Who Deserves Equality?

What is politics without identity?

November 25, 2024

A NOTE: For any of my readers who are trans, this article will discuss a lot of the recent arguments you know about I’m sure. If that’s not something you want to see right now I totally understand and suggest skipping this one.

Sometime yesterday, a little-known app named “Bluesky” you may have heard of recently was aflame because of some of its newer users.

Several of these users invented a new moniker for Elon Musk, dubbing him “Elonia”. According to them, this is meant to remark on Elon’s consistent presence at Trump’s side, and distinct absence of his wife Melania.

Bluesky has been a sort of safe-haven for trans people over the past few years. A place where they could interact, use social media to enjoy themselves without a ton of political talk gumming up the gears, and generally avoid the fact that they’ve been used as pawns in the political games of the powerful.

That’s all changed and many were, rightly in my opinion, outraged by what they were seeing.

I’m going to avoid putting here exactly what these posts were as I don’t think it’s really necessary. 98% of my readers are from Bluesky and I’m assuming the rest know how to use Google so we’ll move past all that.

This morning my inbox was greeted with an interview in The Free Press of Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. If you haven’t been following his career in the past two weeks or so, Moulton has been quite vocal about identity politics.

“We’ve worked so hard at becoming tolerant that we’ve become intolerant,” Moulton, who represents the suburbs north of Boston, told me Wednesday.

The hate started exactly two weeks ago, when Moulton told The New York Times, in an article explaining why Kamala Harris lost, that the Democratic Party had become overly focused on trans issues.

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told the Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” 

Now, I’ve had many people on Bluesky and Twitter over the past few years tell me something similar. I always have a question for them I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer to:

“If you replace ‘trans’ with ‘black’ or ‘woman’ or ‘Asian’ or ‘immigrant’ is it still identity politics we shouldn’t be bothering with?”

I don’t think Moulton should be afraid to say that as a Democrat, but I do think he should feel bad about saying it as a human being.

Would Seth have argued the same thing about African-Americans sitting at lunch counters? Because they didn’t just get beat up politically, they literally got beaten up.

Would Seth have argued that America just wasn’t ready for women’s suffrage so those women fighting for it needed to step aside because it was hurting the party nationally?

What about same-sex marriage? What about the Civil Rights Act of 1974 that prohibited discrimination when applying for credit? Was that one too uncomfortable to defend?

James Carville even had the gall to say this in the same article:

James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist, called identity politics “one of the great self-inflicted wounds of the century.”

Which century? Certainly not the 20th where it defined all of the progress I just outlined. Is it just the 21st then that we’re talking about? Because that’s basically been positives for the LGBTQ community and it seems like Moultin and Carville are saying those identity politics are the ones Democrats need to abandon.

The article finishes with this:

The only way forward now, Moulton said, is for the Democratic Party to reclaim its liberal soul—its appetite for arguments and ideas.

“I do know that women’s rights are important and trans women’s rights are important, so we have to find a balance that makes sense,” he said. “And if we can find that balance as a party, I think we can turn this around and actually win on this issue.”

He added: “Right now, the Republicans are clobbering us with it.”

The liberal soul is mired in the Enlightenment itself that says all are created equal and deserve equal treatment under and by the law. Equal all the time, not equal only when it’s politically easy to do so.

This is the part that is conveniently left out of all these arguments:

According to the CDC, only about 2% of high school students identify a transgender, and only half of them identify as girls. Here in North Carolina, fewer than 10 transgender athletes have played public high school sports. Ever.

This entire argument is revolting because, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it is “endangering all women and girls.”

Look, I’m just a cis dude who is pissed off at seeing members of the political party I most closely identify with abandoning a marginalized group because it’s politically expedient to do so. Especially when it’s a party that has time and space for every other group, and definitely a party that needs all of those groups to vote as a single bloc when the next election comes.

I have no idea what Moulton thinks a “balance” could even be? Unless it’s giving space to be transphobic? Or is it that trans people need to sit down and be quiet when there’s an entire political party whose singular goal has become denying their right to exist?

The only way forward that makes sense to me is that people of common cause and common conviction come together to assert that equality and basic human empathy are deserved by everyone and we will stand together to make sure everyone receives it.

That’s the only answer there has ever been or ever will be when it comes to equality.