The Normal People Understanders

Prior to the 2024 US presidential election, I was one of many people who made the obvious prediction that if Trump wins, there will be Democrats who blame trans issues for Harris’ loss. I even briefly mentioned that in my previous blog post. It was predictable because at least some of them did this back in 2016 and because Trump’s focus on anti-trans ads would make it look like this bigotry sells, whether or not there really was a positive causal relationship. I noted before that this was probably deliberately set up as a strategy to advance transphobia. Elon Musk is pursuing a long game of using his immense wealth to make the world worse for his first child.

It’s important to understand that not only is the impulse to sacrifice equal rights for electoral gain immoral, it is self-defeating. If Democrats try to pander to anti-trans beliefs, it may harm them electorally. It is not generally the case that Democrats would do well to appeal to me. If they tailored their platform to me, they would lose so epically it would be borderline hilarious. But if they tailored their platform to the people telling them to adopt anti-trans messaging, they will also lose. The people calling for this have an unusual combination of positions and are somewhat oblivious to how odd their views are, yet they have a big megaphone.

Julia Serano is one of a number of people who made the case pretty well that there isn’t a winning electoral strategy in turning on trans rights:

Shouldn’t the pundits who propose throwing trans people under the bus provide some sort of evidence that these anti-trans ads are what cost Harris this election?

Don’t hold your breath. They won’t, because all the evidence is against them.

In late October, just before the election, Data for Progress published a poll showing that Democrats and Independents overwhelmingly prefer candidates who support trans rights, reject candidates who support anti-trans legislation, and feel that politicians should spend less time dwelling on this issue. A late September New York Times/Siena battleground state poll showed similar results.

And goes further to say that it could even harm Democrats to pursue this:

So that’s the case for why publicly rejecting trans people won’t help Democrats make any gains in the electorate. But we should also be asking: Is there a potential political downside to throwing trans people under the proverbial bus?

Statistics show that trans adults comprise about 0.6% of the U.S. population. This may not seem like much at first glance—indeed, that relatively low number may lead some politicians and pundits to presume that we are expendable. But if we extrapolate that percentage to current state populations, it equates to roughly 36,000 voters in Wisconsin, 60,000 voters in Michigan, and 78,000 voters in Pennsylvania. In a close swing state election, can Democrats afford to alienate that many voters?

Even if you think the Democratic party can withstand trans voters staying home or casting third-party protest votes, turning against trans people would impact more than just us. Many trans people have cisgender partners, family members, and friends who care about us. According to Pew Research, 42% of Americans know someone who is trans. What message does it send to them if Democrats reject us?

One thing I would add to this is the concept of product differentiation applies to political parties and candidates. It can be the case that the average American is a softcore anti-trans bigot (and I personally believe that is the case) and that wouldn’t mean that pandering to anti-trans bigotry would help Democrats. And that’s because if a voter is motivated by transphobia at the ballot box, they will simply pick the conservative party. The conservative party market is cornered. The Democratic party has to be the progressive party to even have a base on top of which to place swing votes. As noted above, most Americans do support trans rights to an extent, especially if they are Democrats, so wanting Democratic policies and being against trans rights is a niche that’s not worth appealing to, morally or strategically. But that niche unfortunately punches above its weight in elite circles.

It’s worth asking then, if this strategy is so bad or even counter-productive why are so many commentators giddy about promoting the idea that Dems need to pivot to appealing to what they see as the “center” on trans issues. In some cases, I think it’s an honest mistake that may stem from reading too much into electoral results, as people tend to do, and falling for the trap Musk and other ideological billionaires laid. Perhaps some urban progressives buy into derogatory stereotypes that working class people are not only transphobic, but highly motivated anti-trans voters. But obviously a big part of it is that many of these commenters simply are ideological anti-trans bigots and they want to tailor the Democratic party to their specific policy preferences. After all, everyone’s election postmortems conveniently align with their own policy preferences.

There is a group of terminally online center-left people, many of whom writers for mainstream outlets, who correctly note that the public has complex and not entirely liberatory views on transgender issues then wrongly conclude that this means the TERF ideology that lurks in their circles is an accurate proxy for that. TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) subscribe to a convoluted anti-trans ideology that originated in Ivy Leagues schools in the late 70s. These ideas are an intellectually satisfying excuse to hate trans people for those who want to preserve their self-image as being progressive and feminist. It comes with convoluted conspiracy theories and in-group vocabulary that the public is blissfully unaware of. Some tricks these people use to position their odd beliefs as representing an important constituency – flattening politics as a whole or the trans issue specifically into a single dimension, making intra-elite struggles everyone else’s problem and slanted representations of the conversation.

Flattening Politics to a Single Dimension

People like Matt Yglesias position themselves as center-left, making them superficially typical of the population as a whole, ignoring that even internet memes recognize another dimension on which they are distant from the general public. Americans aren’t libertarian but we tend to be more skeptical of authority and big institutions than the rich, powerful people who have direct relationships with politicians and access to the means to evade the security state. People who write for major outlets are comparatively more paternalistic while people I meet out in the desert are skeptical or even fearful of the criminal justice system.

There are also ideas that are popular in specific subcultures and obscure elsewhere. So what the center left looks like can vary considerably by class, geography, gender, etc. Political insiders broadly know this but they may still overestimate how much they understand people approximately at the same place on the left-right spectrum as themselves.

Flattening Opinion on Trans Issues to a Single Dimension

It’s hard to split the difference on trans issues in a way that’s coherent. It’s hard to just have a little transphobia, as a treat. And there is no way to satisfy both trans people and loved ones for whom these issues are a matter of life and death as well as ideologues who see trans acceptance as an existential threat or the destruction of Western Civilization. The way transphobes on the left find what they think of as middle ground is even more unusual though it superficially occupies the same spot on the giant dial that says transphobia as the general public. Your average American thinks trans people are icky but also has a live and let live attitude. Transphobic limousine liberals use incomprehensible TERF language and op-ed language like “youth gender medicine” or buy into a watered down version of the conspiracy theory advanced in Transsexual Empire.

In the general public, views on gay rights and trans rights are tightly coupled. It’s only elite transphobes who try to split hairs and pair their anti-trans beliefs with superficially pro-gay rights beliefs. You don’t turn out the base by sounding like Republicans on the issue. And importantly, you don’t win over cisgender queer voters with transphobia because the vast majority of them especially cis lesbians disagree with that agenda, despite media highlighting the loud minority of anti-trans cis queers.

None of this is to say there’s no overlap between folk transphobia and elite transphobia. One area where they both often agree is opposition to trans women and girls in sex-segregated sports. This position is of course wrong but I understand why people’s intuitions would lead them there. Might as well explain why the beliefs are wrong. It’s simpler to defend a truth than pander to falsehoods. Democrats have no trouble standing their ground in other areas, and it would be so easy for them to defend the trans-inclusive position here as trans activists are on solid foundation. As Parker Molloy explained:

An 8-year-old trans girl1 does not have any advantage2 over any other 8-year-old girl in any sport. A 15-year-old trans girl who has been on puberty blockers does not have any advantage over any other 15-year-old girl. A 25-year-old trans woman who took puberty blockers and later began hormone replacement therapy later in her teens does not have any advantage over any other 25-year-old woman in any sport. None of this should be in any way controversial.

The second you call for a blanket ban on trans girls and trans women participating in school activities with other girls and women, you’re making it extraordinarily obvious that this is not, in any sense, about “fairness.”

Importantly, on this issue there already has been compromise, as Molloy notes. Trans activists aren’t pushing for sports to be based on gender identity, we’re arguing for it to be based on biological realities. It’s the anti-trans camp that pretends away endocrinology, sports medicine and all the ways genetic expression changes through medical transition. They want to constrain “biology” to external phenotype at time of birth and push laws and social movements that inevitably end up harassing cis women and girls.

Universalizing Elite In-Group Fighting

This is probably one of the more annoying aspects of this. Rich liberals are surrounded by other rich liberals. They get annoyed at the sanctimony, the hypocrisy, the language policing and conclude – wrongly – that their annoying friends are the trans rights movement and their annoying selves are a proxy for normal people. In reality, both of these groups are terrible and treat trans issues in a maximally unserious way. Overfocus on symbolic victories and language policing is pretty much the same as only wanting to offer the bare minimum to trans people and calling that reasonable.

The Missing Quadrant

One way those in the media manipulate people in the anti-trans direction is hacking the Overton window. They may not agree with anti-trans progressives but they are sure that their views need to be heard. For some reason, they don’t give the same courtesy to conservatives who support trans rights (with some exceptions), and yes they do exist. Some of the fiercest fighters for trans rights are supportive mothers of trans children and not all of these people are progressive. The way NYT and others make a point of boosting progressive or even trans voices opposing trans rights appears deliberate and doesn’t give readers a balanced view of reality. They platform the extreme anti-trans views but don’t platform transhumanist pro-trans views, with rare exceptions. Of course I write articles from that perspective but I don’t expect syndication in mainstream outlets any time soon.

Let Me Be Real With You

As I briefly mentioned before, your average American doesn’t like trans people but isn’t actively in a hate group. This softcore hate can be dangerous in the banality of evil sense but it also means that most people aren’t primarily motivated by a desire to harass trans people. This also means that hardcore anti-trans bigots may be distasteful to them in the same ways trans people are, and then some. Making being trans your whole personality is annoying and weird, but also understandable. Humans are self-obsessed creatures and all creatures have a self-preservation instinct. The experience of radically changing your appearance and how you are perceived is the sort of thing that’s admittedly hard to shut up about. People experiencing the immense sense of relief known as gender euphoria are perhaps annoying in the same way children on Christmas are. But this all at least makes logical sense, even if you’re not a fan of the whole thing.

Anti-trans bigots make their hate their whole personality. They keep bringing the subject up, that subject the softcore bigots wish not to have to think about. And if you don’t like what real trans people look like (or think we look like due to confirmation bias), you really don’t want to look at the hideous, derogatory anti-trans comics internet neonazis like to make. And on top of all that, they just come across as cruel. It’s creepy to be obsessed with trans issues when you’re not even trans or a supportive ally. Extreme bigotry is simply unpleasant, even when you’re a bit of a bigot yourself. The best way to appeal to the softcore bigots is something not morally ideal, which is to avoid the issue.

This is why trying to split the difference in the wrong way can be counterproductive even from a cold, calculating political or business perspective. Left-wing anti-trans bigotry is not popular just like that of the religious right. Putting “gender critical” views in your platform is the worst of both worlds. It’s failing to follow the politically smart rule of avoiding the issue as much as possible and it turns off progressive voters. It uses cringe wording that doesn’t appeal or even scan to most people, just like a lot of pro-trans messaging, unfortunately. As I sometimes lament, trans people and our haters alike are bad at talking like normal people.

Another obvious point I’d pay for leaving out – so-called left-wing anti-trans bigotry is often just right-wing in nature. We have people like Bari Weiss who still try to claim the liberal label but it’s quite transparent that they are of the right. However, I don’t want to let the left off the hook as we really did create TERF ideology in the first place. We created a lot of bad things that have since found their homes on the right. I also like to keep things simple by just usually calling people what they call themselves.

The anti-trans movement is characterized by epistemic closure. Blanchard’s convoluted system of categorizing trans women as two discrete phenomena requires assuming trans women are systematically lying about their own experiences and so many other things have stemmed from this type of thinking. We were first told that there was a looming detransition epidemic stemming from a rise in early transition, then when that didn’t materialize a new excuse was invented, the idea that escalating commitment locked them into a trans identity. I subjected myself to “Irreversible Damage” and it repeatedly combines these ideas and two incompatible data sets in order to claim that there’s a novel social contagion. The epistemic closure required to believe this is consequential and not something that can be broken through with the right political messaging. Riley Gaines, who is famous for tying with a trans woman for fifth place in a swimming race and telling that story 8 million times, is the figurehead of the “fairness in women’s sports” movement. No one seems to be bothered that she spearheaded the harassment that Imane Khelif, a very much cis woman Olympian received. This movement is obsessed with Lia Thomas and spreads the same wrong or misleading misinformation about her over and over again (see the article by Parker Molloy, above).

It’s not simply that you shouldn’t meet these people in the middle, it’s that you really can’t. Biden didn’t force schools to allow trans girls in girl’s sports in Title IX but if you’re immersed in an anti-trans media ecosystem, you’ll never hear that. You’ll hear the opposite, that his changes require such inclusion. He gained nothing for the Democratic party with that compromise because the anti-trans camp aren’t living in reality. This is not me saying that Dems can’t and shouldn’t ever compromise, but that the nature of the compromise is important. People who believe conspiracy theories aren’t who you try to meet in the middle. If they don’t think a middle ground exists then you can’t simply make one.

Now all these nuances about how to defuse people who are on the fence about whether or not to leave us alone are not things I expect most people to know. It’s understandable to not be transgender and to not comprehend the risk map appropriately. That’s why it’s important, both morally and strategically for Democrats to listen to trans people.

When You Need to Compromise, Listen to Trans People

Don’t listen to weird rich liberals who haven’t “made a detailed study of the specifics of the issue.” It is totally plausible that one party can be better on the issue and that it’s so important that party win that some compromise on the issue itself is necessary to get that party elected. But the important part is trans people have to be the ones dictating what that compromise is. Otherwise, Democrats could be sacrificing something too important.

Details matter. How you meet the public in the middle on trans issues matters. Do you do it in a way that makes you look like a dishonest hypocrite, hated by trans people and our haters alike, or do you do it in a way that gives normal people a sigh of relief that maybe the issue will go away. Do you cede ground on a matter of fact that makes the public think maybe there is something to the religious right’s beliefs on LGBT issues or do you stand your ground where the laws are at their most consequential. No one is going to treat their own continued existence and ability to live a normal life as negotiable. My body, my choice is a popular position and better to just make a straight appeal to that than dance around the issue.

It might not be apparent to most people which issues are more important to trans people or not. Anti youth transition views are actually among the most extreme anti-trans views of all yet they’re often treated by op-ed writers as a fine place to meet in the middle. Early transition is a path to normalcy. It’s actually what should be the conservative approach. Trans people who transition early save on medical costs and usually have an easier time passing as cis. Softcore tranphobia dings us for standing out and many of us (but not me, I’m weird) don’t want to stand out! Children are also more vulnerable and have fewer means to protect themselves from oppressive laws. So restrictions on early transition are some of the most extreme laws of all. But wait, there’s a wrinkle here! Genital surgery is almost never done on minors so it wouldn’t have any effect to ban that or it would have a positive effect if there were no exemptions from the ban for “corrective” surgery on intersex infants, something that should be stopped. This is just one example, but should illustrate the importance of consulting trans people.

In my experience people respect you more if you respect yourself all else being equal. And I recognize the “all else being equal” is doing some heavy lifting. Maybe part of the reason Democrats are less popular than their own policy positions is just the aesthetics. They seem weak or dishonest. And it doesn’t help when Dems act like the same issues they said are hugely important aren’t actually that important. It shows strength to stand up for your convictions and your own rights.

Now to reiterate a point from earlier in the article – if the Democratic party’s messaging on trans issues matched my messaging, they would lose hard. It would be epic. There would be a smoking crater where the DNC headquarters once stood for some reason. But what I say when I’m completely free to speak my mind is one thing, what I say when I’m trying to calm down someone visibly resentful of the fact they have to share this planet with me is another. Ordinary trans people all over the country who have to live with unsympathetic family members, coworkers and gatekeepers have valuable insights into how to argue for our rights and that is more politically relevant than the ad-hoc, data-agnostic election postmortems dreamed up by the pseudointelligentia before the votes were even done being counted.

Democrats shouldn’t hire me to be their consultant. If they did, I’d tell them to throw chairs at Republicans and make them afraid of showing up to work. And I don’t even like Democrats so I’d probably start throwing chairs at them. But I am willing to bet that “I’ll keep your LGBT loved ones safe and help us as a country move past this hot button issue to bigger and better things” is more of a winning message than some woolly shit about race being a social construct but not sex. We must avoid the state-brained idea that every action you take is towards the end of getting the right people elected in order to attain the right policy. Rhetoric works directly on people and their actions. Bad rhetoric is a negative influence on the world with or without the state as an intermediary and it’s all the worse if the bad rhetoric was part of a failed attempt to get a candidate elected.