Avoidable Future Not Avoided

I don't want to live in Hungary to get a material understanding of sex back because I won't get it that way. What I'll get from this administration that you so elegantly helped elect is a fundamentalist religious understanding of gender.

I won't want single mom's and homeowners losing tax deductions in trade for a reality based approach to the cluster of forces and effects that we call ‘genderism' or ‘gender fundamentalism' or ‘gender identity ideology.’ I don't want college students paying taxes on scholarships in trade for my sex-based based rights or the safety and dignity of incarcerated women.

I don't want gay men and lesbian women un-married. I don't want Comstock come backs. I don't want to ‘annex' anything. I don't want ICE raids in exchange for clear and accurate medical information about cervical cancer or breastfeeding.

Because all this is is getting to the square we stood on in the 1950s. There are men out there talking about how great a lobotomy renaissance might be. I don't want to lose the vote or rights to my own money just to so I don't have to hold a boundary around pronouns.

It's dumb that we're here. Because we can admit to our embodied nature, preserve women's dignity and rights, safeguard kids from predatory surgeons, and let girls win their college scholarships in track all without harming any trans or queer folk.

We may have to ask them to be more intersectional and include the needs of women in their analysis and demands, but we do not have to let these rapacious conservatives hunt them for political gain. And that's what you've done.

Yes, you, Democrats. You let the right have a bunch of women voters.

Once again, you did not listen to actual feminists. You did not want to admit that ‘the most vulnerable community' is actually really complex and internally contradictory. You wanted an angel to fight for, a pure and just and shining cause. Well, this is not it.

You can tell me how few of these folks there are all day. All I will do is wonder why we have to move heaven and earth for such a tiny minority, and do it in a way that A) so easily plays into the hands of the worst right-wing reactionaries, and B) makes a bunch of your natural consitutency vote for them in a disordered sense of self-defence.

The trans and queer community includes lots of perfectly reasonable, regular folks who just want to live their authenticity. Such people understand that they live in a world other people and that not every part our selves belongs everywhere in our lives. If you act like a boss at home you probably won't have good relations with your kids. If you wear your BDSM gear to the office, you're doing to creep out some co-workers.

Because, as we keep learning, every community has its bad actors, and operating as if they don't exist gives your political opposition loads of free time to stomp on you and exasperates your constitutents.

Had you taken a more level-headed and respectful approach, rather than the well-funded lawfare one, to the tensions created by including ‘gender identity’ inside the concept of ‘sex' … a rapist would not be sitting in the White House this very minute.

He ran political ads monstering trans people, good hearted educators, and you 24/7 for six weeks. That and saying everything and its opposite is how he won. He could do it because there really are egregious cases and trends of men in women's prisons raping the women there, there really are AGPs masturbating in public toilets, there really are all the boogeymen … in addition to traumatised or stigmatised kids who thing they HAVE to transition because people think gender is nature who are then just pharmland for unaccountable surgeons and Big Pharma. There are complexes of vulnerability, and harm, and cause, and effect here. Taking women's concerns seriously would have been the move.

Addressing them clearly like adults would have given us President Harris.

Instead, we get to a fight very well organized christobromagalarchy bent on social and military violence for the next … generation?

Try doing that when they take the vote from women.