In a campaign season where too many Democrats have failed to stand up for the rights and dignity of transgender people, it’s genuinely refreshing to see a few red-state Democrats refuse to take the bait when Republicans turn to fearmongering and gutter bigotry. In his Ohio race to return to the Senate, Sherrod Brown has very capably dismissed framed attacks on trans folks as a nasty distraction from real issues. Even better, this week we’ve seen two red-state Democrats in close races go farther, calling out their opponents’ gross bigotry and making clear that fellow Americans’ gender identity shouldn’t be treated as a political football.
It really shouldn’t be so rare, considering how easily Montana firefighter Sam Forstag and Iowa law prof and former state Rep. Christina Bohannan have responded to anti-trans demagoguery. With just two weeks and a few days to go until Election Day, we wish more Democrats would follow their playbooks.
Let’s start with Sam Forstag, who debated Republican Aaron Flint Tuesday and offered a clinic in how to upstage a yappy transphobic culture warrior. The moderators asked the candidates whether they agree with the (currently shaky) 2020 Supreme Court decision that the Civil Rights Act bars discrimination against gay and trans people.
Here’s the video, with a content warning that Aaron Flint is a MAGA Republican and says exactly what you’d expect about trans people, although he briefly does that particularly awful thing where he pretends he thinks “every single human being is worthy of dignity and respect,” right before launching into some truly vile attacks on trans people, their families, and doctors providing gender-affirming care. If you don’t want to subject yourself to it, you can fast-forward to the 1:50 mark, where Forstag offers his humane, thoughtful rebuttal. (Flint gets a reply at 2:55, then Forstag comes back from 3:31 to the end.)
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Flint clearly enjoys flinging hateful, lurid accusations at trans people. It’s sick-making how he blithely says all people deserve “dignity and respect,” then immediately starts channeling Radio Rwanda: “Do not touch the kids, and do not allow men into girls' locker rooms. Do not allow men in the girls’ bathrooms.”
Yeah, we get it. While Flint frames the conflict as “common sense versus crazy,” he puts a truly crazy spin even on what he claims to be the immutability of sex.
He’s not just saying transgender girls aren’t really girls, but that they also aren’t even children. Since “boys in girls’ locker rooms/bathrooms” isn’t nearly scary enough, these creeps only talk about “men,” even if they’re fifth-graders who haven’t started puberty. It’s a bizarre double denial of trans kids’ humanity.
Flint can’t stop there, but goes on to ask, “why in the world would we use taxpayer funds to chop off body parts of children for gender mutilation surgeries on kids?” This is, of course, a thing that exists only in the twisted imagination of rightwingers.
Flint closes by extending his accusations of fakery to Forstag, who has lived in Montana since he went to the U of Montana, but who — horror of horrors! — grew up mostly in Portland, which isn’t even part of America, and may not even be human: “Nobody really even knows who he is and what he actually stands for.”
When it’s Forstag’s turn to speak, he gives the perfect reply to his transphobic dickweed opponent with an eloquently plainspoken decency that could just as well be delivered by Jimmy Stewart: “Well, I’ll tell ya: Lies and anger, they don’t solve these problems.”
Actually addressing the legal question from the moderator, he continues, “Everybody in Montana deserves to live the life with dignity that is protected in our state Constitution in Article 2. That is what I will fight for as your next congressperson.”
Forstag frames trans rights, correctly, as American rights, with a nice libertarian speech that should appeal to Montanans who like freedom and actually believe it belongs to people they may not agree with:
“Government has no business sticking its nose into our personal lives, whether that’s a gun safe, whether that’s a doctor’s office. I don’t want a politician anywhere near it. So, well, let’s leave sports to the leagues that actually run them. Let’s let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions, and let’s keep politics the heck out of it.”
Then he pulls back the curtain, exposing what Flint and Republicans are really about: “What I see with that kind of anger and rhetoric is a lot of singing and dancing, and they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets. I won’t stand for that.”
It was beautiful, and Dems on the more progressive side wouldn’t have to include that Second Amendment stuff if they don’t want to.
Our other example has a video too, though darned if we can embed it. In the race for Iowa’s First Congressional District, Christina Bohannan hits back at anti-trans attacks from Republican incumbent Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and does so without backing away from trans people at all. Go watch Bohannan’s classy response video at Erin Reed’s substack, because it’s really good.
Bohannan uses the metaphor of sports as a fair competition to turn aside Miller-Meeks’s rhetoric about “protecting” women’s sports, saying, “As the only one in this race who ran track in high school, it matters to me that girls’ sports are fair. That’s why Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ false smear campaign is downright pathetic.”
There she is, running on a track past digitally-created ‘billboards” listing the issues Bohannan wants to focus on.
“What Miller-Meeks is doing in Washington, siding with the drug companies, taking their money and sticking it to Iowans, that’s what’s really unfair. I’m Christina Bohannan and I approve this message because I’ll cut middle-class taxes, shake up Washington and always put Iowa first.”
Again, it’s a really good ad that’s more in the Sherrod Brown vein of “let’s talk about what matters” instead of pointless culture-war distractions. Bohannon may not offer the aggressive defense of trans people Forstag did (and it is just a 30-second TV ad, not a debate), but she too rejects the anti-trans hate without giving an inch of ground to the haters.
As we’ve noted previously, there’s good reason to believe that Republicans are just plain wrong in hoping they can win votes just by turning their rhetorical bullying of trans people up to eleven. As Flint demonstrates, a substantial portion of the MAGA base really grooves on horrifying tales of how Democrats and schools and doctors want to “chop up children’s body parts” to suit their evil agenda of destroying the family and America.
But beyond the truest believers, poll after poll shows that crap just isn’t very motivating, especially after the four hundredth repetition, and especially not when many voters are far more worried about paying the rent than about whether a trans person came in fourth in a swim meet ahead of a cisgender swimmer.
This is how you do it, Dems. Stand up and stand for what’s right, or at least don’t play the haters’ game. And keep your valuable allies aboard your campaign bus instead of throwing them under it.
[Erin in the Morning / Dr. Helen Weberly / Erin in the Morning / New Republic]
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George Takei
@GeorgeTakei
Haven't cisgender folks been receiving "gender affirming" therapies and treatments for decades?
Boob jobs, testosterone boosters, all okay for cis people, right?
Let's be honest. These new laws are rooted in ignorance and bigotry toward trans people.