Trans-formation

For a group that represents less than one percent of Americans there sure is a lot of churn over transgender people.

It’s literally true that you cannot get through a single day of NPR news programs without hearing a transgender story and exclusively from the point of view of transgender activists. Anyone who raises so much as a question is portrayed as ignorant, unfeeling, transphobic or worse.

On the other hand, while there are plenty of legitimate questions around all this, to hear someone like Ron DeSantis talk about it, you’d think that who uses which bathroom is more important than China, climate change, Putin’s aggression, the economy and the Middle East combined. Faced with obliteration because they’re aggressively on the wrong side of the abortion issue, Republicans are grasping for anything that will give them a foothold. Apparently, they’ve got their polling and their focus groups that are telling them that culture wars issues could be their ticket out of oblivion and nothing is more polarizing than trans stuff.

But when you look at the handful of issues surrounding transgender rights, none of them are especially earth-shattering. Let’s review.

Pronouns. If someone who looks like a man to me wants to be called “she”, well. what’s the big deal? I’ll address her as she wants to be addressed. It costs me nothing to be polite and respectful. On the other hand, requiring people to state their pronouns at the start of a meeting is goofy because we wouldn’t use a pronoun to refer to someone in that context anyway. You’d say, “well, I have to disagree with Alice on this.” It would be rude to say, “I have to disagree with her on this,” as if she weren’t in the room. If someone insists on it, it’s no big deal for that person to say that she prefers to be referred to as she despite apparent evidence to the contrary. It’s no different than saying that I prefer to be called Dave and not David. I do have a problem with using “they” in reference to one person, but that’s easily enough solved by simply avoiding pronouns in that case.

Bathrooms. With so few people being transgender the chances of anyone being confronted with this are very small. It’s never happened to me, but if it did it wouldn’t be any more awkward than what’s become a more or less routine practice of fathers bringing their young daughters into men’s rooms with them. You get over it.

Sports. On this one I agree with almost 60% of Americans who think that people should be required to compete on the team of their physical gender. Athletics is mostly about bone structure and muscles and men have an advantage in those respects, so it’s the physical characteristics that matter in sports, not what someone chooses to call herself. But, on the other hand, I don’t think this rises to the level of government policy. I think Pres. Joe Biden was wrong to sign an executive order on the subject just as I think conservative legislatures and governors are wrong to make policy on it. Leave this stuff to the athletic governing boards to sort out. It’s only a game, people.

Schools. I’m against book banning as a matter of principle, so count me among those who are against pulling books on this subject from school libraries. On the other hand, do little kids need to receive instruction on this topic when they should be learning their alphabet and how to play kickball? No, they do not. That’s why I think the hard-left way over-reacted to DeSantis’ so-called “don’t say gay” bill. It didn’t say that and the hard-left knew it. All it said was that in grades K through 3 there wouldn’t be any formal instruction on these topics. Even opponents of the bill claimed that there wasn’t any anyway. Sure, DeSantis was making an issue where there was none, but the hard-left helped him do it.

Treatments. DeSantis and others on the hard-right want to ban gender affirming treatments for minors. I’m skittish about that myself as it seems it would make sense to wait until a person is through puberty. But what happened to the Republicans’ reverence for the family? If the parents believe that this is the best course for their child then I don’t see where the government gets off intervening. This used to be a conservative point of view.

On some of these things my views line up with those of the majority while on others they’re more liberal, though not NPR-liberal. You can see the results of a Pew Research poll on these issues below. I’m happy to see that two-thirds of us want to protect trans folks from discrimination while only 10% don’t. That’s the most important thing.

But my point today is that none of this should be taking up all of the political and cultural oxygen that it is. Trans people are being used as a wedge by DeSantis and the hard-right while the hard-left is taking a militant and absolutist tone that is just feeding the reaction on the other side. As is usually the case, there’s a reasonable middle ground where we can respect both transgender people and those who have concerns along those lines.

Keep in mind that attitudes are changing fast and young people have no problem with any of this, Give it a decade and none of it will be an issue, but for the next few election cycles, getting out too far could be a problem for Democrats, though it’s nothing compared to the problems Republicans have on abortion.