‘Adopting Panic from the Other Side’: Democrats Stand Up for Trans Rights
Governor talks about his support for transgender Americans in deep-red Kentucky
While some Democrats emerged from their devastating election loss this month voicing a potential willingness to walk away from defending the rights of transgender Americans, others are condemning that position and urging Democrats not to succumb to “panic from the other side.”
Rep Seth Moulton, of Massachusetts, is perhaps the most-prominent of the Democrats to wobble on the rights of transgender youth and others following the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris on Election Day.
Donald Trump and his allies had pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into political advertising in the lead-up to the election which demonized transgender Americans and Harris’ support for them.
But other well-known Democrats — including former White House press secretary Jen Psaki under President Biden and Gov Andy Beshear of Kentucky — are urging their party to hold firm in the face of right-wing bigotry.
“There’s obviously a lot of soul-searching right now going on within the Democratic Party, and that’s a good thing. But what I worry about is that in the course of all of that soul-searching, some Democrats might reach the wrong sweeping conclusions,” said Psaki, now a host on MSNBC. “And there are a lot of issues that fall into that bucket, but one in particular that stuck out to me is transgender rights.
“Republicans spent hundreds of millions on anti-trans ads this election cycle, including one which shows Vice President Harris talking about government funding for gender-reaffirming care for prisoners and detainees. If that sounds like a particularly obscure issue, it is, because it applies to a tiny group of people,” she added, during a segment of her program on Sunday. “And it’s also a policy, by the way, that was in place during the first Trump presidency. Another one of the lines that ran over and over again in the ad and throughout right-wing media is this idea that America is faced with a crisis of boys playing in girls’ sports.
“Now, these ads created the perception that the issues of trans kids playing sports was dominating schools across the country, which is completely false. Some people got pulled into the argument,” Psaki said.
Republicans are manufacturing outrage over what is truly a tiny population of Americans, she said.
“Look, reflection is good, but if that were actually an issue at thousands of schools across the country, it would be worthy of a debate, but there are just incredibly few examples of transgender girls playing in youth sports,” Psaki said. “And when we see those examples, there isn’t evidence that these kids are a threat to safety and fairness. When I say few examples, I mean that if you were to account the examples of transgender girls playing youth sports in any single state, the number often rounds to zero. Take Utah. When a transgender athlete ban was passed there in 2022, there was a grand total of one, one transgender girl playing in youth sports. When South Dakota passed a ban, only one transgender girl had competed in high school sports since 2013.
“In fact, when these bans were making their way through Republican state houses in 2021, legislators in more than 20 states could not cite a single instance in their own state or region where a transgender athlete competing was a problem. And yet, the noise on this issue has been constant,” she added.
Republican outrage over transgender Americans is in bad faith, and Democrats should not follow them, Psaki warned.
“See, Donald Trump and the Republicans have managed to amplify their bad faith attacks to the point that people do have concerns, as misguided and misinformed that those concerns may be. So this is a good time for Democrats to self-reflect about what went wrong and what to do better moving forward, of course, it absolutely is,” she said. “But during that process, it’s important not to yield to manufactured panic and to align with the actual facts before making sweeping claims.
“Echoing and adopting the panic from the other side is not leading. It’s not meeting people where they are. It’s simply falling prey to right-wing propaganda without checking the facts first.”
Meanwhile, the same day, the popular Democratic governor of the deep-red state of Kentucky also was on national television likewise urging his party to continue to back trans Americans and trans youth.
“I vetoed one of the nastiest anti-LGBTQ bills my state had ever seen — in my election year,” Andy Beshear said in an interview on the CBS News program, Face The Nation. “But I did two things.
“Number one, I talked about my life. To me, that’s my faith where I'm taught that all children are children of God, and I wanted to stick up for some children that were being picked on in a pretty rough bill,” he said. “But the second thing is that the voters in my state knew the very next day, I’d be working on jobs; I’d be opening a new health clinic, the first hospital in an African-American neighborhood in 150 years. We just cut the ribbon on. We created two pediatric autism centers in Appalachia so people won’t have to drive two hours.”
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