YES, UNDER PRESIDENT VANCE, AMERICA REALLY MIGHT MAKE BEING TRANS ILLEGAL FOR ADULTS

On Monday, I wrote a post questioning whether we can maintain a united front against the Republican Party in 2028. I wrote the following about Gavin Newsom, a flawed politician who really might be the Democratic presidential nominee that year:

I don't intend to vote for Newsom in the primaries. I understand why people don't like his stance on trans rights and other issues....

Yes, I could imagine Newsom signing legislation that banned trans youth from competing in school sports nationwide, just as Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. But Gavin Newsom won't support a complete ban on transitioning. I think a Republican 48th president might do that. I think we could live to see the criminalization of trans people under continued Republican rule. We won't see that even with a bad Democratic president.

Well, here you go: Yesterday, Erin Reed, a trans journalist, reported this:

On Tuesday, the president of the billionaire-backed Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, appeared on the influential far-right PBD podcast to discuss gender-affirming care.... the conversation turned towards what the Heritage Foundation was working on when it comes to the future of transgender people. It was during this shift that Roberts darkly announced that his solution to being transgender was simple: "You outlaw it," and that the organization was working to ban gender-affirming care at all ages....

... when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

If you know what happened to abortion rights in the decades after Roe v. Wade, you can see where this is going. Maybe receiving trans medical care as an adult won't be made illegal in the next Republican presidency. But that's what the right wants to do, and they won't stop fighting until they get what they want, unless we stop them.

No Democrat wants this. Soon, the overwhelming majority of Republicans will demand this.

But we don't just need to vote for Democrats, even bad or disappointing Democrats, to prevent this and other erosions of rights and decency. We need to push back on anti-trans messaging from the right and the left-center.

This week, the influential left-centrist online magazine The Argument published results of a poll on trans issues under the headline "The Trans Rights Backlash Is Real." The Argument's pollster, Lakshya Jain, cites numbers like this:

... 52% of voters now support legislation requiring trans people to use bathrooms corresponding with their biological sex, while just 33% oppose such a bill.

This is a sharp and dramatic change from the way things stood at the beginning of the Trump era, when Americans consistently rejected the concept of bathroom restrictions for trans people. In a Pew Research Center poll from September 2016, 51% of Americans said that trans people should be allowed to use public restrooms of the gender they identify as. Months later, the Public Religion Research Institute released a similar finding showing 53% of Americans were opposed to laws that would require trans people to use bathrooms corresponding to their birth sex.

Both Jain and The Argument's editor, Jerusalem Demsas, say they're not recommending that liberals beat a full retreat on trans issues. They note that nearly two thirds of respondents in their poll "want to ban discrimination against transgender people in hiring and housing. Not a single subgroup–including Trump 2024 voters—opposes such legislation."

So they call for a partial retreat, defending what the public supports and not defending what the public opposes. Demsas writes:

If you care about building durable protections, you have to build them in the world as it actually exists, not the world you wish you could rhetorically enforce into being.

But as G. Elliott Morris said in a different context last fall:

Public opinion is not static.... It changes over time and it’s unpredictable what it will be in the future. You don’t want to base all of your political strategy over what the polls say today, because there’s no election today. The election is going to be a year and a half from now. Or I guess, in our case, a year and two months from now. You want to base all of your political calculus on what you think opinion will be a year and two months from now. Or also maybe on your values, beliefs.

(Emphasis added.)

Morris was discussing immigration -- another issue on which Democrats were urged to meekly accept the right-wing backlash and meet the public where they were:

In March, a lot of this backlash I was referencing against Democrats talking about immigration, especially [Kilmar] Abrego Garcia, was predicated on this idea that Trump was doing well in his immigration net approval. So don’t talk about that. You don’t want to raise this issue of immigration because he does well on it. The counter argument was like, look, you’re never going to change how people feel about the president if you don’t engage with him.

if you don’t fight him on this. And as soon as we saw Democratic representatives and senators start fighting him on Abrego Garcia, on deportations in general, especially after the events in LA in, gosh, June, I believe, you saw his immigration numbers fall.

And then the Trump administration started the War on Minneapolis. Here's what's happened to Trump's approval on immigration:

So I'll argue in favor of supporting a candidate who's bad on trans issues if that candidate wins the primaries -- but we also need to try pushing publc opinion back to where it was before the massive right-wing (and centrist) anti-trans campaign began. Demsas writes that "the path to civil rights has never run through making disagreement illegal" -- as if we live in a world where "the woke mob" is silencing anti-trans voices -- but there's a lot of ground between this imagined "You must comply" pro-trans regime and complete acquiescence whenever polling on an aspect of trans rights become more than 50% anti-.

We need to emphasize the humanity of trans people, and counter the right's stereotyping of them as sick, violent monsters. The alternative in an America in which they'll soon literally be illegal. And maybe we could even push Gavin Newsom a bit further to the left in the process.