“people” has one more letter than “women”. That’s a 33% increase.
In a tight race, that might tip the scales.
/s
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I’m pretty sure that the edge cases are people with those concerns.
Do you have any demographics numbers on how many of those people there are?
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“No one is less transphobic than me!”
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Not what I was saying.
I’m sure you know the best transpeople.
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Not what I said, and you know it.
But do you realize how many Happy Mutants are reading your posts in Trump’s voice right now?
Edit: It’s more than 0.00001%…
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First, if you don’t support the rights of EVERYONE, then YOUR rights are vulnerable. Second, you should care about the rights of others, because it’s the ONLY moral and ethical thing to do.
Declaring support for various groups that do not look like you sends the message that the politician will fight for everyone’s rights.
That’s fucking accurate. I would very much like transmen to get the access to reproductive care that they need. Denying that access is transphobic. This isn’t rocket surgery here. Denying basic humans rights based on misunderstanding and fear is phobic behavior.
Considering that many of these issues are literally life and death for transpeople… having a candidate that does not address these issues seems deeply counterproductive. Given how precarious the rights of our trans brothers and sisters are at this very moment in history, it seems an issue that SHOULD be in the top of the list with regards to human and civil rights, which should be a KEY of every single democratic platform, right the fuck up there with health care.
Why the fuck not? Are you afraid that a candidate supporting transrights will lead to an exodus? Maybe fuck those guys.
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Replace “feminist” with "supporter of non cis-het people ", and we’ve pretty much summed it up.
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Indeed; reading that was cringey as fuck.
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These two statements shouldn’t have to be repeated as often as they are.
Dismissing other people’s rights as unimportant because they aren’t of import to you personally makes you an asshole and only ever leads to worse things.
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Okay: One last once. Not that I think anyone’s confused, nor am I McManus-splaining. Before my sad back-and-forthing, I tried to make an argument, specifically:
There is finite time in a presidential election to talk issues, and a near infinite number of them.
Message discipline wins elections. Modern media, with its short attention span, is what carries the message.
Democrats and Progressives have a problem with message discipline, because, ironically, they’re good humans who care about a variety of people and issues.
The principle of ‘Healthcare for pregnant people*’ is contained in the ‘Healthcare for all,’ but not the reverse. And suggesting Democratic Political messaging has to address an issue in such specific terms for fear of being exclusionary then extrapolates to the concern they’ll have to address every isssue in the same hand-carved, finely-detailed fashion for the same reason and for fear of being pilloried.
That was all I wanted to say.
In my first post, I said that the Dems need to avoid small-ball incrementalism and small-demographic purity points. We can have huge systemic change, but only if we win, and in a Citizens United universe that repealed the Civil Rights Act voting laws Democrats are only going to win if they excite a great number of people in a great number of places with a strong and powerful message for as many people as possible, and anything that is not that strong powerful message can go on the Candidate’s web site. That was all I was saying. That I would prefer it if the democratic party had a strong exciting message which, while built on principles of equality, fairness, and services for all individuals, did not feel like it prostrated itself to mention every one of those individuals by name.
“Peace, work, freedom, bread and roses” is a message.
Making sure to note which specific kinds of peace, and what hours of work and observing that freedom applies to the every single one of the following alphabetical list of constituencies and that the gluten-free bread is not vegan and the vegan bread is not gluten-free – adding asterisks – does matter and is important, but not at the cost of clear messaging that prioritizes outreach to convertible non-voters.
I have strong feelings about this, because those strong feelings stem from my weakness: I feel like this era in American politics is making me insane – laws don’t matter, principles don’t matter, true things are false and words don’t mean what they mean – and I feel like I will literally die if Trump is President again, and anything that I think imperils a Democratic victory – voter suppression, Tom fucking Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard’s tanned Thatcher act and what I was talking about at heart, weak messaging by candidates – makes me react strongly and speak strongly from a place of mortal fear.
You can think my words were and are foolish, or hateful or hurtful; my intention and rationalization is irrelevant to your perception, and your reality. And my apology would equally irrelevant to any harm my clumsy wording and clammy panic about the 2020 election has caused you**. But if my original words were about or against anything – and they were assuredly not meant to be against anyone – it was weak/bad/hyperspecific messaging at a time when I worry with real fear that only clarity and bold purpose can end a brutal, undemocratic era that is about much more than Mr. Trump’s vile nature and criminal excesses.
Roughly paraphrasing Mr. Sanders’s recent rally, he said “I want you to turn to someone near you, someone you don’t know, who perhaps may not be your race or age or gender or like you and say ‘I will fight for you as hard as I intend to fight for me.’” That’s what I want to do for 2020, and even fight harder than I would for me because I’m not that great a human.
I just get worried thinking of all the ways there are to fuck this up, and how important it is that we don’t. And if my original post hadn’t included a coarse, broad 4-word parenthetical aside/example, I wouldn’t have brought deserved approbation on myself.
I won’t say anything more about the matter, because I have no defense or clarification to offer beyond this***.
Yours, with the legitimate desire effort to be a better and more empathic human,
Declan.
*‘people,’ not ‘women.’
** This is not a non-apology apology, it is an apology non-apology: if you think I’m worthless, I can also note that you would find my contrition worthless, too. But I am of course aware that my clumsy phrasing may have been harmful to others, which is not at all what I wanted and was very much not the ultimate aim of my original post or its brusque follow-ups.
*** I really want the board to get back to dunking on Mayor Pete’s vision of America as, at best, Richard Scarry’s Busytown.
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For someone who is urging people to talk less about things like trans issues (to save time for other issues or whatever), you have a funny way of effecting that.
Maybe the issue isn’t people talking about supporting trans people in a single line of a speech, maybe it’s the unproductive idiots wasting time telling trans people to shush, fifty times more often than the original mention.
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Like I always say about being a woman and being Black, it has the reverse effect:
The same goes for our Trans brothers and sisters, and anyone else who is systemically marginalized and persecuted.
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It’s funny how some white cis male progressives forget that persecuting and scapegoating specific groups of Others is a core characteristic of the right-wing populist movements that they so vehemently oppose.
Trans people are currently somewhere at the top of the hit list of this vile regime’s base. A progressive who’s telling them to stay quiet in service of a larger goal is the one who needs to shut up and stop “helping” until he starts listening more than he lectures.
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To get things back on topic, Mayor Pete continues to think he knows everything.
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To be fair to Biden, one, two and three are numbers.
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As is zero.
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