Democratic Party leaders and their donors bear responsibility for the increasingly widespread view of trans rights as incompatible with a politics that benefits the many, not the few.
Who’s to blame? That question has animated just about every discussion of Vice President Kamala Harris’s catastrophic loss last week to Donald Trump. The answer has been often refracted through the Democratic Party and its media apparatus’s tendency to view everything good and bad in the world through vulgarly drawn demographic categories.
In her gossip column masquerading as serious political inquiry, New York Times writer Maureen Dowd blamed Harris for “touting trans rights” and for wasting breath on identitarian bromides. No matter that the campaign had adopted a strikingly muted position on the identity-based issues that had defined Harris’s 2020 bid for the nomination, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe embraced Dowd’s message while endorsing similar statements by Democratic representatives Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi, who chastised their party’s support of “pandering to the far left” by allowing “boys” to play girls’ sports.
The upshot here is that many prominent liberals now see the widely broadcast “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” messaging as much more than an ugly campaign trick. Instead, it was merely the clearest sign that the Democrats had abandoned their voters’ needs, desires, and beliefs for a top-down imposition of odiously inverted gender norms.
There are many good reasons to doubt this narrative, the first being that the public’s attitudes on trans rights are nowhere near static. Not that long ago, they were actually relatively popular. In 2016, only 35 percent of Americans favored laws that would force trans people to use bathrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their assigned-at-birth-sex.
In fact, only 44 percent of Republicans favored such laws as opposed to the 80 percent that do today. In between then and now, conservative forces failed repeatedly to win ballot referendum fights, federal litigation, and battles over state laws that targeted the right of trans people to merely exist in public space.
That truth is no doubt shocking to those who tend to juxtapose critiques of neoliberal identity politics with their own imaginary visions of traditionalist heterosexual working-class households that look like the cast of Leave It to Beaver and share that era’s gender politics. Of course, even the gender politics of the mid-twentieth century were far from primordially anti-queer. Rather, they were shaped by virulently anti-communist scapegoating of the supposedly weak-willed homosexuals that had spread like cancer across the Harry Truman administration’s federal bureaucracy. So even if trans issues were poorly understood by a meaningful portion of the voting public in the 2010s, social tolerance and civil rights expansions were not preordained to be so polarizing.
What changed in a few short years? Looking to the Ron DeSantis regime in Florida, GOP lawmakers figured out how to craft an anti-trans sex panic over “grooming” public school teachers and parental rights–defying counselors to rationalize their broader attacks on teachers’ unions and public education funding. Trans rights are one thing, but the specter of pedophilic teaching professionals and forced gender transitions are clearly another.
In one particularly innovative rendition of trans panic politics, conservative politicians and think tank propagandists have begun to denounce the “gender identity industry,” which they portray as ravaging the bodies and minds of innocent children and adolescents for profit. According to that view, trans rights are not simply a demand for equality under the law, but instead a covert accumulation strategy by Big Pharma and Big Tech. These industries, the conspiracy goes, benefit from lifelong patients-cum-consumers who buy their drugs and convert susceptible teenagers via unrestricted social media influence.
Trump himself adapted this quasi-populist rhetoric for the campaign trail, vowing to investigate “Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.” A week before voters headed to the polls, J. D. Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, spinning a tale about colluding gender-affirming psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies eager to extract profits. The presence of Caitlyn Jenner — who has denounced liberals for their alleged “indoctrination” of trans youth — at Mar-a-Lago on election night gave some cover to the Trump team, justifying its stance on protecting children from the clutches of Big Pharma and obfuscating the GOP’s plan for trans adults.
On a similarly conspiratorial note, Christopher Rufo has warned that “business is booming” in the gender-affirming care industry, as evinced by one research hospital’s creation of a robotic-assisted vaginoplasty machine. Such fears of “castration machines,” as Rufo termed them, slot neatly alongside the conservative movement’s promise to restore masculinity. The Right thus promises to rescue imperiled men from their own castration anxieties by shadowboxing these and other supposed threats. If many men feel like they have been losing on all fronts — an entirely understandable sentiment given diminished prospects for making a living wage mixed with what must genuinely feel to some like threatening transformations to gendered social scripts — why wouldn’t we expect a potent reaction that could be exploited by the Right?
The force of this broader populist frame against trans rights functions by obscuring the fact that corporate America’s brief flirtation with “woke” reforms has drastically abated in the past two years. Nowhere is this more visible than the tech sector, where Silicon Valley billionaires have lined up to kiss the GOP’s ring.
Seven short years after accepting the Human Rights Campaign’s 2017 National Equality Award, Jeff Bezos tanked the Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris and shortly thereafter congratulated Trump on his electoral victory. That other tech CEOs including Mark Zuckerberg quickly bowed before the man who had very recently threatened to imprison them only further fueled the notion that Trump had returned to vanquish those who would dare to surveil, silence, or otherwise oppose his supporters.
Nine years since Trump descended from that gawdy golden escalator, such populist posturing has been appallingly effective at selling the GOP as a defender of the vulnerable rather than a party committed to wielding brutal cultural reaction to achieve upward economic redistribution. The Democratic Party has played its own pernicious role in obfuscating the origin and strength of today’s anti-trans agenda.
In 2012, then vice president Joe Biden famously described fighting trans discrimination as the “civil rights issue of our time.” What a different world it might be if the Democrats had paired that historic gesture with something other than half measures on workers’ rights, industrial policy, and public goods.
What if the Biden administration’s lawsuit against state bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth had not followed the administration’s decisions to roll back the COVID-19 era expansion of Medicaid and to quietly privatize Medicare through Medicare Advantage? What if instead we had at least heard a full-throated support for Medicare for All, a program that could very easily have included trans antidiscrimination protections and health benefits? If a hospital stay was no longer a harbinger of bankruptcy, maybe otherwise socially conservative voters wouldn’t care so much that trans people shared in the benefits of public goods.
Think also to the Trump campaign’s ads accusing the Biden administration of providing gender-affirming surgical care to prison inmates and “illegal aliens.” That charge drew its strength in part from long-standing bipartisan support for mass incarceration policies and their ideological corollary, the demonization of the accused as incorrigible and undeserving. The same goes for immigrants. Earlier this year, Biden dared Congress to send him a draconian immigration bill assembled by Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell before Trump convinced his loyalists to deny the president a legislative victory.
Given that the substance of the effort was bipartisan — just relisten to Tim Walz’s repeated endorsements of that bill during the vice presidential debate — the opposition to immigrants’ access to trans health care extends from both parties’ larger efforts to cast the undocumented as the source of voters’ pains, the reason for their outrage and their sense of economic and social insecurity. And in both cases, the charge that taxpayers’ funds have been wasted offers an answer for where all of that money has gone while reinforcing the notion that government can only waste funds.
As always, the constellation of nonprofits that calls itself the LGBTQ rights movement shares in the blame. Even the supposedly “progressive” and “grassroots” arm of the movement, the National LGBTQ Task Force, holds conferences adorned with advertisements celebrating sponsorships from Coca-Cola, Comcast, and Gilead pharmaceuticals. In this election cycle, the class character of the movement can be seen in the fanfare around Delaware’s Sarah McBride, who is set to become the first openly trans person in Congress. That blinkered obsession with the novelty of McBride’s identity as a future congressperson appears to have been more important than her work on family and medical leave policies as a state lawmaker or her endorsements from trade unions.
Such prioritizing is a reminder that we lack a political organization or movement that could make those nonidentity factors the condition of its support rather than an added bonus. That, of course, would require something other than the coalitional approach that defines both preexisting identity-based nonprofits and street activist groups — it would entail the forging of something new that could eventually compete with the Democratic Party apparatus in which working-class institutions and concerns have long played the junior partner to a dominant wing of business groups and wealthy donor–funded social justice nonprofits.
Given our current lack of such an organization, we should sadly remain hyper vigilant of how much rot the current array of “progressive” nonprofits might soon sanction. Recall that two decades ago, the Human Rights Campaign — notably McBride’s former employer — entertained a deal with congressional Republicans: we’ll support then president George W. Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security if you’ll sign onto the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. If LGBTQ advocacy nonprofits try a similar maneuver in the next four years, it would be very difficult to blame voters who see a modicum of support for trans rights as anything other than a class agenda benefiting a liberal elite who couldn’t care less for “them,” that pronoun standing this time for an ostensibly gender normative majority, the opposite of Harris’s preference for an undeserving trans “they/them.”
The takeaway here is that Democratic leaders and their donors do indeed have an enormous responsibility for the increasingly widespread view of trans rights as incompatible with or even antagonistic to a politics that benefits the many, not the few. The chattering class is right about that, but for the wrong reasons.
No matter of rhetoric alone, this has been the horrific effect of the party’s diminishing ability to provide enough comforts and securities to stave off strongman promises for economic and cultural renewal. In that sense, the blame cannot be placed on this year’s batch of Democratic campaign consultants but instead on fifty years of allowing labor to atrophy while replacing working-class voters with wealthier, white suburban ones. The scapegoating and suffering that might soon unfold will stain the souls of every centrist voice of reason who denounced social democratic reforms yesterday and who blames trans people today.