Three weeks ago I wrote a VIP story about an argument that was circulating online about why trans issues had risen to the forefront of the culture wars. What prompted me was an outburst on Bluesky alleging that the whole thing was really just a case of astroturf politics ginned up by Republican billionaires to distract the public from more important issues.
As I argued at length in the story linked above, that claim was nonsense. The backlash to issues like trans girls in girls sports didn't happen because there was money behind it. It happened because the absurd claims made on behalf of those trans athletes were obviously false and you didn't need any special expertise (beyond spending a lot of time at high school track meets) to know it.
You can read my whole response at the link above but today, Jesse Singal has written his own response to that particular Bluesky thread but also to the claim made more broadly that some kind of political dirty trick is responsible for the trans backlash.
...it’s pretty silly to land on this explanation given the existence of a much simpler one: Trans advocacy has, in recent years, adopted radical and unpopular positions that Americans don’t like and aren’t warming up to, and as trans advocacy and trans people have become more salient, so too has the divide between elite orthodoxy on these issues and how most Americans view them.
In Singal's view any blame to be placed has to be placed primarily on the activists who have selected these issues as ones they will go to the mat to defend.
That’s largely because they center on a maximalist version of self-ID, or the notion that someone’s sex is what they say it is. Blue states have passed laws extending this logic to areas like locker rooms and prisons, and these are wildly unpopular positions for obvious reasons: Most people don’t think biological males should be able to enter female spaces with no questions asked.
Case in point, the story of Tremayne Carroll. Carroll is a male inmate who, thanks to California law, was being kept in a female prison. When the law allowing that was challenged, the ACLU made Carroll the voice of their opposition, quoting him in a 2022 press release.
“If these plaintiffs get what they want, I’ll be sent back to a men’s prison, where I would face relentless sexual harassment and the constant threat of rape,” Carroll said. “That was my reality for years, and I am terrified to go back. I am a woman, and I don’t belong in a men’s prison.”
Can you guess what happened next?
In 2024, Carroll was charged with raping two female inmates and transferred back to a male prison...
A judge has ordered that during the trial and pretrial hearings, everyone involved, including Carroll’s alleged victims, must refer to Carroll as “she.”
The alleged male rapist must be called "she." Gee, I wonder why there's a backlash to this. It must be because some billionaire is behind it. That or just basic common sense.
The fact that Democrats and even activists have no good answers for basic challenges to these policies has some of them backtracking to a new argument. You've probably seen this one in the wild too. It goes something like this: Almost no one is being impacted by trans athletes or trans prisoners. The numbers are too insignificant to justify the backlash.
But as Signal points out, we just has a "national reckoning" over police mistreatment of black suspects that involved mass protests, riots and arson in cities around the country. All of that was prompted by a handful of exceedingly rare cases many of which were initially hyped and badly reported by the media. So the idea that trans issues are too limited in number to warrant our attention is a joke coming from anyone who ever said a positive word about Black Lives Matter.
Even putting all that aside, it's the left that has made these issues relating to trans people central to their politics. They've done it for years and now would like to slither off and pretend someone else brought it up.
...until 30 seconds ago, the liberal establishment was doing everything possible to raise the salience of this issue. For much of the last decade, trans rights have been treated as an exceptionally vital civil rights struggle, the stuff of White House events and day-one executive orders and endless sympathetic news coverage. It doesn’t make sense, then, to ask why anyone is paying so much attention to trans issues—you were trying to get people to pay attention...
If trans issues concern a small group of put-upon, suffering people, and if the policy proposals involve fair-seeming compromises and tolerance on matters of housing, employment, and bathrooms, that’s one thing. But when the leading figures and institutions in trans advocacy are calling for self-ID in prisons, for the effective abolition of female sports as most people understand it, and for 6-year-olds to be granted deference with regard to gender identities when they can’t even go on a field trip without parental consent … how could that not change Americans’ understanding of what “trans rights” means in the first place? On issue after issue, the progressive establishment has decided to stake out stances on sex and gender that genuinely sound like right-wing caricatures—and to then complain when people respond negatively to this.
He's exactly right. There's a reason that Democrats haven't worked out good answers to these challenges. It's not because they lack clever PR strategists. It's because their own positions are so maximalist that no reasonable defense is possible.
Why should male prisoners be kept in female jails. Well, uh, because, um, you see...
Why should boys be allowed to win competitions in girls sports. Well, you see it's because, uh, you know really, um...
As I argued here, they can't win by persuasion and that leaves only one good option: Backtrack.
There's only one good way to talk about these issues, especially when they involve kids, and that's an admission of fault. In that way it's just like the situation Dems were in after a bunch of them pushed to defund the police. There is a right way to talk about that, and that's to say "Wow, that was a dumb idea, what were we thinking?"
But the activists won't let them do that on this issue, so they are stuck on the wrong side of it. That's great news if you're a Republican but not so great if you're a Democrat hoping to win future elections in places where people who aren't trans activists can vote.
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