It’s an awkward situation.
Democrats signed on to ‘transgender rights’ which turned out to mean forcing women and girls to shower with men, use the same bathrooms and compete against them in school and professional sports. Also it turned out to mean putting toddlers on track to chemical and literal castration. All of this proved to be wildly unpopular.
(Who could have guessed?)
Now the Dems are looking for a way back without actually backing off the policies.
The two approaches they’ve developed so far are to…
1. Dismiss these as non-issues that most people don’t care about. That’s been the approach by some purple state Dems in the past, and it’s occasionally worked. Elections won’t be won or lost on bathroom policies, but it just helps make leftists look like freakshows who can’t be trusted around women and children.
And that doesn’t help.
2. Talk about how there should be “space” for different views.
Dems have turned to Rep. Tim McBride, a man who falsely claims to be a woman, to provide them with sanction and wriggle room on transgender issues.
Mostly that consists of word salads.
“We have to create more space in our tent. If, for instance, we want to have a majoritarian coalition — not just electorally, but specifically on issues around trans rights — that, by necessity, is going to have to include people who have a range of thoughts,” McBride told NOTUS.
“A binary choice between being all-on or all-off is not constructive for anyone,” McBride continued. “It impedes the very needed path toward winning electorally, winning hearts and minds and, most importantly, winning progress.”
“I do think I understand, as a trans person, how to meet people who aren’t trans where they are, and how to find commonality with people,” he said. “Part of that is creating room for a lack of understanding, for disagreement, for grace and, therefore, to create room for growth.”
What does that drivel actually mean?
Rep. Tim McBride is willing to show ‘grace’ to people who don’t want their kids abused or to have to declare pronouns so his party can win elections… so they can go back to doing those things all over again.
This isn’t a retreat from any of their extreme positions, only a tentative promise to stop canceling people who disagree. For now. As long as they need them.
And to claim that talking about the issue is a ‘distraction’.
House Democrats’ most common messaging strategy on trans issues, advised by McBride after the election, has been to treat Republicans’ anti-trans attacks as a distraction and to pivot to other issues.
That’s also the tack that ex-Obama whisperer Ben Rhodes takes in his New York Times bull session.
I believe that most Americans are sick of culture wars that force us to care about the political views of athletes, the restroom policies of some school on the other side of the country or the programming decisions at the Kennedy Center.
I wonder who’s responsible for those culture wars?
Leftists seek to seize new territory. They overreached and now Dems want to pretend that their more controversial policies are a non-issue, but they have not recanted a single one of them.
They’re even now fighting to once again have hospitals go back to chemically castrating kids in defiance of Trump administration orders, to have men continue to compete against women in sports, and to keep mentally ill crossdressers not only in Congress, but in the military.
This isn’t a retreat from extremism. It’s an attempt to distract the public from their extremism.
If Democrats really want people to stop talking about how they want women to shower with men, maybe they should stop supporting and fighting for such policies.
It’s awkward when you support something everyone hates. So maybe stop supporting it.
