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To put it mildly, August was not a good month for the transgender movement.
It started when Virginia gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears appeared at a school board meeting in Arlington to oppose its policy on transgender bathroom use and was greeted by protesters, one with a now-infamous sign saying, “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom, then blacks can’t share my water fountain.” This supposes that because Earle-Sears is black, she is obligated to support the demands of whatever self-proclaimed civil rights movement comes along. To their credit, Democratic officials quickly denounced the sentiment. Then, of course, came the Minneapolis school shooting, the second by a transgender person against Christian elementary-school students in the past two and a half years.*
Mainstream Democrats were already starting to back away from the most radical demands of the transgender movement, but I don’t believe a full reversal is likely. The real problem for moderate Democrats isn’t transgender people themselves, but a wider group within their base that, like the little old lady with a sign in Virginia, or this Nebraska state senator, views transgender activists as the new stand-ins of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, with all the moral authority that implies. (Hans Fiene, writing at The Federalist, dubbed this phenomenon “Selma envy.”) Supporting the transgender movement, even (perhaps especially) if they are not transgender themselves, is how they prove they are Good People who Care about the Most Marginalized.
For those outside the left, the transgender movement is showing the limitations of the civil rights movement model. As civil rights moves away from visible, obvious minority status to more obscure questions of gender, sexuality, and disability (you can claim to be bisexual and marry someone of the opposite sex, or claim to be nonbinary and change nothing about your appearance), minority status becomes voluntary. It begins to attract attention-seekers and narcissists, who then become the vanguard of the movement. Because the allies consider the “marginalized” to have absolute moral authority, they cannot criticize them, no matter how outlandish their demands, how unpopular the movement as a whole becomes, or how much it drags down the Democrats’ electoral prospects. You can even see this pattern in more traditional civil rights movements: For example, self-proclaimed black leaders double down on identity politics even as Donald Trump increases his share of the minority vote.
Allyship offers leftists emotional satisfaction. Increasingly, it comes at the expense of electoral viability. Which one are they more interested in?
*I realize there are some potential ties between the transgender movement and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but since the investigation is ongoing, I’m setting that aside for now.
Discussion (12)
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Based on surveys, I think the middle of the road Democrat is OK with a little bit of assassination. But nearly half are not and those folks are trapped. They have a tiger by the tail and are afraid to let go. They are not speaking up, because they fear for their safety and their careers. The only Dems I see speaking rationally are John Fetterman and now Joe Manchin (who has a book). Now is the time for any sane Democrat to separate from the crazies, let's see if any follow suit. We'll all be better off.
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It does though. It's all about ally-ship and coalition building and standing in solidarity against the
bourgeoisiehaters.CONTRIBUTOR
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I suspect a lot of mainstream Democrats are waiting for someone with particular cultural stature and authority to give them permission, so to speak, to abandon gender ideology. A populist Southerner politician who's good at sniffing then wind, and thinks his party would do better if it backed off one or two social issues dear to the extreme wing of the movement. Go after the T movement as "conversion therapy, except with knives and drugs." Get everyone else on the debate stage to endorse chemical castration. A Brother Souljah moment.
Could happen. But for now it's expected that everyone on the left will believe the proper doctrines, or at least shut up about it, and paint the refusal to believe wholeheartedly in transgenderism as a "spreading hate" towards a "marginalized community." The left believes the science is settled, and was settled a while ago, accepted by all proper-thinking people, and the right's inability to accept and endorse is a sign of mulish, malevolent ignorance.
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I think many Southern Democrats have this opportunity. I do not think any will take it.
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I love "Selma Envy" and plan to
stealadopt it for personal use.It describes not just the yearning for an MLK-style noble cause, but also the attachment to Civil Rights tactics---the Mostly Peaceful Protests that, when they turn to riots, can be declared the Voice of the Unheard.
All of this is theater: The protesters ape courage, but they are screaming and spitting in the faces of police officers who are constrained by laws, policies and procedures, training and, frankly, character from retaliating with the violence they are capable of. They are bit part players in progresive melodrama: The stormtroopers in front of whom one can pose for the cameras which are, lets face it, the focus of the exercise. Clergy who would never otherwise wear a clerical collar dress up in their Christian costumes and force some random cop to play Bull Connor in their own little one-act. "I Put It All On The Line For Justice," they'll tweet, posting a photo of themselves in handcuffs. They will spend so little time in custody (the fines are often pre-paid, too) that the tweet has to stand in for MLK's letter from Birmingham Jail. An hour of thrilling thespianismo and safely home in time for vegan supper...
It solves nothing, ameliorates nothing, "raises awareness" of nothing. In five years, give or take, MLK and the SCLC desegregated the lunch counters, desegregated the interstate transportation system, registered hundreds of thousands of voters and passed the Civil Rights Act. In ten years, #BLM accomplished ...well, we should be so lucky that they accomplished nothing. In fact, the net result of their "movement" has been more dead black people. The net result of the "Free Palestine" movement has already been more dead Palestinians. I'd be willing to bet that the Trans movement will one day be proven to have caused measurable increases in suffering and suicide among the supposed beneficiaries of leftist "compassion."
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