Have liberals moved too far to the left culturally? Is that why we lost in 2024?
This is hardly a new dispute. Thomas Frank wrote his seminal exploration of the question, What's the Matter With Kansas? in 2004, back when Democrats were considerably more moderate than they are now. But it seems newly relevant in the wake of an election where the American public seemingly decided that even a lunatic right was better than leaving liberals in power.
These things tend to be thermostatic. After a few years people get tired of whichever ideology is ascendant and switch to the other one for a while. Still, why switch to Trumpism, which most liberals view as wildly beyond the pale?
A lot of it has to do with the nature of extremism. Which extreme are you more afraid of? As an example, consider the question of puberty blockers in trans children. A moderate view might be something like Sometimes they make sense, but the evidence suggests we should be a lot more careful about prescribing them. What are the two extreme views on either side of this?
- Conservatives: Ban hormonal treatments for minors.
- Liberals: Twelve-year-olds know what they're doing. Transition away.
Which is scarier? As in many things, the conservative view is essentially Stop. Let's go back to the way things were a few years ago. And this is not very scary. The liberal view, conversely, is inherently a little disturbing if you're not already a confirmed lefty.
This isn't always the case. The moderate view on abortion, for example, would be I support Roe v. Wade. The two extremes are:
- Conservatives: Ban abortion completely.
- Liberals: Just let women and their doctors decide.
In this case, partly because abortion is a well-worn issue, it's the conservative position that seems scarier to most people. Republicans have discovered this to their dismay ever since Dobbs forced them to put their money where their mouths are.
But for most cultural hot buttons, especially fairly new ones, the conservative extreme is the less scary. After all, Stop doing it has a natural limit of zero. And since zero was often the normal position only a few years in the past, how scary can it be? By contrast, the sky's the limit for lefties. We can compete for ever more extreme positions almost without limit.
This is meant as an explanation, not an endorsement. I have my own views, of course, but they don't matter. I'm nowhere near the median voter, and the question is how they feel. The answer, I believe, is that they often find liberal extremes scarier than conservative extremes, so when the extreme left gains influence they'll gravitate naturally toward conservatism even if it's also (or more) extreme.
Not always, but often. And it's mostly related to the mere existence of influential liberal extremes, not whether Democratic politicians actively endorse them. If they don't actively condemn them—yes, the dreaded Sister Souljah moment—then they're implicated and conservatives win. This is what happened in 2024.
"Conservatives: Ban hormonal treatments for minors.
Liberals: Twelve-year-olds know what they're doing. Transition away."
The first half of this is an accurate summary; the second isn't and amounts to a straw man argument.
Drum, like most reactionary centrists, has been on an anti trans bender for a few years now
What's remarkable is that he seems to be utterly oblivious of this (I get the sense that he doesn't actually communicate with a lot of people in real life outside of his wife, and she seems to be highly disinterested in his little blogging hobby).
Drum is a reverse libertarian. Someone who is quite liberal when it comes to economic policies, but borders on a bigot on social ones. There is not a single social issue where his default assumption isn't whatever the Republican talking point is. He regularly dismisses all these social issues as not a big deal, and often recommending those minorities affected be ignored ot entirely thrown out to the curve for the sake of catering to a few more white men like himself.
What the fuck is wrong with you? "Borders on a bigot"? Every word of your comment is a sick projection of a sick mind. If you really believe what you say, then you are no better than the actual bigots who would love nothing more than to throw our society back into the dark ages. Really, this is just fucked up and you need to stop.
Oh my, someone is upset that Kevin got a bit of criticism. I'll never undertand this kind of detached from reality devotion from fans of public figures. The proof is in the pudding. Name the social issues were Kevin has not claimed the issue isnt really too bad as the left claims it is, where he has not asked for people to just stop complaining so much, or where he has not asked for more moderation or outright capitulation for the sake of appeasing the rightwing bigots.
Sick is getting crazy angry instead of trying to argue with facts in a blog that prides itself about being fact based above all else.
He hasn't been anti-trans, he's just constantly buying the bad info that's put out.
I can't blame anyone for not knowing the Cass report was made with input from anti-trans advocates and zero trans related experts. There's an industry lying about trans care.
At no point was medical intervention before social or talk therapy. At no point was surgical before prescribing. And at no point were any of these without long periods of years between them!
No, he has not, and your smear is vicious garbage.
If you look at the NYT comments section on *any* article concerning minors receiving x-sex hormones, you'll see that nearly everyone who subscribes to the Times is by your definition a reactionary centrist.
People who have time to comment are mostly people for whom have no other responsibilities.
You’ve really never heard a version of this obviously simplified argument? because I certainly have from plenty of non-ridiculous voices.
Pretending away the inconvenient arguments and positions that the far end of our coalition is making does not work.
of course we have heard
as a strawman on Fox, or in those Trump ads, and probably from some randos on twitter, but not from any liberal I would take seriously.
you, like Drum, are part of the problem.
Well unless we are defining the argument as inherently a strawman and likewise anyone who says it as a strawmen, then this has not been my experience. I have read plenty of folk discussing this saying that there should be no restrictions on minors.
It is telling to me that the response to this kind of claim is monolithically, “this is a rightwing smear”, and rarely, “the underlying claim is absurd and no one on the left should hold it, regardless of its source”
" . . . this has not been my experience. I have read plenty of folk discussing this saying that there should be no restrictions on minors."
You? Who are you?
Spare us the solipsisms. Do you have evidence that this is a policy decision of any recognizable Democratic Party organization?
This points up another asymmetry: Trump never had to denounce the Proud Boys or the Unite the Right marchers, quite the contrary. But when any random Internet nobody claiming left opinions espouses an extreme view, liberal politicians must denounce them. Sistah Souljah moments forever.
What the fuck does that have to do with what he said?
Conrad, no one is saying twelve-year-olds get medicine without a doctor and therapist's input.
That's what it has to do. That's what makes it a straw man argument - and why it points to the false equivalence where Republicans get to have violent nuts act on their right-wing rhetoric and Democrats get penalized for not even sharing left-winf rhetoric.
A better way to make the point would have been to say that Republican politicians weren't under pressure to disavow the Proud Boys after Trump's comment. But even that's not a fair comparison because the Repubs were under a totally different kind of pressure in the other direction.
We can't compete when the media is constantly telling lies about the parties' positions.
Believing that there should be no restrictions on the type of gender affirming care available to minors is a far cry from "Twelve-year-olds know what they're doing. Transition away." I don't think liberals are advocating letting minors make any medical decisions on their own without parental consent, for the most part, and without the consultation of relevant medical professionals. I don't think there are any Democrats that do either. I do think this is exactly what conservatives believe. No one wakes up one morning believing themselves to be
a certain gender then schedules hormone treatments for the next day. Gender affirming care is a process.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.hrc.org/resources/get-the-facts-on-gender-affirming-care&ved=2ahUKEwiZjOWd9eGJAxVeFVkFHerrNPEQFnoECBQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0YTc248KdfW9V9ygjvsfcP
I don't know about the first part -- waking up one day and deciding you're trans. But the process is often a very fast process if you're 18 or older -- Planned Parenthood, for example, basically tells you you'll walk out of your first appointment with a prescription for X-sex hormones.
I've heard many interviews with parents who told their story of the gender specialist they saw with their minor child, who pushed for affirming transition from the first one or two meetings. While these are anecdotes, we've seen evidence of this for years.
You know of lies, then. So you're lying.
Anecdotes of lies.
Affirming isn't medical.
There's literally no permanent side effects to hormone blockers on adults, either, hence ease of access.
Your experience is nonsensical to the topic unless you're a trans person.
Bullshit.
Dude, Fuck off then.
Exactly, which is crystal clear to anyone not imprisoned by the narrow, rigid reactionary mindset that's become the flag and rule for way too many.
Bullshit.
Just because others make a strawman argument doesn't make it not a strawman argument.
This is where my reply for 'socially transitioning isn't even medical' was supposed to land, but instead you get it.
This should actually read:
"Conservatives: Ban hormonal treatments for minors.
Liberals: Made up Fox News quote."
Literally transitioning isn't puberty blockers.
So you've lied.
Wow, this one fell in the wrong spot.
Exactly.
It may be a straw man argument but to a conservative mind it is highly convincing, maybe even BECAUSE of its straw man character.
The first half also isn't accurate. The extreme position for conservatives, as announced at CPAC is that "transgenderism" must be removed from public life and all gender affirming care (for minors or adults) is banned.
Don't be ridiculous. Twelve-year-olds are not deciding for themselves.
It is true, however, that change, especially rapid change, generally produces a backlash. People seem to have a limited capacity for change. This is likely an evolutionary adaptation from a time when change was so gradual as to be imperceptible to the average person. Change was bad. This is no longer the world we live in.
This is not, a rapid change,
You just don't know what you're talking about.
I took hormone blockers before I transitioned... in 1996. After two years of therapy and effort slowly ramping up, never taking more steps than I was ready for.
This isn't new. Puberty blockers were approved long before I used them.
In terms of how humans perceive and experience the world based of millions of years of evolution, the past four to six years have been a period of extremely rapid change in terms of trans rights almost exploding into the public consciousness. For you as an individual it may seem like forever; for anyone not immersed in that world it has unequivocally been a massive change in basic ideas of who and what we are, as people and as a people. This is inarguable, and if it's not taken seriously it WILL result in a backlash, as we have seen recently.
That is... a much better argument.
However, there are cultures which value trans people going back to the dawn of history. That's why we have 'two-spirit' and 'hijra'. It's in Greek myths and Roman history. It's not a new thing.
Kevin did not say that any one said or says that. He presented a generalized perception of the 'argument' that I guarantee you parallels what many, many people think. His point is valid; the only question is how much of an effect it had and has. Based on my experience, it could be considerable effect.
"He presented a generalized perception of the 'argument' that I guarantee you parallels what many, many people think."
it's like nothing ever makes it through your thick skull.
1. Kevin presents a simplified, but false, view of the liberal position.
2. People point out that his simplified view is false and is, in fact, made up by the right.
3. You respond with "I guarantee that's what people think the liberal view is" as if that somehow negates the fact that it's false.
so, people believe a lie about the liberal position on a topic and your response to that is "it's liberals fault and they need to change their position". it's mind blowing
I am plugged in to the trans community. I have never once heard anyone say, "let twelve-year-olds decide". I have heard "let the child, the doctors, and the parents decide".
Trans people and their parents have been assaulted and defamed by this stuff. I really wish you would listen more carefully to what's actually happening, and what trans people and their parents and doctors are actually saying.
Yes, I'm sure that people think that's what their saying. That's part of the defamation, and demonization campaign against the trans community. I wish, oh, how I wish, that Kevin would stop enabling this defamation.
he really can't help himself
that is very clear these days
+1
It's true that there is a lot of nastiness and defamation coming from transphobes, but most of the trans activists are also very poorly behaved. They have a bad habit of insisting that whatever they want to believe is true even when there is reason to believe it isn't, and respond to anyone who disagrees with them even slightly with toxic verbal nastiness. When you refuse to listen to any kind of dissent or consider the possibility that you might be wrong about something or might need to compromise on some points, the inevitable result is that you lose sympathy.
It happens in the comments on this blog all the time. Kevin states his honest opinion and people respond with name-calling and put-downs, usually without bothering to make an actual argument or anything resembling one.
From the standpoint of people who haven't chosen a side and are still persuadable, the whole trans rights debate just looks like a cesspool. You can't get any sympathy points from the bigotry and toxicity of your opponents if you are being intolerant and toxic yourself.
It really is a shame. Trans people face a lot of challenges and would benefit from greater social acceptance. Unfortunately, their champions are losing a winnable fight by behaving horribly and driving persuadable people away.
Please enlighten us...what is it that trans activists believe that is not true? Also include how it is that you know what "trans activists" believe, as if that's a monolith.
+1
Fuck you, I do not need to 'behave' when you're here sayig we should ne discriminated against.
No, fuck you and well done on proving his point.
Waaah waaah how dare I tell a bigot to fuck off.
Fuck off, bigot.
This is exactly right, and is exactly what Kevin has been trying to say forever, and the comments here prove these points with prejudice. It's precisely the same as the almost violently aggressive equating of any criticism of Israel with antisemitism. What's remarkable is how sealed off, reactionary, and incapable of insight and self awareness this segment of our society is, structurally identical to the least tolerant evangelical christians. Your comment is thoughtful, sensitive, and considered, and for this you get swarmed with reactive, cheap, and ad hominem attacks.
I have friends who have trans kids, and even they talk about how these relentlessly aggressive 'activists' make their kids' lives much, much harder. It's kind of sick, in a way.
Fuck you. You're fucking lying about how trans care works.
Trans people are legally discriminated in housing, employment, school, and healthcare in red states. They're faced with actual threats to their lives and while zero anti-trans activists have been killed, dozens of trans people are killed every year.
And the 'eek, they were trans' defense still crops up.
+1
nobody has died from transitioning.
but most trans people I know who have been rejected by their families admit to suicidal thoughts and multiple suicideal attempts, to being sexually assaulted and beaten and threatened repeatedly in their lives.
This, in the context of the Republican smear campaign that by all accounts was very successful of depicting the "Democrat" party as favoring trans operations for children? This is not a topic on which very many people hold nuanced views. One of the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project said this past week that the anti-trans TV ad broadcast during sporting events likely led many young men, Latinos and Blacks included, to vote for Trump.
What's more important to you? Democracy and Women's rights or insisting on the rights of the statistically few children to transition to a different gender? Because the far left vocal advocacy of Trans Rights has set women's health rights back at least a decade. Women will die because of Trump's victory. It has also angered many gay people, because "LGBTQ+" lumps together the issues of many millions of Americans with those of a tiny fraction of the population. Add in the hardcore pro-Palestinian protest votes against Biden and there went Michigan and Pennsylvania. Enjoy President Trump! People pushing your views helped elect him.
Ahh, right here the bigot reveals themself.
The same laws which protect trans people, protect gay people.
'Lump together' the bigot says, erasing the long history of drag and gender nonconformity in the gay community.
You're the bigot, and you know it. You're using this forum to attack and demonize anyone who offers any perspective that doesn't hew to your narrow minded and reactionary ideology.
You think you're fighting some kind of existential battle for the soul of humanity, but all you're doing is exposing your own deep seated resentments and narrow mindedness.
Ahh, yes, the bigot's defense, 'no, you!'
What am I bigoted against?
Popper was right.
No one is talking about not protecting trans people.
What I hear is that parents in the US and UK feel bullied by therapists to affirm their child's transitioning. Yet the evidence that transitioning helps a child is lacking -- you can read the Cass report, or you can look at the studies themselves -- you'll see that the studies all suffer from small sizes, short follow up periods, losing track of study participants and/or lack of any sort of control arm.
Yet the negatives of a child transitioning are many, and the idea that a minor can provide informed consent for the lifelong changes to their bodies that medical transition creates, is a joke.
Given that the vast majority of children with GD will desist on their own, sending children down the medicalization path is concerning. Especially if the children don't understand the ramifications and the parents feel pressured to agree.
Bullied, says the bigot.
Let kids be kids. Present how they want to.
They don't have to transition.
Fuck off with your lies.
This might be a plausible explanation except for one thing: It doesn't answer Kevin's own question, which is quite correctly framed as "why switch to Trumpism?" as opposed to "why the switch back to a more-or-less normal conservatism?
It might have been a decent explanation for the latter (a normal swing to the center-right). It doesn't come close to being one for the former outcome. Rather, it simply normalizes the radical abnormality of that outcome. In fairness, so do almost all of the theories currently on offer!
In this case, cherry picking puberty blockers as one's key case leaves out the quite literally dozens of issues on which Trump has take positions completely outside the (relatively recent) bipartisan consensus--and positions which, crucially, have no such "natural limit" in their extremism.
These might not be "cultural hot buttons" in the usual sense, but that's simply because they have mostly not been contested issues--until Trump. Thus, no previous GOP president or presidential candidate ran on: destroying the civil service, using Executive branch powers to crush political opponents, mass deportations, the illegitimacy of the US electoral system and his right to subvert those of its outcomes he does not like, etc., etc., etc.
So the unanswered question remains: Why Trump and Trumpism?
Excellent point!
My Grand Unified Theory of Trump is that he has an unparalleled ability to appeal to low-information voters, because he is authentically one of them. He spouts things that lots of people believe, but normal politicians never say because they know they aren't true, in simple, declarative sentences. That alone makes him seem like a dream come true to people who don't know any better.
Hence why education polarization, which was previously either not a thing or only slightly a thing, has become big under Trump. Also why the polls consistently underestimate him: a lot of his voters don't pick up the phone or make their vote decision at the last minute.
Pete Buttigieg: When all you have is a hammer...every problem looks like a culture war.
The things that Republican politicians and their donors want poll very badly. People HATE the things Republicans actually want to do. Culture war issues are nothing but a shiny object R's use to distract people from their real agenda.
Yes, if we had a functional media that didn't pander to the lowest common denominator, there would be better reporting about the actual economy and actual policies that actually matter. Instead they go chasing shiny objects "because that's what people are talking about".
Well, now the American people will get the radical right-wing government the GOP has never offered before because of puberty blockers and the price of eggs. Lovely! They deserve to see how it operates.
Sourly amusing to see the very illustrations of the observation that the Culture war focused fraction of the US Left rather prefers to excommunicate any even mild deviation from the One True View....
Drum clearly exploring how you are perceived and voilà the very illustrations of why the loss occurred. He becomes not merely someone with a different interpretation and highlighting a real image issue, but no, he is an Anti, a heretic....
Very nice for ensuring purity, rather poor for electoral successes.
ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz . . .
You just illustrated the truth of Lounsbury's comment.
Seriously, if you don't like Kevin's posts, go troll somewhere else.
Weirdly it didn't. But of course the bigot had to lie,
This is a dumb misinterpretation of what people are saying.
+1
Ahh, yes, don't bother point out that you're supporting bigotry.
Yup. Exactly.
the Lounsbury Gambit...
1. write a lie about what liberals think or how liberals act while being condescending and belittling liberals.
2. wait for someone to say "stop lying"
3. respond (or wait for someone else to respond) with "ah ha, you just proved my point"
Seriously, most people have moved beyond this level of "debate" by the time they're out of high school.
+1
The TG community is overly aggressive. One time I posted something to the effect that persons with penises should not use female bathrooms (a situation for people who have not fully transitioned) and I was merciless trashed. It’s no wonder they don’t have any allies. As to how treat minors with gender dysphoria, one should defer to the experts but it is my understanding in reading Andrew Sullivan that the science is inconclusive and that many countries in Europe have walked back on the issue. I also know that by invoking the name Andrew Sullivan, many are going to lose their minds.
Fine. You’re right. Happy now? How do you plan to enforce this “no penises in the women’s room” policy? Hiring millions of gender police to look up everyone’s skirt - including the underage ones - at the nation’s approximately 10 million or so public restrooms? Because - as the right wingers like to say about the border - a policy that isn’t enforced is a policy that doesn’t work.
How is the "no men in the women's room" policy enforced now? Answer: Mostly it's not. Anybody who is not obviously male can enter a women's washroom pretty much anywhere without question. For that matter, anyone not obviously female can enter a men's washroom without question. Washroom segregation works because people follow the rules, not because those rules are enforced.
A clearly stated rule that people with penes should use the men's room would be enough by itself to ensure near universal compliance even without any enforcement at all.
Why are people so caught up in where people pee? Here's a simple solution...let people pee wherever they feel most comfortable, as long as they don't splatter.
Because what they really want is for no trans-people to exist. "You can't use this public restroom because you haven't had bottom surgery, but you won't feel safe using the other public restroom because you have had top surgery" is more or less saying "you can't use public restrooms ever."
Because some men go into women's restroom to peek at lady parts and, occasionally to assault women.
And these (straight) perverts take cover, hiding under the skirts of trans women.
Men suck sometimes. Particularly when they fail to realize how perverted and abusive other men can be and how they hide it.
But I come from Maine, were we nearly elected Elliot Cutler to be governor twice. He's in jail now.
The ostensible rationale behind separate bathrooms was presumably to deter sexual predation. If that is the case, then by extension gay men should be prohibited from using men's rooms and gay women should be barred from ladies' rooms. Now, what do you think would happen if that policy were to be put in place?
I'm just saying it's complicated when we try to maintain any form of segregation by sex/gender, including high school sports.
What's the old joke? The epi rebukes the Harvard man walking past the sinks after using the urinal, noting that at Yale they're taught to wash their hands after peeing, after which our miscreant notes that at Harvard, they're not taught to piss on them.
Really, all I care about when people use the restroom, unisex or otherwise, is that they clean up after themselves and not act like animals.
Taking Andrew "Bell Curve/Testosterone is Magic" Sullivan seriously is a major self-own.
Yet it is a fact that anyone with access to Google can verify that Norway, Sweden, Finland, France and the UK all have greatly reduced the access of children to transitioning. Typically, children can still get that care but only as part of a well structured medical research project, because the evidence of effectiveness for these treatments is simply not there.
Even if Andrew Sullivan discusses it, it can still be true.
There's literally zero 'structured' programs to transition related care. So you're just lied by omission.
At no point was medical the first step, but the Sweden memo lied about that. UK just banned it, but none of the other countries did the leading medical associations approve this ban.
The evidence is there, you're just lying about it.
I don't buy "part of a well structured research project". The ethical implications of using children as guinea pigs are horrifying.
"my understanding in reading Andrew Sullivan"
So, basically you don't have any idea what you're talking about. Check.
Correct, Andrew Sullivan is an idiot who should be generally ignored.
This is the case of the blind chicken who still finds a worm once in a while. You can not declare a statement wrong just because you read it in a post by Sullivan, no matter how bad he is generally.
Alas, it's still wrong.
This page will disappear soon, but it's the truth: https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-08/gender-affirming-care-young-people.pdf
Indeed. As I commented elsewhere in this thread, they are doing themselves no favors by behaving so badly.
I would gently and cordially disagree about penises in women's restrooms; unlike men's restrooms with their open urinals, women's restrooms only have stalls and you can't see anyone's genitals. It's probably best for people to use the restroom that matches what they look like. Of course, the BEST solution would be to do as the Europeans do and build restrooms in which all the stalls have real walls and real doors, because the real root of this problem is that a lot of people don't feel like American-style stalls grant real privacy. (I've never personally had a problem with it, nobody can see me, but a lot of people feel otherwise.)
And yeah, the science about juvenile gender transition is nowhere near settled. The claim that it is settled is driven by activism, not science. The trans activists have adopted a strategy of loudly insisting that the things they want to believe are true and bashing anyone who disagrees or points out evidence to the contrary. The studies that would actually settle the issue simply haven't been done, because the clinics that perform juvenile gender transitions are afraid to find out. (Anecdotally, we know that some people are happy with their transitions and some people have detransitioned, but we have no idea how many, nor do we have firm data about what characteristics might predict who will be happy and who will detransition.)
And it's not just Sullivan saying this either. There was a woman who worked for a pediatric gender transition clinic in Missouri who quit and blew the whistle on them because they were not saying no to *anybody* who was referred to them, they prescribed hormones to everyone even when there were obvious red flags and good reasons to believe that the kid shouldn't transition. Trans activists loudly denounced her and claimed that her claims had been "debunked" by the testimony of parents who had good experiences there... but just because some of the kids and families were having good experiences obviously doesn't mean everyone was. Two things can be true at once: actual trans kids who can benefit from early transition exist, and kids who aren't trans and shouldn't transition can end up transitioning and regretting it.
Don't let the people who use name-calling and put-downs to try to shut you up get you down. Anybody who wants to be taken seriously in this debate should bring an actual argument, and keep it civil.
Don't let the fact that you're using your misogyny to be bathroom police get you down?
Gross. Just fucking gross.
What's gross is your relentless nihilism.
You've repeatedly posted the 'bullied into transitioning' lie.
I work with adolescents and their families, and these decisions for minors can be very, very difficult. Peer pressure,social media pressure, identity formation, family dynamics....it's sometimes exceedingly complex and difficult. Some younger people are certain, with good reason. Some are certain, but after a while that certainty becomes less so. Some are 'trying on' identities, and need to be understood as such. Bottom line - it's often complex and nuanced, and incredibly ill-served by the vitriol and narrow mindedness of way too many supposed advocates.
Bottom line less than 1% are dissatisfied with affirming care.
An excellent comment, despite all the dissing you've received.
I'll point out that we also have no idea how many people, even if 'happy' with their transition, would have desisted without transitioning, because there are essentially no studies with people randomly assigned to different treatment groups, and are thus needlessly suffering from the medical effects of transition for nothing.
Uhh, what?
You want to torture young people, cis and trans, by uhh...what?
No. Affirming care is allowing them the gender expression they want. No more, no less. It's not medical intervention, it's not surgery.
And you can't desist if you haven't transitioned! That's like saying you can erase out a word you didn't write.
State intervention has a very high bar, and we tolerate all sorts of iffy parental choices on the darker side of the grey zone. This issue is not a close call as to being nowhere near the level we set for restrictions.
California has banned conversion therapy. Since this involves no irreversible physical changes the bar to ban it should certainly be higher than for sex change surgery.
We would not allow parents to have a child's limb cut off if the child had body dysphoria. Why are breasts and genitals different?
Heck, we don't even allow a totally harmless clitoral nick because it seems too culturally adjacent to clitorectomy and sewing up a vagina.
Gay conversion therapy is known quackery. But equating that to trans therapy is on point for you. Don't ever change.
Children don't have surgery.
You don't know a damned thing about it.
Heck, we don't even allow a totally harmless clitoral nick because it seems too culturally adjacent to clitorectomy and sewing up a vagina.
And yet we permit male circumcision.
Fuck off, penis police.
Fuck off yourself, Red Guard troll.
You'e the one sharing the false anecdotes about 'bullied into transitioning'.
I think that there's a different dynamic here.
Conservatives perceive liberals as having a do anything you want culture -- abort your baby, change your child's gender, etc. There are not limits or restraints on what liberals do EXCEPT for limiting what conservatives can say about it. No racist jokes, no questioning if children are being mutilated, no expressing concerns that women are home having babies.
I don't think it has anything to do with progressives going to far and everything to do with a perceived double standard that conservatives were not allowed to push back, so they MAGA'd back by making it acceptable to break all the rules of civil society.
This is true, but you have to be clear everything conservatives want to do either involves being ignorant, bigoted, abusive, or controlling. Or all of these things.
I want to know the name of at least 2 liberals (because Kevin said it was plural) who literally said 12 year olds should be free to transition with zero input from anyone else (parents, doctors, etc).
+1
That seems like you don't know what social transitioning is and why it doesn't, in fact, involve doctors.
Not completely. I know a few trans people, one I've known all my life and do know that long before any hormones or surgery they live as the gender they identify with. But transitioning usually does include hormone treatments and surgery at some point. Which does require medical advice. I don't think Kevin knows the process so when he says transitioning he means everything. Or atleast that's my impression
Medical intervention is after social transition.
But affirming care is just that: Saying you are loved, you are valued, and letting them have the gender expression they want to do, it doesn't require social transition, medical or surgical intervention.
When I transitioned in 1996, the youth group I was in had some who were just crossdressing, some who did drag, some who took hormones and didn't transition, some who transitioned and didn't take hormones... and a couple who sought surgery. The latter were few because that's expensive!
There is no one way to be trans. And culturally, gender nonconformity is totally a gay thing, not specifically trans.
+1
Transition doesn't involve medical care, Mr smarty-pants. It doesn't involve input from doctors because there's not medical care there. It doesn't involve parents because parents shouldn't choose what twelve year olds wear, within what's appropriate for twelve year olds.
I understand "transitioning" as precisely the medical/surgical process of changing the person's apparent sex, and I presume that's what Kevin meant too.
I suggest a more likely theory is “hating the other “ has broad appeal and has been shown to work. In my hometown of Chicago, this played out not in dog whistles but in very direct, public statements: “those people are terrible”, “Even if x does some bad things, x will protect us from THEM”. All the different type of groups (ethnic, religious, geographic, etc) were pretty easily manipulated. Feeling you are better than members of another group and, in some cases, the freedom and power to lord it over them, is often irresistible to some people.
Nearly everyone is overthinking this or maybe just avoiding the obvious. This election was not about issues and it was not about left/right. This election was decided by the fact that the Democrats nominated a woman of color and a large part of the electorate is just not going to go for that.
I don't buy that, simply because a woman of color replaced a white man and by all indications did better than the white man was doing.
Better doesn't mean racism, misogyny didn't push the margins. She only lost by 2 points.
Harris polled better than Biden. I'm not sure how much of that was Democrats who were discontent with Biden but would have come home in the end regardless, and how much of it was swing voters who were unhappy with Biden's age and might have voted for Trump, but the swap produced a clear lift.
If this election was actually about dissatisfaction with the economy/the border and wanting to change, then Harris benefited simply by not being Biden. No doubt some proportion of respondents in every survey did not know that Harris was the incumbent Vice President.
This seems an assertion without evidence.
Doesn't need to be a big force to change this election, though.
But uhh... the racism and misogyny was on display.
Kevin has bought into the Fox talking points. This is an obvious example:
"The two extremes are:
"Conservatives: Ban abortion completely.
Liberals: Just let women and their doctors decide."
Wrong. The correct statement is:
Right-wing radicals: Ban abortion completely
Conservatives (and liberals): Just let women and their doctors decide.
Reproductive choice is a bedrock conservative value. The modern GOP is a right-wing extremist party, not a Conservative Party.
The conservative side only seems less scary if you're a radical centrist.
By "radical centrist" what do you mean exactly? Is it, perhaps, someone who really dislikes extremists after a lifetime of watching them behave badly and fail?
I am definitely left-of-center, but that's how I feel. The extremes occasionally come up with something useful, but most of the time they're just unrealistic, undisciplined and out of control. The country is better off with the centrist establishment in power and I make no apologies for saying so.
No, someone who wants to 'abandon wokeness' is definitionally pro-bigotry, and hence, not left at all.
No, someone who intentionally makes any position other than their own into an antipodal evil is pro-authoritarian, and hence, not liberal at all.
The guy who spreads false 'bullied into transitioning' stories wants to tell me about antipodal evil?
“Have liberals moved too far to the left culturally?”
The short answer is obviously yes.
There are certainly finer points to consider in a deeper analysis. But if the question is considered from the perspective of an average person, the answer could not be more obvious: yes.
We have a blindingly obvious example from this week! Here’s Dem Rep Seth Moulton making a statement that most people would consider to be a fairly obvious example of common sense (from the nyt):
“I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
I hear that, and I think he has entirely legitimate concerns. They should be discussed.
But this was the response from the Dem party:
“Mr. Moulton’s campaign manager resigned in protest. The Democratic governor of Massachusetts rebuked him. And the chair of the political science department at Tufts University threatened to block his students from interning in Mr. Moulton’s office.”
There’s also this:
“Asked for comment on Mr. Moulton’s remarks, each of the 10 other members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, declined to comment or did not immediately respond.”
WTF?
To be clear, Moulton’s statement, which the Dem party is treating like unspeakable heresy, is for most people the absolutely normal view:
“About two-thirds of Americans say transgender athletes should be allowed to play ONLY on teams that match their sex at birth, according to a Gallup poll conducted last year.”
And this is the week following an election we lost in which this exact issue was effectively used against us!!!
I’ve been a lifelong Dem who used to joke that I wouldn’t vote for a Republican to be dog catcher. But I now look at this sort of ideological extremism in my own party, and I wonder who the f*#k are these ridiculous clowns?
So if I’m a lifelong Dem who lives in a blue city that’s in a blue state, and I still think the Dem party has lost its damn mind, then what does a normie centrist in the Midwest think?
Yes. The Dems have obviously gone too far “Left” culturally. I don’t see how on earth anyone could deny that. And we’re going to keep losing elections (say hello to a reelected President Vance in 2032) unless and until we can properly address the extremists on our own side.
I agree with you about trans people in sports, but Kevin was talking about gender affirming health care, which is only tangentially related and has an entirely different moral basis.
You agree with the bigoted version of forcing girls to undergo invasive inspections to make sure they're not intersex or boys?
Because that's the argument here. There are no 'boys in girls sports'. And 'boys' would definitionally not have 'undergone male puberty' in any case. It's disgusting misogyny.
+1
I wish we could make a deal in which Democrats agree to abandon wokeness in exchange for Republicans agreeing to abandon Trump. Sadly, there's no authority on either side capable of negotiating or honoring such a deal.
That's gross. 'Abandon recognizing bigotry'? Why would you say a bigoted thing like that?
+1
Okay, you just plus oned a repeated bigot sharing a fake story.
Hear, hear +
Another bigot?
Everyone except you is a bigot, it seems. On one of the most liberal, thoughtful, nuanced, intelligent, respectful platforms in the country. Everyone's wrong except you. Got it.
You just need to learn to ignore Crissa.
They never have anything interesting to say anyway.
Noted without anything interesting to say, other than approving bigotry?
You don't think Kevin Drum or any of the people who post here can't be bigots? "On one of the most liberal, thoughtful, nuanced, intelligent, respectful platforms in the country." "Liberals: Twelve-year-olds know what they're doing. Transition away." Sounds like a Fox News talking point of what they think liberals believe. Which they don't. That's hardly liberal, thoughtful, nuanced, intelligent or respectful. Recognizing your own bigotry is quite difficult especially when you don't generally consider yourself a biased person, which I don't think Kevin is. Denial is usually the responce though. Strenuously defending that denial comes next.
Can be bigots not can't be.
Noted your lack of nuance, mr shares false anecdotes of 'bullied into transitioning'.
“I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Moulton is a headline chaser. Was there any particular, burning need for him to speak out publicly about a phenomenon that is vanishingly rare? Not every moral panic ginned up by the Republican Party requires an official response from the Democratic Party as a national political entity. In this case, letting local communities, schools, institutions, colleges and sports governing bodies work it out will probably work best. And let's be real: Republicans didn't start focusing on this (mostly made-up) "problem" because it helps Democrats.
+1
How many trans girls or women participate in sports?
If the Moulton girls are participating in contact sports, which should be the only kind of sports in which they get run over, they are going to get run over by bigger girls even if there are no trans athletes on the field, unless they are the biggest girls on the field.
Trans people are few in number and trans athletes even fewer. This is an issue of such vanishingly small significance that I don't understand why politicians waste time on it.
Of course, it's all in the framing. Other posters have pointed out what I'll generously call the "flaw" in Kevin's framing of transitional medical interventions (which take a wide variety of forms), but let's pause by the abortion thing for a moment before considering two "scare" cases for the Republican party right now:
Republican politicians don't actually pass laws reflecting what they claim they want. Because if you are "Pro-Life" and think a zygote should have full human rights, aside from genuinely having problems with IVF and other fertility treatments, you shouldn't have any objection when a woman goes to the ER with a molar pregnancy where her fetus has no brain and all its organs are on the outside of its body. An abortion is going to save that woman's life, and whatever you think of the fetus, it has no possibility of survival and arguably isn't alive at all. Similarly, some extraction procedures are performed on corpses, when the fetus dies in utero.
But Republican lawmakers didn't ban baby-killing. They banned a medical procedure. Even when that medical procedure saves a life or doesn't end one. And for the most part, they've shown no interest in changing the laws to save women's lives. These are people who think the state should decide if a mother or fetus are in an either/or situation (a cancer diagnosis, for example) and furthermore, that the state should always pick the fetus over the mother regardless of circumstances. These are the same people who say they're for "small government."
But let's consider two "scare" situations for transpeople now.
Scenario 1: A boy is a good athlete but not really good. He wants an unfair advantage so that he can win more frequently. So, he convinces his parents that he's actually a girl trapped in a boy's body. He also convinces medical providers of that. Then he receives hormone therapy and possibly surgery, costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, and cheerfully reports to compete as a girl. Of course, that could take several years, entails actually undergoing the medical procedures, and probably involves learning to wear make-up, wearing women's clothing, and subjecting themselves to abuse, bullying, and worse. And given national trends, if competing as a girl isn't already banned in this student's state, it might be by the time the process has gone far enough.
Or the boy could just use steroids and other supplements to get an unfair advantage while competing as a member of his original gender. Most public schools don't even test for steroid usage because of the costs; the best statistic I found suggest 20% of students are tested AT ALL. That seems much easier, though I grant that if a lot of high school boys are doping, you'd not get much advantage; then again, what are the odds the girls aren't? You'd think a political party concerned about fair competition in high school sports would be more concerned about doping than about a handful of transathletes.
Scenario 2: A man has a sick fantasy about raping women in public restrooms. To fulfill this fantasy, he has two options:
Option 1. Undergo gender reassignment, possibly involving hormones and surgery, getting a new wardrobe, learning to wear make-up, and disrupting all sorts of other parts of their life. Then, stroll into a ladies' room and look for an opportunity to rape a woman with your no-bottom-surgery-yet genitals.
Option 2. Find an out-of-the-way ladies' room, wait for a woman to go in, then follow her and lock the door and rape her.
Of course, if you're really concerned with women being raped, well, there aren't great statistics on this, but serial rapists can do a great deal of harm, so catching them would seem to be an important priority for a "law & order" political party. You don't have to seek out the "he said, she said" cases, but rather the cases where one man stands accused by a much larger number of women. And surely that's the kind of man you'd want to catch and convict.
Why in the world does anyone think that a state government is going to make better decisions on behalf of children than their parents and doctors? And why, if that's a genuine concern, wouldn't states use all the tools already at their disposal to intervene if parents are genuinely acting against the best interests of their own kids? Why pass new laws prohibiting a specific treatment for a specific condition? If gender reassignment surgery and treatment is a "controversy," then the way to have a conversation isn't to ban one of the positions legally.
When in comes to transgender care, conservatives are, unsurprisingly, absolute hypocrites.
Basically you can divide anything parents and children do together into three buckets:
The good stuff: things such as education and exercise, which the public not only encourages in word but also in deed.
The grey zone: this is gigantic and we give parents huge discretion here, more often than not driven by conservatives. Not only do we tolerate risky activities like contact sports, off-road driving, swimming, hunting, etc but in many cases things that are clearly harmful or dangerous to the child like vaccine rejection, guns in homes, or unsupervised home schooling.
The really, really bad stuff: The state rarely steps in before outright child abuse
Obviously there is some fuzz around the science of transgender care, but there is no way to read the literature that doesn’t lead to “neutral to positive”, which is obviously well into the grey zone and better than all sorts of parental choices we tolerate at the behest of conservatives.
In our current discourse, Democratic candidates are often held accountable for the worst possible characterization or spin of the weakest or most problematic arguments made by anyone on the left side of the political, while Republican candidates are not accountable for the actual positions they take or policies they pass and implement, only the most generous and flattering possible spin on conservatism.
The "trans" example Drum gives is a good example of this: Conservative politicians have banned a lot of treatments in states where they can, and many conservatives are arguing for much worse repression of trans people, whereas Democratic politicians are generally allowing medical professionals and families to make these choices. For example, no one is actually suggesting that twelve-year-olds get to prescribe themselves hormones. Certainly, no major politician I've heard of.
Of course, this is a huge problem for Democrats, but we can't solve it unless we identify it. And a lot of the "solutions" proposed by various Democratic aligned pundits, etc., are basically that we have to reach a point where no one on the left side of the political spectrum ever says anything that is incorrect or could be misconstrued. This of course is impossible, particularly in the twitter era and with a lot of people eager to misconstrue things, and no solution at all. But it does let elite Democrats and moderate Democrats to shift all the blame onto randos with no power and allows them to avoid actually challenging the people with power--in media and politics--who create this dynamic.
+1
Definitely. What media will carry the Democratic message anyhow?
still doesn’t answer the question of how everyone predicted an even race with maybe a tad advantage to Harris “ and the reality was a GOP sweep
Biden won 2020 by less than 1% in some states
Tweeto won 2024 by 2-3%
still doesn’t answer the question of how everyone predicted an even race with maybe a tad advantage to Harris
Nate Silver had the modal outcome being Trump sweeping all seven swing states.
The outcome wasn't remotely surprising for those of us seriously watching the polling analysis. I'm not going to claim I knew in which direction the polls were likely to be off: I did not. I figured it was a coin toss (both sides had things they could look at that appeared hopeful).
But the point is, polling error has averaged about three points going back to the 1960s. So it was clear that if 2024 saw a typically-sized error, then the candidate benefiting was likely going to win decisively, given the closeness of the swing states.
Yeah people predicted an even race, and Trump won by 1% how did all the pollsters get it wrong by being well within the margin of error.
Biden won the popular vote by 4 points, Trump seems likely to win by 1% when the vote is done. Of course Clinton won by 2 points overall. Unfortunately that is not how things are determined because of the electoral college. But there is not really any significance to how much the swing states were won, just that they were. And, of course, Biden won some of them by more, and Trump won some of them by less.
The shift is significant, and Drum gives that.
The answer to the question you ask is that pollsters predicted it could go either way, and if so it was likely the swing states would go the same way, and that is what happened, unfortunately it happened in the direction of the rapist who stole national secret documents and used them as his personal play things. So that is embarrassing for the country. But it isn't clear what you think needs explaiing.
We're missing a more important point here: in almost every case*, liberals/progressives are saying, leave the state out of the decision, let people decide for themselves. No one will be forced to abort a fetus, no one will have their sexual organs altered against their will. If you don't want it, don't have it. How is that scary? Actual conservatism favors less state control, so the culture-war right-wing is something else, they are advocating for the state to make decisions for everybody else, since they already would never think of having an abortion or allowing their children to be given puberty blockers, etc.
*There is that smallish area where one person's decision affects another; bathrooms and sports. The numbers are tiny and the impact is as well.
I am afraid the "real" conservatism that argues consequently for a hands off government has never existed. Sex has always been scary to conservatives and they have always advocated massive government power in those areas. Namely
miscegenation, sodomy, prostitution and, yes, abortion.
Genuine small government conservatism exists, but most small government conservatives call themselves libertarians, and they are not numerous.
Yes, you both have it right. I should have said, conservatives who *claim* to believe in small government. For the great majority of Republican politicians, they want government to be small relative to the power of business. When it comes to regulating personal conduct, they pander to their base
There is something weird about the premise of the argument. Democrats have gotten the majority in all but two of the presidential elections since 1992 (although they have lost the presidency 4 times in that period). They have generally gotten more votes in Congressional races, and the Republican control of the Senate is due entirely to the small state slant that favors Republicans. So why are we explaining why Republicans get more votes than Democrats, when more often than not they don't?
There seems to be something of a parity, with a slight edge to the Democrats of people who are so disgusted by the other side that they won't vote for them under any circumstances. There is a small group in the middle that actually swings, but they swing mostly due to their perception of the economy, which is unfortunately not the same as the actual state of the economy.
Drum seems to be trying to explain why people who were deluged with commercials about Salvadorian gang members coming to the US to get arrested and get turned into women in our prisons were swayed towards Trump. But as Drum notes, voters in swing states were less likely to shift towards Trump than voters in other states. So that suggests that voters who saw commercials about how awful Trump is and how awful transgender people are were less likely to be swayed in Trump's direction. So Drum is trying to explain the opposite of what happened.
I mentioned in my last comment that there is no particular reason to think that the anti-trans ads were effective. But there is still something worth explaining in that Trump is objectively awful, while transgender people are not, so why is there a parity between the hatred on the two sides? That seems to be a fair question.
But Drum should consider that some of that effect comes from the fact that centrist Republicans do not generally straw man the far right. In fact they go out of their way to provide cover for them. As many have correctly noted here, Drum simply straw mans the position of the left with regard to 12 year olds. Obviously if it was just Drum it wouldn't matter, and if it was just the transgender issue it probably wouldn't matter. But this habit of the center left to not just oppose the left but to engage in straw man arguments that serve to simply endorse the MAGA position on these issues.
As even the evidence that Drum has put forward in other posts shows that people who get treatment as transgendered youth almost never regret it. While some do, they do so at lower levels than for just about any medical treatment. The idea that children are being rushed into treatment for gender dysphoria not only has been debunked, but it seems to be what we have the strongest evidence for. And yet that does not stop people like Drum and Chait, until last week of New York Magazine, from pushing this MAGA lie.
When the centrists join with the right to push the rights talking points it is not surprising that they get taken more seriously than they should.
To take another example, the great bulk of censorship is driven by the right, but most people are convinced that censorship is about wokeness (political correctness in my generation). That has always been nonsense. One can just look at the list of books that get banned. But one thing that feeds into it is that only the left criticizes book bans by the right, so that gets dismissed as partisan, while the idea that wokeness is a serious problem gets pushed from the right to the center left, so it is bipartisan.
This is not an easy issue since some things that fall under wokeness deserve to be criticized. But the center right doesn't care that so much that falls under MAGA deserves to be criticized. But minimally the center left can stop straw manning the left. That can't be justified as truth telling and is harmful to the left, including the center left.
Literally there is no evidence that puberty blockers 'need to be handled with more care'. The regret rate for them is the lowest of any medical procedure ever surveyed.
But conservatives always lie about the standards of care. Never were the standards of care to prescribe them without hormone tests and years of talk therapy.
The liberal position, as far as I can tell (Democrats tend not to tall about trans issues very much for obvious reasons) is better summarized as "once the child, their parents, and a doctor all agree, access to treatment should not be so nearly impossible as it is right now."
(I can say this with some confidnce since I know the parents of two trans teenagers, both in liberal states, and I know how extraordinarily difficult it is for them to get the treatment they want for their children.)
There are, indeed, some on the extreme who feel that "12 year olds know best" but their counterparts on the right -- in terms of numbers and significance in the debate -- are not the "ban treatment" people they are "kill trans people" people.
But 'transition' isn't medical. 12-year olds should be able to have whatever gender expressions they want. Literally no one is asking for them to have surgery.
In fact, if a 12-year old is having precocious puberty and is cisgender, they would get puberty blocker. But these bans stop trans kids from getting them in the exact same situation.
Puberty at 12 is not "precocious", it's about average. I've never heard of puberty blockers being prescribed simply to delay an otherwise normal puberty.
So what you are saying is that younger kids should be able to get puberty blockers if their doctors proscribe them but 12 year olds should not?
I find the trans obsession very weird. We've been doing surgery on kids genitalia for ages and ages, it's just mostly been babies born intersex. They really have no say in the matter, and often grow up to be unhappy with what was chosen for them. But no one talks about banning that!
And while you can have arguments about sports participation, it seems like the kind of thing that should be discussed at the local level. Turning it into a big issue in a presidential election seems pretty bonkers. Trump's economic plans could drive us into a severe recession and people chose a president based on who they want to be on a high school swimming team. Total lunacy!
And as for bathrooms, there have been transwomen using women's bathrooms and fitting rooms for ages and ages. It's really not a big deal - transwomen want to be accepted as women, so there's nothing weird about them being in women's spaces. Personally, I prefer European-style nongenered bathrooms with multiple stalls. They are far superior from a caregiving perspective. But support for caregivers in another important issue that has been ignored because of trans panic.
No.
1) The economy. People hated inflation, blamed Biden. Harris said she couldn’t think of anything she’d have done differently than President Joe Biden during the last four years. Dumb.
2) Illegal immigration. Biden and Harris got it wrong before they got it right. Red meat for MAGA. Not good enough for too many other voters.
3) Dems were elected and re-elected in many states and districts that went for Trump.
4) Biden was a historically frail incumbent. Harris ran a historically short presidential campaign. Note to Dems: Don't do that.
5) Entrenched SCOTUS effects on voting rights, and gerrymandering enabling more candidates who are extreme being elected.
How did Harris or Biden get immigration wrong?
They didn't. That's Republican framing saying 'they got it wrong'.
And no one can help the candidate becoming frail. That's the hazard of a long campaign season.
The rest of your post is +1
The support for the premise is wildly underwhelming.
BLAME THE IMAGINARY FAR LEFT! is not an original premise.
Lets just file this one under 'wildly flailing around to explain Trump's popularity' and move on.
I think that one related issue is how schools treat kids who have decided that they might be trans. These kids -- and I've taught a few -- may want to be addressed by a different name and use different pronouns, and they might dress in ways that express their feelings -- more androgynously, for instance. I think that socially conservative parents find agreement from more moderate folks about whether schools should inform them about student choices like these.
I don't know how these conversations are supposed to play out. "Hello, parents! Has your child come out to you as trans?" Some parents will be able to take the information in stride, but a great many will be alarmed at the prospect, and angry at school officials if they have delayed getting them the news.
I had a student who was dead set on transitioning to male, complete with surgery, in 8th grade. The student was so distracted by their options that I was called in as a tutor. Tutoring was not what was needed; counseling was, but no amount of counseling was going to set the student on the right track academically any time soon.
I think that many people forget that a kid who is going through this has a LIFE. Gender dysphoria is very disruptive for an adolesent, more so than for an adult, It's also disruptive for parents and family members. That it has become such a political football only makes it worse for the kids who are dealing with it. The media only care about clicks and eyeballs, and there is no compassion for these kids and their families. Maybe we as a society can eventually adapt to these new circumstances, but I fear that our institutions are caught unprepared and unwilling to deal with the situations that arise for these families.
As long a substantial wing of the Dem Party frames total bans on abortion and trans rights as equal in "extremism" the Republicans will win. It's like we never remember the last RW outrage -- Sharia Law, CRT, Defund the Police, Marxist anti-colonial Kenyans. Whatever it was, it was always false and always untrue.
Virtually every red state and its republican political army wants to ban and criminalize abortion.
Virtually zero on the left say "Twelve-year-olds know what they're doing. Transition away." It just doesn't happen. Just like no one was implementing Sharia Law, CRT wasn't a thing, no one in the Dem Party is a marxist.
None of that is true, but as long as even smart guys like Drum are going to frame it like tose things are remotely true, we're doomed.
We don't need Sister Souljah moments. We need the next Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
I'm not sure how to implement your "don't say bans are extreme" policy. What do we call them, then?
We do call them that, because they are not supported by a majority of voters, nor a plurality. We also call them that because they result in more deaths. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-ban-deaths-pregnant-women-sb8-analysis-rcna171631#:~:text=Exclusive%20analysis%20finds%20the%20rate,during%20the%20same%20time%20period.
It is hard to follow your comment since the blame seems to keep shifting. It starts with the weird idea that people on the left are going around comparing the extremity of bans on puberty blockers and extreme bans on abortion. Has anybody linked the two before you now?
Then it points to issues that the right has turned into scares, some of them based on things the left (like defund the police) has said and some of them made out of whole cloth (like bringing in sharia law). So is the problem what the left says or is it irrelevant what the left says.
And then you seem to switch to blaming the center left for straw manning the left. That seems fair with the case of 12 olds getting hormone blockers on a whim, but less true of defund the police (which the center left has attacked but I don't know that it has done the strawmanning) and not at all true of the sharia law charge.
You write as if you are identifying a problem, but I can't tell if the problem is things the left says, the fact that the right can create a feeling of panic out of nothing, or the center right for misrepresenting the positions of the left.
What the actual fuck, Kevin?
If the abortion “debate” looks like this:
Conservatives: Ban abortion completely.
Liberals: Just let women and their doctors decide.
Then the trans “debate” would look like THIS:
Conservatives: Ban hormonal treatments for minors.
Liberals: Just let parents and their children’s doctors decide.
The inability to even come close to fairly representing the liberal position says more about your own ignorance than the supposed extremism of the liberal position.
Not a winning issue for dems.
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, a series of polls found that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was in a familiar position: fighting for political survival in a state where other Republicans were routinely dominant.
But Cruz’s team felt confident. They were better positioned this election cycle overall and they’d identified what they saw as their ace in the hole: Democratic challenger Colin Allred’s record on transgender rights — specifically, the issue of transgender children playing in youth sports. The year before, Allred, a Dallas congressman, had voted against GOP legislation that proposed cutting off federal funds for school athletic programs that allowed “a person whose sex is male” to participate in women’s sports. The law defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
Cruz and his allied political groups blitzed the airwaves with ads highlighting that vote and Allred’s other stances in favor of transgender rights. The ads, often featuring imagery of boys competing against girls in sports, reflected what Cruz’s team had found from focus groups and polling: Among the few million voters they’d identified who were truly on the fence, the transgender sports topic was most effective in driving support to Cruz, said Sam Cooper, a strategist for Cruz’s campaign.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/14/ted-cruz-texas-senate-win-transgender-rights-political-future/
I'm disappointed with Kevin's buy in of the right wing framing here. I agree that Republicans are great at taking the most radical position of a random social media post and sticking it on the Democratic party while the Dems seem to struggle to attach even views espoused by Republican politicians to the party. That is a messaging and media issue.
But for Kevin to contend that the extreme conservative position is "ban all hormone treatments for minors" requires ignoring pretty much all of CPAC and the attempt by the FL GOP to ban gender affirming carw for adults. Kevin can apparently find any view made by a leftist that supports his position but can't pay attention to a bill DeSantis tried to get passed? There's punching left from the center and there's punching left from behind the right wing barricades and Kevin is getting awfully close to those walls on the social issues.