Who’s to blame? That question has animated just about every discussion of Vice President Kamala Harris’s catastrophic loss last week to Donald Trump. The answer has been often refracted through the Democratic Party and its media apparatus’s tendency to view everything good and bad in the world through vulgarly drawn demographic categories.
In her gossip column masquerading as serious political inquiry, New York Times writer Maureen Dowd blamed Harris for “touting trans rights” and for wasting breath on identitarian bromides. No matter that the campaign had adopted a strikingly muted position on the identity-based issues that had defined Harris’s 2020 bid for the nomination, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe embraced Dowd’s message while endorsing similar statements by Democratic representatives Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi, who chastised their party’s support of “pandering to the far left” by allowing “boys” to play girls’ sports.
The upshot here is that many prominent liberals now see the widely broadcast “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” messaging as much more than an ugly campaign trick. Instead, it was merely the clearest sign that the Democrats had abandoned their voters’ needs, desires, and beliefs for a top-down imposition of odiously inverted gender norms.
There are many good reasons to doubt this narrative, the first being that the public’s attitudes on trans rights are nowhere near static. Not that long ago, they were actually relatively popular. In 2016, only 35 percent of Americans favored laws that would force trans people to use bathrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their assigned-at-birth sex.
In fact, only 44 percent of Republicans favored such laws as opposed to…
Auteur: Joanna Wuest
