Trans rights, voter wrongs

This article is in

 The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here.

Donald Trump will probably be reelected in 2020 – not because he is a good president, smart, or has good policies. He will win, I believe, because the Democrats are awful.

The party that is meant to be ‘for the people’ has completely lost touch with the people. Rather than address real issues, the Democrats have resorted to virtue signaling. Take, for instance, the recent LGBTQ Democratic presidential town hall hosted by CNN. Candidate after candidate stood up and repeated the words ‘transwomen of color’ as many times as they could manage, hoping that this would win over voters. Have they learned nothing from the last election? Empty words aimed at pleasing the young, woke and very privileged may score well on Twitter, but voters don’t want fakery. They don’t want to hear about a tiny minority of people who have invented a problem that doesn’t exist. While I have sympathy for people struggling with body dysmorphia and other forms of mental illness, pronouns are not an important election issue. People who exist outside college campuses know this.

People want politicians to address real-world problems. They want jobs. They want to know they can support their families. They want to keep their homes. They want access to food and health care and schools. They want to live their lives with dignity and freedom. They also want honest politicians. People they trust to tell the truth, even if the truth isn’t so pretty. They want courageous leaders who say what they think. And whether or not Trump actually is that leader, he appears so to many. The Democrats, meanwhile, confuse their base with social justice warriors on Twitter. Most working-class people simply aren’t interested in ideologies propagated by academics and college activists, or the rejection of material reality in favor of postmodernism.

During the October 10 town hall, Kamala Harris took the stage and announced that ‘Twenty black transwomen have been killed this year. 20.’ The hysteria around the murders of transwomen in North America is staggering. It’s sometimes difficult to read about anything else. You can’t easily find the number of black women killed in the US today. If you Google some version of ‘Black women killed 2019’, you will find article after article about ‘transgender women of color’ or ‘black transwomen’.

For his part, then-Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke chose just to repeat the words ‘transwomen of color’ ad nauseam. He added that while states were passing ‘bathroom bills’ there was ‘an epidemic of trans people being killed.’ This might have made him feel good. But it isn’t true. Indeed, far more black men and women who don’t identify as anything at all are killed every day in America than ‘trans people’. Hell, four women are killed every day in the US from domestic violence alone. While any murder is concerning, there is no epidemic of trans-identified people being killed, and stirring up moral panics that distort reality for political gain strikes me as unethical.

The entire event was odd, to say the least. Despite the fact that the vast majority of the town hall was spent discussing trans-identified people and gender-identity legislation, candidates were consistently interrupted by trans activists claiming they were being ignored. From the audience, a man named Blossom Brown interrupted the parent of a ‘trans kid’, shouting ‘Transwomen are being hunted. Systematically.’ CNN moderator Don Lemon invited him to come to the stage, saying, ‘Blossom, let me tell you something. The reason that we’re here is to validate people like you.’ Lemon then gave the mic to Brown, who took the opportunity to complain about the lack of representation of black trans people at the town hall.

Earlier in the evening, a group of protesters descended on two gay men, Anderson Cooper and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, interrupting another gay man who was in the midst of asking a question, chanting, ‘Trans people are dying. Trans people are dying.’ After CNN host Nia-Malika Henderson mispronounced the name of a trans-identified singer named Shea Diamond, Diamond corrected her, then said ‘It’s violence to misgender or to alter the name of a trans person.’ The constant interruptions from trans-identified men, the endless complaints about being erased despite the fact that almost the entire evening was dedicated to discussion of trans issues, were revealing. I don’t believe I heard the word ‘lesbian’ uttered once. People complain that the LGB movement has been coopted by the T, and they are right. Moreover, it’s not just the gay and lesbian rights movement that has been taken over by trans activism. Progressive politics and the liberal media have been, too. The public is fed up. The full embrace of gender identity ideology has become a major vote loser.

After the Campaign for American Principles (CAP) put out an attack ad targeting Democratic candidate Andy Beshear’s support for gender identity legislation, polls showed an eight point increase in support for GOP Kentucky governor Matt Bevin. Say what you will about the right, but they vote too. And most people aren’t on board with allowing boys to compete against girls in sport, effectively destroying any chance of success for female athletes, no matter how often they are told ‘transwomen are women’.

What liberals and the left seem not to realize is that lies don’t simply become true through repetition. The Democrats and the liberal media shoved the narrative that Trump was unpopular down the public’s throat in 2016, and were shocked when he won the election. Now they are trying to force us to believe that the matter of gender identity is settled, and that males who identify as women are the most marginalized group on earth. But the reality is that lots of people support Trump, and the vast majority of the world’s population does not believe that men can be female.

People really resent being told things they know not to be true. People do not like politicians who assume they are too stupid to think for themselves — that they will just swallow whatever is fed to them. Most people have real problems, not fake ones, and they don’t want to be shouted at by self-centered, entitled people, or woke bullies.

The Democrats are not just making the same mistakes, they are doubling down on those mistakes. Democratic party may be protecting themselves from the wrath of social media activists. They aren’t winning over the people who matter: voters.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here.