Insiders, including at centrist think tank Third Way, are cautioning Democratic candidates against echoing Republican talking points on trans rights.
Insiders, including at centrist think tank Third Way, are cautioning Democratic candidates against echoing Republican talking points on trans rights.
Endorsing tents on fire is kinda the establishment way right now, whether they’re filled with their own constituents or babies in Gaza. Republicans are hemorrhaging support because they are being exposed as standing for nothing right now, and if the Democratic party wasn’t led by people who also stand for nothing the shift would be monumental. Instead we’re losing them to Nazis or they’re able to jump straight over the establishment freaks to get to the left.
To be clear, I don’t mean liberals as the establishment. Chuck and Jeffries aren’t even able to stand for liberal values. Trans rights fit squarely in this category and they’re fucking cowards.
Transphobia is a liberal value, even the concept of “biological gender,” is reliant on liberal conceptions of the natural world and statically-defined social categories. You can’t talk about “liberals” without it being the “establishment,” because we live under a liberal hegemony where those values are not only pervasive, but dominant throughout our culture and society.
I’m not saying this to like, catch you, but to point out the dangers in accepting the conflation between liberalism and “liberal”-- as in freedom, or social progress – as that association is itself a consequence of liberal appropriation of social justice rhetoric and values. Liberals claimed ownership over anti-racism, ant-sexism, and pro-queerness, and the result of that assimilation into a liberal system was the erosion of every victory gained by activists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These people are not and have never been our friends.