Some Final Thoughts on the Gender Wars and the Left

The year 2022 is about to be behind us, and 2023 rises in the near distance. The future always begs some questions. Will it be more of the old wine in new bottles? Will I find the lovers best suited to me? And will the left - inasmuch as it still exists to be called such - get its shit together?

One area that guarantees to cause dumpster fires on social media that I wish we could have left in 2021 is the so-called gender debate.

Even though the only hope I see of that ending is a scourge of Republican takeovers showing utterly and finally the irrelevancy of the gender debates loudest performers to the struggles of the working class. I know that was an incendiary mouthful. But as I see no hope that the moderate left has any capacity to resolve this extraordinary debate, what else can I hope for other than a nuclear detonation

You will have already assumed my position on this, and that is to be forgiven given the lines drawn by those performers who claim to carry the cause of trans rights.

I cannot call them organizers.

But you just might be wrong in where you think my thoughts on this struggle lay.

A Pew Poll from mid 2022 sums up best where the vast majorities of Americans are on this issue. I say vast majorities, because being the reputable and thorough poll it is, Pew takes a broad look as well as dives into different ideological and age groups.

Unfortunately, if anything disqualifies the woke scolds, as someone called them, from being called organizers it is that public opinion such as Pew's has absolutely no effect on them.

The poll resonates with me personally, since it jives completely with my anecdotal experience in the workplace, where this issue has come up as official policy is rolled out from upper management, among family, and friends.

An organizer harnesses and mobilizes. They don't scold. They don't put dissenters into "baskets of deplorables." This is the rhetoric of elites and academics who hate the working class anywhere it exists outside their conferences and cohorts.

Pew's headline deck [that blurb following a headline] succinctly summarizes its extensive findings [for those who do not want to get extensive]:

"Most favor protecting trans people from discrimination, but fewer support policies related to medical care for gender transitions; many are uneasy with the pace of change on trans issues."

An organizer would take this information and mobilize the people, the constituency, the workforce, whomever, to securing that those anti-discrimination policies are stopped and that the trans community itself reap the benefit.

"Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults say there is at least some discrimination against transgender people in our society, and a majority favor laws that would protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces," reads the Pew report.

You should see opportunity here for transgender people. I do.

"But" the Pew report goes on "60% say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, up from 56% in 2021 and 54% in 2017."

This is the cue for the woke scolds to come out with their horses and hounds for the blood sport of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist [TERF] hunting. It is with this rising 60% they see their opportunities to malign and castigate anyone who will not conform.

What's gained by this tactic, and what is lost, is the question for the organizer? But, as I noted, these are not organizers.

One prominent social media influencer with a large social media following declared JK Rowling "the world's biggest transphobe." Tens of thousands of "likes" were generated. I found an article in The Harvard Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Law Review titled "America’s War on Black Trans Women."

This is beyond hysterical nonsense, and not outliers as far as framing for these advocates. This is how full of themselves some people have become.

The violence inflicted on trans women, and Black trans women in particular, has so many known associative factors - as journalist Katie Herzog has amply recorded. Sex work/prostitution being the main cofactor. Drug abuse and the drug trade being another. But "America's War on Prostitutes" doesn't have the right ring for GLAAD.

Besides this social media influencer's account, I also follow Rowling on social media. Rowling's opinions are literally indistinguishable from the majority in that Pew Poll. But you'd never know that if you only read the Tweets and screeds of her TERF-hunting detractors.

As a union organizer myself, their haranguing approach has always baffled me. I wouldn't last a minute interacting with my coworkers like this on a campaign. We would have won nothing as a union local against our management were I to delineate 60% of my coworkers as trash and called them such because they weren't, say, communists, like me.

The Pew poll goes on with some encouraging news that shouldn't be dismissed. "Nearly half of adults (47%) say it’s extremely or very important that if a person who transitions to a gender that’s different from their sex assigned at birth changes their name, others refer to them by their new name."

But this is of no matter to the woke scolds if that same 47% say something like former Olympiad Caitlyn Jenner is a man because she was born a male. Too bad: the cup is still half empty, so they're branded TERFs. That has become their red line and their "safe space."

Clearly, the goals and vision of these advocates are different than mine. The winning of broad civil rights for trans people is a minimum requirement. The significant goal is, for them, for us to all "see" and become enlightened to their "new facts" that females and males are interchangeable, that sex is a state of mind more than a determinant of birth.

That is a galaxy beyond our understanding. Some argue it harms women. Some would say it's just bullshit pseudoscience.

Regardless, I return to exploiting what seems like a huge leap forward in this area, where a majority of polled Americans support policies that protect trans people. Unlike other movements, like Black or First Nation civil rights, the significance of trans rights has risen and become acceptable to broad sectors of this largely white country - which might be a topic for another essay, exploring how the swelling "LGBTQIA+" "community" has outpaced significantly the Black struggle.

I am sorry this sentiment has not been effectively exploited as the advancement it is. Instead, it has become bonfires of vanities, egos, and posers. This as a loss. I see these performers as I view some current labor leaders, disconnected from their rank-and-file workers. A disconnect I would say bred from hatred of working-class people.

Those union workers are rebelling. The forces that want to gain tangible rights for trans people should too and purge these clowns. I would argue these so-called trans advocates, to crisscross my allusions, hate the working class too. That's their problem. They're dripping with contempt for working-class people. They're snobs. That's why they haven't an organizer cell in their bodies and are shrews.

As much as I hope they disappear in 2023, I am pessimistic. The people who tired of them are also tiring of the Democrats. Your average moderate Democrat conforms to the Pew poll, too, but gives oxygen to the clownery in a balancing act. In our two-party system, the GOP is the likely alternative, and in its current form, when it replaces the Democrat, it will not give oxygen to any aspect of this fight. The circus will be driven from town, but with it the civil rights most Americans will support will have less legislative support too. And that's a shame.