Less than a week away from the midterm elections, and things are looking dire for the Democrats — who could lose both House and Senate in a possible “red wave.” And if the Dems lose on both a national and a state and local level, things could be even more dire for trans people and their allies, who face a plethora of bills that could curtail their rights to free speech and, some warn, possibly even their rights to live as trans in public.
The anti-trans rhetoric in the political arena seems to grow worse by the day; Fox News’s Tucker Carlson talks menacingly about “World War Trans,” whatever that means. Violent right-wing protesters, some of them outright Nazis, disrupt Drag Queen Story Hours. Today, Tulsi Gabbard, now a Republican, declared that doctors providing trans youth with gender-affirming care should be locked up.
As Slate notes, the very
bodies of transgender Americans are on the ballot … Florida is denying adult Medicaid patients access to gender-affirming hormones and surgery; many states now mandate that trans teenagers develop certain secondary sex characteristics against their own wishes and those of their parents, who may be charged with abuse if they seek care for their children. Should a mother who helps her child obtain desperately wanted puberty blockers be sentenced to life in prison, as a Michigan bill would allow? … Any shift in the margins of Republican-led legislatures—a few more fanatics here, a smaller majority there—will determine exactly how far the party’s punitive crusade for gender conformity will go.
And right now, the voting rights of trans people are on the line, as voter-ID laws may enable unsympathetic poll workers to stop trans people whose ID doesn’t reflect their gender identity from voting at all. This could affect hundreds of thousands of trans Americans and tilt the election results to be even more of a victory for reactionary forces.
The Advocate lays out the math:
A September report from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimated there are 878,300 voting-eligible transgender adults in the U.S. Almost half, or approximately 414,000, live in one of the 31 states that require or request that voters show some form of ID. Of those, nearly another half, or 203,700, have IDs that don’t reflect their gender identities and the names they go by.
Some unknown percentage of these people will be turned away at the polls, losing a fundamental right because their IDs didn’t match the way they now look or the name they now go by.
This makes it all the more imperative for everyone who opposes the assault on trans people and LGBTQ+ folks more generally to vote next week.
And that’s not even mentioning the threats to women’s rights and, you know, the survival of democracy itself.
VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! Vote as if your life depends on it because, once again, it does.
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Yeah, it’s not hypothetical.
I have been stopped from voting before. Fortunately for me I was persistent, came back hours later and encountered more resistance but overcame it. Although this was 20 years ago (before Oregon had universal vote by mail) it was in “liberal” Portland, so I have no doubt that that I wasn’t the only one.
I wrote about this on my blog a while back b/c some asshole said that “surely” trans people weren’t being denied the right to vote.
You can read my longer statement on trans voting rights here.
There’s some evidence that things may not be that dire, as the “red wave” is probably an illusion caused by too many junk polls heavily biased towards older conservative voters being included in the aggregations. One good sign is that the turnout among under-25 voters is normally low and largely conservative (US liberals don’t typically start voting until their late 20s or early 30s) but the registration of younger people is unusually high for an mid-cycle year, and the majority as Democrats. Not a large majority, mind you, but that’s a big difference from the usual small minority.
But Red Wave, Blue Wave, down to the wire, or anything else, the current state of politics is never a good excuse not to vote if you can (I’m aware there are some people who realistically can’t). I’ve voted in every election since I was 19 because I take everyone’s quality of life seriously.
I think the red wave is actually likely to be worse than people think, at least in the House and in state legislatures. For one thing, there is a long term trend that midterm elections are decided by votes against the status quo. But this trend is not equal. Anger towards Republican presidents does not push progressive talking points. But anger towards Democrats does push Republican cultural issues. Even if Democrats lose few seats, they will be trading their most pragmatic and conservative Dems for future Newsmaxx hosts, and the electorate appears to be ok with it.
Just once before the camps open I want to hear the “both parties are just as bad” lot admit that okay, maybe one side is a smidge worse.
The same faction has spent decades claiming that women don’t really want abortions and are deluded by greedy predatory doctors, and here they’re making the same fundamental argument.
Mr. Parasol and I took advantage of early voting a couple days ago.
I’m hoping the under-40 folks start voting in numbers, because the over-60 folks seem determined to turn the whole planet into their funeral pyre.
That’s it. I’m getting me mallet
I’m glad I have a kitty to pet. And a doggo is available at the neighbors.
As someone who’s been voting by mail for a while (like everyone in California gets to, because we still mostly believe in democracy here), my pet peeve is that I should be excused from getting mailers or having to see TV ads about politics. Once that baby’s in the mailbox, I ought to be magically exempt.
@GSS ex-noob:
As someone who’s been voting by mail for a while (like everyone in California gets to, because we still mostly believe in democracy here), my pet peeve is that I should be excused from getting mailers or having to see TV ads about politics. Once that baby’s in the mailbox, I ought to be magically exempt.
Oh, lord—I remember the U.S. Presidential campaign season from 2008; I was a voter who had never expressed a partisan affiliation, in a traditionally pivotal swing state. From the standpoint of electoral desirability, that made me the equivalent of a supermodel who owns a sports bar; every night I’d come home to find my landline answering machine full of several minutes of political spam. The capper came the time I’d received a robo-call inviting me to a Virtual Town Hall via conference call; my consent was evidently superfluous, since the proceedings then played out over the phone and were duly recorded.
I just don’t get why conservative cis folks are so scared of trans people. I mean the rank-and-file, not the fearmongers. I’ve never once been accosted in a public restroom (by anyone, actually) or even had any pro-trans pamphlets handed to me or anything. I guess they believe the cynical fearmongers and not their lying eyes?
GSS ex-noob: I’ve been wishing that for as long as I’ve been a permanent voter-by-mail, which is over ten years now.
Could it be gay panic? I.e., they fear they might find someone attractive, then discover they have a little something extra in their pants, and therefore OMG I’M GAY!!! NOOOOOOOO!!
Of course, it doesn’t work like that … if the only reason you were attracted was feminine traits, that only makes you gay if you’re feminine too. But “it doesn’t work like that” doesn’t tend to be a convincing argument to these types on any topic (as witness, say, their response to facts and data about climate change).
But it would explain why it’s trans women particularly who seem to offend them, and why they’re obsessed with genital inspections and the like. They want to be assured that no skirt anywhere is concealing a penis. It’s that simple. Combine with their homophobic belief that being gay would be the most horrible, awful fate imaginable, and you get the recipe for existential terror.
I almost sympathize with the fuckers … for a conservative, it must be like living through a zombie apocalypse and not knowing who might have been bit … and if you guess that wrong, you’re next. But they’ve kind of done this terrorizing to themselves by investing so much emotionally in their particular, extremely homophobic worldview.