so bold to misquote some Jesus… how ever the least of us are treated is how we would treat anyone else. If we’re willing to torture people who are in jail, it’s not far off to treating trans kids like shit, either, and then all other kids… and then everyone of us.
She says:
One, we have to be better as elected officials in saying no, in saying: Public opinion is everything.
And that… bothers me, when it comes to the fundamentals of human rights. There was a time when the white mainstream opinion was that enslaving Black people was okay, that women were unfit for voting or participating in civic life, poor children should be part of the work force, that queer people just… didn’t exist at all, etc… Sometimes public opinion isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous and immoral. If public opinion among white people started swinging back to being pro-segregation, would that be okay to given in on?
And if you want us to change, you need to help foster the change in public opinion before you’re asking these elected officials to betray the fact that they are, at the end of the day, representatives who have to represent in some form or fashion the views of the people that they represent.
Okay, so part of her argument is that we’ve (the left, liberals, what have you) done a bad job on messaging. Maybe that’s so, but that’s in part because it’s a more complicated argument to make on the nuances, perhaps? And it’s not like the GOP has had any problem just… ignoring their more liberal constituencies, to the point of making them targets for rolling back their rights.
Maybe academically that’s true, but welcome to the real world.
Also, once again, I’m annoyed that people think this way and then we wonder why academia is being torn down in front of our eyes… this idea that academics aren’t living in the real world, as if they magically don’t have mortgages or kids or bodies that exist in this world and minds that are shaped by the world. Maybe it’s where I got my degree, but very few folks I knew from academia were living in some sort of safe space outside of “the real world”… I was actually watching a Matt Bernstein podcast yesterday with Natalie Winn, and they made this point that the right regularly comes up with extreme scenarios to undercut arguments (specifically the arguments people made when Simone Biles argued that Riley Gaines maybe shouldn’t bully teens on HS softball teams that made the leap from that to THAT MEANS SIMONE WAS OKAY WITH NASSER!!!). It’s often the left/liberals/Democrats who are focusing on the material conditions and the right who is coming up with bizarre scenarios that maybe never happened, but you know COULD happen maybe…
We got into this rabbit hole of academic intellectual discourse that doesn’t actually matter in people’s lives.
I don’t know… it actually matters to me, because I see it as trying to capture reality in language, and reality is complex, and often time, so-called “common sense” actually isn’t… like there are people who argue that a gender binary is just “common sense” but the actual scientific facts betray that “common sense”… I don’t know, it seems to me that this is just yet more of attacks on the humanities and liberals going along with it, because “well, that’s where the ‘real’ people are now, so we can’t rock the boat”… But if the fucking boat is leaking, not big enough for all of us, and there are some people in said boat setting literally fires and pushing off everyone that they don’t… 
When you allow trans people to be seen as human beings who have the same hopes and dreams and fears as everyone else, once that basic conception of humanity exists, then all the other things, all the other conversations sort of fall into place. Language inevitably changes across society, across cultures, across time, but it is a byproduct of cultural change.
Okay… yeah, I think that’s true… hence the old idea that good representation matters… But what is the cause of cultural and social change?
And I just think we started to have what maybe were conversations that were happening in academic institutions, or conversations that were happening in the community, and we started having those out in public on social media.
Okay, that’s true… but there is a problem of active attempts to distort the meaning of these scholarly discussions. It’s an active campaign to discredit queer theory and DEI, and critical race theory, to distort them and social media was a great vehicle for pushing those distortions…
And then we demanded that everyone else have that conversation with us and incorporate what the dominant position is in that conversation in the way they live their lives.
And what’s wrong with hard conversations, though? What’s wrong with complex conversations? Where did we get to the point where we thought that the “real Americans” can’t have complex conversations about complex issues?
Let’s just talk about human beings who want you to live by the golden rule. Let’s just talk about the fact that trans people are people who can be service members and doctors and lawyers and educators and elected officials, and do a damn good job at that.
Sure, but you got to counter the “trans people are coming for your kids” narrative, too. And if you really want to illustrate the humanity of everyone, you have to be able to start with the idea that all of us are fully human, and that’s not the position of the right wing right now. The dehumanization of trans people, immigrants, POC, etc is mainstream on the right now. That wasn’t just a reaction to people asking for pronouns in bios… it was a calculated strategy by the far right to make their positions common sense among the conservatives in this country.
But ultimately politicians aren’t the people who should be making these decisions. The family should be making these decisions. The family, in consultation with a doctor, should be making these decisions.
Okay, but what about when there is abuse? Children are not property, they are people in their own rights, who do need guidance and protection, but what about when that becomes just authoritarian violence from the parents? If the doctor is saying to a parent, “look, this kid needs X” and the parents refuse because they think they know better than the doctor, and that kid ends up dead as a result, why is that okay and acceptable? I know she’s not saying that, and yes parental input matters here, but if a parent firmly believed that beating their child once a week and starving them to keep them compliant, I doubt ANYONE would agree it’s a “good thing” to allow that parent input… Abuse is never okay, and I think that denying children gender affirming care can constitute abusive behavior.
And look, the conversation changes when people understand what it means to be trans. Because I think right now we think of it as a choice. We think of it as an intellectual decision. Like: I want to be a girl. I want to be a boy. And I want to do this because of these rewards, or I don’t want to do it because of these risks.
But that’s not what gender identity is. It is much more innate. It is a visceral feeling. It’s not the same as whether you get a tattoo or what you have for dinner. It’s not a decision. It’s a fact about who you are.
I think this is a good way to try and frame it, but I don’t know if it’s that easy to explain to someone who isn’t trans? Like, I’m cisgender and I don’t think I can fully understand what it means to have dysphoria, but I trust people who tell me about it and try and make me understand it. But the problem is that the right doesn’t have the same drive to try and understand, because they’ve just decided that it’s some “attack” on their rights and on “god” or something… In our current environment, going for an empathetic response will only get you so far with these chucklefucks. Even if they accept one trans people, they’re likely still going to think of all this being “one big anti-cis conspiracy” and that one trans person they know is “one of the good ones.”
And I think that because we stopped having that conversation, because we stopped creating space for people to ask questions, for people’s understandable — perhaps invasive, but understandable — curiosity to be met with an openness and a grace, not by everyone, but just the people who were willing to do it — we stopped people having an understanding of what it means to be trans. And it allowed them to start to see it. Or it allowed for their pre-existing perception that this is some sort of intellectual choice to manifest.
See, though I don’t know that we did “stop having it” from the side of trans folks who are cultural creators, artists, activists, public figures, etc. I think that the right has spent years building up their own cultural ecosystem that actively excludes other ideas, and they’ve come to see “mainstream” culture as an enemy imposed on them, and they have no interest in having those conversations as a result.
And when you take that capacity for us to authentically talk about our experience away from us — because it’s not academically the purest narrative that creates space and room for every single, different lived experience within that umbrella — you give people justification to say or think: This is a choice, and if it’s a choice, the threshold to allow for discrimination becomes lower.
Maybe I’m wrong, but that doesn’t seem like it was coming from the left? When a perfectly normal story that kids should be able to read or watch is being banned, that’s not coming from the left or liberals.
Ugh… I don’t know… I find this conversation frustrating, because it seems, far too often, the right is never asked to DO anything, to give up anything, to be less than perfectly centered in our narratives, as if the rest of humanity is just… tangential to their stories and narratives… I’m unsure how we actually move forward when it’s only some people who are centered and understood as “normal” and everyone else has to constantly work for some basic recognition…
I mean… yeah. Exactly. I don’t know that most people understand how difficult these sorts of cultural sea changes are (especially in the age of mass media, where “common sense” is in part imposed via mass culture), and sometimes, you got to find a way forward to protect people even if the “mainstream” isn’t on board…Democracy isn’t just… getting the most people to agree with you, it’s finding a way to balance public opinion with what is right.
Yeah, no. People can be ignorant and often awful to each other. Our elected officials do work for us, but they are also supposed to be leaders, and part of that is helping to shape that public opinion and push it towards truth and justice.
I can remember being told the whole point of representative democracy is to pick leaders you trust to make decisions better than the average. I wonder if anyone still believes in that. 
Is there a link to the transcript?
Regarding the questionnaire on trans healthcare. This is exactly what we did in Philadelphia for candidate questionnaires for years before we passed the legislation covering trans healthcare in 2013.
It’s how you educate candidates and the public and how you build support for issues. You may phrase things in ways to maximize support and engagement; of course. Do you agree with removing discrimination in healthcare for trans people then add in a specific etc.
Indeed, in your link in fact… it actually did not hide it behind a paywall for me… but here is the archived version…
Yeah that makes sense about the questionnaire… I was more concerned with his argument that gender affirming care for prisoners shouldn’t be standard of care for people in custody.
Oops. I didn’t scroll down past the audio.
Thanks!