The Democrats Need an Honest Conversation on Gender Identity

[Ingenieur]

An interesting article in The Atlantic today, and a sign the tide might be turning in the USA.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/democrats-dishonest-gender-conversation-2024-election/680604/

Most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.

Baby steps

Ok but it's clear women are pushing against gender ideology as a grass roots movement and bots aren't really necessary for that to happen

I'm not sure why it needs to be mentioned particularly for FWR, unless it's to undermine the reality of what's happening? Women speaking up is probably one of the few things that has started with just the every day woman saying no.

I'm not sure why it needs to be mentioned particularly for FWR, unless it's to undermine the reality of what's happening?

Me neither.

It's very clear that some think the Democrats do not need to have an honest conversation on gender identity, but simply to get better at counteracting bots.

"Hey, all you real people having real discussions about your real experiences. There are lots of fake people saying things on the same topic somewhere else."

Okay...

Thanks for that.

Maybe get a "Bots Exist" billboard or something and stand in the corner with the "Aliens Exist" guy, but I'm not quite sure what we're supposed to do with either of your information.

Yes it's boring.

It's detracting from the point of the thread.

It doesn't actually make any difference to the fact that women voted with their feet or declined to vote at all (in the case of the democratic women who failed to vote because of this issue even though abortion was on the table).

If this poster is suggesting the Democrats should just shrug their shoulders and say 'no one really cares about women's sex based rights and sports and medical transition of children this was all down to bots', well good luck to them in 4 years.

It's quite difficult to counteract bots when you are actually guilty of what the bots are accusing you of.

Quite, @MissScarletInTheBallroom

If this poster is suggesting the Democrats should just shrug their shoulders and say 'no one really cares about women's sex based rights and sports and medical transition of children this was all down to bots', well good luck to them in 4 years.

Yes does that really help them? I think some might go down that path as a way to not deal with the loss, but I doubt it will improve their situation

Didn't someone once say that "gender" made an honest newspaper of the Daily Mail? (Temporarily anyway) The Daily Mail exists to shock its readers and all it had to do to shock the fuck out of people was to keep reporting the bare unvarnished truth about gender. They were the first and sometimes the only newspaper to report the facts.

An interesting article which looks at the suggstions Barack Obama's direct influence remains potent in U.S politics.

"Woodrow Wilson, the only other ex-president who stayed put, had been incapacitated by a stroke midway through his second term and couldn’t leave. Obama announced at the start of his second term he wasn’t going away, and spent the first four years of his post-White House tenure to lead the resistance, and the next four as shadow president.

Obama never hid his role as the real center of power during Joe Biden’s term. When he retired the old man to make way for the candidate he’s preferred since at least 2019, Obama simply grabbed the mic and took center stage. The “Kamala Harris” campaign—whose “New Way Forward” slogan he premiered—was, in reality, just another Barack Obama campaign.

Following the election, he issued a statement shortly after Harris gave her concession speech. This marked another Obama first—no other former president has distributed his opinions to the public in the immediate aftermath of a presidential election, because no previous holder of that office intended to give the impression that he was still involved in deciding the fate of the nation...."

www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/obama-not-going-anywhere

“I'm not sure why it needs to be mentioned particularly for FWR, unless it's to undermine the reality of what's happening? Women speaking up is probably one of the few things that has started with just the every day woman saying no.”

Yes. And not just mentioned though, pushed as a big enough influence to remove responsibility from the Democratic Party’s own strategies.

I don’t think anyone denies that there are bots and troll farms in the world. Just like there are algorithms that act invasively on social media, I haven’t been able to work out whether those algorithms have also been included in the bot / troll farm activity.

“Women speaking up is probably one of the few things that has started with just the every day woman saying no.”

But this above, this has swelled hugely over the past 4 or 5 years and it is important to acknowledge. As it is important to acknowledge that so many families have been directly impacted.

Yes, this is the issue and what the focus of the thread should be. Blaming bots will not help the Dems introspect on how they got their message so wrong that people not only didn’t vote for them, but chose not to vote at all. 2m fewer people voted Trump in than failed to get him in in 2020, so there was no real renewed groundswell of support for him - but 16m did not vote this time and the Dems would be beyond stupid not to take a moment to introspect on why those people stayed home rather than vote for them.

That really is an interesting take @Shortshriftandlethal though it has its own bias of course. I found this part particularly relevant to the discussions on this thread:

"The “folks,” in Obama’s condescending account, were not rejecting the transformative program he championed. Rather, they were reacting, likely irrationally, to phenomena that lacked cause or agency. There have been “price hikes resulting from the pandemic”not historic levels of inflation caused by the Biden administration’s climate change agenda that has transferred trillions in middle-class wealth to Democratic Party donors and clients as well as the People’s Republic of China. There has been “rapid change”which is to say the tens of millions of illegal aliens the Biden administration has ushered across the border in less than four years, spiking crime rates, suppressing the wages of U.S. workers, burdening taxpayers with the cost of education, housing, and other services for noncitizens. In any case, it’s not that this “change” wasn’t progress. It’s just that it may have happened too fast. And these “conditions,” which in Obama’s construction materialized out of the blue, “created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world.”
No doubt this document was read, drafted, and revised dozens of times by a team of Obama loyalists to ensure that every word served a purpose. “Around the world” is intended to underscore the small “d” in democratic—Obama is not talking about an American political party but rather a political system. Trump didn’t beat Democrats, he thwarted democracy by defeating its defenders. In contrast to Harris, Trump is more like a right-wing fascist, or an authoritarian strongman, like Vladimir Putin, for instance. Thus, in the context of democracy, Trump’s presidency is not legitimate. And that calls for resistance."

Yes, obviously wriitten with a Republican minded slant - but nevertheless interesting as to just how influential Obama still is, but also how his 'machine' cannot countenenance any opposition or alternative perspective that cannot be dismissed as being produced by russian bots and other bad actors.

Rule by endless malicious litigations is one of the things that many Trump voters were roundly rejecting, but if this piece is to be believed we can expect these litigations to continue.

Yes, obviously wriitten with a Republican minded slant - but nevertheless interesting as to just how influential Obama still is, but also how his 'machine' cannot countenenance any opposition or alternative perspective that cannot be dismissed as being produced by russian bots and other bad actors.

Very, and I think reflects the general perception on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Exactly. It’s similar to the “far right would agree with you” argument.

I'm still laughing at anti-trans on 😄 Reddit!

Also, my quoted post is a few pages back now, but the part about the pushback against genderwoo being germinated by observing its real world effects, completely ignored. Lia Thomas isn't a bot, the attempts to make Title IX happened in front of everyone's eyes, the fragrant Isla's pink leggings (with the matching suitcase) that the rapist took to the women's jail he was initially sent to, were on many front pages, 15,000 (at least) minors who have undergone 'gender affirming care' in the US, their treatment cost real money, over 120m dollars, Maria MacLachlan was really beaten and was admonished by the judge for not calling her male attacker 'her'. I'll stop now, some people have problems with long posts.

It’s illustrative, but expected, that this has been the reaction. I’m fully aware of the work that you have done; what I’m saying is there are others out there seeking to exploit that. Networks work day and night to amplify messages that clash against one another to create culture wars - and the aim of this? To elect right-wing governments, primarily, or destabilise societies. I’d say they are really getting the upper hand.

I’ll leave you to your thread.

@EyeofOrion

Perhaps start a thread in politics or chat about bots? I fail to see what I'm supposed to do about them.

I’ve been told on another thread that fake, bot-generated memes and videos and ubiquitous and I definitely would have come across one.

I would still really like to see an example of one of these

Perhaps it was only ever to be distracted from the fact that the DP's strategies failed to get them elected and not discuss how the Democratic Party needs to start to listen to the women they have alienated or told that their views on this topic are hateful.

Considering the basic information and very vague discourse that we finally got, I wonder that there was much of significance beyond that?

The policies from the left can be destabilising too, in fact we're seeing a lot of that tension rn as the west try to deal with that legacy

They also have plenty of institutions amplifying their message. They have taken a blow with Trump's win but that doesn't mean those systems are not in place and equally effective

But back to the question if you want the Democrats to do better you'll have to look at more than it's the bots

It wuz the bots wot made me do it 😔

Yes dem bots are to blame for the Democrats surrendering their grip on reality!

shakes fist at the bots

I’ve been quietly following this thread for days, genuinely trying to consider every side with an open mind as I’m still learning and aiming to listen without defensiveness or judgment of ideas that challenge my stance.

But this comment really does come across as, ‘Be careful, your strong voices on this issue might be used by or help the other side, so maybe you’d be better off staying quiet.’ It’s hard not to read that as a roundabout way of saying ‘don’t speak up so much.’

It’s patronising, infuriating, and, ironically, exactly why people like me (someone initially apathetic, unsure of how this would affect my day-to-day real life, and genuinely wanting to understand both sides) have been (thankfully) driven to look deeper into original sources and real world events, and ultimately reject genderism with real conviction.

Back the original OP, with the above in mind I can definitively see how the Democrats might need a convo on gender identity and see how their loss might have been influenced by this.