Trans journalist Erin Reed has published a list of Democratic midterm candidates with anti-trans records, and the question she is forcing is one the party would rather not answer: if trans voters keep rewarding Democrats who harm them, what signal does that send? The calculation is real, the stakes are high, and there is no clean answer.
I mean no offense but you are sounding ignorant on these topics and assuming it’s a choice of nothing happening or things getting worse, when the reality is it is both sides making things worse in these few instances.
These Democrats are not simply ignoring us, they are taking away our rights. They are working with Republicans to pass laws to limit our freedoms, they are copying their talking points to demonize us, for all intents and purposes they are no different on trans issues as Republicans.
Likewise the UK justice previously had greater support for trans people but was changed under Labor to redefine what it meant so that it could exclude trans people. This was not some archaic law, but a political choice by Labor to actively harm trans people.
Guess what happens in an election with FPTP where a candidate from one of two parties will win, and people vote their conscience or don’t vote at all.
The worse of the two candidates wins.
If we’re talking about US senators or representatives, there’s a lot of value in having a majority in either or both houses, and the margins are pretty slim. Yes, you’ll risk getting another Fetterman, but the House majority party gets to pick the Speaker, which allows for a huge amount of control over what comes to the floor at all.
Ok, then that seems like a simple game theory case where the lesser worse should change to mollify those voters of conscience since the alternative is them always losing.
You’re still not going to get more rights by voting red or abstaining. You have allies. Let us help instead of forcing us to dig everyone out of a hole made by right wing funie Christians
No issue is a strict binary - there are many degrees of transphobia, just as there are many degrees of any bigotry, as well as many degrees of non-human-rights issues, like support for public schools or privatization of health care. I would imagine that in almost every case where there is an anti-trans democrat running against an anti-trans republican, there is a significant difference both in terms of how rabidly transphobic the candidate is and which specific anti-trans policies they will support. There is also likely to be a big difference whether or not there is any potential for them to see the error of their ways. While most anti-trans democrats are likely on the wrong side of trans participation in sports, they are not likely to support criminalizing trans existence or encouraging violence against trans people, while many republicans are. They also will face pressure from pro-trans members of their own party, and from significant pro-trans constituencies, which republicans will not.
In FPTP voting systems, we rarely have the luxury of voting for candidates who have our full-throated support in the general election. Even if one issue is massively more important to you than the rest (and when that issue is a matter of survival, that is 100% valid), there is almost always a greater and lesser evil on that issue alone. Voting shouldn’t be viewed as a matter of identity or even as an endorsement, but rather as a practicality. It is a method of weighing in as to which of the limited options available is more tolerable (or less intolerable). Does that suck? Absolutely. Does it make sense to vote any other way within such a system? Not at all - because if the more tolerable side loses, the only lesson they are likely to take from that loss is to become more like the winning, intolerable side.
Can I have a source on the claim that the Equality Act was changed to redefine what it meant so that it could exclude trans people?
context
Not arguing that it was changed, but in the court decision, the judges relied on the 1976 Sex Discrimintation Act for and even the ruling judge said himself, that trans people “had been led to believe… for the last 15 years that they had rights, which they didn’t have”. It was a judicial interpretation of the law that evaluated the 2004 gender equivalency provisions against the 1976 law moreso than the 2010 law to narrow the protected class from the 2010 law.
If a Musky PAC were to run ads saying how terrible Brown or another candidate would be for trans rights, in the same way Jewish and Arab voters were shown contradictory messages in 2024, would that influence how or whether you vote?
To be clear, I think that trans people should compete in sports according to their gender and be conferred the same rights as anyone else. But people that want to limit trans people’s participation in sports for flawed, scientifically refuted reasons while treating them as humans, I don’t think is the same, as wanting to ban them from bathrooms changing driver’s licenses and treating them as subhuman demon freaks. We should not equate the two.
To give a similar example, the fight for gay sex and marriage in Canada was fought over decades, and the stigma remains in small pockets. A progressive Prime Minister decriminalized it in the 1969 while not his entire Liberal Party was openly for it, and it was still in the decades after that a ban on workplace discrimination and in the 2000s when marriage was recognized. So we have to pull in the same direction, allow trans people the same basic rights as anyone else, then talk about competitive and recreational activites like sports later rather than just labelling it all as anti-trans sub-humanization talking points.