Maslow’s Hammer says that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And if you’re an anti-trans obsessive, everything can and should be blamed on trans people, including the US election result.
The narrative already emerging from the anti-trans commentariat on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Kamala Harris campaign failed because of The Transes. And as always with the anti-trans mob, that’s nonsense. The Harris campaign conceded The Trans Issue – how I hate that phrase – completely: it didn’t feature trans people in its campaigning, it didn’t stand up for trans people, and even when given the opportunity to refute the Republicans’ anti-trans scaremongering in direct questioning – by some estimates, as much as 40% of the Republicans’ ad spending was spent on demonising trans women – Kamala Harris flatly refused to do so, calculatedly throwing trans people under the bus in the hope of winning a few bigots’ votes.
But the problem with offering far right lite is that nobody’s buying it. Time and again, given the choice between full-on evil and slightly less evil, people choose the full-fat version. The supposed good guys concede territory to the bad, and having done that the bad guys demand they concede more.
What far-right lite does do, however, is alienate some of your own voting base – without bringing any of the other side across. When the Democrats weren’t throwing trans people under the bus, they persuaded 6% of registered Republicans to vote Democrat. In this election, that figure didn’t increase. It dropped, to 5%, with the Republicans’ total vote numbers remaining roughly the same as in the last election. This wasn’t an anti-trans swing to Trump.
You cannot meet bigots halfway because they lie about where halfway is. You can see that here in the UK: the supposed “reasonable concerns” (which were never reasonable) over trans people were only supposed to be over changes to the Gender Recognition Act; when they destroyed those changes, the bigots then decided they wanted rid of the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act and all other protections for trans people. Supposed concerns over healthcare for under-18s – again, never reasonable – have now expanded to demands for an end to all healthcare for trans adults – demands that as I and many other trans women can attest, are already being met by some GPs and health boards.
The panic is such that organisations are now being attacked for doing things that only the deeply deranged could see through an anti-trans lens; for example this week, Marks & Spencer has been under sustained online and media attack for referring to teenage girls as “bright young things”, a decades-old phrase that the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade have decided is proof of pro-trans pandering.
What we have now is a full-on, mask-off, hoods-on witch-hunt dedicated to erasing every aspect of trans people’s rights and safety until the goal of eliminating trans people completely is achieved – a witch-hunt in which the press is gleefully, hatefully complicit.