Idiots And Joe Scarborough Know Who Lost Democrats The Election, It Is These Trans People Existing

Eat shit, shut the fuck up, eat shit AND shut the fuck up. Love, Wonkette.

Brain genius Seth Moulton, shown here defending his 6-year-old daughter from getting run over by Usain Bolt. Caricature by DonkeyHotey, CCA 2.0

Wait, what? We have a new, deeper-dive Wonkette in which writers are supposed to “thinker more, go deeper, and incidentally not die”? Well then, I shall give you more than fart noises and “STFU, stupid Dems!” But this will not be a piece of high art. We’re going to break this into four sections so we can be super clear about some otherwise complicated stuff.

Section The First: Save your patellar reflex for the doctor’s office.

Over the last couple of days, disappointed Dems, lefties, and Never Trumpers have been pointing more fingers than three Spider-Men at a bank robbery. Let me be clear: Even though this post is about those brain geniuses blaming trans people, even when talking about other brain genius ideas, most of this is bullshit. There is no election between now and November 22. There is no need to panic. We can and should wait for actual research to figure out why so many people who voted Biden in the last election stayed home this time. Waiting for solid information is what reasonable adults do. Popping off with how you know Dems lost because they are not actually all clones of you and thinking your identical, brain genius thoughts is not what reasonable adults do. It is what Matt Yglesias does. No one should be Matt Yglesias.

Section The Second: This is SUMMMMM bullshit.

Morning Joe’s titular Joe Scarborough was quick to say that he hates Monday morning quarterbacking, he really does, but dammit a county-level Democratic leader said that anti-trans ads turned men off Harris and lefties are too scared of trans people to rebut those messages. Immediately after Scarborough & company declared that this election was about “cultural markers that matter greatly” in voters’ lives, prominent Democrats leapt to echo the message.

On election night, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, Gilberto Hinojosa said,

“You have a choice as a party. You could, for example, you can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there's certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support.”

And while he has already apologized, two US House members, Rep. Tom Suozzi (New York) and Rep. Seth Moulton (Massachusetts) ran to the New York Times to disingenuously blame the “far left” for defending trans participation in sport and thus causing Harris’s loss. Suozzi was quite clear:

“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left. I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”

Except yes, Suozzi does want to discriminate. For someone who wants to see Democrats shoot straight and stop holding back the truth out of fear of reaction, he sure doesn’t seem willing to do that himself. Telling trans girls that they can’t play sports because they’re a threat to cis girls is discrimination. The question isn’t whether trans girls are being singled out, they obviously are. The question is whether this is morally justified. A cis dude who presumably has actual testicles ought to be able to make the case that Democrats should not be afraid of the far Left without himself sabotaging the clarity of his point out of fear of being criticized by the far Left.

The fatal problem for Suozzi is that while he deeply believes in discrimination, he doesn’t deeply believe in any justification for that discrimination — moral or otherwise. For years now people from JK Rowling to Martina Navratilova to Riley Gaines have been speaking up to make the case that trans participation in sport (and Victoria’s Secret fashion shows) harms girls. But their case is entirely based on anecdotes. There is no evidence that girls are injured more often when they play with or against trans children. There is no evidence that trans college students claim a disproportionate amount of scholarship money. And there is no such thing as transitioning to win meets or matches, titles or tournaments.

Suozzi doesn’t think “biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports,” and he’s entitled to that opinion, but as a hero speaking truth to power, he’s not winning any medals for bravery, much less insightful analysis. He says straight talk is needed to win elections, but he has nothing to offer beyond waffling bullshit.

Moulton’s statement is, if anything, worse.

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

If Seth Moulton’s Twitter account is correct, then Moulton’s oldest girl is exactly 6 years and 4 weeks old. Trans 6 year olds invading girls’ first grade sports is, to put it mildly, not a thing. To the extent that any group of 6-year-olds playing sports can be called “organized,” organized leagues for the k-1 brigade are universally co-ed. The brutal injuries inflicted by 6-year-old “athletes” running over other 6-year-old “athletes” are not, in fact, a challenge that many Americans face. More Americans face the challenge of remembering how many orange slices are needed for half time than the challenge of keeping 6-year-old “male or formerly male athletes” off of 6-year-old girls’ soccer teams, because, again, there aren’t gender segregated soccer leagues for 6-year-olds.

So yes, Moulton, you should be afraid to say that you’re worried about your first grader playing kickball with boys at recess, because that’s a very, very stupid thing to say.

All this finger pointing is premature, generally worthless, and dramatically likely to be pushed aside after enough time passes for thoughtful and productive analysis to be done, but assuming that Suozzi and Moulton actually want their point of view to be taken seriously, they have to offer more than bullshit that they themselves do not even believe.

Section The Third: These lies have consequences.

Going back to Morning Joe, his guest on election night, Mike Barnicle, claimed, “No one wants to harm transgenders, but how many of them are there? Seriously?” In the morning-after segment linked above, Joe Scarborough followed up on the topic, “Nobody’s saying to be anything but kind to all Americans.”

The problem is that yes, many people do want to harm trans folks. This has been true for years, and if you’re inclined to believe GLAAD the problem is getting worse. Segregating busses wouldn’t have saved me from being attacked in 1996 any more than segregating Oklahoma’s kids by birth sex saved Nex Benedict from harassment, bullying, and assault in their high school bathroom.

Yes, Trump is saying be something other than kind. Yes, people want to harm trans folks. Yes, people have a particular love for murdering trans women of color. And yes, this starts early. In my own backyard (if this apartment building had a backyard), a Bellingham High School student was attacked on October 22. While I’m not one to assert telepathic knowledge of what’s in another’s mind, I do think it’s just a wee bit telling that the attackers recorded themselves on video, “screaming 'kill the tr***y' and 'kill the fa***t.’”

The day before that attack, October 21, just a short ferry ride away in Bremerton, Washington, an adult man demanded to know if his son’s friend was gay, and upon hearing confirmation that he was, set to wrapping a noose around the 14-year-old child’s neck.

Yes, you read that correctly. All it took for a man to attack his son and attempt to murder his son’s friend was hearing that the friend was gay. (Don’t worry about the dad, he’s free on bail as the court determined he did not present an unacceptable danger to the public if released.)

So, yes, you beeswax-and-porcupine-quill assgadgets: People do want to harm “transgenders.” Yes, people are being all kinds of unkind to Americans.

And do you know how we stop this from happening? When a 6-year-old child wants to play t-ball with their friends, you fucking let them. You don’t ban them and tell your own children that that kid is weird and sick and wrong and dangerous and out to steal your scholarship so you can’t ever go to Harvard and then you die penniless and alone like some person who couldn’t even make the varsity tennis team. You give your kids better lessons than you and your peers got or we’ll get no better next generation than this one, and we’ll be reading about fathers lynching gay kids and cis teens bashing trans students in 2048 and wondering how we all got here when no one wants to harm the transgenders and everyone is nice to all Americans.

You let kids play because raising children who don’t hate other children is even more important than finishing 4th in the state of Oregon in 6th grade fencing. I was proud of that trophy for a hot second when I was 12 years old, but I can tell you that I would have traded all 5 and a quarter gilded plastic inches of it to not be beaten in the bathroom my first year of college.

No one here at Yr Wonkette is naive enough to think that how to productively counter anti-trans messaging will never make it onto the agenda of a Democratic strategy retreat. What we are saying is that if you want to have that conversation, maybe you need to think of something to say that isn’t a lie you feel like you have to tell to crossdress your trans-blaming in nuanced concern drag.

If you find yourself on television or talking to the New York Times and you feel that the point you vitally need to make must be preceded by a disclaimer that everyone loves all Americans and literally no one wants to hurt the queers, that should be a clear signal that it’s the absolute perfect time for you to sit down and shut the fuck up.

And if after you do that you still feel compelled to make the very nuanced point that you’re not blaming trans people, you’re just blaming cowardly Dems who won’t stand up to trans people and tell them the party just can’t support their far-Left desire for things like “existence” and “not being beaten by classmates to the point of severe concussion,” then that’s the perfect time for you and your nuance to shut the fuck up a little bit harder.

Part The Fourth: Whose problem is this anyway?

As your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke has said many times, but most recently on Wednesday, cis people are more obsessed with gender than trans people could ever be. By definition trans people have asked themselves, “Could my gender be something different than what everyone else assumes? Could it be different than what I assumed?” and then answered, “Well, yeah. I guess.”

Meanwhile cis people wonder if anyone’s gender could ever be different than anyone assumed, and they answer not so much with noncommittal words as with stabbing a 34-year-old Black woman 20 times. They answer with stabbing a 16-year-old white girl 28 times. They respond with shooting and hanging, beating and burning, and all because society has set up lines and declared, “These must not be crossed.” And, sure there are plenty of cis folks who don’t actually assault and murder. But those cis people who don’t take up weapons themselves sit in barber shops and churches and jury boxes nodding knowingly, “I’m not saying he should have killed her, but I understand.” Is it all cis folks? No. Is it such a tiny number of cis folks that trans people can trust their cis neighbors to do the right thing? Not so much.

And let me be clear: There are reasons those lines of gender segregation were established. In an imperfect, violent world, there can be increased safety by enforcing certain lines. And when there is no increased safety, there can still be increased comfort, an assumption of safety that, while not true, calms anxiety and makes possible feelings of security that, however naive, are welcome and even necessary. But the violence doesn’t go away, and not only because cis women are most at risk of being beaten, raped and murdered by the men in their own homes. Even violence outside the home doesn’t go away. It is merely refocussed on those crossing these lines.

Trans folks are well aware that these lines were created for earnest reasons that originally had nothing to do with anti-trans sentiment. And we are well aware that for cis people who have grown used to them, change can be scary. But good reason or not, longstanding tradition or not, gender segregation is a practice created and sustained by cis people for cis people. The responsibility to end it rests in cis hands just as surely as the responsibility for ending racial segregation rested — and rests — in white hands.

It is tempting, too tempting, to think that our reasons for present day sins are much nobler than the justifications of our parents and grandparents for sins past. The truth is that white women were afraid of losing their racially pure bathrooms. They did feel more comfortable knowing that Black women had their own toilets, that negroes had their own sports leagues. These were real feelings of importance to real people and defended with real violence because these issues were just that vital to the white voters threatened by change.

There are many reasons that could be listed to justify including trans kids in the same sports leagues as Moulton’s tiny, precious daughter, but at bottom it comes to this: Gender segregation, however reasonable in this context or that, teaches anti-trans hatred. If cis politicians dither for another generation, we’ll have that many more nooses around the necks of that many more queers. We’ll have that many more children raised to believe other kids are different and dangerous, sick and sinful.

Cis public figures cannot blame trans children for the consequences of the gender segregation that cis adults created while retaining their moral integrity. Cis public figures cannot ennoble the current cis generation as infinitely kind, as unwilling to ever harm, while retaining their credibility. Week after week trans people are literally bludgeoned and knifed, but this dishonest deflection of responsibility — for elections won and lost, for positions advocated or abandoned, for forgotten political Edens and current political divides — is a series of cuts no less cruel.

Do better, Democrats.

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Your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke also writes other perverted stuff!