Trump went to town on Harris’ 2019 response to a question posed by the ACLU about whether inmates should be given taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgery. Was her failure to address this “political malpractice”?
Since Ms. Harris’s defeat, her campaign’s decision has landed in the center of a contentious debate over how large a role transgender issues played in her party’s losses around the country. Several prominent Democrats said Ms. Harris’s relative silence was a damaging concession to Mr. Trump — and evidence that the campaign was so out of step with Americans’ views that it did not appreciate the potency of the ads.
“Malpractice was committed by that campaign,” said Ed Rendell, a Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The issues raise a host of questions, none of which have been adequately answered.
- What compelled Harris to support this position in the first place? She wasn’t a college sophomore, but a United States Senator. Had she not given this any thought? She can’t claim naive youthful ignorance, so she was either pandering to the woke or actually believed this. If the latter, why?
Having taken such a position, did she not realize that she either had to explicitly disavow it or it would follow her? While Harris offered vague claims that she “evolved,” she neither stated she no longer agreed with this position or she was now against this position. Whoever told her that “evolving” was going to suffice as an explanation did her no favors.
Even if she had disavowed her earlier position, it would have rung hollow in the absence of a damn good explanation for why, in 2019 as a senator, she held this position. If her excuse was that she was pandering to the left, then that would make her a panderer. Hardly a strong reason to vote for Harris. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine any explanation for her taking that position that wouldn’t blow up in her face. While that may be a justification for offering no excuse, that would (and did) blow up in her face as well.
What’s wrong with standing up for imprisoned transgender people and their need for medical care consistent with their gender identity? Transgender issues are nothing like lesbian, gay or bisexual issues, other than the historic societal lack of acceptance. But lesbians don’t need surgery on the public dime. Gay men don’t need to wag their penises in women’s locker rooms in front of other people’s five-year-old daughters. Bisexuals don’t demand that people be fired for deadnaming them or refusing to use their preferred pronouns. Acceptance and elimination of discrimination is generically one thing, and something most people strongly support, but there are impositions of the few on the many that diminish some people’s rights for the sake of transgender people’s rights. These need to be addressed, and not merely screamed over by extreme activists and allies, who have done as much harm to the cause of transgender acceptance as help.
But the election was decided on the economy, not transgender issues? Well, yes. no and maybe. That public monies are spent to provide what activists call “gender-affirming” surgery, while detractors call it sex change operations, those are monies that comes from taxes. People pay those taxes. People want their tax monies spent on some thing and not others, and of the others, neither inmates nor “illegal aliens” rank high on the list of reasons for an American child to go without dinner.
People see monies spent on inmate surgery (and the housing, feeding, schooling and medical care of undocumented immigrants) as money not being spent for the benefit of American citizens in need. When there isn’t enough money for Medicaid (or public defenders), how can there be money for inmates to receive gender-affirming surgery? When a family is struggling to put food on the table, using taxes to pay for inmate sex-change surgery is spitting in their economic face. Money is fungible, and money spent on inmate sex-change surgery is money not spent elsewhere, or not taken from working folk at all.
Harris supporters argue that whatever compelled her to answer the ACLU’s question at all, and answer it in the affirmative, no longer mattered by 2024, when she no longer held those views and didn’t campaign based upon being the candidate of the woke. But her failure to deal with this problem, to confront her earlier positions, wasn’t going to disappear because her supporters so dearly wanted it to. Take deeply problematic positions and, well, they stick to you.
Ms. Harris could not dismiss the Trump attacks so easily. Mr. Trump’s most prominent ad used a 5-year-old video clip of Ms. Harris saying that “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to taxpayer-funded gender transitions. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” an announcer said.
I suspect many, if not most, progressives truly believe that they are either in the majority or at least so clearly in the right that there is some righteousness to be had from not taking positions that conflict with woke ideology. It seems like Harris’ advisors were concerned that a full-throated disavowal of her earlier position would offend the left fringe of the Democratic Party, already dubious in their support because of her tepid backing of Israel, and tried their best to not push them further away by taking a swipe at transgender orthodoxy.
But largely the campaign decided the best response was changing the subject. Meg Schwenzfeier, the chief analytics officer for the Harris campaign, said the vice president’s team determined its economic message was the most effective answer.
“In all of our quantitative and qualitative research on this ad, our best-testing responses pivoted to the economy,” Ms. Schwenzfeier said. “These responses not only neutralized the attack but actually moved people towards us — because they showed voters that the vice president did care about you.”
How did that work out for you?
I see “transgender issues” as a stalking horse for the progressive/leftist radicals’ larger agenda of a vague i. e., bureaucratic, apparatchik), but onerous, blood-sucking totalitarian government of overlords. I think the majority sensed this, hence the election of Trump. Transgenderism, particularly the crazed notion that someone can change their sex by thought, is so irrational that it’s hard to argue with, and commensurately can be promulgated only by pressure tactics. It’s not only the subject transgenderism that turns people away from it, but the tactics used to get the public to accept it. The way the progressives/leftist radicals promoted transgenderism was seen as the way they would govern.
As the saying goes, don’t judge a person ’til you’ve walked in their moccasins. Or, at least, have a little sympathy for folks on whom Mother Nature has played a cruel trick. They’re just trying to find a way to fit in and be comfortable.
It’s been about 150 years since there was the first description of what homosexuality is, and there is still a bloc trying to eliminate it via legislation. I don’t know when the transgender issue was identified, but they are just getting started, politically.
As for Harris, you have a lot more freedom of opinion as a senator then a presidential candidate. As the saying goes, where you stand depends on where you sit (or want to sit). There is no reason she would want to defend goofy opinions from the past. Better just to ignore them.
Nobody feels it necessary to walk in creationists’ shoes before judging their ideas and how they should affect policy. And not sure where 150 years comes from. But if we take it as argued that gender and sex really are different, and that gender is socially constructed, the cruel trick has been played by society, not Mother Nature. David Bowie was liberatory. The movement today is not. And teaching nonconforming children that their alienation is a deficiency of Mother Nature’s doing rather than society’s is thoughtless and/or predatory. And big business.
Gemini says:
Terminology: The term “homosexuality” itself was coined by Karl Kertbeny around 1869.
Ah, now I see what you were saying there. It does seems a little Eurocentric, in terms of which historical attempts to describe “what it is” are considered relevant, and ironically that label and conception (i.e., an orientation of sex-based attraction) is itself is being dismantled by the current movement.
The transgender madness is one of the special interests sheltering in the Democratic Party’s big tent. Most likely, a Harris administration would have continued the fiefdoms parceled out by the Biden administration to advance “LGBTQ” interests. I think Harris’s campaign people quite correctly reasoned that this was not going to get them any votes from independent voters trying to figure out how to pay for gas, housing, utilities and groceries. So she didn’t talk about it, but she didn’t disavow it because it was, in fact, still part of the program.
For politicians, the pandering is the essence. But some pandering shows really bad judgment and a tendency to get snookered by righteous flat earther crusades.
The party as a whole got taken in by it so good luck repudiating that from the top without causing chaos in the party. An intelligent discourse on it is probably too much to ask for, but even without it one side of the debate is so evidently more incoherent and toxic, even totalitarian (wikipedia can “deadname” Muhammed Ali but not Rachel Levine). It’s as much the party’s failing as Harris’s that they are saddled with this regressive baggage.
Just as money is fungible, so are votes (to a degree). Within a given Electoral College district (usually a state), no vote is more valuable than any other. How many votes (if any) did her economic plan gain her? How many did LGBTQIALMBNDJI+ issues gain or lose her? I expect the answer is that both were a net loss for her, but the Ds just aren’t willing to have either of those conversations.
One possible response could have been “Not one single inmate has had a government-sponsored gender surgery”–which has the benefit of being (what National Lampoon used to call) a true fact. Then again, that remark could be construed as a confession of ineptitude, as the administration did not build many of the promised EV charging stations or rural wifi towers either.
It’s neither true, nor a fact. It has been done.
I think that would not be a “true fact.” There have been federal cases against the bureau of prisons in which the courts ordered the surgeries as part of taxpayer-funded inmate health care. I’m pretty sure at least the one in Illinois was actually performed, because ACLU did a celebratory propaganda piece on it.
The problem the federal prisons have encountered is lack of an “expert” to say the surgeries aren’t “necessary,” as only the whack-and-stitchers who treat transgender patients and believe in the surgeries are qualified to address the standard of care in their niche specialty.
Gender transition has likely existed for as long as society itself, yet humanity remains. A vast array of body modification is permissible in America and highly popular. I would say with strong certainty that the number of gender transition procedures are dwarfed by the number of other cosmetic surgeries to one’s organs involved in human reproduction.
I understand a level of concern with minors undertaking these types of surgeries but many types of of life altering medical treatments are successfully regulated (consider mastectomy due to genetic vulnerability to breast cancer).
I also have to ask why those who rigorously support freedom of speech are so threatened by the expression of being transgender (to they extent that this reflects an individual’s informed choices).
If this was intended as a parody of the clueless dogmatism of the left, this comment might have been brilliant. Instead, it’s not only completely off-topic, but pretty much why Harris failed so miserably. How did you manage to string all those words together and never once come close to grasping the point?
“I also have to ask why those who rigorously support freedom of speech are so threatened by the expression of being transgender”
I am in favour of freedom of speech, but what about someone being “transgender”, however you wish to define it, gives them the right to dictate MY speech and actions? Freedom of speech works both ways.
>I also have to ask why those who rigorously support freedom of speech are so threatened by the expression of being transgender
As pointed out in the SJ piece (and elsewhere), when the “expression of being transgender” includes having naked men in locker rooms filled with women and young girls, it is an issue. When “the expression of being transgender” means that a man starts participating in women’s sports, putting them at risk of injury and depriving them of the chance at winning a fair contest (along with the lost scholarships, prize money and other accolades), it is an issue.
Your comparison of “transgender surgery” to cosmetic surgery is apt. Very few people have a problem with adults having any sort of cosmetic surgery they want, as long as they pay for it themselves. Most people would have a problem if illegal aliens or prisoners were having cosmetic surgery performed on the taxpayer dime. This goes double for illegal aliens in prison.
Perhaps the worst argument offered by proponents of taxpayer supported, force-of-law backed obeisance is that “transgender issues in sports, locker rooms and prisons occur so rarely that it isn’t even an issue, except for bigots!”. Well if these incidents are so rare, and such a non-issue, then why to proponents of transgenderism push so hard for these laws? I thought it was so rare as to be a non-issue! You can’t have it both ways. Either it is a non-issue, in which case transgenderists should just drop it, or it is an issue, and we all have the right to chime in.
“Meg Schwenzfeier, the chief analytics officer for the Harris campaign, said the vice president’s team determined its economic message was the most effective answer.”
They determined poorly. The economy was a looser for the Democrats, and I was honestly surprised Trump did not dust off and reuse Reagan’s “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago commercial, because for many Americans the answer was a resounding “No.” despite left leaning media and pundits doing everything they could to convince voters inflation is under control and the economy was in great shape.
Her constant flip flopping on nearly every issue didn’t Harris any favors. And what really sealed her fate was saying she’d run things differently than Biden yet going on The View and saying she couldn’t thing of a thing Biden had done she would do differently.
What’s this all about anyhow? Color me confused and befuddled! Nothing new, to be sure. We did not have these discussions when I was growing up. That was the golden era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell . (When almost everyone was “normale,” except those few “hiding in the closet. ” Ahem.)
This is getting tiresome. Honey, could you pass me another Bud? No, keep your clothes on! Am watching the Game now,, babe.