Why do Dems want to die in the trans sports ditch?
Ex-men jocks who want to slam around women athletes are not the bullied, they're the bullies.
The sacred right of transgender ex-men jocks to whomp hell out of real women has been central to the transgender rights movement since 2013 when the New York Times launched the era with a long lament that mixed martial arts bruiser Fallon Fox wasn’t being allowed to beat up women for money.
When Fox then did get paid to fight against a real woman, Tammika Brents, Fox broke her skull:
But that didn’t cause the liberal establishment to re-evaluate their latest and increasingly greatest cause.
Perhaps Donald Trump winning a second term in no small part because he’s in favor of men beating men and women beating women for pay, but not men beating women might cause Democrats to reconsider.
Or perhaps not.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) is an ambitious guy who has been trying hard to assemble a Presidential-sounding resume. He’s a little like the Democratic J.D. Vance, but without the spectacular rise from the depths of society (Moulton comes from the upper middle class). But his credentials are impressive: e.g., he majored in physics at Harvard, then served four tours in Iraq as a Marine Corps officer, winning a combat bravery medal, then got an MBA at Harvard Business School to see how the private sector works. But, he’s a youngish straight white man, which is a tough row to hoe in the Massachusetts Democratic Party if you want to first move up to governor or senator to burnish your Presidential timberhood.
He briefly tossed his hat in the White House ring in 2019, but generated even less support than Kamala did.
Since the latest election, he’s spoken out against the Democrats’ most telling Sacred Cow: the inalienable right of male jocks like Fallon Fox and Lia Thomas who have announced that they are female to trample real female athletes into the dust beneath their chariot wheels.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Mr. Moulton said. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
According to both a Democratic PAC that tested Trump’s ads for Kamala’s campaign and Bill Clinton, the Democrat with the best political instincts of his generation, the Trump ads against the Democrats’ policy of encouraging ex-men to brutalize women on the rugby field and basketball court were barn-burners with voters still on the fence.
So, the ambitious Moulton had put his finger right on a key issue, one that centrist voters found had validated GOP charges that Democrats had lost their marbles in recent years over Diversity.
But, as Moulton quickly discovered, the problem with warning his fellow Democrats to not go nuts over a tiny fringe group is that they largely had already gone nuts over a tiny fringe group. From CBS News:
Gov. Maura Healey says Rep. Seth Moulton was "playing politics" with trans athletes comment
By Neal Riley
November 13, 2024 / 1:07 PM EST / CBS BostonMIDDLETON - Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey on Tuesday knocked Rep. Seth Moulton for "playing politics" with his post-election comments about transgender athletes. …
Healey, the first member of the LGBTQ community to serve as governor in Massachusetts, was asked for her take on Moulton's stance. …
"I also think it's important in this moment that we not pick on particularly vulnerable children," she told reporters in Middleton. "And you know that's what I've been disappointed in seeing."
I think one reason for the ascent of transgenders (along with black women) to the peak of the woke pyramid of privilege is that many women imagine that anybody who declares themselves transgender must be a helpless victim of bullies, and they need her motherly protection. Because of the enormous censorship of the facts about many of the most prominent transgenders, it never occurs to many women that the type of ex-men who want to pound volleyballs into the faces of real females and body check girls into the boards at the hockey rink are not the bullied sissy boys, but are ultra-bullies themselves.
To pick an opposite example, I knew a little boy who was extremely effeminate, the epitome of the kind of person the nice white ladies imagine Lia Thomas and Fallon Fox must be. On Christmas, he'd play with his girl cousins' and their new toys, explaining, not unreasonably, "I only play with girl toys, that's just the way I am."
He liked dressing up as a girl, but he didn’t want to play on girls’ sports teams. Why would he ever want to do something so butch as be on a softball team? Maybe if there were a girl’s water ballet team or rhythmic gymnastics team, but softball? Maybe if they had cuter uniforms. But, really, he’d much prefer to design the team new, more chic uniforms than to wear a uniform himself.
So, I’m against bullying extremely gay boys like this. But I’m also against autogynephilic males who are the epitome of toxic masculinity bullying female athletes.
“One lesson I would be quick to draw from [the 2024 election]: Americans are not interested in seeing biological men punch women in the face at the Olympics… If that sounds like ‘Transphobia’ to you, you are the problem.” — Sam Harris
How to explain how/why the politicized Transgenderist Movement occurred and gained so much apparent success?
We need more time, I think, to understand it. Along with the meaning of many of the bad trends that seemingly emerged in the 2010s, or that at least "came to a head" in that decade.
The obvious explanation is that the Gay Marriage movement, of ca. 2003-2015 (?), was felt to be winding down by mid-2013, and no longer served the kind of useful purpose it had over years of then-recent memory. Something new was needed to carry forward the energy. Then, once an elite agenda-setting element embraced it, political Transgenderism became part of ideological-coalitional politics. (There were no "adults in the room" to say "stop this nonsense right now.")
But something feels missing in whatever single explanation I hear or can imagine.
The theory has been proposed, by Mr. Sailer indirectly at least, that Barack Obama may be responsible for the Transgenderism movement. Indirectly. By whipping up something called "identity politics" in his 2012 re-election campaign.
Obama's campaign was targeted at the Eternal Villain, the White-Christian Heterosexual Male and that Eternal Villain's water-carriers and dupes. The theory, as I interpret it, continues as follows: The anti-White Male energies spilled over and, as a "social contagion" mutated into a free-floating anti-heterosexualism. This ended up becoming a serious force (as seen by the sharp drops in girls being socialized into quasi-adult consciousness in the 2000s and 2010s identifying as full-heterosexual).
The whole thing was a little bit of a dilemma, given that a huge majority of people -- even agenda-setting elites -- are full-heterosexual "cisgenders." But mid-2010s Transgenderism adapted itself successfully, cycling through the culture over the coming 5-10 years.
The whole thing finally met "steel" sometime in the early 2020s, of course symbolically with the Trump-2024 win. Kamala, the worst presidential candidate in U.S. history an "empty vessel extraordinaire," had the bad luck of jumping on the Transgenderist Train in 2019, near its peak.
The above is a hypothesis for how a politicized Transgenderism -- implausibly, laughably -- became a plank of "the Left" by the end of the 2010s, starting in or by late 2013. Maybe nobody jumping on the early bandwagon in 2013-2015 could foresee where it would go, but the whole thing followed its own logic within our system.
Anyway, the "Obama-2012 reelection strategy" hypothesis doesn't feel like it has the explanatory power to get over the finish-line. Effect, not cause?