Dear Democrat
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Dear Democrats,
You don’t have to explain it. You feel that you must continue to vote for Democrats. Those Democrats will be happy to have your vote while they continue to silence your friends, hurt children, and confiscate women’s rights, sports, and spaces.
No one says you must vote for Trump or anyone else to stop this, but your vote for Democrats advances all of those policy points. A dilemma!
Unless, of course, you choose to speak up within the party and organize with like-minded Democrats to change it from within. The fight within the party is a fight. Will you ask downballot Democrats “what is a woman”? Will you challenge them to explain the difference between a man cheating at sports and a man named Susan cheating at sports, using facts? Will you give them copies of Helen Joyce and Hannah Barnes and Rachel Rooney and tell them to do the homework and listen to detransitioners?
Because that would be an admirable stand.
Recently, I have engaged with the TERFs arguing across the Atlantic on TERF island. Many of them feel that their work inside the Labour Party has been fruitful. Others think the street actions have borne fruit in Keir Starmer deciding that trans women are not really women. The truth is that both of these efforts were necessary to change the Labour Party. People had to speak up in meetings and suffer the consequences and lobby continually to be heard. People also had to speak up in the public square and suffer the consequences and lobby continually to be heard. Change required action inside and outside the party. It always does.
Maybe you feel unsafe doing that kind of activism, however. Perhaps you are trapped in the partisan equivalent of an abusive relationship.
You are still allowed to quietly rebel in the ballot box. You do not have to support every Democrat in every election. You can be strategic and safe because it’s a secret ballot. You can hold feet to fire. There will not always be a “Trump card” to terrify you into voting for a creature like Joe Biden.
It is okay if you want to disagree about what should happen to Democrats as a whole, or any Democrat in particular. Not only are we free to disagree, we are also free to change our minds.
Many Americans clearly have changed their minds about the direction of the republic and the excesses of ‘gender identity’ ideology absolutely are a factor in that change of mind. So go into conversations with Democrats armed with that talking point. Whisper or mutter softly if you feel it necessary. Convince your fellow Democrats to stop silencing and start listening.
Figure out where you will stand, and then stand there.
Dear Democrat
Right-wing culture warriors will never get through to Democrats on the gender-identity crisis. Abigail Shrier made a huge mistake by going on Tucker Carlson's program because she discredited herself by association with Tucker's brand of fascism. Chris Rufo is poison to liberals and progressives. The right-wing philosophy bros who are using gender-critical forms to attack modernity or gay people aren't helping the cause any either.
That's why the initiative to challenge trans orthodox beliefs must come from people who are Democrats. I do it by posting gender critical comments in response to articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times and elsewhere, always identifying myself as a Biden-voting Democrat who also happens to be a gay grandparent. Moderators have sometimes removed my comments, probably because I was more intemperate than was prudent, but they let others stay. Most recently, when The Post ran a retrospective on the lobotomy, I wrote that someday the public would be as repulsed by "bottom surgeries" and "top surgeries" as we are by lobotomies today. It's still there.
Sure, people eager to show what good "trans allies" they are reply with personal insults or expressions of outrage at the sheer heresy of it all. It's telling that almost no one engages with the ideas or the facts. That's one thing that trans rights activists and credulous trans allies have in common. They censor and they bully. However, my gender-critical comments also earn "likes," and that's what I'm after. I want the brainwashed liberals and progressives to see that they can't silence us all, that people are expressing forbidden ideas and that other people support them. Drip, drip, drip long enough suddenly the house collapses.
The bigger question is why and how did this level of insanity take hold....where so-called progressives and their parties promoted anti-science misogynistic child-harming LGB-rights-gutting nonsense, and cheered for it. What led to this leads to all sorts of other bad positions as well.
We need system change. And to get there, we need to have lefty leftists and conservative right-wingers and everybody else to refuse to cancel each other, and to talk about how we got here. And how to get to a better place. As huge as the harms from Gender Ideology are---and they are huge---there are even bigger things at stake. Like whether we're going to witness a nuclear holocaust. And/or ecological devastation on a much grander scale than ever before....and I don't just mean from global warming which sucked all the funding and attention out of the room some time ago. The Dems are not our friends, nor are the Republicans. Or the Kool-aid-drenched Greens. We need to regroup, starting with the surprising alliances we've formed among those who notice the emperor has no clothes and also notice that cancel-culture only serves the emperor.