My latest column at UnHerd, on California Governor Gavin Newsom, who really really really wants to be president, the world’s most pressing human-rights campaign. be damned:
Late on Friday evening, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required affirmation of a child’s gender self-identification to be considered in custody and visitation disputes. In his veto message, Newsom praised the “passion and values that led the author to introduce this bill” and expressed his “deep” — and, somehow, “many decades-long” — “commitment to advancing the rights of transgender Californians”.
Newsom packaged his veto in the warning that “[o]ther-minded elected officials, in California and other states, could very well use this strategy to diminish the civil rights of vulnerable communities”— suggesting that other states may retaliate by favouring non-affirming parents in custody disputes.
There was a shorter way for Newsom to say all of this. What he meant was: I’m running for president. During his four years in office, the Governor’s signature has entrenched gender ideology in California’s schools, healthcare settings, and prisons in state law. There’s little reason to think he has had a sudden awakening to the potential harms of an agenda he has long supported. But what Newsom lacks in principles or scruples, he makes up for in political sensitivity: the political winds are shifting and thus he must shift, too — or at least appear to.
Newsom's sudden 180 shift is clearly naked politics shifting with the wind. Up to this point he has done everything possible to hurt children and families.
I've never liked Newsom, and it is all because of the trans issue. I suspect that he jumped on the trans bandwagon early because it was the latest liberal issue to come down the pike, and because trans people generate a lot of sympathy (by, let's face it, looking and acting bizarre). He has supported all kinds of bad laws, like the one that allows trans children to get treatment over the objections of their parents. Indeed, in California a parent can lose custody of their kid by objecting. He clearly doesn't have a nuanced understanding of the issue; he just supports it because it is, well, liberal. I would never support him for president. Biden is similarly stupid. (Having said that, all us Americans need to support Biden to keep Trump from getting back into power.)
Talking about generating sympathy, on Go Fund Me you can find trans women begging for help -- and they always meet their fundraising goal! I once found a picture of three "trans women" who just looked like ordinary masculine young men who had put on dresses to defraud some suckers, and they got all the money they were asking for! What is it about trans people that makes them so appealing to so many people?