He also voted against the "H.R. 28 - The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act" and explained it but saying(in part):
"The problem with this Republican bill, however, is that it is too extreme; it simply goes too far. Because it fails to distinguish between children and adults and different levels of athletics, school-aged kids who simply want to play recreational sports and build camaraderie like everybody else could be targeted by the federal government. My kids play co-ed sports today just as I did when I was their age, and I don’t want any kids their age subjected to the invasive violations of personal privacy this bill allows."
I think it's a perfectly legit critique of Seth, statistically the chance of his daughters having to compete against a trans athlete at the middle or highschool level is extremely small. There's a difference between saying "There should be room for nuance and we should be willing to listen to people" and tossing gas on a fire of an issue that is already wildly out of proportion in the discourse to the actual number of people affected because you want to, lets be honest, get more press for your next race.
Transfemale athletes have disproportionate impacts. For one, each may compete against hundreds or thousands of girls or women over the course of their career, unfairly disadvantaging all of them. They also make a mockery of the concept of female sports, replacing the acknowledgement of the obvious genetic differences between men and women with a reductive stance that being female (or male) is solely a matter of personal identity and some hormones.
I used to think it was fine for males to compete in female sports. Then I saw a clip of a trans teenager competing in track and field. She was a freshman. Not only did she beat every senior participating in the long jump, which had never happened in the school’s history, she set a state record. So she likely made it impossible for a cis teenage girl to ever do the same.
That's a different argument than the one Jerusalem made: "Moulton’s oldest child at the time was about 6 years old, which means she was still at the age where boys and girls play sports together and any trans kids playing with them are not the hulking monsters he invoked but mere children."
Having said that, your argument depends on the meaning of "extremely small" and your expectation of how responsive politicians ought to be. As a Massachusetts parent of two high-school daughters, I can tell you first-hand it's been commonplace for several years now, at least since the end of the pandemic. The issue isn't a personal priority of mine, but Moulton's right on the merits.
First, I still don't understand why we shouldn't be allowed to critique a poorly worded statement made by a politician, when obviously as others pointed out he has gone on to phrase it better, probably as a result of the fact people pointed out to him why they didn't like him referring to trans girls as hulking monsters.
Seth is a smart guy, so I'm not afraid to hold him to a standard of speaking intelligently and compassionately about things.
Second, I don't know to to frame anecdotal example with reference to data we do know about the actual number of trans athletes competing at a high school level competitively across the country. All I can say to that is doesn't that make it more necessary to treat this issue with care than he did at first from a local perspective?
I’ll echo the Moulton takes. You can’t characterize moderation in the frame of legislation with the Laken Riley Act, then point to rhetoric as a form of moderation. You need to separate these two things out.
As others have said, Moulton was voicing legitimate fears parents have. And the fact that parents get shut down by progressive scolds is what makes thoughtful moderation difficult because there’s no room for debate.
Finally, others have pointed out his actual legislative record but more recently look at his campaign. He’s doing events with former service members booted from the military for being trans. Isn’t “we need to respect the safety of girls in sport but trans people are encouraged to serve the country in uniform” something close to thoughtful moderation on this issue?
I read Jain's piece. My recollection was that the main point wasn't actually what the public's opinion on trans issues was, currently, but how rapidly it had shifted over a short period of time.
What this implies is that the public doesn't really know what it thinks on this issue. It's whipsawed by competing propaganda from partisan groups and/or salient anecdotes.
So I thought the article was speaking to trans rights advocates, saying, basically, "change your game plan." You were doing something that worked, and then the other team changed their strategy/tactics to make that not work. So you need to update.
What Molloy and crowed feel, I think, is that making this point isn't so much throwing trans people under the bus, but trans advocates. It's saying they "screwed up" by "letting" public opinion slip away. But that's not accurate or fair. As they say in sports, the other team has coaches, too.
To me the core flaw in the progressive mindset is not their choice of tactics. I think their hectoring tactics were limited and vulnerable but I have to acknowledge, they worked well for a while.
It's their refusal to accept that all politics is competitive. Believing you have justice on your side doesn't give a reason to expect that you'll be successful, because _all the people who disagree with you also think justice is on their side_. So the only question before trans rights advocates should be: how do we win back, and even win more, people to our side. I'm not sure how you can do that if you don't know what people think.
I didn't think the progressive hectoring tactics worked. Do you have examples of it working? To me the public has moved in a more conversative direction in DEI initiatives, immigration, and trans issues where are where I think most hectoring occurred.
It worked until it didn't. Ultimately it overreached and created blowback as we know, because many people resented being bullied. BUT, for a while it worked, especially related to race after George Floyd etc.
If you were reasoning purely inductively from 2020 until October 7, you could reasonably infer that the progressive train would never be stopped. I was working on a business that served Wall Street in 2000, the dot.com bubble was the same. Sure it seemed absurd in some ways -- just call a business ".com" and they shower you with cash? But the answer from experience was "yes, exactly. It works like that."
I'll bet the Jacobins felt the same way. It's like when you play hearts and try to shoot the moon. You feel like you _are shooting the moon_ the whole time, even though you actually don't know if you are until the last card.
I think there is both a timing and a measurement question. From say 13-20 I noticed a marked increase in things like inclusivity exercises, Chief Inclusion Officers and "first [marginalized group on added to [taste maker]'s board".
What I'm not sure of is:
- Was this the result of hectoring or something that might have happened anyways
- What were the effects on public opinion. Anecdotally those I know who participated in overly hectoring inclusivity exercises became *less* amenable to those topics.
For example, defund the police both did not defund the police and in many ways entrenched their support.
Yascha Mounk just interviewed this guy Jacob Savage on his podcast (it's on Substack, I have to find the link). Savage has written about how millennial white men got frozen out of many jobs in Hollywood, academia, literature. He has various numbers to back that up.
If that's true -- that progressives got those industries to cough up jobs they habitually give to white guys over to people of color and women -- then the tactics worked for a time. The hectoring was clearly a part of it because Savage reports that recently, things have snapped back. So in other words, Hollywood and New York literati temporarily performed anti racism even though they didn't really believe in it. Doesn't that have to be attributed to the temporary effectiveness of bullying?
Of course, what we know now is that in the longer run, this lead to big losses. It's not Napoleon taking Moscow but you get the idea. I think the flaw in the progressive plan was that they needed to _convince_ people they were right, but they were able to win so many victories for a while thru pure pressure, that they thought they were convincing people when they weren't.
Or, maybe they knew all along that there would be a backlash, so tried to gain as much as they could while they had the momentum. But man, this backlash is a doozy.
He quotes some numbers in there. He's referring to a piece he wrote that I think has the same numbers with more details, but I haven't read it. It's this....
I think it was absolutely toxic and counterproductive. The only silver lining is that it has caused the right to overreach so terribly that perhaps they'll lose some grip on their power, but I wouldn't bet my 401k on it.
There is in my mind, a factor that is in play here that is weirdly not really well discussed amongst critiques of trans activists but should be fairly obvious on it's face:
If you ARE trans, you have a certain level of personal investment in an issue that could quite literally be the difference between you being able to legally get the medical care you need and not getting it. The stakes just are not the same. Similar things could be said of parents with trans kids!
If AREN'T trans, your investment in this issue isn't going to be as personal. These are just abstract arguments about a very small part of society. Going your entire day without talking to or ever seeing a trans person is going to be the experience of most people (depending on wear you live and what you do).
So to me, this isn't really some mystery that can only speculate/theorize on. Not everyone reacts to losing with grace, particularly when you stand to lose much more than others.
This is a great point. I think this is how it feels. I've had very much this conversation with a friend who is a parent of a trans individual.
And yet, don't soldiers face the same kind of threat? I've never been one so am honestly asking. And maybe there is a similar morale effect, where the arny keeps saying the public should only be told that we're winning. I remember in Iraq when they kept saying we're "turning the corner" because "General Petraeus" is here.
And the irony is, the medical care you are talking about is an issue where the public can and would be with the trans community. Since when did we think it was a good idea to let politicians decide what medicine doctors could prescribe?? No one except a hard core ideologue would be for that. And Jain's analysis shows most people aren't ideologues on this issue.
War and soldiers here, I think, is a great relational example.
Soldiers, often feel a sense of responsibility or have one imposed on them when their side conducts themselves poorly. You may have conducted yourself honorably, but your government or other individuals did not, and you wore that uniform. People associate you with it.
If you are trans, you suffer for the missteps of others you have no control over. Unlike being a soldier, it's much harder to "take off the uniform" essentially. You could chose not to present as trans, yet for obvious reasons that involves taking on a certain level of suffering in return. Both a soldier and a trans person have to see people talk about something without all the knowledge of the situation, or the investment.
War time censorship, as you elude to, is a complicated beast. It's hard to walk the very fine line of not cracking down to much on free speech while preventing panics from consuming the public. This happens during natural disasters as well. With regard to trans issues, I think for some trans people they do wish media would take a hand in preventing panics, yet for all the same reasons thats also a fine line to walk!
My personal view is that in all these cases compassion should be our north star, and ruining a childs life because they are trans, ruining an adults life because they are trans, is not an acceptable response to the excesses of a very tiny pool of individual actors.
I agree compassion is what should guide us on this topic. But does publishing a piece that says that polling shows your side has lost ground amount to ruining someone's life?
The reason I made the military comparison was because I agree with your earlier point: the sports analogy (which I typically use, and do think applies to most progressive issues) is callous when talking about the trans issue. So I shifted to war because it's life and death.
And it's fundamentally competitive. There's an adversary, and if it is not defeated, the risk of harm increases. So then somewhere, someone working on behalf of the movement/army has to be looking at the situation analytically, seeking an advantage and trying to minimize weaknesses. Maybe a Substack isn't the right place -- too public. I don't know. But the idea that conceding that past tactics were a mistake, and therefore can never be abandoned, sounds like what a losing general/army does. And no one is helped by losing.
I was former military and I too like military analogies. Clausewitz said war is politics by other means. The converse is true.
Military officers know that if you do an aggressive offense you are likely to get overextended. The enemy will see the weakness of your position and counterattack. If you stand and hold your ground when overextended you will likely be completely wiped out. Fleeing in disorder will also get you wiped out. The sensible thing to do is a fighting withdrawal keeping good order to a defensible position. Then you stand and hold your ground and regenerate strength for your next offensive.
The Trans activists were very aggressive in pushing their agenda, got overextended and they are now getting hit with a counteroffensive. Their position is unsupportable at this time, so they should fall back to positions that the voters do support.
I wasn’t sure you meant that, actually, I thought maybe. Because the context of this conversation, in my mind, was whether people who support trans rights —e.g. The Argument, other liberals — should publish articles that show that trans issues have lost support. This was why I shifted to the military case (after your point), because that is a situation where people get sensitive and sometimes don’t think the truth should be published because it will hurt morale (The “turning the corner” in Iraq, or more famously and egregiously, refusing to show body bags on the news during Vietnam).
So I think there are people out there making a legitimate point — talking publicly about how the trans movement has lost ground, even though this is true, is hurtful to trans people. I respect that argument. I just think that the damage of not talking about is worse, because it will make continued losses in the struggle more likely.
But those decisions were informed first by medical science. I am not aware of any established/accepted medical reason for female genital mutilation. So the reason it is not allowed is not because politicians had to put a stop to it, against the recommendations of medical professionals. It’s because it’s not recommended by medical professionals.
Of course the FDA has a say in these things. But part of the way things used to work was that the FDA was run and informed by medical scientists, and politicians had minimal oversight except on process. For example, politicians might say _how_ drugs are to be approved, but approvals were done by medical professionals through that process. Politicians did not directly weigh in on these approvals.
And I get that this is something a lot of people want to change ( I am not one of them). This is something people want —- to reject what science says that if the science says something is safe that the public thinks is bad. Abortion controversy is similar, but there at least the conservative side says it is speaking for “the unborn.” But why would a grown-up whose doctor prescribes a medication that the medical establishment has deemed safe be told that they can’t have that treatment because, say, a majority of Americans think they “shouldn’t want” that treatment of that the reasons they are seeking it are illegitimate? There are many, many treatments that might get denied to any us by that logic, not just trans people.
I get that people don’t trust doctors/medicine now like they did before. Alas. But I don’t get why they think that it would make sense to substitute medical science with public opinion, and don’t think that’s really what people want.
I haven't followed it closely, but I do know that, at least on the kids' stuff, the scientific consensus in other countries is shifting. And I agree, if the science changes, because we learn that some things we thought were effective aren't, that can't be beholden to the political preferences of activists, either.
I'd rather have this kind of thing hashed out by scientists -- rigorously, with real challenges that keep there from being an agenda -- than decided by a politician who is being pushed by an interest group or public fervor.
The logic of the this rebellion against science reminds me a bit of the Marxist revolutions from 75-100 years ago. There's legitimate reasons for skepticism and a feeling of betrayal from those on the "outside." The insiders -- capitalists -- were not serving the public and were getting away with something. But that doesn't mean that the remedy -- centralized planning -- works at all. It strikes me that we sometimes, or perhaps often, have a choice between corrupt and ignorant. It sounds morally better to avoid "corrupt," but I never want to hitch my wagon to ignorant.
I don't know much about gender dysphoria or the specific other challenges trans individuals face. But I believe they are very real and need our care and compassion. That some doctors/scientists pushed it too far, and tried to claim their case was airtight and that you were a bad person for even questioning them, is quite bad. It was unjust to everyone. But this doesn't mean this individuals won't suffer if we take some kind of rash, reactionary course correction.
My point re soldiers is that in life or death situations, presumably leaders of the people at risk -- officers -- are analyzing the situation looking for every advantage, and the soldiers are glad they are doing that. But I really can't say because I have not been one.
The question I always use about this is: Do you believe that _in 1970_, activists seeking to advance queer rights should have made _gay marriage_ a central focus of their arguments?
Fundamentally the question of whether allowing gay people to marry the partner of their choice is good on a moral level, and the question of whether it pragmatically advances "the good" for society, didn't change at all between the Harvey Milk days and the 2010s. But the reaction of the average citizen to this idea changed A TON. If, as a gay rights advocate in the '70s, you made this demand, the VAST majority of people would've just tuned you out. This concept was outside the Overton Window. Meanwhile, there were other incremental issues around housing and employment, and general social acceptance, where you could be moving the ball forwards. (Some of these remain open today -- attitudes have shifted so employment discrimination over queer identity is rarer, but it's still basically legal to discriminate against people on that basis.)
Most people _understand_ that it was possible to be for queer rights in 1970, without loudly advocating for _gay marriage_ right then. And if you understand that, then you also should understand that it's possible to move the ball forwards on trans rights today, and you'll probably do better at that if you focus on areas that don't provoke the average persuadable citizen to tune you out or perceive you as crazy.
In the 1970s gay rights activists were mostly radical sexual liberationists who saw their fina goal as destroying marriage not extending it to LGBT people. In places that legalized sodomy their next step was to get other things legalized. That’s why SF doesn’t have any law against public nudity.
It was the AIDS crisis of the 1980s that made marriage rights the end goal of the gay rights movement.
Yes the through the 1990s, the LGBT rights movement accepted incrementalism and compromise and threw their full support behind politicians like Clinton and 2006 Obama who didn’t fully support us.
But in general from the 80s to the 90s trans rights and gay rights advanced in lockstep - sometimes the T was ahead of the rest of the community. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for trans people and their parents to assume that in a would where same sex couples can marry, of course puberty blockers are between a family and their doctor and people can do gendered things according to their gender identity.
Now trans people are back in the 1970s on most issues, while the rest of the community has kept all of our gains. That has to feel awful. It’s similar to African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, albeit not as severe.
That doesn’t change the objective situation; of course. Pushing on an 80-20 issue won’t help.
The activism of the '70s was more varied than what you're suggesting. Harvey Milk was making compromises with the straight world, engaging in "respectability politics" to help win fights over stuff like an employment discrimination ordinance.
My point here is just that people should be thinking hard about Sarah McBride's perspective here, on how civil rights are never won all in one fell swoop, sometimes there are setbacks, and along the way we'll probably have to work with imperfect allies.
To be clear, if I could just impose my own views, democracy be damned, I am way out at the bleeding edge on this. I'm a queer man married to a trans person, and in my twenties I was involved in running some of those, uh, "interesting" clubs in SF.
People saying dumb shit about trans teens irritates me. But also, I think keeping my spouse safe means building a durable majority that is opposed to MAGA persecution, which may mean extending some tolerance to people who have some discomfort with "alternative lifestyles", the same as winning gay rights issues meant giving people some time to "evolve". Remember that Barack Obama ran in 2008 as supporting civil unions but not gay marriage! But you would've had to be an idiot to believe that electing _any_ Republican president would be equally-good for queer rights, relative to electing _any_ Democrat.
So what does thoughtful moderation on trans issues look like? I think we can all get behind supporting anti-discrimination laws but that doesn’t really come close to answering a lot of the questions de jure.
I think one position to stake out is, "Government should not be involved in determining trans sports eligibility; sports organizations should decide themselves." This is also genuinely what I think, because the sports organizations are experts on their own sports and best positioned to decide what is and isn't fair in terms of trans participation. For example, I can't imagine that anyone cares what gender you compete as for archery, since men and women have roughly the same records in it and there aren't differences between the competitions. On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that the rules that allowed Lia Thomas to compete in women's NCAA swimming were too lax. But the best organization to adjust those rules is FINA, just as they banned the full-body fast suits years ago when they decided they changed the records too much. Government just shouldn't be involved in this in either direction.
It's worth pointing out that NCAA was already in the process of adjusting the rules for swimming when the Lia Thomas controversy became nationally known. They had already decided that going forward they would require trans female athletes to be on testosterone suppressing drugs for a year longer than previously in order to become eligible to compete. The Lia Thomas story was actually a story about the system working toward fairness on a thorny issue, so it's a real bummer that it seems to have convinced so many people that trans women represent a huge threat to fairness in sports.
Yes, it's definitely because the story was so convenient for Republican political purposes that it got picked up. The fact that the NCAA was fixing it themselves is just evidence that this stuff really doesn't need government intervention. I wish were in the alternate history where the Obama administration had never written that "dear colleague" letter and no one had ever thought to make laws on this topic.
I think this would be a fine position for Dems to take but it would require them to abandon policies they've proposed that would ban anyone from using sex rather than gender identity as a criteria. The Equality Act, for instance, which they reintroduce every session. Rather than just simply banning discrimination in the ways that most voters favor, it redefines sex to include gender identity such that they are not really distinguishable, and also prohibits disallowing anyone access to facilities (including locker rooms) that match their self proclaimed gender identity.
Yeah, the Dems should absolutely scrap that language. I can't imagine most trans women want the standard for who has access to a women's locker room to be mere self-proclaimed gender identity. They don't want duplicitous men coming in to leer at them either, they want recourse to kick them out. I don't know what the actual standard should be (probably there are some inclusive gyms that have come up with a good policy), but it shouldn't be that and the Dems should drop it.
Let state or local figure out their own bathroom / locker room policies. The best is to require only unisex single occupancy bathrooms and locker rooms.
In new gyms, yeah, making sure that there’s no nudity in common areas is the best approach. I think everyone born after 1976 would appreciate that. But not every gym can be refitted to work that way.
I don't see why schools being public should mean the government would need to weigh in. There's no laws about what type of swimsuits are legal for each gender to wear in competition, the schools just defer to USA Swimming regulations. I suppose if a trans woman wanted to sue to be allowed on a team without meeting the sport's transition requirements, then the whole Title IX and sex discrimination aspect might come up, but I feel like that's better worked out on an individual basis rather than making proactive laws about it.
Because public school rules are funded by and part of the government. Who else but the government would set the rules for government schools?
And we created title IX because recognized that women's sports teams were needed, and that biological men had an unfair advantage.
An important note, is that it should really be thought of as a women's team and an open team. If you don't meet the eligibility requirements to play on the women's team (being a biological woman, and not taking performance enhancing testosterone), then you are free to play on the open team (commonly referred to as the men's team).
For example, when I wrestled in high school there were a number of girls that wrestled on the open/men's team.
I mean, we set minimum standards for curriculum, but lots of schools set up their own interpretations for what they teach, whether they bother with dress codes, how they enforce discipline, and myriad other issues. Not everything needs to be a law, and trans participation in sports seems to be something that is broadly better served by letting the sports organizations decide for themselves.
Fairly bold to assume all can get on board with supporting anti-discrimination laws. Have you seen the standard article/comment about trans people on Substack?
What the survey showed (on yesterday's article) was that a large majority of the public is on board with banning discrimination against trans people in housing and employment. That's a big bold takeaway that got missed in the framing of the article as a "backsliding" on trans rights.
I don’t agree with the part about the Laken Riley. Perhaps it was a bad bill on the merits but I bet voting for it helped Democrats politically representing red districts. It allowed those Democrats to make an argument to their voters that they at least did something to address their concerns about illegal immigration. It also provided them with an argument they could use to show to their voters that they aren’t just typical down the line Democrats, that they think for themselves and are willing to disagree with their party on certain issues.
Like Jerusalem claims that the Laken Riley vote will be “forgotten by the next election”. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If a politician takes an unpopular vote in their district, even if it’s somewhat obscure, their opponent is allowed to bring up that vote in attack ads. There are a million examples of this. Here’s one:
Despite Lakshya’s contention that people aren’t shifting their votes on trans issues, Future Forward found that the heavily featured attack ads criticizing Kamala Harris for her (alleged) past support of gender-affirming care for prison inmates and immigration detainees (i.e. the "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" crapola) were highly influential in persuading marginal, low information voters to go for Trump. Not sure what to believe, but I think it's reasonable to conclude that messaging blitz was effective at the margin.
Matt Yglesias wrote about how this situation was the product of needing to appease and gain support from each of “the groups”, prompting Harris’ camp to respond to the ACLU questionnaire in a manner they, for strictly political reasons, otherwise wouldn’t have. In this reading, it is the more progressive stance adopted for purposes of appeasement and coalition-building that was thoughtless, not a more moderate stance. I propose simply that politicians stop acting without thought. Their job and duty to the country demands it.
The FF ad testing found that the "Kamala is for they/them" spot was 77th percentile for Republican ads (I know this because I was on the mailing list). The 99th percentile GOP ads were all about prices. Meaning yes, that ad was effective at moving votes to Republicans, but it was far from the *most* effective ad.
Not saying you're wrong that the ad didn't move votes. Just adding some nuance because I've seen tons of people discuss the FF testing without giving the full context of which ads FF found most effective for Republicans.
I’m going to betray my ignorance of the FF methodology here, but I still don’t know how to interpret the relative importance of these percentile ratings in terms of actual voting outcomes. Clearly, GOP ads focused on affordability tested out as more important. But did those ads change how the low information voters that decided the election actually voted? Given that Harris was the VP of the incumbent administration that oversaw high prices, was an ad spot even necessary for voters to trust Trump on prices more than Harris?
I guess what I’m asking is: Does what amounts to an unforced messaging error – giving rise to the ad spot ranking in the 77th percentile of importance – dominate the effect on actual voting outcomes of an ad spot in the 99th percentile? Maybe if Dems coalesced around a candidate that wasn’t part of Biden’s administration, I could see the ad spots focused on prices having more of an impact at the margin. But since it was Harris, I think the trans messaging carries more relative weight than even FF suggests.
I think the takeaway is that Democratic politicians who’ve never taken a position on trans issues can just continue to not take a position, but that Democrats who have a history of being pro-trans will need to be publicly anti-trans. But I’m just some guy on the Internet, what do I know?
I personally know 2 people IRL that I kept from voting for Trump in 2016 and 2020 despite all their right-to-life friends urging them to do so. I convinced them Trump was too horrible on everything else. However, in 2024, they both voted Trump solely because "the Democrats are pushing kids to be chemically castrated and have their genitiles mutilated." They were not convinced by calling it "gender affirming care."
Anecdotally, all my conservative family members (i.e. everyone older than my generation) also placed the largest emphasis on the gender affirming care issue when citing their intention to vote for Trump. I think it's just low hanging fruit since, "who would argue against protecting children?" But my family isn't struggling financially as much as most, so hardly a representative sample.
We know, independent of objective economic reality, people are much more likely to complain about the economy and prices when the other party is in the white house. Data show this is true even if they're personally financially secure and economic indicators are broadly positive. Especially since the Pandemic, there is a divergence between consumer confidence and actual measures of economic performance. Noah Smith calls it the vibes vs. data effect. So I think it's reasonable to assume the prices ad testing got a similar boost from the related response bias.
Lastly, if the conservative version of virtue signalling is part of the motivation to focus on gender affirming care, I think something in reverse is happening for a slice of the GOP electorate when they cite economic issues as being so important. In my view, the slice in question is sick of seeing so many brown people but still clings to enough decency not to say that part out loud. And so they say ads that focus on banal issues like the economy are most important, rather than admit they voted the way they did because the orange man promised to get rid of all the brown people.
But Milan is absolutely correct to suggest I'm cherry-picking data from the source I originally cited, as is my right as a run-of-the-mill comments section schmuck haha.
"are largely opposed to extending parents of trans children the traditional right to make medical decisions for their children in consultation with a doctor."
That's not true. They just don't think that gender blocking hormones or gender transition surgery is appropriate for any kids
2. However, I think you are excessively charitable to Molloy and the rest of the transmaximalists.
3. Does “against misplaced moderation” also apply closer to home…say, against a squeaky, fat, bald guy from DC who consistently inveighed against discussing the administration’s treatment of Abrego Garcia and loudly indignantly squeaked about “gotcha questions” when asked?
4. Does it also apply to the bedwetters who, when Democrats gain control, will say moronic shit like:
"Now is the time for unity, not division"
"American politics needs bipartisan consensus, even as a Democrat I want a strong Republican party"
"I'll gladly welcome any Republican in my administration so all Americans can feel represented"
"Leave the divisive rhetoric behind with Trump, the Department of Justice will now look forward, not backwards"
5. Does it also apply to squashing pundits and candidates who attempt to impede the necessary effort to kneecap the maga movement (eg: removing car dealer exclusivity, going after supplements, rigorously enforcing the IRS rules against politics from the pulpit - enforced by either crippling fines or public renunciation of faith, eliminating all farm subsidies and telling the farmers to get bent if they complain or embark on a suicide campaign as they do in India, cutting as much money as possible from red states, redrawing states such as by kicking the Appalachian sections of VA/MD/parts of PA to WV ) and ensuring greater power for Dems (eg: nuking the filibuster, DC/PR/USVI statehood and telling those who whine to move to Russia, court packing after having a polite chat with Roberts about the error of his ways, aggressive house building in blue states by surgical debarking of NIMBYs, massive immigration reform to create a constituency for more like the immigrant population in the Toronto suburbs that squash Trumpist candidates and all the goodies needed to reward the base - such as universal healthcare and infrastructure)?
Dems running for national office should run on this platform:
- delegate most transgender issues to the states (e.g. medical transitioning for youth).
- delegate the issue of trans girls in girls sports to the appropriate sport leagues.
- reinstate Biden-era employment polices for Federal Government, including military.
- Reintroduce the Equality Act, but with several changes. First, ban discrimination in housing, employment in education based on "sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity," not the currently proposed language of "sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)." Second, don't ban segregation based on sex in public facilities. Instead, require that all public bathrooms be unisex single occupancy bathrooms.
This will put the national office Dems on the right side of the polling. Delegate or defer unpopular issues until such time as there is strong nationwide support them. And no, it is not the job of Congressional Representatives to change voters minds - that is the job of activists and public intellectuals. It is the American tradition that Congressional Representatives represent voters. That is why they are called "representatives." Activists that want Congressional Representatives to change the minds of their voters are being lazy.
Regarding transgender medical treatment: For adults, states should freely allow it. For youth, I support the Dutch protocol, but no more. After listening to the NYT podcast series, I think this is the best compromise solution. Dutch protocol has so many safeguards that false positives would be extremely rare. The consequences of medically transitioning a child that does not actually have gender dysphoria are serious. The consequences of not medically transitioning a child that actually does have gender dysphoria are not serious - they have to wait until they are an adult to medically transition (no good quality evidence of increased suicide rates).
This is so right. Voters aren't dumb or unnecessarily cruel--they often hold nuanced views on contentious issues. Being thoughtlessly harsh on trans rights or immigration doesn't win elections. It just produces bad policy that future leaders have to clean up.
This post is essentially defending your polling and going after people criticizing you. It is a bad look. The poll was interesting and started a conversation. But this piece makes it seem like you want to end it. I’m a journalist for a major newspaper and other publications don’t really do this. They let people have their say, heck maybe even publish a few of their comments and counterpoints. They don’t attack people on Twitter/X and in subsequent pieces. I love your publication and have supported you from the beginning, please don’t adopt this reactionary style of commentary that ends any and all good and healthy debate. Let your polling and commentary stand on its own merits.
Sports are perhaps the only case where people acknowledge sex-based performance differences and realistically prefer keeping it “natural.”
Now please take your definition of fascism and make it centered around forcing an elite class of flexible gendered athletes to steal all the women’s medals. Theoretically possible.
There are several good points here, but the hit on Seth Moulton is nonsense. His daughters aren't going to be six years old forever.
He also voted against the "H.R. 28 - The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act" and explained it but saying(in part):
"The problem with this Republican bill, however, is that it is too extreme; it simply goes too far. Because it fails to distinguish between children and adults and different levels of athletics, school-aged kids who simply want to play recreational sports and build camaraderie like everybody else could be targeted by the federal government. My kids play co-ed sports today just as I did when I was their age, and I don’t want any kids their age subjected to the invasive violations of personal privacy this bill allows."
https://moulton.house.gov/news/press-releases/vote-explainer-hr-28-protection-women-and-girls-sports-act
He also seems to be the only named politician in the piece.
"Several Democrats have even admitted to regretting their votes." This links to CT Rep. Hayes and Rep. April McClain Delaney.
"Last July, Iowa’s governor... " "...Iowa lawmakers... "
Co-ed would still be fine, the problem is when it's a girls/women only team and you have biological boys playing on it
I think it's a perfectly legit critique of Seth, statistically the chance of his daughters having to compete against a trans athlete at the middle or highschool level is extremely small. There's a difference between saying "There should be room for nuance and we should be willing to listen to people" and tossing gas on a fire of an issue that is already wildly out of proportion in the discourse to the actual number of people affected because you want to, lets be honest, get more press for your next race.
Transfemale athletes have disproportionate impacts. For one, each may compete against hundreds or thousands of girls or women over the course of their career, unfairly disadvantaging all of them. They also make a mockery of the concept of female sports, replacing the acknowledgement of the obvious genetic differences between men and women with a reductive stance that being female (or male) is solely a matter of personal identity and some hormones.
I used to think it was fine for males to compete in female sports. Then I saw a clip of a trans teenager competing in track and field. She was a freshman. Not only did she beat every senior participating in the long jump, which had never happened in the school’s history, she set a state record. So she likely made it impossible for a cis teenage girl to ever do the same.
That's a different argument than the one Jerusalem made: "Moulton’s oldest child at the time was about 6 years old, which means she was still at the age where boys and girls play sports together and any trans kids playing with them are not the hulking monsters he invoked but mere children."
Having said that, your argument depends on the meaning of "extremely small" and your expectation of how responsive politicians ought to be. As a Massachusetts parent of two high-school daughters, I can tell you first-hand it's been commonplace for several years now, at least since the end of the pandemic. The issue isn't a personal priority of mine, but Moulton's right on the merits.
First, I still don't understand why we shouldn't be allowed to critique a poorly worded statement made by a politician, when obviously as others pointed out he has gone on to phrase it better, probably as a result of the fact people pointed out to him why they didn't like him referring to trans girls as hulking monsters.
Seth is a smart guy, so I'm not afraid to hold him to a standard of speaking intelligently and compassionately about things.
Second, I don't know to to frame anecdotal example with reference to data we do know about the actual number of trans athletes competing at a high school level competitively across the country. All I can say to that is doesn't that make it more necessary to treat this issue with care than he did at first from a local perspective?
It wasn't poorly worded at all.
I thought it was perfectly worded to reach out to moderate voters
I’ll echo the Moulton takes. You can’t characterize moderation in the frame of legislation with the Laken Riley Act, then point to rhetoric as a form of moderation. You need to separate these two things out.
As others have said, Moulton was voicing legitimate fears parents have. And the fact that parents get shut down by progressive scolds is what makes thoughtful moderation difficult because there’s no room for debate.
Finally, others have pointed out his actual legislative record but more recently look at his campaign. He’s doing events with former service members booted from the military for being trans. Isn’t “we need to respect the safety of girls in sport but trans people are encouraged to serve the country in uniform” something close to thoughtful moderation on this issue?
I read Jain's piece. My recollection was that the main point wasn't actually what the public's opinion on trans issues was, currently, but how rapidly it had shifted over a short period of time.
What this implies is that the public doesn't really know what it thinks on this issue. It's whipsawed by competing propaganda from partisan groups and/or salient anecdotes.
So I thought the article was speaking to trans rights advocates, saying, basically, "change your game plan." You were doing something that worked, and then the other team changed their strategy/tactics to make that not work. So you need to update.
What Molloy and crowed feel, I think, is that making this point isn't so much throwing trans people under the bus, but trans advocates. It's saying they "screwed up" by "letting" public opinion slip away. But that's not accurate or fair. As they say in sports, the other team has coaches, too.
To me the core flaw in the progressive mindset is not their choice of tactics. I think their hectoring tactics were limited and vulnerable but I have to acknowledge, they worked well for a while.
It's their refusal to accept that all politics is competitive. Believing you have justice on your side doesn't give a reason to expect that you'll be successful, because _all the people who disagree with you also think justice is on their side_. So the only question before trans rights advocates should be: how do we win back, and even win more, people to our side. I'm not sure how you can do that if you don't know what people think.
I didn't think the progressive hectoring tactics worked. Do you have examples of it working? To me the public has moved in a more conversative direction in DEI initiatives, immigration, and trans issues where are where I think most hectoring occurred.
It worked until it didn't. Ultimately it overreached and created blowback as we know, because many people resented being bullied. BUT, for a while it worked, especially related to race after George Floyd etc.
If you were reasoning purely inductively from 2020 until October 7, you could reasonably infer that the progressive train would never be stopped. I was working on a business that served Wall Street in 2000, the dot.com bubble was the same. Sure it seemed absurd in some ways -- just call a business ".com" and they shower you with cash? But the answer from experience was "yes, exactly. It works like that."
I'll bet the Jacobins felt the same way. It's like when you play hearts and try to shoot the moon. You feel like you _are shooting the moon_ the whole time, even though you actually don't know if you are until the last card.
I think there is both a timing and a measurement question. From say 13-20 I noticed a marked increase in things like inclusivity exercises, Chief Inclusion Officers and "first [marginalized group on added to [taste maker]'s board".
What I'm not sure of is:
- Was this the result of hectoring or something that might have happened anyways
- What were the effects on public opinion. Anecdotally those I know who participated in overly hectoring inclusivity exercises became *less* amenable to those topics.
For example, defund the police both did not defund the police and in many ways entrenched their support.
Yascha Mounk just interviewed this guy Jacob Savage on his podcast (it's on Substack, I have to find the link). Savage has written about how millennial white men got frozen out of many jobs in Hollywood, academia, literature. He has various numbers to back that up.
If that's true -- that progressives got those industries to cough up jobs they habitually give to white guys over to people of color and women -- then the tactics worked for a time. The hectoring was clearly a part of it because Savage reports that recently, things have snapped back. So in other words, Hollywood and New York literati temporarily performed anti racism even though they didn't really believe in it. Doesn't that have to be attributed to the temporary effectiveness of bullying?
Of course, what we know now is that in the longer run, this lead to big losses. It's not Napoleon taking Moscow but you get the idea. I think the flaw in the progressive plan was that they needed to _convince_ people they were right, but they were able to win so many victories for a while thru pure pressure, that they thought they were convincing people when they weren't.
Or, maybe they knew all along that there would be a backlash, so tried to gain as much as they could while they had the momentum. But man, this backlash is a doozy.
It seems we're saying similar thing re: persuasion which is what mattered in the end. I'd be curious to see the numbers you mention.
So here's the podcast link.
https://open.substack.com/pub/yaschamounk/p/jacob-savage?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4kjfwn
He quotes some numbers in there. He's referring to a piece he wrote that I think has the same numbers with more details, but I haven't read it. It's this....
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
I think it was absolutely toxic and counterproductive. The only silver lining is that it has caused the right to overreach so terribly that perhaps they'll lose some grip on their power, but I wouldn't bet my 401k on it.
There is in my mind, a factor that is in play here that is weirdly not really well discussed amongst critiques of trans activists but should be fairly obvious on it's face:
If you ARE trans, you have a certain level of personal investment in an issue that could quite literally be the difference between you being able to legally get the medical care you need and not getting it. The stakes just are not the same. Similar things could be said of parents with trans kids!
If AREN'T trans, your investment in this issue isn't going to be as personal. These are just abstract arguments about a very small part of society. Going your entire day without talking to or ever seeing a trans person is going to be the experience of most people (depending on wear you live and what you do).
So to me, this isn't really some mystery that can only speculate/theorize on. Not everyone reacts to losing with grace, particularly when you stand to lose much more than others.
This is a great point. I think this is how it feels. I've had very much this conversation with a friend who is a parent of a trans individual.
And yet, don't soldiers face the same kind of threat? I've never been one so am honestly asking. And maybe there is a similar morale effect, where the arny keeps saying the public should only be told that we're winning. I remember in Iraq when they kept saying we're "turning the corner" because "General Petraeus" is here.
And the irony is, the medical care you are talking about is an issue where the public can and would be with the trans community. Since when did we think it was a good idea to let politicians decide what medicine doctors could prescribe?? No one except a hard core ideologue would be for that. And Jain's analysis shows most people aren't ideologues on this issue.
War and soldiers here, I think, is a great relational example.
Soldiers, often feel a sense of responsibility or have one imposed on them when their side conducts themselves poorly. You may have conducted yourself honorably, but your government or other individuals did not, and you wore that uniform. People associate you with it.
If you are trans, you suffer for the missteps of others you have no control over. Unlike being a soldier, it's much harder to "take off the uniform" essentially. You could chose not to present as trans, yet for obvious reasons that involves taking on a certain level of suffering in return. Both a soldier and a trans person have to see people talk about something without all the knowledge of the situation, or the investment.
War time censorship, as you elude to, is a complicated beast. It's hard to walk the very fine line of not cracking down to much on free speech while preventing panics from consuming the public. This happens during natural disasters as well. With regard to trans issues, I think for some trans people they do wish media would take a hand in preventing panics, yet for all the same reasons thats also a fine line to walk!
My personal view is that in all these cases compassion should be our north star, and ruining a childs life because they are trans, ruining an adults life because they are trans, is not an acceptable response to the excesses of a very tiny pool of individual actors.
I agree compassion is what should guide us on this topic. But does publishing a piece that says that polling shows your side has lost ground amount to ruining someone's life?
The reason I made the military comparison was because I agree with your earlier point: the sports analogy (which I typically use, and do think applies to most progressive issues) is callous when talking about the trans issue. So I shifted to war because it's life and death.
And it's fundamentally competitive. There's an adversary, and if it is not defeated, the risk of harm increases. So then somewhere, someone working on behalf of the movement/army has to be looking at the situation analytically, seeking an advantage and trying to minimize weaknesses. Maybe a Substack isn't the right place -- too public. I don't know. But the idea that conceding that past tactics were a mistake, and therefore can never be abandoned, sounds like what a losing general/army does. And no one is helped by losing.
I was former military and I too like military analogies. Clausewitz said war is politics by other means. The converse is true.
Military officers know that if you do an aggressive offense you are likely to get overextended. The enemy will see the weakness of your position and counterattack. If you stand and hold your ground when overextended you will likely be completely wiped out. Fleeing in disorder will also get you wiped out. The sensible thing to do is a fighting withdrawal keeping good order to a defensible position. Then you stand and hold your ground and regenerate strength for your next offensive.
The Trans activists were very aggressive in pushing their agenda, got overextended and they are now getting hit with a counteroffensive. Their position is unsupportable at this time, so they should fall back to positions that the voters do support.
I don't think that publishing this piece amounts to ruining someones life and I'm kind of confused on how you think I meant that
I wasn’t sure you meant that, actually, I thought maybe. Because the context of this conversation, in my mind, was whether people who support trans rights —e.g. The Argument, other liberals — should publish articles that show that trans issues have lost support. This was why I shifted to the military case (after your point), because that is a situation where people get sensitive and sometimes don’t think the truth should be published because it will hurt morale (The “turning the corner” in Iraq, or more famously and egregiously, refusing to show body bags on the news during Vietnam).
So I think there are people out there making a legitimate point — talking publicly about how the trans movement has lost ground, even though this is true, is hurtful to trans people. I respect that argument. I just think that the damage of not talking about is worse, because it will make continued losses in the struggle more likely.
Politicians for years have decided what medical doctors can and cannot do.
For example, we ban female genital mutilation. There are also all types of drugs that are banned by the FDA
But those decisions were informed first by medical science. I am not aware of any established/accepted medical reason for female genital mutilation. So the reason it is not allowed is not because politicians had to put a stop to it, against the recommendations of medical professionals. It’s because it’s not recommended by medical professionals.
Of course the FDA has a say in these things. But part of the way things used to work was that the FDA was run and informed by medical scientists, and politicians had minimal oversight except on process. For example, politicians might say _how_ drugs are to be approved, but approvals were done by medical professionals through that process. Politicians did not directly weigh in on these approvals.
And I get that this is something a lot of people want to change ( I am not one of them). This is something people want —- to reject what science says that if the science says something is safe that the public thinks is bad. Abortion controversy is similar, but there at least the conservative side says it is speaking for “the unborn.” But why would a grown-up whose doctor prescribes a medication that the medical establishment has deemed safe be told that they can’t have that treatment because, say, a majority of Americans think they “shouldn’t want” that treatment of that the reasons they are seeking it are illegitimate? There are many, many treatments that might get denied to any us by that logic, not just trans people.
I get that people don’t trust doctors/medicine now like they did before. Alas. But I don’t get why they think that it would make sense to substitute medical science with public opinion, and don’t think that’s really what people want.
To put it kindly that medical science is on a really shaky foundation.
And that hasn't been helped by all the lies that were told, or the pretend certainty about the "science"
I haven't followed it closely, but I do know that, at least on the kids' stuff, the scientific consensus in other countries is shifting. And I agree, if the science changes, because we learn that some things we thought were effective aren't, that can't be beholden to the political preferences of activists, either.
I'd rather have this kind of thing hashed out by scientists -- rigorously, with real challenges that keep there from being an agenda -- than decided by a politician who is being pushed by an interest group or public fervor.
The logic of the this rebellion against science reminds me a bit of the Marxist revolutions from 75-100 years ago. There's legitimate reasons for skepticism and a feeling of betrayal from those on the "outside." The insiders -- capitalists -- were not serving the public and were getting away with something. But that doesn't mean that the remedy -- centralized planning -- works at all. It strikes me that we sometimes, or perhaps often, have a choice between corrupt and ignorant. It sounds morally better to avoid "corrupt," but I never want to hitch my wagon to ignorant.
I don't know much about gender dysphoria or the specific other challenges trans individuals face. But I believe they are very real and need our care and compassion. That some doctors/scientists pushed it too far, and tried to claim their case was airtight and that you were a bad person for even questioning them, is quite bad. It was unjust to everyone. But this doesn't mean this individuals won't suffer if we take some kind of rash, reactionary course correction.
Sorry, can't edit my comment.
My point re soldiers is that in life or death situations, presumably leaders of the people at risk -- officers -- are analyzing the situation looking for every advantage, and the soldiers are glad they are doing that. But I really can't say because I have not been one.
1. you might be attributing “thoughtless moderation” to people a bit too strongly
2. thought moulton wasn’t necessarily “thoughtless”. he wanted to help trans people by addressing the elephant in the room
The question I always use about this is: Do you believe that _in 1970_, activists seeking to advance queer rights should have made _gay marriage_ a central focus of their arguments?
Fundamentally the question of whether allowing gay people to marry the partner of their choice is good on a moral level, and the question of whether it pragmatically advances "the good" for society, didn't change at all between the Harvey Milk days and the 2010s. But the reaction of the average citizen to this idea changed A TON. If, as a gay rights advocate in the '70s, you made this demand, the VAST majority of people would've just tuned you out. This concept was outside the Overton Window. Meanwhile, there were other incremental issues around housing and employment, and general social acceptance, where you could be moving the ball forwards. (Some of these remain open today -- attitudes have shifted so employment discrimination over queer identity is rarer, but it's still basically legal to discriminate against people on that basis.)
Most people _understand_ that it was possible to be for queer rights in 1970, without loudly advocating for _gay marriage_ right then. And if you understand that, then you also should understand that it's possible to move the ball forwards on trans rights today, and you'll probably do better at that if you focus on areas that don't provoke the average persuadable citizen to tune you out or perceive you as crazy.
In the 1970s gay rights activists were mostly radical sexual liberationists who saw their fina goal as destroying marriage not extending it to LGBT people. In places that legalized sodomy their next step was to get other things legalized. That’s why SF doesn’t have any law against public nudity.
It was the AIDS crisis of the 1980s that made marriage rights the end goal of the gay rights movement.
Yes the through the 1990s, the LGBT rights movement accepted incrementalism and compromise and threw their full support behind politicians like Clinton and 2006 Obama who didn’t fully support us.
But in general from the 80s to the 90s trans rights and gay rights advanced in lockstep - sometimes the T was ahead of the rest of the community. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for trans people and their parents to assume that in a would where same sex couples can marry, of course puberty blockers are between a family and their doctor and people can do gendered things according to their gender identity.
Now trans people are back in the 1970s on most issues, while the rest of the community has kept all of our gains. That has to feel awful. It’s similar to African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, albeit not as severe.
That doesn’t change the objective situation; of course. Pushing on an 80-20 issue won’t help.
The activism of the '70s was more varied than what you're suggesting. Harvey Milk was making compromises with the straight world, engaging in "respectability politics" to help win fights over stuff like an employment discrimination ordinance.
My point here is just that people should be thinking hard about Sarah McBride's perspective here, on how civil rights are never won all in one fell swoop, sometimes there are setbacks, and along the way we'll probably have to work with imperfect allies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-sarah-mcbride.html
To be clear, if I could just impose my own views, democracy be damned, I am way out at the bleeding edge on this. I'm a queer man married to a trans person, and in my twenties I was involved in running some of those, uh, "interesting" clubs in SF.
People saying dumb shit about trans teens irritates me. But also, I think keeping my spouse safe means building a durable majority that is opposed to MAGA persecution, which may mean extending some tolerance to people who have some discomfort with "alternative lifestyles", the same as winning gay rights issues meant giving people some time to "evolve". Remember that Barack Obama ran in 2008 as supporting civil unions but not gay marriage! But you would've had to be an idiot to believe that electing _any_ Republican president would be equally-good for queer rights, relative to electing _any_ Democrat.
excellent analogy
So what does thoughtful moderation on trans issues look like? I think we can all get behind supporting anti-discrimination laws but that doesn’t really come close to answering a lot of the questions de jure.
I think one position to stake out is, "Government should not be involved in determining trans sports eligibility; sports organizations should decide themselves." This is also genuinely what I think, because the sports organizations are experts on their own sports and best positioned to decide what is and isn't fair in terms of trans participation. For example, I can't imagine that anyone cares what gender you compete as for archery, since men and women have roughly the same records in it and there aren't differences between the competitions. On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that the rules that allowed Lia Thomas to compete in women's NCAA swimming were too lax. But the best organization to adjust those rules is FINA, just as they banned the full-body fast suits years ago when they decided they changed the records too much. Government just shouldn't be involved in this in either direction.
It's worth pointing out that NCAA was already in the process of adjusting the rules for swimming when the Lia Thomas controversy became nationally known. They had already decided that going forward they would require trans female athletes to be on testosterone suppressing drugs for a year longer than previously in order to become eligible to compete. The Lia Thomas story was actually a story about the system working toward fairness on a thorny issue, so it's a real bummer that it seems to have convinced so many people that trans women represent a huge threat to fairness in sports.
Yes, it's definitely because the story was so convenient for Republican political purposes that it got picked up. The fact that the NCAA was fixing it themselves is just evidence that this stuff really doesn't need government intervention. I wish were in the alternate history where the Obama administration had never written that "dear colleague" letter and no one had ever thought to make laws on this topic.
I think this would be a fine position for Dems to take but it would require them to abandon policies they've proposed that would ban anyone from using sex rather than gender identity as a criteria. The Equality Act, for instance, which they reintroduce every session. Rather than just simply banning discrimination in the ways that most voters favor, it redefines sex to include gender identity such that they are not really distinguishable, and also prohibits disallowing anyone access to facilities (including locker rooms) that match their self proclaimed gender identity.
Yeah, the Dems should absolutely scrap that language. I can't imagine most trans women want the standard for who has access to a women's locker room to be mere self-proclaimed gender identity. They don't want duplicitous men coming in to leer at them either, they want recourse to kick them out. I don't know what the actual standard should be (probably there are some inclusive gyms that have come up with a good policy), but it shouldn't be that and the Dems should drop it.
Let state or local figure out their own bathroom / locker room policies. The best is to require only unisex single occupancy bathrooms and locker rooms.
In new gyms, yeah, making sure that there’s no nudity in common areas is the best approach. I think everyone born after 1976 would appreciate that. But not every gym can be refitted to work that way.
"Government should not be involved in determining trans sports eligibility; sports organizations should decide themselves." "
the problem is where people care the most about this is in public schools and colleges (which are also largely public)
Not to mention title IX
I don't see why schools being public should mean the government would need to weigh in. There's no laws about what type of swimsuits are legal for each gender to wear in competition, the schools just defer to USA Swimming regulations. I suppose if a trans woman wanted to sue to be allowed on a team without meeting the sport's transition requirements, then the whole Title IX and sex discrimination aspect might come up, but I feel like that's better worked out on an individual basis rather than making proactive laws about it.
Because public school rules are funded by and part of the government. Who else but the government would set the rules for government schools?
And we created title IX because recognized that women's sports teams were needed, and that biological men had an unfair advantage.
An important note, is that it should really be thought of as a women's team and an open team. If you don't meet the eligibility requirements to play on the women's team (being a biological woman, and not taking performance enhancing testosterone), then you are free to play on the open team (commonly referred to as the men's team).
For example, when I wrestled in high school there were a number of girls that wrestled on the open/men's team.
I mean, we set minimum standards for curriculum, but lots of schools set up their own interpretations for what they teach, whether they bother with dress codes, how they enforce discipline, and myriad other issues. Not everything needs to be a law, and trans participation in sports seems to be something that is broadly better served by letting the sports organizations decide for themselves.
Fairly bold to assume all can get on board with supporting anti-discrimination laws. Have you seen the standard article/comment about trans people on Substack?
What the survey showed (on yesterday's article) was that a large majority of the public is on board with banning discrimination against trans people in housing and employment. That's a big bold takeaway that got missed in the framing of the article as a "backsliding" on trans rights.
I don’t agree with the part about the Laken Riley. Perhaps it was a bad bill on the merits but I bet voting for it helped Democrats politically representing red districts. It allowed those Democrats to make an argument to their voters that they at least did something to address their concerns about illegal immigration. It also provided them with an argument they could use to show to their voters that they aren’t just typical down the line Democrats, that they think for themselves and are willing to disagree with their party on certain issues.
Like Jerusalem claims that the Laken Riley vote will be “forgotten by the next election”. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If a politician takes an unpopular vote in their district, even if it’s somewhat obscure, their opponent is allowed to bring up that vote in attack ads. There are a million examples of this. Here’s one:
https://www.ktvh.com/news/truth-be-told-sheehy-ad-attacks-tester-over-immigration-vote
Despite Lakshya’s contention that people aren’t shifting their votes on trans issues, Future Forward found that the heavily featured attack ads criticizing Kamala Harris for her (alleged) past support of gender-affirming care for prison inmates and immigration detainees (i.e. the "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" crapola) were highly influential in persuading marginal, low information voters to go for Trump. Not sure what to believe, but I think it's reasonable to conclude that messaging blitz was effective at the margin.
Matt Yglesias wrote about how this situation was the product of needing to appease and gain support from each of “the groups”, prompting Harris’ camp to respond to the ACLU questionnaire in a manner they, for strictly political reasons, otherwise wouldn’t have. In this reading, it is the more progressive stance adopted for purposes of appeasement and coalition-building that was thoughtless, not a more moderate stance. I propose simply that politicians stop acting without thought. Their job and duty to the country demands it.
The FF ad testing found that the "Kamala is for they/them" spot was 77th percentile for Republican ads (I know this because I was on the mailing list). The 99th percentile GOP ads were all about prices. Meaning yes, that ad was effective at moving votes to Republicans, but it was far from the *most* effective ad.
Not saying you're wrong that the ad didn't move votes. Just adding some nuance because I've seen tons of people discuss the FF testing without giving the full context of which ads FF found most effective for Republicans.
I’m going to betray my ignorance of the FF methodology here, but I still don’t know how to interpret the relative importance of these percentile ratings in terms of actual voting outcomes. Clearly, GOP ads focused on affordability tested out as more important. But did those ads change how the low information voters that decided the election actually voted? Given that Harris was the VP of the incumbent administration that oversaw high prices, was an ad spot even necessary for voters to trust Trump on prices more than Harris?
I guess what I’m asking is: Does what amounts to an unforced messaging error – giving rise to the ad spot ranking in the 77th percentile of importance – dominate the effect on actual voting outcomes of an ad spot in the 99th percentile? Maybe if Dems coalesced around a candidate that wasn’t part of Biden’s administration, I could see the ad spots focused on prices having more of an impact at the margin. But since it was Harris, I think the trans messaging carries more relative weight than even FF suggests.
I think the takeaway is that Democratic politicians who’ve never taken a position on trans issues can just continue to not take a position, but that Democrats who have a history of being pro-trans will need to be publicly anti-trans. But I’m just some guy on the Internet, what do I know?
I personally know 2 people IRL that I kept from voting for Trump in 2016 and 2020 despite all their right-to-life friends urging them to do so. I convinced them Trump was too horrible on everything else. However, in 2024, they both voted Trump solely because "the Democrats are pushing kids to be chemically castrated and have their genitiles mutilated." They were not convinced by calling it "gender affirming care."
Anecdotally, all my conservative family members (i.e. everyone older than my generation) also placed the largest emphasis on the gender affirming care issue when citing their intention to vote for Trump. I think it's just low hanging fruit since, "who would argue against protecting children?" But my family isn't struggling financially as much as most, so hardly a representative sample.
We know, independent of objective economic reality, people are much more likely to complain about the economy and prices when the other party is in the white house. Data show this is true even if they're personally financially secure and economic indicators are broadly positive. Especially since the Pandemic, there is a divergence between consumer confidence and actual measures of economic performance. Noah Smith calls it the vibes vs. data effect. So I think it's reasonable to assume the prices ad testing got a similar boost from the related response bias.
Lastly, if the conservative version of virtue signalling is part of the motivation to focus on gender affirming care, I think something in reverse is happening for a slice of the GOP electorate when they cite economic issues as being so important. In my view, the slice in question is sick of seeing so many brown people but still clings to enough decency not to say that part out loud. And so they say ads that focus on banal issues like the economy are most important, rather than admit they voted the way they did because the orange man promised to get rid of all the brown people.
But Milan is absolutely correct to suggest I'm cherry-picking data from the source I originally cited, as is my right as a run-of-the-mill comments section schmuck haha.
Why is the Argument's style to place footnotes before sentence punctuation? Seems bad!
"are largely opposed to extending parents of trans children the traditional right to make medical decisions for their children in consultation with a doctor."
That's not true. They just don't think that gender blocking hormones or gender transition surgery is appropriate for any kids
1. Overall, good piece.
2. However, I think you are excessively charitable to Molloy and the rest of the transmaximalists.
3. Does “against misplaced moderation” also apply closer to home…say, against a squeaky, fat, bald guy from DC who consistently inveighed against discussing the administration’s treatment of Abrego Garcia and loudly indignantly squeaked about “gotcha questions” when asked?
4. Does it also apply to the bedwetters who, when Democrats gain control, will say moronic shit like:
"Now is the time for unity, not division"
"American politics needs bipartisan consensus, even as a Democrat I want a strong Republican party"
"I'll gladly welcome any Republican in my administration so all Americans can feel represented"
"Leave the divisive rhetoric behind with Trump, the Department of Justice will now look forward, not backwards"
5. Does it also apply to squashing pundits and candidates who attempt to impede the necessary effort to kneecap the maga movement (eg: removing car dealer exclusivity, going after supplements, rigorously enforcing the IRS rules against politics from the pulpit - enforced by either crippling fines or public renunciation of faith, eliminating all farm subsidies and telling the farmers to get bent if they complain or embark on a suicide campaign as they do in India, cutting as much money as possible from red states, redrawing states such as by kicking the Appalachian sections of VA/MD/parts of PA to WV ) and ensuring greater power for Dems (eg: nuking the filibuster, DC/PR/USVI statehood and telling those who whine to move to Russia, court packing after having a polite chat with Roberts about the error of his ways, aggressive house building in blue states by surgical debarking of NIMBYs, massive immigration reform to create a constituency for more like the immigrant population in the Toronto suburbs that squash Trumpist candidates and all the goodies needed to reward the base - such as universal healthcare and infrastructure)?
Matt Yglesias catching strays in the comments section...
Dems running for national office should run on this platform:
- delegate most transgender issues to the states (e.g. medical transitioning for youth).
- delegate the issue of trans girls in girls sports to the appropriate sport leagues.
- reinstate Biden-era employment polices for Federal Government, including military.
- Reintroduce the Equality Act, but with several changes. First, ban discrimination in housing, employment in education based on "sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity," not the currently proposed language of "sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)." Second, don't ban segregation based on sex in public facilities. Instead, require that all public bathrooms be unisex single occupancy bathrooms.
This will put the national office Dems on the right side of the polling. Delegate or defer unpopular issues until such time as there is strong nationwide support them. And no, it is not the job of Congressional Representatives to change voters minds - that is the job of activists and public intellectuals. It is the American tradition that Congressional Representatives represent voters. That is why they are called "representatives." Activists that want Congressional Representatives to change the minds of their voters are being lazy.
Regarding transgender medical treatment: For adults, states should freely allow it. For youth, I support the Dutch protocol, but no more. After listening to the NYT podcast series, I think this is the best compromise solution. Dutch protocol has so many safeguards that false positives would be extremely rare. The consequences of medically transitioning a child that does not actually have gender dysphoria are serious. The consequences of not medically transitioning a child that actually does have gender dysphoria are not serious - they have to wait until they are an adult to medically transition (no good quality evidence of increased suicide rates).
This is so right. Voters aren't dumb or unnecessarily cruel--they often hold nuanced views on contentious issues. Being thoughtlessly harsh on trans rights or immigration doesn't win elections. It just produces bad policy that future leaders have to clean up.
“treating voters like morons”
For the most part, I respect *people*. My opinion of *voters* could not be lower.
This post is essentially defending your polling and going after people criticizing you. It is a bad look. The poll was interesting and started a conversation. But this piece makes it seem like you want to end it. I’m a journalist for a major newspaper and other publications don’t really do this. They let people have their say, heck maybe even publish a few of their comments and counterpoints. They don’t attack people on Twitter/X and in subsequent pieces. I love your publication and have supported you from the beginning, please don’t adopt this reactionary style of commentary that ends any and all good and healthy debate. Let your polling and commentary stand on its own merits.
Sports are perhaps the only case where people acknowledge sex-based performance differences and realistically prefer keeping it “natural.”
Now please take your definition of fascism and make it centered around forcing an elite class of flexible gendered athletes to steal all the women’s medals. Theoretically possible.