Return to sender
Jonathan Chait pays a visit to the magical floating la-la land of “broadly correct principles” where progressives can stake out a happy, morally superior, and politically viable middle ground on trans issues:
Before this month’s elections, when Democratic candidates were being attacked for letting transgender athletes compete in girls’ sports, trans-rights activists and their allies had a confident answer: They had nothing to fear, because anti-trans themes were a consistent loser for Republicans. That position became impossible to maintain after the elections, when detailed research showed that the issue had done tremendous damage to Kamala Harris and other Democrats. In fact, the third-most-common reason swing voters and late deciders in one survey gave for opposing Harris was that she “is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class,” an impression these voters no doubt got from endless ads showing her endorsing free gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained migrants.
Now some of the very people who pushed Democrats into adopting these politically toxic positions have shifted to a new line: Abandoning any element of the trans-rights agenda would be morally unthinkable. “To suggest we should yield even a little to Mr. Trump’s odious politics, to suggest we should compromise on the rights of trans people,” wrote the New York Times columnist Roxane Gay, would be “shameful and cowardly.” Asked whether his party should rethink its positions on transgender issues, Senator Tim Kaine said, “Democrats should get on board the hate train? We ain’t gonna do it.” The writer Jill Filipovic recently argued that Democrats must refuse “to chase the median voter if that voter has some really bad, dangerous, or hateful ideas.”
Refusing to accommodate the electorate is a legitimate choice when politicians believe they are defending a principle so foundational that defeat is preferable to compromise. But in this case, the no-compromise stance is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of the options on the table. Democrats do not, in fact, face a choice between championing trans rights and abandoning them. They can and should continue to defend trans people against major moral, legal, and cultural threats. All they need to do to reduce their political exposure is repudiate the movement’s marginal and intellectually shaky demands.
So what demands does Chait consider indispensable and just, and which are “marginal” and “intellectually shaky”?
The major questions about trans rights are: Do some people have the chance to live a happier and more fulfilling life in a different gender identity than the one to which they were born? Do some of these people need access to medical services to facilitate their transition? Do they deserve to be treated with respect and addressed by their chosen names and pronouns? Do they deserve equal protections from discrimination in employment, housing, and military service? Must society afford them access to public accommodations so as not to assault their dignity?
I believe the moral answer to all of these questions is a clear yes. The evidence also suggests that this is a relatively safe position for politicians to take. Americans broadly support individual choice, and trans rights fit comfortably within that framework. Sarah McBride, the incoming first transgender member of Congress, faced down bullying by her new Republican colleagues—an example of how Democrats can defend the dignity of trans people without allowing themselves to be depicted as extremists. The Trump administration is reportedly planning to kick transgender people out of the military, a move that only 30 percent of the public supports, according to a February YouGov poll. If Trump follows through, this fight would give Democrats the chance to highlight the pure cruelty of the Republican stance.
Democrats mainly ran into trouble because they either supported or refused to condemn a few highly unpopular positions: allowing athletes who transitioned from male to female to participate in high-level female sports, where they often enjoy clear physical advantages; allowing adolescent and preadolescent children to medically transition without adequate diagnosis; and providing state-funded sex-change surgery for prisoners and detainees. The first two issues poll horribly; the last has not been polled, but you can infer its lack of support from the Harris campaign’s insistence on changing the subject even in the face of relentless criticism.
To Chait’s credit, he dares to look deeper than the movement’s noxious tactics/“confrontational approach” (poh-tay-to, po-tah-to). He just hasn’t thought his suggestions all the way through.
He either misunderstands or misconstrues a few of the ‘rights’ he thinks Democrats need to defend. Protection from discrimination in employment and housing is an easy yes. Military service is thornier. Is gender dysphoria a serious mental-health condition and/or is transition sickening and disabling in ways that might reasonably disqualify someone from military service? The question of whether transition is safe, effective, ethical medicine is an open one. Should the extension of ‘respect’ really be equated with using “chosen” pronouns? Isn’t it possible to respect someone as a human being without recognizing them as a member of a sex class to which they don’t belong? What does “access to public accommodations” mean, exactly, and why do I suspect Chait means men in women’s spaces, rather than men of all degrees of gender-nonconformity being safe and welcome in men’s spaces?
Chait suggests there’s “plenty of reasonable room for Democrats to retreat—on female-sports participation, youth gender medicine, and state-sponsored surgery for prisoners and detainees” and argues that “compromise without complete surrender is, in fact, possible” (and—presumably—desirable).
But this is where Chait hasn’t thought things through. I’ve written about the all-or-nothing nature of trans activism recently, a subject Chait touches but doesn’t engage when he quotes Katelyn Burns’ claim that “if trans girls are really boys when they’re playing sports… then trans women should be considered men in all contexts.”* Chait declares that “that simple equation collapses under a moment’s scrutiny”:
Female sports is one of the rare cases in which the broadly correct principle of allowing trans people to set the terms of their own identity can meaningfully inhibit the rights of others. One can easily defend Lia Thomas’s right to be addressed as a woman and allowed access to women’s bathrooms without supporting her participation on a women’s college swim team.
Burns—not Chait—is totally right about this. If we acknowledge biological sex in every setting where sex matters—or frankly just in any setting where sex matters—we acknowledge that we’re just pretending that transwomen are women the rest of the time. We’re saying: sure, we’ll humor you sometimes, but of course we don’t really mean it. If we really meant it, we’d [fill in the blank: let you compete in women’s sports, lock you up in women’s prisons, you name it…].
Treating men and boys as though they were women and girls in settings where sex matters undermines the rights of women and girls to fairness, safety, privacy, dignity, etc., so that’s out. That leaves settings where sex doesn’t matter. But what does it mean to treat a man “like a woman” in settings where sex doesn’t matter? Doesn’t the idea of treating men and women differently in settings where sex doesn’t matter sound kinda… sexist? (Or—at best—chivalrous?)
In search of middle ground, Chait finds himself in no-man’s-land. What he proposes will satisfy no one and solve nothing. Trans activists will never accept an asterisk (*Woman® for All Purposes Except When It Really Matters) and women’s-rights campaigners will never surrender the language they need to make the still-simmering conflict visible. Chait wants everybody to agree to say of Thomas: “she doesn’t belong in the women’s competition.” Trans activists will insist ‘she’ does, claiming this ‘woman’ is being discriminated against for nothing more than being trans. Feminists will point out that ‘she’ doesn’t belong—because ‘she’s’ a man.
A lot of good progressives want to avoid the obvious conclusion here, which is that we really fucked this up. There’s no worthy cause to salvage here. Gender-nonconformity should be no big deal but that’s not what trans is about and no level of inner or outer gender-nonconformity alters one’s sex in any way. Trans-identified people deserve all the ordinary human rights the rest of us enjoy and no special privileges whatsoever. Birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, and passports should never falsify the bearer’s sex. People of any age who are deeply distressed by their bodies, sexual orientation, or sex-role expectations deserve compassionate psychotherapeutic support—not risky cosmetic interventions, which are not medicine and which should never be offered as such, or covered by insurance, or promoted—much less celebrated!—in any way. We should never indoctrinate kids into thinking they might be born in the wrong body because there’s no such thing. There is only your body, the only one you’ll ever get, which is too precious to sacrifice on the altar of an identity born of advancements in medical technology on the one hand and social-cultural regression in the form of queer theory on the other and sold to people who are suffering for a multitude of other reasons that deserve all the understanding and attention currently misdirected at ‘trans.’
In other words: the ‘cause’ is 100% pernicious bullshit and the sooner the adults in the room can just say so, the better.
The idea of "compromise" with these neo-Lysenkoists is laughable. How can there be a "compromise position" between material truth and fantasist lies?
While we're at it, should we "meet halfway" with flat earthers, and reach an "agreement" that Earth is shaped like a hockey puck?
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"Equal protection in housing and employment" already IS a guaranteed right regardless of "gender identity" or sexual orientation.
No thanks to the Democrats, though; this was decided by the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court in its 2020 Bostock decision, which extended the housing and employment nondiscrimination provisions of the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act to those two extra types of classes.
Of course, that doesn't stop Dems and their TRA-captured propaganda media outlets from slipping "equal housing and employment" into various contexts to try and trick readers into thinking they have common cause with "trans rights". A particularly egregious example is here: https://x.com/conora05/status/1855226623915651103
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Finally, when Chait says
>> the third-most-common reason swing voters and late deciders in one survey gave for opposing Harris was that she “is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class <<
...either he's lying, or else he just doesn't know that 28 is more than 22 or 23.
because, see, here's the exact datagraphic Chait is taking about: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcBM0rKW8AA1omI.jpg
"Too focused on cultural issues such as trans issues" is the third LINE—meaning that it's third place in the statistical sum of ALL voter types represented in the chart—but among swing voters, it's the ••MOST•• important issue BY A SOLID MARGIN.
Swing voters even have their own column—which is why I suspect Chait is just lying, for reasons similar to the various subterfuges called out in the xwitter post above.
Aaaaannnd
keep in mind that
* the polling outfits are still too craven to give transgenderism its OWN response to these surveys (vs. dumping it into a catch-all "CuLtUrE wAr" category)
and, most importantly of all,
* the American electorate only knows the teeny tiny top of the tip of the GIANT iceberg of transgenderist abuse, institutional privilege, and sexual violence. Most have NO clue that there are predatory men "identifying into" Women's prisons, disabled and elder care facilities, rape shelters, homeless shelters, and other such places where a fresh group of ACTUALLY vulnerable, ACTUALLY marginalized WOMEN—and children, too, in family shelters—are perfectly placed to be the next victims.
Most Americans haven't seen much more of the trans industrial complex than Dylan Mulvaney, non-military "admiral" Dick "Rachel" Levine, and William "Lia" Thomas.
Oh just I M A G I N E how much more "AnTi TrAnS" the country will turn as people actually begin to learn about all the really really bad shit.
A possible positive view of Chait’s piece is that he’s finally decided, like so many other pundits, that the issue is unavoidable. I think all pundits start thinking there’s plenty of room for compromise.
Ideally, if he spends any more time thinking or is yelled at for not believing a man is a biological female, he might begin to understand the issue better. He might be at the beginning of his gender journey, in other words.
I saw a meme of people on a roller coaster. The people with neat hair and unmussed clothing in the cars ascending the hill were new to gender ideology and believed compromise was possible. They were staring at people in the cars coming down the hill, who were wild eyed with hair flying and tattered clothing —they were the people who had been fighting gender ideology for awhile already.
I think of that image a lot because I feel like I’ve experienced it.
Let’s hope Chait is on his way up the roller coaster but will soon be on the way down.