Anyone else think Trump will ultimately do more damage to the gender critical cause?

No, I don't think that @savehannah.

For a start, Trump is in no way Gender Critical and secondly the vast majority of people know the 2 sexes are different sexes. It's a biological reality that there's no getting round.

He will damage America. He will damage women. He will damage the Right. But I don't think he'll damage the GC cause.

I dont think any Democrats are claiming the high ground.

They are only too aware that their failure has landed the US with this man who boasts about how he is the supreme leader, who has no need to be accountable and hasadopted the cartoon of him as a king - in a country that was created out of getting rid of being run by a monarch.

Perhaps the US needs to bring in a law that anyone standing for president has to take an exam to show they understand the US constitution.

Ironically the Democrats could benefit out of this, because as Trump gets more and more extreme even Republican politicians are critical of the things he is saying or doing. So his extremism gives the Democrats a rallying point as a potential alternative. But whether they are competent to run an effective campaign against Trump will be the ultimate test.

It is far more likely that Trump will lose not because of his global grandstanding, but if cuts to welfare and medicare, medicaid impact republican voters. Already some of the "Latino" voters who switched to him are saying they didn't vote for him to tear their families apart.

Yes I think the Democrats have big questions to answer about how much they were covering up Biden's condition, and who was really in charge, and until they do, any claims they make to holding the moral high ground are going to ring pretty hollow.

Yes, I read about this. It’s very worrying. A serious but unforeseen outcome.

As I posted earlier the removal of the word "women" (or age or race) had NOTHING whatsoever to do with gender vs. sex.

It is about Trumps absolute believe that nobody should be given money, opportunity or even compensation for being part of a group that is or has been discriminated against by a dominate white male patriarchy.

So saying a woman has now been into space is one thing. But saying a woman has been into space because she was helped by a programme helping women get to the same level as men is by his world view manipulation and an impingment on the natural order of things. ie why he thinks white farmers in South Africa should be offered refugee status as compensation for having to "help" indigenous citizens of SA have access to some of the land (stolen) from them. And you can be he wouldn't be making racist jokes about them eating dogs and cats.

(If anyone is interested in a running commentary on how the Trump administration is interacting with existing US government rules etc., Heather Cox Richardson who is a historian is writing some informative daily "letters". - Dont know if she is a feminist. Her latest is here https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-20-2025 - she also posts on facebook.)

Well yeah, anyone who's ever cared for an elderly relative with dementia could see that he wasn't capable.

And the media spent four years - longer! - telling us not to believe our lying eyes. Makes you wonder what else they're prepared to lie about.

Okay, thanks. Were they trying to avoid him stepping down and having Kamala in charge?
It says everything that there is no investigation in the media...

People say Jake Sullivan, but I don't think there was one person. I think it was mostly the administrative state working on autopilot, and calling Obama if there was a crisis.

I have heard/read rumours that Obama was involved in running things behind the scenes.

What I don't get is who was literally running the country whilst Joe Biden was incapable?
I never believed the rumors he was gaga as I thought his physician, the Vice President, his Cabinet etc would enact the mechanism to have him step down...and this is why I no longer watch/trust the mainstream media.

Surely what the US needs is for some Democrat big hitter to come out and openly dump the gender woo. If such a person exists. Mayor Pete? Or is he not a big shot enough?

Can't say I have noticed that, but it's a very interesting point.

Parties only become sane when faced with some massive external force. If it's left up to the activists, they just double down.

I think that's the answer to why a clever politician like Nicola Sturgeon sank so much of her credibility into a cause with 20% support. Everyone around her told her it was really popular.

We also have to consider the possibility that, left to their own devices, the Dems might never become sane on this issue.

Considering how polarised Americans are supposed to be, it's amazing what happens if you concentrate on the "what" instead of the "who". There's a lot more consensus than you might think.

Trump has been pretty smart in his first weeks in going for issues with 60/40 or 70/30 approval. Or, in the case of men in women's sports, 85/15 approval.

On the other hand, if you go to Democrats and emphasise that X is a Trump proposal, or you go to Republicans and emphasise that Y is a Pelosi proposal, concentrating on the most polarising personalities in each tribe, you get close to a 50/50 split. Funny that. It's almost as if someone benefits from polarisation.

It will be really interesting when Hegseth invites DOGE into the Pentagon to look for waste and graft in the defence budget. I would bet money that the lefty Democrats in the Senate - Warren, Sanders, Markey, Wyden - will be making impassioned speeches about how you can't prune back the military-industrial complex.

If you can't stomach Trump, that's fine. I just think it's self-defeating to insist that we wait for the Democrats to become sane. During the election there were people spinning scenarios about Harris somehow becoming sex realist, when her entire record speaks against it.

My view is that, if I ever get to the stage where, every time I want to voice an opinion, I have to stop and ask myself whether this might mean someone thinking I support Trump - well then Trump really will have won.

I have had similar thoughts. I don't like Trump, there's nothing about him I respect or admire. That I agree with his position on trans ideology is neither here nor there. I'm glad he's taken action on that but he is no friend to women's rights.

My concern re this is that it sends a very clear message to people who may have been on the fence, and are now questioning things because who would want to align themselves with a viewpoint that Trump shares?

At a very basic level people are likely to link the two ie "Trump bad - anything Trump does must be bad - gender critical views/anti trans stance must be bad" (That's a really simplistic view but I have a sick child and I'm not articulating well)

Nobody wants to align themselves as holding the same views as someone they otherwise find morally repugnant. And many people feel that way about Trump. So yes, I have concerns that it might influence the views of questioning people or those who may have been beginning to question the blind acceptance of trans ideology

@Merrymouse : "I think he doesn't care beyond the short term political win. "
That goes for all issues apparently, see Riyadh on Ukraine.

It's so interesting to read here. No one seems bothered by the incredible waste and graft found going on in the Pentagon, Social Security, Medicare. This + women's rights is what makes Trump so popular. Also illegal immigration.
Legal Hispanics do not want illegal immigration; they voted for Trump 42 %record numbers.
Americans don't want illegals getting social security, housing or medicare or social benefits either.
the racism, sexism, Russian tropes are all pretty dead, just like fascist and Nazi.

Like I said, I'm having trouble seeing this as any kind of victory for 'protecting women'. OK so you've defeated the transes, but to me this seems to be at the expense of the even greater empowerment of every misogynist man.

Who on this board do you think is personally responsible for Trump routing the Democrats? The Democrats and their supporters did that.

I think that there are many, many things we can blame Trump for but that the Democrats hardening their stance on gender ideology is a decision they have taken all on their own.

There are women in Trump's administration, and also gay men afaik.
I had a conversation about this in the pub last night (so everyone slightly tipsy) and met the argument that hormone replacement reduces male strength and that the wheels were coming off trans ideology anyway and so the Democrats would have brought in similar legislation if they saw this was what most people wanted.

We are not in the US and we were in a pub and wanting not to get unfriendly. No actual TRA allies! But group included me, two men just met - pub is open and friendly, no TV, no music, so talking to each other is high on everyone's reason for being there - and my DS plus my dog, whose presence had initiated the contact between us (definite people pleaser!). The consensus was Trump was a bad thing and that his directives were also bad, because the evidence everyone wanted bans on men in women's sports etc isn't there. When it was there the Democrats would have legislated. We ended there and I thought it pointless to continue, having brought up the Peggie v Upton case, which it was generally agreed showed the tide was turning in the UK. The problem is that I am not sure any amount of tide turning without some corrective legislation is going to fix this and Trump has probably kick-started things in the US, but short-term has caused the Democrats to harden their stance. So, yes, I think he might have done damage simply by being him.

Donal Trump didn't talk down to his supporters? Not even when he said

‘Jill, get your fat husband off the couch, get that fat pig off the couch,..‘Tell him to go and vote for Trump, he’s going to save our country.’”
“Get him up, Jill, slap him around...”

I think I detected a slight John Wayne accent in the 'Get him up, Jill' bit, it sounded rather like 'Take 'em to Missouri, Matt'

I don't know if Trump also 'did' accents.
He did however mock a disabled reporter's voice - does that count?

@TempestTost

It's back to this omnicause business. If someone has some kind of issue with illegal immigrants, or for that matter legal ones, that is not the same as racism. Even if their reasons are stupid. (It could also be anti-outsider. Or just not a fan of the immigration policies. )

Lots of us noticed during the campaign how Harris would roll out a new accent for a different audience. A variety of very fake Southern accents for black audiences, a fake Mexican accent for Hispanic audiences. She's a woman from San Francisco who grew up in Canada, and none of that was convincing.

You often find this with Democrat politicians talking to minority audiences. They adjust their accent and dumb down their vocabulary. Biden does it, Hillary does it, AOC does it. Even Obama doesn't talk to a black audience the way he talks to a mainly white audience.

I wonder how this kind of thing would go down in different contexts, like straight men playing camp for a gay audience.

I'm not saying Trump is exactly popular with minorities, though more so than people think, but I think minorities appreciate that he doesn't pander or talk down to them. He speaks exactly the same to everyone, the same way that he's always wearing the dark suit and the big red tie.

I think gender ideology is now on the way out. The spell cast by the trans activists which meant that no one was allowed to talk about it for fear of being booted out of their job, or ostracised by their peers, has been broken. Even though big institutions like the NHS, universities, police etc are still in thrall to it the general public can see what gender ideology means in practice. Politicians, always slow to catch on, are starting to understand that the electorate are really unhappy about the implications of allowing men to claim to be women.

It's one of those things that is impossible to reverse, in my view. In the same way that you can't unbreak an egg or put the genie back into the box or any other kind of analogy you can think of, once people have seen that gender self-ID means allowing six foot, entirely intact men to put on a wig and a dress and use the women's changing room, they're never going to un-see that. There isn't going to be a future in which there's some kind of compromise that allows the "nice" trans women into changing rooms but not the nasty ones.

In fact, all that's going to happen now is that we will simply see more and more coverage of the cases that Genevieve Gluck has been so diligently reporting on in Reduxx: male sexual offenders using gender self-ID as a means to harm women and girls. Now the floodgates have opened (another metaphor!), the flood is only going to go in one direction.

I had the Sting song in my head, too.

It was released in 1987 and the chorus obviously contains a word play on the standard phrase of the time. Otherwise, it would have been incomprehensible twaddle.

I concur about the toast.