Michelle Goldberg’s latest in the New York Times is about how Nancy Mace is a big old meanie for telling Sarah McBride to GTFO women’s bathrooms.
It’s hard to imagine how terrifying it must be to be a trans person, or the parent of one, in America right now.
Not really. It’s like being anyone else Republicans hate, but with more narcissism. The essay is a great illustration of centrist self-defeat, though.
Donald Trump and his party, having triumphed in an election in which they demonized trans people, seem hellbent on driving them out of public life. Democrats, some of whom blame the party for staking out positions on trans issues that they couldn’t publicly defend, are shellshocked and confused.
Obviously, some Democrats are based and the ones like Goldberg are confused. Trans is a radical, obnoxious demand to replace physical sex with bullshit in all areas of public life. She understands this, because she supports some nebulous idea of “trans rights” except for all the bullshit trans activists actually demand:
I say this as someone who has been called a TERF, a contemptuous acronym that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, more times than I can count. For a decade now, I’ve been trying to balance a belief in the rights of trans people with my skepticism of some trans activist positions. I’ve written with a degree of sympathy about feminists who’ve been ostracized for wanting to maintain women’s-only spaces. I believe that the science behind youth gender medicine is unsettled, and I dislike jargon like “sex assigned at birth” that tries to mystify or elide the reality of biological sex. (Except for rare exceptions, doctors don’t “assign” sex, they identify it.) I care very little about sports, but it seems dishonest to deny that male puberty tends to confer advantages on trans women athletes.
This is how she euphemizes her “Die TERF cunt!!!” hate mail:
Occasionally, I receive angry or plaintive messages from trans people accusing me of helping America down a slippery slope that has brought us to our lamentable present, when discrimination against trans people has been normalized to a degree that recently seemed unthinkable.
And then there was the time they tried to hurt North Carolina:
During Trump’s first presidential campaign, he said his trans supporter Caitlyn Jenner was welcome to use whatever bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower. At the time, North Carolina’s bathroom bill, which resulted in economically painful boycotts of the state, was widely seen as a self-inflicted wound.
Eight years later, anti-trans rhetoric was a central part of the Trump campaign; between Oct. 7 and Oct. 20, more than 41 percent of pro-Trump ads promoted anti-trans messages. Over a dozen states now have laws restricting trans people’s access to single-sex bathrooms. In the face of this onslaught against a tiny and vulnerable group of people, there’s pressure on liberals to keep any qualms we might have about elements of progressive gender ideology to ourselves.
LOL 41%.
We can now see that North Carolina was ahead of its time. What Goldberg can’t bring herself to admit is that Donald Trump took the same journey as all of us: it seemed mean-spirited initially, but in the meantime we learned more about trans people and didn’t like what we learned one bit.
I think underneath this passage is seething resentment that threatens her very self-image as a Good Person:
That’s one reason, despite my interest in sex and gender, I haven’t written about these debates as much as I otherwise might have. But I’m increasingly convinced that this widespread reticence hasn’t served anyone very well. The basic right of trans people to live in safety and dignity, free from discrimination, should be uncontested. But evolving ideas about sex and gender create new complexities and conflicts, and when progressives refuse to talk about them forthrightly, instead defaulting to clichés like “trans women are women,” people can feel lied to and become radicalized.
She’s not confused, either.
In 2023, for example, Joe Biden’s administration proposed a common-sense rule that would prohibit outright bans on trans girls and women in school sports, but allow for exceptions to promote fair competition and prevent injury…
Politically, nuance is a harder sell than certainty. But it’s more honest, and honesty is what’s needed in the face of a coming tsunami of malicious MAGA propaganda.
When the truth is simple, “nuance” is a hard sell because it’s bullshit. It’s not honest at all. She’s not doing what she recognized the need for above: defending the concept that there should be even one boy on a girls’ sports team anywhere. Liars start talking about “nuance” and “complexity” when a situation is simple but they don’t like the straightforward conclusions.
Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican rapacious for media attention, is campaigning to extend the congressional bathroom ban to all federal buildings, including museums and airports.
Rapacious is an interesting term here because Mace has mentioned her status as a rape survivor in all of her public statements on this topic. Even a Good Person like Michelle Goldberg can’t resist the fun of some self-righteous bullying. Her anger at the transes gets displaced onto Mace.
I’ve been to the left of Democrats my whole life, so it was crazy seeing footage of Mace and thinking the world is healing despite knowing what a Republican is. Fuck, it feels good to win something. The transes are such obnoxious liars that Republicans get to be the brave truth-tellers and it doesn’t even cost them anything.
The conclusion is incoherent:
The new administration will most likely attempt to ban Medicare and Medicaid coverage for trans people’s hormone therapy, meaning some could be cut off from drugs they depend on. At a time when some parents of trans kids have fled red states to protect medical care they see as essential, the Trump administration wants to prohibit such treatment for minors nationally.
There’s some ideological ground that Democrats should retreat from. But then they need to find a place where they will stand and fight.
In other words, Michelle Goldberg thinks it’s important to fight for child sterilization despite publicly agreeing the evidence is weak. It’s almost like she’s crying out for Republicans to finally save us from this menace. She’ll keep making liberals lose as long as it takes. This is the essence of centrism.