A wiser woman than I said we should all give dems the spurs on trans rights, specifically to say we’ll stop supporting them with votes if they stop supporting us. My initial reaction is to think of just how much I despise all the leftists who said it was OK not to vote this time around. It was potential dem voters staying home that caused us this crisis in the first place, and the margin was so massive it must have had multiple causes. Misogyny, racism, transphobia, vote suppression (i have firsthand knowledge of some, but it doesn’t explain the big shortfall by itself), apathy caused by a campaign relentlessly focused on fear? Discouraging voters was surely one of the causes, as well as single-issue voters like pro-Palestine people not wanting to sully hands. This campaign would be both of those things, right? Single-issue vote discouragement?
On the other hand, voting for the lesser of two evils only makes sense if it actually does prevent some amount of evil from happening, undoes the evil that was done the last time their opponents were in power, something… Like, I’d accept that my demographic had no legal protection and was royally fucked, if there were some kinda super-genius badass legislative masterminds successfully making great things happen to, say, benefits for the poor, or environmental legislation, medicare… something important. The dems, and left parties around the globe, have been unbelievably useless at this. Biden should be using the last days of his executive power to make baller moves, but there’s no indication that’s going to happen.
As an example of that, I thought about pardoning Leonard Peltier. No dem was ever gonna do that, but I haven’t looked into the subject much. I just assumed that since a lot of thoughtful people think he is innocent, they probably had good reason. A brief look into the subject brought up this slanted-ass bootlicking NPR article that was covered top to bottom in e-begging. (How long has NPR been sucking fascist balls?) If there is reasonable evidence supporting his innocence out there, getting people OK with releasing him would be as simple as presenting that evidence, right? I dunno.
How about something less controversial. Commute the penalties of everyone on death row to life imprisonment. Full pardons for everybody on death row where the police or prosecutors are legally proven to have fucked up the truth for the sake of a lynching. Last time the billowing bowelsack was on his way out of office, he accelerated the rate of executions, including those of people who had strong evidence of wrongful conviction. Just do the opposite thing. That’s an obvious good deed that would not be easily reversed.
One factor in how the election was lost: the dem hesitation to simply stand for anything. If there was a case being made outside of “at least we won’t kill you,” I didn’t hear it. It may have been spoken, but the threats were so much louder. All I saw was them using terror to ransack the wallets of the base, and making wacky jokes. I dunno if anyone was paying attention when Clinton lost, but all the night show funnymen were joking in overtime, didn’t make a difference when it counted.
Having lost, it seems to me, puts dems exactly where they want to be, doing what they do best. Tut tut ineffectually from the corner, play the good cop role in our persecution, and so lend a veneer of legitimacy to our deeply anti-democratic government. They make themselves reeeally hard to defend, especially the centrists like Pelosi.
As much as I feel a nigh-murderous hatred for anti-voting tumblr anarchists, they represent a genuinely felt position among many lgbt people – particularly trans women – that nobody in power honestly cares about them or is willing to protect them from literal genocide. That belief was stoked by social media cryptofascists, especially foreign ones, but it would have been there even without that encouragement. Dubya’s government tried to use disgust of gay people to bolster their political power, unsuccessfully. Us trans folk are even more disgusting to the masses, so using us has proven more successful. Or has it? The gasbag barely got more votes than he did last time. Again, this was all about our side staying home, and not theirs achieving anything besides holding the base.
I’m conflicted. This is an important enough issue for obvious personal reasons, as well as for all the trans people less privileged than myself, that it’s easy to see making it the one issue to vote on. So are the other issues though. US support of genocide abroad, anthropogenic global warming… As I used to say a lot, everything is on fire and nothing isn’t.
But in the end, no, I won’t join the crew in saying I won’t vote dem if they don’t support trans rights. I would implore whatever passes for human decency in them to throw us a bone, but I can’t say I’d one-issue this, as bad as the dems are. The nazis are just so god damn much worse. I say vote dem anyways, and if they ever win again (lol), don’t assume that’s the end of it. We’ll have to fight them for what we need; it’ll just be easier to fight them than the fourth reich. Maybe fight them like my comrades are trying to, with this campaign, if it makes sense to you. I can’t join them in making those vows of non-voting against spineless dems, but I like to think I have other types of fight in me, when it counts. Who even knows until you’re on the line? None of us should have to be living through these struggles.
Either way, the country is going to be so gerrymandered and vote-suppressed in four years that dems will be lucky to win participation trophies, so I’m probably overthinking it. Just done and tired, waiting for the hurricane of hammers to drop. And still viciously, viscerally furious with the proselytizers of non-voting.
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EDIT: forgot silver lining. yes i think dems are not going to win next time without the republicans literally having a child sex orgy on prime time basic cable and using the blood of a vivisected vietnam vet for lube (that was a bit off color jeezis). but people survived fascism in spain and we can do it here too.
The whole thing of the centre left parties not standing for anything and therefore lots of left voters staying at home rather than voting really resonates with me. The Labour Party in the UK won the election this year with less votes than they lost the previous election. Really the only reason they got elected was because the Tories fucked up so very thoroughly, it’s more accurate to say the Tories lost the election than to say Labour won it. It’s profoundly depressing, and I don’t anticipate Labour doing much because the Tories left the economy in a mess and Labour have promised not to do any of the obvious things like taxing unearned income properly.
unearned income can be a deceptive category depending on your country’s laws. in the US that includes some paltry things like social security payments., which are taxed, despite being nowhere near enough to live on for anybody. –they are exempt from the taxes that pay for social security itself, FICA and SECA, and medicare taxes, but still subject to all other kinds of income tax
thanks for the comment tho, good gravy. wotta world. it’s interesting to me that the incoming labour fuckos just came out and said “sorry base, we are giving you literally nothing,” where in the USA there is no way a democrat would do that, unless they were a manic pixie turncoat like that seriema freak. they would give people literally nothing, they just wouldn’t tell us that to our faces like that absolute bastard starmer.
I live in a representative-ish democracy so my opinion on how to vote in the USA is limited. But I did hear one American leftist online say this (not a quote, I paraphrase from memory):
From what I see from beyond the pond, I tend to agree.
whether i agree with serano’s idea or not, i love to see it inspired a bunch of support for transgender people happening, including our ftb decloakers, and i am ok with allies having different approaches to the problems. i do find your paraquoted reasoning convincing.
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Yeah… I really don’t like the strategy of withholding votes for Dems if they were to hypothetically go anti-trans. I’m too enthusiastic about game theory to think it’s inherently flawed, I just think it’s flawed in practice. Votes for Nader & Stein have not moved Dems to the left; on the contrary, it pushes Dems to court more swing voters so they can have a fighting chance against Bush & Trump. If Dems went anti-trans, I would absolutely still vote for them, it’s not even a question.
But whether or not *I* threaten to withhold votes, it’s clear that other people would. So the idea of Harris taking an explicitly anti-trans stance seems like a terrible idea. Best thing to do is to say nothing. Which what do you know, is what she actually did–comments from 2019 not withstanding. So she’s supposed to time travel to the past and change what she said back then?
As far as post-election theorizing goes, the most believable hypothesis I’ve heard is that it’s the economy. Inflation was high in the last year, people don’t like that. Of course, the inflation wasn’t really Biden’s fault, and some of it wasn’t even Trump’s fault, also inflation has gone down but people are bad at math so they perceive it as still being high. All this stuff about trans people seems pretty marginal, as far as political strategy goes.