Somewhat grown up piece from Trans US Representative

[NumberTheory]

Sarah McBride, the first TiM to be voted into the House of Representatives in the US talking about why the trans movement lost in the US in the New York Times. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that the goal of gender replacing sex everywhere is an unreasonable one, but it is a thoughtful examination of what the activist movement in the US did and how and why it was a failure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-sarah-mcbride.html

https://archive.ph/xOmav

There it is. ‘Swung right’. I guess McBride knows US politics infinitely better than me but there’s a huge right wing case for trans liberation. Because I am British, McBride sounds so right wing on trans rights to me - all about the state getting the hell out of their life, certainly nothing leftish like trying to establish if a definable group of people actually might need additional support to realise their potential or what a supportable version of participation in society might look like. Though at least there is a little playing around with the idea that wedging LGBTQI+ all into one homogenous group might not have been the best idea. And a very muffled acknowledgment that trying to put themselves forward as a marginalised person isn’t really going to land with most people

Not WHY though. Not actually saying what the differences are in those categories, just that voters have different views on the categories when you poll them.

Theres two words missing as well. Woman and women.

I think Americans do tend to understand their rights in terms of individual freedom, whether left or right wing.

Little House on the Prairie could not happen in the U.K.

I think he's just wrong about this part.

"Candidly, I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion. We’ve lost the art of change-making over the last couple of years. We’re not in this position because of trans people. There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds — rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support. We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago."

The issues I had in mind that negate the contact hypothesis cluster around two opposite groupings of behaviour. 1) isolating themselves, timidity, anxiety, absenteeism, easily upset 2) demanding, overbearing, controlling, intimidating.

I’m not convinced most people, particularly those who are unaware or unconcerned about the erosion of women’s rights, care about pronouns or being alongside someone with ‘odd beliefs about their sex’. What they mind is being around people who are often emotionally dysregulated. Like most species, humans find it hard to ignore dysregulation in others.

Mediation/ ‘training’ that places demands on others to do things differently tends to be tolerated to the extent the ‘asks’ are deemed to be reasonable. If they then deliver the asks, yet frequent dysregulation continues - this only serves to further negative perceptions.

The solution to this is providing trans people with mental health supports/ interventions that build resilience and social skills training that support effective interaction.

Yeah, McBride is a very corporate Democrat straight out of the Biden school, and not one of the rainbow keffiyeh lefty types in the party. Which means he might be capable of reflecting on where transactivism went off the rails - though yes, a complete inability to see women which is all too common in men who want to be women.

The American context is very different, but it's influential here at least partly because Stonewall took so many of its cues from HRC and GLAAD. I'd argue that Stonewall adopting an Americanised paradigm was a big part of how it misjudged things.

I also think about Andrew Sullivan's warning to gay activists after Obergefell not to be sore winners. Sullivan by instinct is a golden bridge man, who understood that gay marriage was a novel thing and lots of people would have to be reconciled to it. And there would be legal issues with conservative Christians working in wedding-adjacent businesses like bakers and florists. So there was Brendan Eich's ousting at Mozilla, and there's that baker in Colorado who's been dragged into court multiple times for not icing slogans on his cakes. It's as if the gay movement, who used to be great at making friends and persuading people, suddenly said, "fuck it, we've won, we get to be the bullies now." That stuff gets noticed, even by people who don't have much affinity with the targets.

So even if there was an increasingly positive attidude towards gay people, I'm not sure that transfers to the gay organisations who had achieved everything they set out to achieve, were flush with money and political clout, and decided they didn't need to do any more persuasion. So the small pivot was towards targeted punishment beatings towards people they saw as being on the wrong side of history, and the big pivot was towards trans, a very novel set of demands with a lot more impact on others (though the gay men who run the orgs aren't very good at noticing women).

This might be what McBride and Klein are getting at, though it's easier for them to blame campus revolutionaries than the big LGB orgs that became TQ+ orgs, which are still massive players in Democratic politics.

I wish someone over here would sit down with Ben Summerskill and get his take on this history.

It's going to be a hard sell to be openly pretending to be the opposite sex and wanting to everyone around you to pretend, too. Its putting a lot of work onto others, and there are going to be times when its not possible to pretend.

And its where the pretence ends that will always cause issues.

I cant see how trans people would actual ever want 'women/men light' status? To have the rights of the opposite sex to a point? Therefore they are always to going to push forward and clash with women rights.

I think the postion we are in was inevitable.

Isn’t this the person who declared that he was going to use the female bathrooms in the Congress building , in spite of the fact that his office suite comes equipped with a private bathroom just for him?

(Ive used birth sex pronouns for this person for clarity, not insult. )

Congress passed a motion specifically banning ‘transgender’ ‘’women’ from using the female facilities in Congress. They made no secret of the fact that it was targeted at him, because he had made it clear that his intentions were confrontational and transgressive ( sorry for the pun).

So I would take any reflection as a Napoleonic retreat ( pour mieux sauter)

That's right. He declared his intention to use the female facilities before even arriving in Congress.

And he might have got away with it, if not for Nancy Mace. I don't care what political disagreements anyone has with Nancy Mace, she's a useful woman to have around.

Another word that was missing was "listen". Certainly not "if we listened we might realise that maybe the other side do have some useful points - not about about everything but about some things - and maybe we will change our minds and realise some of the things we want right now really aren't that good after all, maybe not for us or maybe not for other people. And we'll all be the better for knowing that." It was much more "if we say the right things at the right time then in the end we'll get everything we want".

I was also struck by the emotional argument which McBride laid out very clearly around pronouns. McBride's argument was along the lines of trans people feelings are so very strong that they define who we are, and (implicitly) everyone has the right self definition because America. McBride tried to dismiss pronouns as "easy". Either someone is mistaken about how to use pronouns, in which case we forgive them, or they are purposely using the wrong pronouns in which case they are bad people. McBride leaves no room for all the situations where people "know" someone else's sex as intensely as anything thw other person "knows" about themselves. A woman (or indeed man) viscerally knows what sex raped them no matter how the rapist identifies. A parent viscerally knows what sex of baby they bonded with no matter what that baby say about themelves later. And then it is not "easy" but excruciatingly painful to have to use the wrong pronouns. I guess for Mcbride's world that's just wrongthink and we'll all grow out of it in the end when we're all as enlightened as McBride.

I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion.

In other words, they've lost the ability to pull the wool over people's eyes.

We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.

Their strategy has stopped working because people are waking up to the fact that other people have rights too. Particularly women and children who are viewed by the trans lobby simply as validation tools but not as real people with rights and needs of their own.

And they are in this position because of the trans movement. Treating more than half the population as subhuman was never going to be a successful long-term strategy. And the trans umbrella which covers everyone from gender non-conforming children to part-time crossdressers to people who've had their bodies surgically modified, with equal 'rights' being advocated for everyone under that umbrella, was always going to run into problems eventually.

If they wanted more acceptance they shouldn't have recruited children into this ideology and tried to convince everyone that there's no difference between a little boy who likes to play with dolls and abusive males like Isla Bryson and Sarah Jane Baker.

Yes, I completely agree, and you have expressed that very well.

I only skim-read the interview, partly because some of it was rather annoying, but there was an interesting part where he acknowledged that people have their own pain to deal with. The marginalisation discourse usually only recognises the pain of those deemed to be marginalised, which is certainly not the parents (or wives, children, siblings) of trans identifying people. But in fact they have been totally marginalised because their stories have not been permitted to be told; I think that is now changing.

This.

There's a really interesting discussion of this on the BARpod subreddit. Some great comments.

Ezra Klein and Sarah McBride: How to Beat Back Trump on Trans Rights — and Much Else : r/BlockedAndReported