The Democrats Need an Honest Conversation on Gender Identity Part 2

Interesting piece on Seth Moulton who was recently excoriated for saying he didn't want his daughters playing sports against boys: https://www.thefp.com/p/seth-moulton-democrats-trans-issues-trump

I thought Kamala had to be the nominee because otherwise the funds contributed to the Biden Harris ticket could not be used?

(Not that I'm especially anti Kamala or think she was a bad choice. I think all the Dems would have taken the same position on accommodating cross sex demands.)

The Clooneys are a long time political family in Kentucky, though, I think? He’s related to Abraham Lincoln and his father ran (unsuccessfully) as for congress, so in local political terms he probably feels entitled, esp given his platform. Do will the schlebs would stick to their day jobs, though.

Whatever the truth......he has still had a huge, and undue, influence within the Democratic Party.

As for George Clooney.....who does he think he is...he seems to be on the phone to the Whitehouse all of the time, seeming to think his complaints and views matter or carry exceptional weight.

I understood that Obama was sceptical of Harris’ chances and held off endorsing her until it was clear that she had wide support among Democrat delegates.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3g32y8j772o

I understand it was he that effectively elected Kamala Harris; and he that drove her campaign.

That’s interesting. I don’t recall Bill Clinton giving public speeches admonishing the Dems for their policies and attitudes towards those who disagree with them but I’ve seen Obama do so on many occasions. It didn’t look as though anyone in the Democrats took his advice so I assumed they saw him as old news or insufficiently woke 🤔

Many suggest that Biden's term in office has really been Obama's third term in office, and that it is hew has driven much of the cultural policy, and certainly when it comes to the trans issue.

He is the only U.S president to have stayed on living in the Capitol after his term of office came to an end,

Yeah, Obama’s initial involvement manages to sneak under the radar for some reason but Biden made more of a song and dance about it, and actively changed Title IX on his first day, so he has a much stronger association with ruining women’s rights. He took Obama’s idea and ran with it.

"In 2016, President Barack Obama issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. schools, instructing them to interpret the word sex to include “gender identity” for all Title IX purposes. Democratic support for “trans” has continued apace since then...."

I hadn't fully realised it was Obama that really accelerated this.

New article by Kara Dansky re the Democrats and their position on gender losing them support among the electorate:

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5004781-democratic-leftist-feminist-criticizes/

This might help you to see what the original tweet was referring to:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1859276515508199830.html

Yes I can see both and all the following ones.

I can't see the second tweet either, so perhaps access depends on being signed up to TwiX?

I can see both. The second comes with a necessary sensitivity block.

Interesting @UtopiaPlanitia that the second tweet you posted doesn’t seem to exist anymore but the first one does. Someone didn’t like the videos and reports of badly behaving men? Tricky that the posts do probably break posting guidelines but by removing them, it’s easier to deny they happened and the evidence that men DO carry out those behaviours is erased. Easier for TRAs to carry on insisting/pretending it never happens.

I came across this tweet thread from an American Left-leaning man discussing what’s going on in the US at the moment with regards politics, election fallout, Congressional toilet policy, free speech and I thought it might be of interest to the thread:

https://x.com/Rob_ThaBuilder/status/1859276515508199830

“Ok, time for a nuanced discussion on this topic, and some backstory:

I suspect a large chunk of ppl who currently are absolutely opposed to ANY man in women's spaces today (myself included) would have probably agreed with Chad here 5+ years ago (myself included).

Most of us probably would have thought something similar, like "well, if the person is passing and looks like a woman, I don't see the problem with them just using the bathroom". And if that's all that was happening - ppl who pass as women just using the bathroom - the current backlash occuring now likely would never have happened.

But that isn't all that happened, is it?

Over the past few years, it became increasingly clear that something else was going on, and that accelerated when Elon Musk bought this platform and prioritized the ability to speak truth against politically convenient narratives. We started seeing videos of men masturbating in women's bathrooms, started seeing SM posts of very obviously non-dysphoric men taking "trophy hunting" pictures of themselves triumphantly posting pictures of themselves in women's bathrooms, smugly bragging about their new access to these spaces, and gloating about the fact the actual women whom these spaces were created for couldn't do a thing about it. All of these things that we saw were things that we never saw on pre-Musk Twitter, and anyone posting them was banned.

And very quickly, we were radicalized.

There was a window - albeit brief - a few years ago when the trans community could have done something to prevent much of this. They could have acknowledged that self-id was a disaster, that it was a safeguarding nightmare, and that the so-called "true trans" (for lack of a better term) was outnumbered 10 to 1 by predators, perverts, sexual deviants and sex pests PRETENDING to be trans just to satisfy their paraphilic desires. This was obvious to any impartial observer easily a few years ago. Had the trans community correctly recognized the issue, recognized the safeguarding nightmare it was creating, and began policing itself and made very clear that these types of men did not represent their community, things MAY have turned out differently.

But they didn't. Instead, they doubled down, they said "anyone who claims to be trans IS trans" and called anyone concerned about the safety of women and girls in these spaces bigots, Nazis and transphobes. They refused to compromise even one inch, while demanding women give up everything. Absolutely no sacrifices were required by the men who wanted in, and every sacrifice demanded by the women who said no.

And so we were forced to come to the logical conclusion that, well, apparently these predators and sex pests must actually BE part of the trans community. And since they're the majority of the trans community, that must mean the community as a whole is a degenerate, sexually deviant group of predators who are a danger to women and girls, even while we acknowledge that there DO exist trans ppl who are not that, who really just DO want to live their lives in peace. Unfortunately, they are the minority. And in short order, we were radicalized.

And so that window for an alternate scenario closed. Positions have hardened on both sides, and all of the people who might have considered compromise a few short years ago have landed on the only reasonable position: that since the trans community refuses to police itself, we will have to do it for them. And since women CAN NOT TELL which men in their bathrooms "just want to pee" and which ones want to jerk off in the next stall listening to THEM pee, the only safe and effective solution to this problem is that ALL men - regardless of how they identify - must be kept out of women's spaces. And for all these ppl, there is no going back.

And the trans community has absolutely nobody to blame but themselves for that.”

Link to the rest of his thread (with videos & reports of men behaving inappropriately in women’s public toilets - content warning) which gives examples to explain his change of mind on the issues he discusses above:
https://x.com/Rob_ThaBuilder/status/1859277572359463091

There are certainly people like that, but by no means the majority. There are more homeschoolers now in the US than there have ever been, mainly because school quality is so poor.

It's possible some imagine that all homeschoolers are flat Earth people, though that seems quite sheltered, to say the least.

But that wasn't really what I was so surprised by. It was more the extent that this group of people are almost the opposite of what they imagine. They are really just so conventional, and I would almost say temperamentally conservative. Very little imagination, no real impulse to question, and seemingly very motivated not to step outside of the safe box.

It's like an updated version of the old fashioned conservative, prissy librarian.

@TempestTost

I used to be very involved in the homeschool community, going back 30 years. There were always conservative homeschoolers, but just as many or more liberal/leftist ones, and lots in the middle. Most had a view that ultimately parents chose the best education for their kids, which might or might not be public school. Particularly on the left, lots of parents saw public school as a bit of a conformist vehicle for the state.

Now, on this reddit thread, you could see the opposite idea - these people did not like that parents thought they shouldn't put their kids in a state approved school. They thought it was weird that parents would question what was being taught in a "good" school district - weird and dangerous.

Anyway - it really struck me that progressives today do not seem to be the progressives of my younger years, who were a little suspicious not only of authoritarians, but any narratives by the government going unchallenged, and who wanted critical thinking taught to heir kids. These people are timid, want an authority to tell everyone what is right, and are suspicious of anyone who questions the state. They have what seems to me to be a weird trust in the state.

That's interesting - without knowing the content of your actual thread, I used to belong to some Facebook homeschooling communities (US-based). In the last few years, these became quite rigid in focus: Christian, flat-earth, no evolutionary study, humans never went to the moon type of thing.

It could be that librarians are expressing a concern for the children exposed to this type of education.

Yes, absolutely.

All good.

Yep, I totally get it that you and I are approaching it differently.

For me, that's the essence of "centrist": a common goal (stopping this enforced acceptance and all the harm it's doing to children, vulnerable young adults and EVERYTHING related to women's rights) but a different way of getting there.

A lot of the Me too supporting men are creeps, and the first to say that women have to undress in front of men if those men identify as women. Just look at for eg Neil Gaiman.

Me Too was a very useful moment.

I remember that on FB plenty of my ex-military colleagues (we're all women) just put Me Too as a status.

And in our military groups too, and bloody Norah all the blokes telling us that we were overreacting to what had been a bit of fun, or that it hadn't happened etc etc. Shocking.
my DH is in one of the groups and i had to remind them of the day one of the corporals i worked with grabbed my boob in a bar, and DH punched him before i could even get a swing in. and was charged for it.

Then they were all "yeah but once". But in the end we did manage to have some good conversations about what we had been through ("but you should have complained at the time"....) and what actually went on. And some of them got it.

So in that respect Me Too did a bit of good.

This.

Me too had some important elements, but overall it was a stupid, poorly thought out movement that accomplished little. And it was always going to accomplish little because it wasn't looking at real people and real behaviour and thinking about how we shape behaviour in populations. It was just virtue signalling and allowing certain people to trade in victim status.

This is what most progressive issues seem to be now. There isn't even any room to talk about crafting effective solutions, much less discuss the fundamentals.

I had a weird experience yesterday reading the reddit for libraries. Someone was complaining about homeschoolers in their library - it was, I think, a reasonable complaint/question.

However, I was really shocked to see the amount of antipathy to homeschooling itself among the library workers.

Keep in mind here, library workers tend to be very heavily progressive. I was at a conferernce last month, I haven't seen that many masks in two years! In the US 98% identify as Democrats.

I used to be very involved in the homeschool community, going back 30 years. There were always conservative homeschoolers, but just as many or more liberal/leftist ones, and lots in the middle. Most had a view that ultimately parents chose the best education for their kids, which might or might not be public school. Particularly on the left, lots of parents saw public school as a bit of a conformist vehicle for the state.

Now, on this reddit thread, you could see the opposite idea - these people did not like that parents thought they shouldn't put their kids in a state approved school. They thought it was weird that parents would question what was being taught in a "good" school district - weird and dangerous.

Anyway - it really struck me that progressives today do not seem to be the progressives of my younger years, who were a little suspicious not only of authoritarians, but any narratives by the government going unchallenged, and who wanted critical thinking taught to heir kids. These people are timid, want an authority to tell everyone what is right, and are suspicious of anyone who questions the state. They have what seems to me to be a weird trust in the state.