Trans rights, the 2024 Election, and Trump II (Updated)

I have been tossing around ideas for this post since the election. My thoughts are not fully formed, but I wanted to get them down on paper.

• Trans and non-binary people form a vanishingly small percentage of the U.S. population. The question is what to do with that information. One narrative criticizes Republicans for obsessing and seeking to suppress a tiny group whose existence does not affect their lives--"why do you rally around hurting such a small group." A second criticizes Harris and Democrats for caring so much--"why do you care so much about (and feel the need to express support for) such a small group." Unfortunately, the latter has taken hold among Harris voters, particularly in light of evidence suggesting that Trump's anti-trans rants (the "She's for They/Them, Trump is for you" ad and Trump's stump bullshit about boys coming home from school as girls) moved meaningful numbers of votes. On the second narrative, it is not enough for Democrats to downplay support for this group--Harris should have responded by joining Trump and Republicans in piling on this group and agreeing to push them out of the polity. And the required move becomes not just declining to "promote" trans issues (whatever that means), but refraining from protecting trans people when the other side attacks. The idea seems to be that a small vulnerable group does not need protection.

• For example, see this word salad from Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton: 1) "There are just a number of issues where we’re out of touch;" 2) “I think that Republicans have a hateful position on trans issues;”3) Democrats still lose voters because of the party’s “attitude;” 4) “Rather than talk down to you and tell you what to believe, Democrats should “listen to hard-working Americans.”

    Let's put aside Moulton's apparent dichotomy between trans people and hard-working Americans. Moulton serves as a policymaker (or at least pretends to), so make policy of those four statements: The Republican position on trans issues is hateful. But hard-working Americans agree with (or at least are not repulsed by with that position, so Democrats are out of touch if they fail to listen to those hard-working Americans. And that leaves us where in terms of policy, Rep. Moulton?

• This is about pushing this group out of the polity, taking steps to keep them from living their lives as they see fit. Anti-trans activists and officials advertise sports and bathrooms as the key issues and the servile media transcribes it. I will come back to sports in a second. But note that the anti-trans policies on offing extend beyond those issues. Several days after the election, Trump had a social-media post enumerating anti-trans proposals he plans to pursue--stripping federal funds from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, denying Medicaid funds for gender-affirming care, banning trans people from the military, suppressing classroom discussions of trans issues, etc. And Trump nominated as surgeon general the person who pushed and enforced many of Florida's anti-trans efforts. This is not about sports-and-bathrooms.

    Also nonsensical is the feint towards "reasonable" compromises (most recently by now-former Texas Democratic chairman Gilberto Hinojosa) by making this a pocketbook issue--let people do what they want but don't make taxpayers fund it. The amount of any taxpayer money that goes to any expenditure is infinitesimal--that is why we do not allow federal taxpayer standing. And we do not allow individual taxpayers to opt-out of particular expenditures--we do not prohibit Medicaid funds for Sickle Cell Anemia treatments to appease those who do not like Black people. Again, such efforts single out trans people for differential treatment for no reason other than some segment do not like them.

• I confess to being wrong about how central these issues will be to the new administration. I thought this was a cynical political move but that once in office Trump would focus on the things he cares about: immigrants, tax breaks for billionaires, personal enrichment, and revenge on his political enemies. The House GOP freakout over Sarah McBride and some of Trump's nominees suggests this is going to be a central feature in the coming years.

• On sports--this is a real issue but also a straw man that does not justify the broader policy proposals. The science is out on how much advantage male puberty provides once a trans woman undergoes hormone therapy; while the "fairness-and-safety" argument is important, it cannot end the conversation. Even if the science is there,  anti-trans policy (barring all participation in all sports at all levels) is (stop me if you heard this one before), over-inclusive: It applies to sports (e.g., swimming) without safety issues; it applies to sports (archery, bowling, shooting) without sex-based advantage and thus no fairness issues; it applies to trans men playing men's sports (where biological advantage runs the other way); it applies to all ages and levels of competition (drawing no distinction between grade-school, high school j.v. and the Olympics). Policies target people who never went through male puberty so never received the supposed advantages.* And some of the cases that have drawn legal responses have targeted individual players who are not very good at their sports or certainly not so superior in their sports as to create an unfair playing field.**

[*] Or worse, work in tandem with bans on gender-affirming care for minors. So trans girls cannot play girls sports because they have  an advantage from male puberty, but we are going to force them to go through male puberty.

[**] Bey0nd the inherent genetic unfairness that defines sports. Michael Phelps is a genetic anomaly--no one complained that he had unfair biological advantages.

The longer I have worked on this, the angrier I have become. I apologize if this is more of a jeremiad than I expected when I started.

[Update]: I may owe Rep. Moulton some sort of apology. According to this interview with Rolling Stone, the Times quoted him out of context and slapped a headline on the story that made him sound more opposed to trans rights than he intended to suggest. Post hoc CYA or genuine? You decide.