A story has begun about the 2024 election, and it is likely
to be perpetuated for many decades. It is the kind of plausible fallacy that
gets deep traction in the discussion of electoral competition. For this reason,
it will become the equivalent of a political “urban myth”: the notion that the
Democrats lost the 2024 election because of their delusional militancy on the
issue of transgender rights.
The
reason this myth will take hold is easy to understand. The Trump campaign made
one of the biggest media purchases in campaign history, to air a television ad
highlighting comments that Kamala Harris had made during the 2019 Democratic
primary. Asked (initially on an ACLU questionnaire, later in a taped interview)
if she would approve publicly funded gender transition surgery for prisoners,
Harris had said that she would. The ad shows a series of photoshopped images of
Harris standing with transgender (or gender-ambiguous looking) people, includes
soundbites of her comments, and concludes with the trolling tagline: “Kamala is
for they/them.”
The ad
is grotesquely bigoted, but its callousness is only fully recognizable to
someone who has some knowledge of and/or personal experience with the issue of
transgender rights. Its message very effectively exploits viewers’ low-context,
knee-jerk reactions to stimuli that have been extracted from an issue that
remains poorly understood by most voters. Though the deliberate bigotry of the
ad is entirely to the disgrace of the Republican operatives who deployed it, Democrats
failed to give the ad a robust and timely response. This is why the myth will
persist that “Democrats lost in 2024 because of their delusional support for
transgender rights.”
On the
surface, the issue of transgender rights seems to operate like other questions
of civil and human rights. Even so self-righteous an opponent of transgender
rights as J.K. Rowling acknowledges that transgender people (that is, people
who were deemed “male” at birth but feel most natural living as “female,” and
vice-versa) face tragic abuse and discrimination living in a society that makes
few if any concessions to their organic identity.
But the
problem of how to protect transgender rights and defend transgender citizens poses
challenges that were not faced by past campaigns to defend civil and human
rights. The question of interracial marriage, for example, was easier for
activists in the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960’s to address, because the
question itself only seemed “loaded” from the perspective of the bigot:
Bigot: “You’re telling me blacks and whites are equals?
Don’t you see that will mean that blacks and whites will be able to marry each
other?”
Activist: “Yes.”
A
simple “yes” here is of course both a statement of principle and an effective
political tactic. Affirming the natural right of people to marry regardless of
race is morally righteous. At the same time, refusing to pander to the
sensibilities of the questioner helps to undermine the bigoted assumptions
foundational to racism, and normalize perceptions of equality.
An
equivalent question faced by transgender rights activists helps illustrate the
unique challenges posed by the politics of this issue:
Bigot: “You’re telling me that a person born as a man can live as a woman?
Don’t you understand that this will mean that men will compete against women in
sports?”
Activist (in effect): “You are a bigot.”
A
simple “yes” or “no” here is ineffective, as neither would undermine the
assumptions at the foundation of bigotry, but to the contrary would reinforce
them. The terms of the question itself attack the principle of transgender
rights. Someone who refuses to recognize the difference between sex and gender,
and to take care to speak in those terms, is not discussing the issue in good
faith. Thus the only choice that an activist has in the face of this kind of
question is to challenge the legitimacy of the question itself, and by
extension the ethical status of the questioner.
This is
not to suggest that the reforms necessary to protect transgender rights do not
pose legitimate policy questions for the conduct of organized sports. But in
this campaign as in other struggles to defend civil rights, it is natural for
the vulnerable group and its allies to insist that the onus is on anyone who
would engage such questions to do so critically and in a spirit of maximum
respect. If the “entry toll” of a conversation is that I must concede my own
identity, I cannot be expected to respect the terms of the discussion or treat
its participants as good-faith partners in dialogue.
This
highly fraught communication dynamic obviously has the potential to be
intensely divisive. Is the person who asks a question like the one above
necessarily a “bigot,” much less a “hateful one”? The answer to that conundrum
is likely to depend on whom you ask. A transgender person who has been physically
assaulted by angry bigots might feel comfortable labeling the questioner
“hateful.” Someone less personally close to the heart of the issue might instead
call them an “insensitive bigot.” Whether the person is a bigot or not, and if
so what kind, are largely academic questions. The qualifier used does not
depend on some essential definition, but flows from the conscientious choices
of the person using it, and what they believe will best serve the cause of
transgender rights.
Much,
though not all, of the myth of the “delusional militancy” of the Democratic
party is rooted in these discursive dynamics of the struggle for transgender
rights. Gender is much more deeply woven into the basic mechanics of our
language than race or class. We do not in English, for example, have different
pronouns for referring to individuals according to their race. Discussing
questions raised by the issue of transgender rights in a way that respects the
humanity and dignity of transgender citizens thus calls upon us to rethink
words and categories that we had previously taken for granted, and to use
language in ways that may seem unfamiliar. Such demands cause resentment, and
the Trump campaign successfully exploited those resentments to delegitimize
Kamala Harris in the eyes of many voters.
This
created a dilemma for the Harris campaign that it failed to unriddle, thus
contributing to the myth of “delusional militancy.” As the New York Times has
reported, the Harris campaign had polling data showing that the ad blitz being
conducted by the Trump campaign was very effective. The ad was costing Harris support in key states, which in such a closely contested race might have changed the outcome of the election. The campaign held
internal deliberations over how to respond to the ad, and ultimately decided
that no direct response was possible.
Why was
this? Responding to the ad effectively would not have been easy. The Harris
campaign would have had to engineer a very high stakes event, a special speech
dedicated to the issue of transgender rights, akin to Barack Obama’s 2008
speech on race relations in response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy. In
that speech Harris would have had the opportunity to explain the principles
behind transgender rights, highlighting stories about the experience of
transgender people, the types of abuse they are forced to endure, and the
reasons why so many Democrats feel so passionately about this issue. To
substantiate such assertions, she would have had to tackle some of the most
difficult questions that surround the issue of transgender rights, such as
those regarding pediatric medicine, organized sports, and the housing and care
of transgender prisoners.
Such a speech
would have entailed profound risks. Anything Harris said would be vulnerable to
distortion and demagoguery. The Trump campaign would most likely have taken
soundbites from such a speech and made another “She is for they/them”
advertisement. At the same time, a truly effective speech would almost
certainly have drawn angry denunciation from activists and progressive
Democrats. In the struggle to protect a vulnerable and abused minority, there
are always voices who take a very uncompromising and maximalist stance against
any suggestion of complexity or doubt (in large part out of the conviction that
this is the only tactic which can stand against the demagoguery of bigots).
Despite
these dangers, there is good reason to believe that such a speech would have
boosted Harris’s electoral performance. Politicians are normally very averse to
controversy, but Donald Trump has changed the rules of the game, if only
temporarily. As long as the media was talking about him, even negatively, he
was winning, since any attention helped foster the false impression that he was
important, effective, and “normal.” Anything Harris could have done to turn the
national conversation toward actual issues and away from stupid stunts (“He’s
in a MacDonald’s! He’s in a garbage truck!”) would have aided her at the polls.
Beyond
this, a candid speech would have made voters feel that they “knew” Kamala
Harris in a more full-blooded and personal way. Trump gives the impression of
persistent authenticity, he does nothing to hide his cretinous personality from
public scrutiny. Harris was obviously advised that she could not afford to have
too distinctive a personality in public. As a woman of color, so this
perspective held, being candidly revealing about herself and her personal
priorities would make her look too “angry” or “emotional.” She was thus advised
to speak as often as possible in slogans and catch phrases (“turn the page,”
“we’re not going back,” “he has an enemy’s list, I have a to-do list”). The
result was that voters felt Trump was being “real” and Harris was hiding
herself. A nuanced and candid speech on transgender rights would have provided
an opportunity to fight that impression.
Finally,
a high-stakes speech on transgender rights was the only chance that Harris had
to fight the knee-jerk hostility to her campaign that had been aroused by
Trump’s manipulative advertisements. The ads had made her a caricature. A
speech would have “humanized” her, and that would have made her more appealing
to voters in many dimensions beyond the specific horizon of transgender rights.
Would it have worked? We will never
know. In the final analysis, voters’ anger over inflation and the policies of
the Covid lockdown had much more to do with the outcome of the election than
virtually any other factor in this election year. Incumbent parties around the
world, whether on the political left or right, have been losing elections by
much wider margins that Harris, whose defeats was among the slenderest margins
of defeat in US history. But on the specific issue of transgender rights we can
be certain that she had no other choice other than to do nothing, which is what
she opted for, and that resulted in defeat.
Why did
the Harris campaign choose inaction? There are many reasons, but none of them
have to do with the “delusional militancy” of the party as a whole. As EzraKlein noted in a recent podcast, in the last ten or fifteen years a culture of groupthink
has settled over the leaders and elected officials of the Democratic Party in
its relationship with activist groups. Anything that is likely to ignite angry
rhetoric from progressive civic groups on a whole array of issues is strictly
avoided, without thought for how many votes such groups can actually swing in
the context of a general election. Since activist groups tend to be more
uncompromising and maximalist in their approach to issues, their disproportionate
influence effectively curtails the party from developing messaging that would
make broader headway in the electorate at large.
This
groupthink is not a product of congenital militancy on the part of Democrats,
however, but is a function of many factors common to both sides of the
political spectrum. These include the amplifying effect of social media, the
churn of 24-hour cable news, and heightened polarization in the aftermath of
the Cold War.
Perhaps the single greatest factor
distorting messaging on an issue like transgender rights is rising wealth
inequality. Extreme pressure groups enjoy disproportionate influence because
they are funded by wealthy donors. The smaller an audience that a message is
crafted for, the more “purist” and uncompromising it will become. Democratic
leaders are unwilling to offend extremist activist groups on the left for the
same reason that Republicans fear offending extremist activist groups on the
right: because they know that such groups have access to and wield great
influence with the same small group of wealthy donors who increasingly control
ever larger shares of wealth in the US, and whose financial support is critical
to ballot box success. When a small group of donors whose wealth and lifestyle
inclines them to believe that they know better than anyone else is calling the
shots, political messaging is pushed ever further toward the extremes on either
end of the political spectrum. Thus the same forces that restrain Democratic
leaders from engaging in a robust and nuanced discourse concerning transgender
rights (or immigration) have made extreme positions such as “climate denialism”
and “personhood amendments” orthodoxy in the GOP.
The Democrats obviously should have responded
to Republicans’ attack on transgender rights in robust and complex terms. Though
the effectiveness of the Trump campaign ad depended upon the failure of
millions of voters to see how grotesquely and manipulatively bigoted its
message was, in a contest with such high existential stakes the onus was on the
Democrats to meet the voters “where they were.” But that judgment is much more
easily made in hindsight than was possible during the heat of the electoral
campaign. The tone of the Trump campaign was so toxic and the threat that Trump
himself posed to our democratic order was so clear (and has become clearer as Trump
announces cabinet picks clearly designed to weaponize the working policy organs
of the Executive for purely political ends), that it was easy to believe voters
should see the need to defer the questions surrounding the issue of transgender
rights for a time when our constitutional structure had been made secure from
assault. Now that we are facing the potential dismantling of the Republic, the
chance for reasoned debate on transgender rights or any other issue may be lost
indefinitely.
