Trump and LGBT+ Voting

Just like other women, trans women should have the right to walk down the street at night without worried about being attacked, or to get a minicab on their own without worrying about sexual abuse. Trans people should have the right to evidenced based healthcare when they need it, not three or four years down the line after endless waitinglists and gatekeeping. Trans people should have the right to use toilets and changing rooms safely and with dignity no matter what non trans people ultimately decide we should do - many many trans people currently avoid toilets and changing rooms altogether. Trans survivors should have the right to a place of safety, in a male free space if necessary, should they face domestic abuse, and the right to adequate services and support if they are victims of sexual violence. Trans people in prison have the right be housed safely and humanely without an additional punishment tacked on just for being trans such as being left in solitary or moved to a trans wing hundreds of miles from where family can visit. So there's a few to be getting started with.

Non binary people have no formal protection in law

Why do non binary people need formal protection? From what? Surely this is unworkable as literally anyone can identify as NB and can change their mind the next day. With such an unstable 'category' it's hard to know what protections you could technically give. Luckily though, they continue to have their human rights and protections, no matter how they identify.

I also don't get what rights trans people don't have or what it is they aren't protected from?

@Shedbuilder

They are fully protected when it comes to employment, housing, services — so many things that until relatively recently the LGB community weren't, and for which we had to fight.

No they aren't. Non binary people have no formal protection in law and neither do any other trans people who do not meet the threshold of gender reassignment. As many often point out, gender identity is not a protected characteristic.

Trans people gained some formal rights with the Sex Discrimination Gender Reassignment regulations in 1999 however these only applied to the workplace and those who had begun medical transition. LGB people gained similar rights in 2003. Both groups had these rights extended to prohibit discrimination in the supply of goods and services in 2007. However it was not until the 2010 Equality Act that trans people who had not begun medical transition were protected. So at best you could argue that LGB and Trans rights have pretty much progressed hand in hand, although many trans people do not have formal protection. But your statement as it stands is far from the true picture.

What’s disappointing is that the majority of threads get turned into this endless discussion about toilets.

? This is a specific discussion about Trump & LGBT. Trump's actions in this area have focused on the access of transwomen to women's single-sex spaces. Why would you be surprised about that in this context?

They are fully protected when it comes to employment, housing, services — so many things that until relatively recently the LGB community weren't, and for which we had to fight.

It's understandable that Cubans in Florida are apprehensive about any drift to the far left by the Democrats having escaped the Communist regime in Cuba.

Pro-trans is pro-equality agenda and I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. Get over it.

Amazing. What a fantastically convincing argument.

What’s disappointing is that the majority of threads get turned into this endless discussion about toilets.

Pro-trans is pro-equality agenda and I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. Get over it.

This is the analysis I was waiting for. Not saying it's unbiased in any way, but at least they set their biases out and you can see they try to be fair and take in different perspectives.

What's so disappointing? That we're not all whoop-di-doop about Biden rolling out a pro-trans agenda?

I'm not speaking for all the feminists on mumsnet!! God forbid. I'm only speaking for myself and how I see what's going on. Other people have different views, as you'll see if you read through this thread or others.

Here's an article from the very left-wing woke publication The Guardian which comments on Democrat party corruption. I'm sure there are loads of different aspects to this discussion but it definitely doesn't take any intellectual effort to see the moral bankruptcy in both parties and the lack of any unifying vision or policies that will defend US democracy. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/11/hunter-biden-democrats-joe-biden-ukraine-trump

Wow, that takes some intellectual effort to think Rep and Dem have nothing to offer. I don’t think I’m interested anymore. Just a brief foray into the feminist section and it’s not at all what I expected. Disappointing.

Sorry, I meant to say the whole 2-party system is corrupt and both parties are corrupt. They are interested in getting power and staying in power, and using that power to further their personal interests (check out Hunter Biden's emails, oh sorry you can't, they've been censored...) I'm not saying the Republicans are great and the Democrats are bad. They're both horrendous. Neither party has anything of value to offer; the only hope I hold out is that as neither side got a convincing victory, some kind of balancing influence will have to come to bear, or maybe a viable third party will arise. I liked the idea of Unity 2020 although I think it was all a bit of a shambles - but maybe now there's a chance for something like that to come through.

How are the Dems extremely corrupt?

I think a narrow and slightly ambiguous win for the dems is possibly the best outcome. The woke left are framing it as "white surpremacy" that trump increased his share of black/latino/LGBT vote but the dems now should be aware that the woke policies push people to the right. Maybe a new balance can be established from this. I suspect if trump won there would be increased rioting and violence by BLM/Antifa - might still happen but harder to justify now and will expose them much more. I don't think there's anything good about the dems right now. They are extremely corrupt. But it looks like they won't have the Senate and therefore won't be able to get anything done, so maybe there can be a time of recalibration. I hope.

On-topic, Day 1 Biden is likely to rescind Trump's transgender military executive order.

In addition, Biden Cabinet picks on Education and Justice are certain to restore Obama-era rules allowing transgender criminals to switch to female prisons, and transgender students to use the facilities of their choice, while the Housing & Urban Development Secretary will nix new rules allowing women's shelters to exclude transwomen. The Secretary for Health will restore rules on health insurance covering transgender-related treatments, and there will be an end to support for female athletes in athletics. There will also be further extensions to 'non-binary' identity, and numerous other measures related to transgender rights.

Not on point but here is John McCain's concession speech. I doubt we'll hear anything as gracious from Trump.

The timing was wrong for McCain and he was saddled with Sarah Palin. There has to a Republican president at some point and it's a pity he didn't get the chance.

The Democrats won the 1988 Texas Senate race with 59% of the vote. Trump will have won Texas with a bigger margin than Bush in 92 or Dole in 96.

Nevada has always been in play - it only failed to vote for the winning candidate in 2016 and 1976, in the last century.

Arizona has flipped because of an increasing Hispanic population, but also because of educated white migrants, largely from California.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/06/chillingeffect-gave-red-state-arizona-doseof-blues/

It's probably not a good idea to compare Miami-Dade now to 32 years ago - the Hispanic population was 35% in 1980, 49% in 2000, and around 69% today.

The equation for the Republicans is very different to the Conservatives - the US has a large minority population, and states such as Arizona will be majority-Hispanic in a decade or so.

Biden has won this election by spending lots of money campaigning towards white voters in Pennsylvana, Wisconsin & Michigan, which he has recaptured. Trump has won the largest Republican minority vote share since 1960, despite Black Lives Matter, despite being an evil racist, and so on www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/once-again-democrats-have-misunderstood-minorities/2020/11/05/6d55d668-1fa6-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html

The Tories don't need to care at all that they are no longer a force in Bradford, Yardley, Slough, Luton and other constituencies with large Muslim populations that they held or performed well in under Thatcher & Major.

Clearly most religions tend to be extremely conservative socially, whereas both the Democrats & Labour are socially very liberal. The black population of the US votes almost exclusively for the Democrats, but it is not a significantly growing force. Trump won Mississippi with 60% of the vote, while the population is 37% black, while Pennsylvania will give Biden the White House while it is 80%+ white.

'Minorities' are not a single group - the Tories have held Harrow East against trends in London by appealing to Indian voters (as distinct from other South Asians).

In the current US election then a few hundred thousand extra Hispanic voters in Arizona over the last however many years will certainly have helped the Democrats, but it's simultaneously possible for their to be more Hispanic voters but for those voters to be less Democrat-voting than in the past.

You need to appeal to the right voters in the right places to win elections - Corbyn did well in 2017 by appealing to middle-class liberals, but he was trounced in 2019 when working-class white voters abandoned generational support for Labour and switched en masse. It remains to be seen this is a permanent realignment - e.g., conservative parts of the South still have many Democrat remnants, such as Joe Manchin who won the Senate seat held by Democrat Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Byrd. Manchin himself is not a KKK member, but he does vote against abortion and so on and take pains to say that he is a conservative Democrat, because otherwise he would be toast before his extremely socially conservative constituents.

In the UK there are all kinds of Momentum types who hold seats where they have little in common with their constituents. That was true for many decades, e.g., the Peter Mandelson, a member of the Hampstead elite won thumping majorities in Hartlepool, as did Blair (Fettes & Oxford) himself in Sedgefield, symbolically captured by the Tories for the first time since WW2 in 2019.

I recently read this article in The Grauniad about a journalist who moved to Portland from London, and she was horrified that the US was not as liberal as she hoped www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/oct/31/we-left-the-uk-for-portland-expecting-a-liberal-dream-that-wasnt-the-reality

It would seem that culture war issues should be more off-putting to voters in the US than in the UK since there are more of them - the UK religious vote is often Muslim and Labour-voting in spite of this, while the Christian vote is hardly an electoral force. Yet apparently Biden has just won an election by being slightly more appealing to educated white voters following 4 years of BLM, trans rights, and such like, while being less appealing to minority voters.

Clearly the likes of the Lib Dems & Momentum are batshit insane on trans issues, but I doubt that will stop them eventually doing all their craziness - if it doesn't put off enough voters in the US, it's not likely to do so in the UK.

Although perhaps without Trump the Democrats would have been hammered handily. And without covid, of course, he should have won at a canter.

Either way, as others have said, Trump has certainly pushed the Democrats=socialists equation hard, and takes a harder line on both Cuba and Venezuela than his predecessor did.

Because of its Cuban exile makeup the Latino vote in Florida isn't really comparable to that elsewhere. Whatever happened in Texas, overall Biden is projected to win 46% of the vote in Texas, the highest vote share for a Democratic candidate there since 1976. And in many places such as Arizona and Nevada the Latino vote is partly credited with the fact that these places are increasingly in play in presidential elections (whether or not Biden wins them this time round).

A better analogy for Labour taking N England for granted would probably be provided by how Trump was able to seize the rust-belt states such as Michigan, Penn and Wisconsin, last time round. Still, all three of those were won by Ron Reagan twice, so again not all that close an analogy; the Labour heartland didn't contribute to Thatcher's landslides.

The Democrats are to the right of mainstream Conservatives in the UK. The telling point is health care. No Conservative government is ever going to replace the NHS with a private health care system (despite the scaremongering on the left).

No Democratic administration is going to introduce an NHS system.

Trump's success with Latin voters was down to this line being accepted uncritically by many:

"Biden is a socialist."

Really that politicL compass is very good and applies all over the world. Being on the lefr economically does nor imply being liberal on social issues. Ir can and the two do sometimes fo together. But they are two seperate scales.
Also a lesbian and hild no illusions that republicans are good for lgb. They aren't at all. But that does not make Biden a socialist or even all that socially liberal. He falls not far from the conservatives and the DUP on both scales (much closer to them than to labour for example)

I'd have thought socialists would be pro-choice but Galloway is Catholic IIRC, maybe that's why he's a forced-birther

The Labour Party in Scotland when it was a real force relied heavily in Glasgow and the west on the Catholic, working class vote. I doubt that voter segment was in favour of abortion.

You have a rather simplistic way of looking at things- if one believes x, then you must believe z,y and a,b,c too.

That's what I mean, yes. Abortion, family planning, contraception etc. And my point is that George Galloway has a fair bit in common with conservatives - a lot of people on the far left do. Not liking Jews much, for instance. I'd have thought socialists would be pro-choice but Galloway is Catholic IIRC, maybe that's why he's a forced-birther.

@Shedbuilder I'm glad. I've seen some support in here for horrible homophobic fundie twats just because they're anti-trans, and fundies do not have a good track record when it comes to LGB people.

'Woke' on Mumsnet, honest to G-d, seems to mean 'anyone who cares about anything other than class'. I thought 'woke' specifically referred to black American social consciousness. So Bernie Sanders isn't woke but Biden is now?

And why would LGB people want to vote Republican when Republicans have a consistent track record of shitting on us? You really think people like Pence are on our side and won't make things more difficult for LGB people?