Republicans spend millions on anti-trans propaganda to shift public opinion against trans people over several years.
Democrats fail to challenge their narratives and instead try to distance themselves from the issue.
Republicans get free reign over how trans people are framed in the public consciousness.
Democrats decide trans people are too unpopular after all and it would be best to throw them under the bus to be more electable.
If only there was something they could have done on this issue besides giving up preemptively...
It's especially frustrating because republicans support extremely unpopular policies all the time and when polling shows they're unpopular they don't give up or change their minds, they double down and force the other team to compromise or even give up instead.
Democrats rarely even try to do the same.
They are a band of feckless goons who won't stand up for the policies they claim to support. The moment they face the smallest amount of pushback on anything they go further to the right and start talking about how actually they support anti-trans policies and hate immigrants too.
Republicans straight-up make terrorist threats against random entities that are even remotely adjacent to trans people, like children's hospitals or beer companies, and they just give up and drop trans people at the whims of the terrorists.
Would be nice if the rest of that country didn't readily bend the knee to bullies all the time.
Support for gay marriage among Republicans is higher today than it was among Democrats 26 years ago.
And I don't think it's because the gay lobby gave up and went, "Well, I guess we're just going to have to accept that this issue is always going to be too dangerous to take a stand on."
From what I recall similar things happened with issues like interracial marriage. You have to actually fight for unpopular but correct things for them to become less unpopular.
Yeah it's fucking astonishing. When Gay Marriage was a big national debate, the conservative, anti-gay folks said,
"Unlike the civil rights movement, which was based on prejudice over something that doesn't really matter, homosexuality strikes at some of our most fundamental intuitions and beliefs about the nature of men, women, and society, so the left is crazy if they think the issue will ever be anything but deeply controversial."
And now, about a decade later, we get,
"Unlike the movements for civil rights and gay rights, the trans movement involves such complex and foundational issues in human psychology that etc etc."
Genuinely what do people like this think is going to happen if they adopt and legitimize the framing of their opponents at the expense of their own base in an increasingly polarized world?
We saw that work out in the UK. Starmer gets into power primarily due to the other side fucking up, moves to the right, alienates his own base and even invites them to leave if they disagree with his policies, becomes extremely unpopular, resigns after loading the guns the fascists will use to persecute minorities in the near future.
