How The ACLU Lobbied Kamala Harris To Support Illegal Immigrant Trans Surgeries

Of candidate questionnaires and ideological inquisitions

Working with a research team a decade ago, I discovered that the most active and influential email list in Oklahoma conservative politics belonged to a group of certified John Birchers. Their organization, Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee (OCPAC), watched Republican state legislators closely, assigning scores to every vote they made, even minor and procedural. Then they published the scores in a widely-read newsletter.

That’s it. That’s the one neat trick to taking control of an American state legislature. Just condition the individual office-holders of the party that is in power at the state capitol to regard their arbitrary scores as meaningful, and the politicians will do the rest themselves. Candidate scorecards are an effective way to lobby a political party in any direction across a range of issues.

In 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked Kamala Harris, who was running for president in 2020, a series of questions. You can read them, as well as her answers, at the ACLU website. Because irony is dead, Harris was asked to make a binary choice by checking a “yes” or “no” box for each question and then explain her answer more fully. Harris not only wrote answers, but committed to her answers verbally.

Screenshot for posterity

“As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care? If yes, how will you do so?” the ACLU asked.

Her answer:

It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition. That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates. I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.

To recap, the ACLU specifically asked Harris whether she would use presidential powers to supply non-citizens in “immigration detention” with transgender surgeries and she actually said yes. Not because she thinks that is a good idea necessarily, but because she wanted a perfect score. To earn an A+, Harris had to demonstrate mastery of the intersectional language of the progressive moment.

All undocumented migrants breaking and entering the United States are oppressed by their detention, you see, but some undocumented migrants breaking and entering the United States are more oppressed than others. Those are the transgender ones. No matter who you are in America, you get to be more special than your regular demographic descriptor through the add-on identity of ‘transgender.’ It’s the trump card (heh) of the new oppression hierarchy.

On CNN, an incredulous Erin Burnett said such agenda items as free sex changes for undocumented immigrants “are hard things to come up with.” So amazed was Burnett that she returned to the point twice during a segment with “Kfile” editor Andrew Kaczynski, who is assigned to cover Kamala Harris this election season. Here is a brief clip of their exchange.

One wonders where Burnett has been, lately. A white supremacy cave, maybe? Everyone knows that taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for undocumented immigrants are essential to the plan for fighting climate change, ending sadness, and eliminating racist food deserts from cities (cit. The Omnicause Handbook, pp. 477-508). Duh!

Kidding aside, Harris’s answers to the ACLU are platitudinous because the questions invite platitudes. This is the candidate equivalent of push-polling, which attempts to alter voter behavior through propaganda framed as an opinion poll: “Candidate X supports drowning kittens while Candidate Z wants to put kitten murderers in jail. Do you support Candidate X, who is pro-kitten murder, or Candidate Z, who is against murdering poor, defenseless kittens?”

Better yet, once it becomes politically impossible to “defend kitten-drowning” in America, the ACLU can take the manipulation to another level. “Do you support transgender surgeries for helpless kittens, or do you want the literal genocide of transgender kitty cats?”

This phenomenon had generalized across the western world, especially the Anglophone world, long before the advent of ‘gender identity.’ It has now empowered the successful administrative capture of policy on behalf of gender ideology in numerous countries. Stonewall has its Diversity Champions scheme in the UK, for example, while ACON has its own point-scoring system for Australian companies, organizations, and departments. The ACLU is a key ideological enforcement agent in the Democratic Party and uses the same method.

However, such conditioning does not prepare candidates to answer questions like “What even is non-binary anyway?” No, that would elicit a thoughtful answer, which is exactly the thing they are trying to avoid. The ACLU merely makes the politicians repeat the word “non-binary” as if it was meaningful. This explains why the politicians who support the ‘trans agenda’ seldom articulate their support of such nonsense. They are simply on the side of the thing that they think sounds good to the voters they want to reach. Organizations like the ACLU pretend to speak for those voters.

Both of our political parties have done this forever, contributing to the partisan polarization of our time. But ideology is really not the point; winning elections is. Kamala Harris is not actually very ideological. She did not need to define words like “equity” to know they are supposed to be popular with Democratic presidential primary voters. In 2020, she also did not have to explain how she could run on her record as a prosecutor while calling for immigration and other law enforcement to be downsized and defunded. She just used the words, and now she doesn’t, anymore.

All she had to know or say in 2019 is that Donald Trump was mean to immigrants, that he wants to be mean to the “trans kids” by denying them hormones and surgeries, and that the two paths of oppression intersect. Anyone can learn a new language, even Kamala Harris. She has learned to speak to the progressive left. It has taught her how to speak to them.

Rather than attempt to un-make this well-established system of partizanization, sex realists should lean into it. What I propose is a “gender idiot scale” or “GI scale.” Every politician should want the lowest possible score, whereas an open-ended scale will allow politicians to be as as gender-idiotic as they want, indeed they can compete at being the biggest idiot.

The units on the scale will be called “Strangios” for ACLU heir apparent Chase Strangio. A candidate who uses preferred pronouns, even “to be polite,” gets +1 Strangio, whereas a state senator with pronouns in his social media bio earns two Strangios.

Each sex realist organization will have to prioritize gender idiocies on its questionnaire. For example, supporting males in women’s sports might be worth three Strangios, while a statement of support for males in women’s jails could add four Strangios to the score. Or an organization that is more invested in sports than jails could switch the two around. The point is to score gender idiocy consistently and honestly.

Everybody can have a gender idiocy score, including sex realists. This system will be a perfect delight to the “ultra GCs,” who can let their Puritan flag fly as “Zero Strangios.” Even Donald Trump will have a score, because he has used preferred pronouns before, for example while inviting Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner to use any bathroom in Trump Tower that he wants. (Supporting males in female restrooms should be at least +3 Strangios.)

The GI Strangios Scale will make it possible to for everyone to see which candidate for any office is the biggest gender idiot. It will also allow sex realists to assign dubious awards, such as “biggest gender idiot of 2024.” We have work to do, people, and we don’t have time to fix this system first, so let’s use the tools already available to us. When in Rome, etc.