Summary
Trump and Vance have made anti-transgender attacks a central part of their campaign, using demeaning language and misrepresentations to portray transgender individuals as a threat to national identity.
Harris has largely ignored Trump’s attacks but has pushed back on his characterization of her stances, noting that federal policy allowing transgender military personnel access to gender-affirming medical care was in place during Trump’s presidency.
Advocates like GLAAD’s Sarah Kate Ellis and Charlotte Clymer warn that Trump’s approach fuels hostility, marginalizing vulnerable communities and creating a culture of animosity instead of understanding and empathy.
I was in a store and heard a radio ad for the Republican senate candidate that made it sound like the most important issue in the election. Not climate change. Not inflation. Not education or defense or the economy. No, the issue that should decide the election was whether “boys” would be playing in “girls” sports.
Oh, and because it was about trans women being in women’s sports it ended with “We don’t need those nuts in Congress,” a joke about pre-transition women’s genitals.
What assholes.
Yeah, and what weaklings. Attacking a vulnerable group does not make them look strong.
What’s their next attack target, puppies?
What’s their next attack target, puppies?
Remember the time one of those shitheads shot and killed her own dog?
RIP Cricket.
These are the same assholes who want to eliminate Title IX. It’s clear they don’t care about women’s sports, they just want to hurt people.
I disagree. They don’t think of us as people
There are ways to integrate trans athletes into lots of sports, if the will is there to do that. You’re right, there’s no conversation about that happening, just fear mongering and transphobia.
In NY State, we have a state-wide proposition that extends the anti-discriminatory language in the Constitution, currently just covering “race, color, or creed”, to a whole host of other categories, including national origin, disability, gender expression, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare. They even take the time to replace “his or her” with “their” in the clause. The important bit is supposed to be the pregnancy parts, because it was initially proposed as a way to put abortion access into the State Constitution:
https://elections.ny.gov/2024-statewide-ballot-proposal
The opposition to it has been all over the map. I see signs saying to vote no on the proposition to “protect women’s sports” and “stop funding health care for illegal immigrants”. No signs at all saying to vote no in opposition to abortion: I think even the Republicans here know that is a non-starter. But I think it’s telling that all these signs are asking people to vote “no” on an anti-discrimination amendment because they think these people need to be discriminated against. It’s hate all the way down.
Montana?
Nope, Pennsylvania.
Ah, over here in Montana both the senate and western district house race are HAMMERING Trans people like high school sports is the most important thing in the entire world. Absolutely pathetic. Makes me sick.
Unlike what some people have been claiming, looks like doubling down on the fascist rhetoric and bigotry hasn’t made Trump any less popular.
If anything it’s made him more popular.
Recent polls are showing a different side of it apparently
https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/4949915-gop-campaign-ads-trans-rights/
"Just more than 60 percent of surveyed voters, including a majority of independents and 41 percent of Republicans, said it is “sad and shameful” for GOP candidates to make anti-LGBTQ rhetoric a part of their campaigns, according to the poll, which was released Thursday. "
My question is, if it’s sad and shameful, why is Trump still so popular in polls?
Sure, they may say it’s “sad and shameful”, but it’s clearly not bad enough for them to not want to vote for Trump anyhow.
The polling data that is publicly available is not anywhere near as honest as the internal polling data that the campaigns have.
Oh yes no disagreement there, but by all appearances it’s probably still going to be a fairly close shave – much closer to 50/50 ballpark than, say, 40 / 60 or let alone 30 / 70. So out of the people who do bother to vote, around half of them are still probably going to vote from Trump
“It’s sad and shameful that we have to hear about how gay people are. Can’t they just go back into their closet?”
Yeah, feels like most of the left’s strategy has been ‘See what a horrible person he is!?’, feeling absolutely positive that people will agree it’s bad and will shun Trump.
Except a huge chunk of people seem to be completely happy with all of these horrible things, so the whole effort backfires.
The problem is that he really is a horrible person. So when you talk about him, it seems reasonable to point that out. So Harris can give a speech with 30 minutes of policy proposals and 5 minutes of pointing out his horribleness, and the media headline “Harris calls Trump Horrible” and the policy things are buried in the article.
If Trump was just a normal businessman, he never would have gotten elected. His base likes the horribleness. They think he will be horrible only to people they feel deserve it.
No, I’m specifically talking about the multiple campaigns on the left going back to 2016 that heavily focused on awareness and education of Trump’s many issues. The left consistently banks on the logic of ‘if I just make people aware of this wrong, then they will vote/protest/demand change’. They think simply educating people will magically get them to agree and take appropriate action.
Instead of actual political maneuvers similar to what the right has been pulling for years, they think ‘awareness’ is the only real work they have to do. There have been multiple times the right has blatantly ignored procedures, laws, etc and the left routinely fails to do anything beyond making their voters aware that the right is being a bad guy. They don’t attempt to hold them in contempt, they don’t choose to proceed forward anyway, because ‘tradition’ says they shouldn’t. They haven’t responded with any of their own schemes to counter the right at all.
The right is doing every possible action they can get away with and the left is so scared of doing anything even slightly controversial that they don’t even take the options available by the rules, but instead hold themselves to even higher standards than necessary.
If Trump was just a normal businessman, he never would have gotten elected. His base likes the horribleness. They think he will be horrible only to people they feel deserve it.
So many on the left seem to think that deep down people are good, and that if they just knew all the horrible shit conservatives are saying and planning they wouldn’t vote for them. There’s just this near-total refusal to acknowledge that for a scarily large proportion of the population, that horrible shit is their reason for voting for conservatives, and not only will pointing it out not help, trying to educate them generally just won’t work.
Actual leftist here.
The people you’re talling about are liberals, the leftmost kind of right-winger.
We’ve been trying to get them to start treating the Republicans like a threat for decades, and it’s not happening because the Republicans aren’t a threat to the Democrats, just to us.
Oh yes, liberals absolutely are way worse about this, but I do see it even with actual leftists. It feels like with “centrists,” the deal seems to be what you described: a sort of “well, certainly the leopards won’t eat my face, and I don’t like messing with the status quo because it works well enough for me.” However, with some leftists, it seems to be more about an optimistic view of “the human condition” and an assumption that people are, by and large, good and want to do good (even to folks they don’t know).
I’m a degrowth anarchist myself, and since I live in Finland, I get to enjoy proportional representation. I vote for a democratic socialist party that is at least reasonably close to my values and actually has a chance of landing parliament seats and governmental positions. Over the decades, I’ve noted that many “actual” leftist voters and politicians are maybe a bit… well, let’s say a bit too upbeat about what sort of animal Homo sapiens actually is. These are folks who genuinely do care about “woke” stuff like intersectionality and put in the work towards really changing things, but who seem to think that deep down, everybody wants a just, more equal society and not a hierarchical hellhole where the “strong” dominate some “lesser” social classes (foreigners, poor people, whatever)
Exactly
I wonder how many Americans are going to go to Thanksgiving dinner with all of their family and lie about who they voted for because they don’t want to talk about how they don’t see anyone but cisgender men as real human beings.
Not nearly as many as will lie about who they voted for because they don’t want to get disowned or shot by their hyperconservative families.
The folks supporting dehumanization and oppression of others are generally proud of that fact in my experience.
Yeah, let’s make the military great again! Just like in Full Metal Jacket!
For any Americans capable of voting who aren’t planning on voting, fuck you. Exercise your rights. In fact, exercise in general; a good benchmark to aim for is the ability to outrun cops. The future of monocultured, homogenous, morbidly obese, microplastic and PFAS leachate-laden Judases who filed in to toe the line for the ruling class and shun their brethren will be all that’s left on earth after the richest cretins rape the planet for its last naturally occurring resources and pile into the most market-tested, fool-proof space vehicles manufactured by literally the singular winner of capitalism. Capitalism, the golden child of pyramid schemes. Those bovine-shaped humans left on earth crawling on all fours ruminating highly processed refuse will still be muttering out loud to themselves how it was all worth it. “At least I won’t accidentally befriend a trans person” because it will have been years ago that they were banned and disappeared magically. Heart disease continues to run rampant on this future Earth, however. And there’s of course the carbon dioxide problem. Somewhat bittersweetly for the Bovine sapiens species, the last remaining vestiges of oxygen-starved brain activity need only worry about one thing: sniffing for morsels through heaps of plastic waste.
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