[danShumway]

> It IS new to care about the feelings of minority groups that much..

I think you're making the mistake of conflating the motivations behind people who are fighting for trans rights and the motivations behind people who are fighting against trans rights. But the motivations between those two groups are not going to be identical.

I buy that Maslow's hierarchy of needs might maybe offer some explanation why we're finally getting around to addressing problems affecting the trans community, but is not sufficient to explain why it would be a brand new priority for Republicans to regress trans rights.

Tribalism/reactionism however does go a long way towards explaining why the GOP would not just oppose new legislation helping trans communities, but actually go so far as to pass new laws restricting their rights, as if trans people were never using bathrooms before 2018 or if there's some kind of brand new problem that requires blocking medical care for them. It makes a lot more sense to look at the opposition through the lenses of reactionary politics and polarization -- that the GOP is lashing out against trans people in anger over the progress they have made and because their rights have become a polarizing issue.

[mam3]

>> but is not sufficient to explain why it would be a brand new priority for Republicans to regress trans rights.

Because 1/ adressing some issues means not adressing other.. the public debate cannot handle so many things at once and 2/ from the point of view of a french person america is particularly confrontational when defending pretty much... anything.

In practical terms, republicans feel for 1/ that if you defend trans rights, you are going to forget more important fights such as the obesity crisis, the opioid crisis, the absurdity of your healthcare system, the economy. And for 2/, that they are going to be shamed if they disagree with the actual issues such as letting men compete in women categories.. so yeah i have 0 problems with trans people but understand the republicans motivation.

Im rather left but i feel the left has too much moved to defend minorities issues, wich is a shame because historically left wing movements were workers rights which were more about the mass vs the few "elite". Thats why, in france at least, a lot of the working class now vote extreme right, and in usa, trump.

[danShumway]

> if you defend trans rights, you are going to forget more important fights such as the obesity crisis, the opioid crisis, the absurdity of your healthcare system

I don't understand this argument at all.

Lots of people disagree with the Left's proposed policies on these issues, but they do have policy proposals. It's just flat-out inaccurate to argue that trans acceptance has reduced Left focus or fervor about other subjects. If anything it's the opposite, the people who are most likely to be arguing the loudest for trans rights are also most likely to be proposing large changes to our health care system, mass decriminalization of drugs, mass reform of how we police opioids and how we rehabilitate addicts, and public health laws and restructures of our food system. I can count on one hand the number trans activists I know online who aren't fiercely pro-union and fiercely in favor of raising minimum wages at a federal level.

The common argument from USA Republicans is not that the Left is too weak on these issues, it's that the Left is too radical on these issues. I don't know what experience would lead someone to believe that trans activists are less likely to be politically involved in other areas or less likely to support at the very least populist-adjacent ideas. It just does not match up with reality in the US at all.

People can criticize the far-Left activist-sphere for a lot of things, but they're definitely not rejecting populist ideas or cozying up to the elites. It's just a wild argument to make. Ask McConnell if he thinks that people like AOC aren't interested in worker rights or unions. I mean, my goodness, the position of the mainstream GOP leadership in the US right now is that the far-Left is composed of dangerous radicals who want to execute Bezos and give all of his money to his factory workers.

If what you say is the common French perspective about what attitudes are in America, then France is not getting good enough reporting about American issues or how people over here are actually arguing about them.

Similarly:

> adressing some issues means not adressing other.. the public debate cannot handle so many things at once

I don't know how this is being reported elsewhere, but to be clear, it is Republicans who are proposing these bills. More anti-trans legislation has gotten proposed in the last year alone than we had in probably the last decade. Republicans did that, not Democrats. So the idea that this is an attempt to avoid distracting from other issues just doesn't make sense, because if that's what Republicans actually believed then they wouldn't be constantly bringing the issue to the forefront of debates and passing a ton of legislation fighting against trivial issues like what bathroom someone walks into.

What would make the response make sense is if Republicans viewed petty victories like policing genitalia inside of a public restroom as victories in a broader "culture war" in which trans people symbolize a cultural enemy.

Which, look, it's fine. We can acknowledge that some things are a culture war. You bring this up yourself when you talk about the fear that allowing trans rights to progress too far will lead to people who dissent being ostracized. For Americans that is inherently a tribal fear. It is a fight over a change in cultural values and standards: a worry that a certain cultural tribe (often white, Conservative, and/or Evangelical) is losing power compared to other subgroups.

[mam3]

Ok fine for point 1/ but you didnt answer to point 2/ which is kinda the most important ;).

P.s. Most people in france do not think that much about america, its just my take from watching debates on HN and the trump election. We have A LOT less identity politics daily, so trans right has just never really been on the radar / something people are going to care opposing.

[danShumway]

> but you didnt answer to point 2

Sure I did:

> You bring this up yourself when you talk about the fear that allowing trans rights to progress too far will lead to people who dissent being ostracized. For Americans that is inherently a tribal fear. It is a fight over a change in cultural values and standards: a worry that a certain cultural tribe (often white, Conservative, and/or Evangelical) is losing power compared to other subgroups.

I don't disagree with you that people have this as a fear, but it is a tribal fear, it's a fear of turning into the outgroup. In America, anti-trans legislation seeks to mitigate certain demographics' fear by othering the groups that "threaten" them. The anti-trans laws that get passed because of that fear are passed with the intention of slowing down and hurting what Republicans have designated as the enemy tribe (in this case, the trans community).

It's hard for me to think of anything more tribalistic than viewing an entire demographic as a threat, and then actively taking away their rights in an attempt to reverse cultural change.

[mam3]

Of course its tribalistic, but you seem to think only one side is. Both side are tribalistic in that case, its the point of the "cancel culture".. when you can lose your job for voicing conservative opinions, no wonder you turn to voting trump.

Im not sure conservatives are the one who started it. Trump merely surfed on (tho amplified) an existing tribalistic divide.

From a french person pov, the polarity and violence between is literally insane considering you guys mostly agreee on important (to me) issues.

[danShumway]

> but you seem to think only one side is.

I don't think that's at all an accurate representation of what I've said:

> And of course, this isn't necessarily Republican-exclusive, I do also see Democrats who call themselves allies but have done very little research about what problems trans people face or how trans communities talk about these issues. And I do think there's a little bit of tribalism there where a subset of the Democratic party has picked a side in this debate based pretty much entirely on their party identity, not because they understand what's going on or because they've done any research.

My main argument here from my first comment has been:

> Some laws are tribalistic in America.

It's not just the populations that are tribalistic, it's not just the way the laws are applied. The laws themselves are tribalistic. The laws themselves are designed to hurt people.

To the extent that we're focusing on Republicans, it's because Republicans are behind the vast majority of this legislation. We're talking about tribalism within the law itself. Cancel culture as modern Republicans see it is a cultural issue, not a legal issue, so it's not really applicable to a debate about tribalism within the law.

----

> when you can lose your job for voicing conservative opinions, no wonder you turn to voting trump.

Honestly, on the Republican side of things, if people want to be bigoted in private or express an opinion... I mean, I don't like their opinion, I'm not going to pretend it's not homophobic/transphobic, I'm going to exercise my right to free speech and call them out -- but that scenario would be a very different thing from Republicans passing legislation to take people's rights away, and I wouldn't be nearly as upset about it.

I think there's this characterization of the trans community itself that they're looking for a fight; the more I interact with them the less I believe it. They want to be left alone, they want people to give them a few extremely basic accommodations like using correct pronouns. They want to have access to medical care, they want to be able to make their own medical decisions without a bunch of governors getting in the way. I mean, talk about cancel culture, they want to be able to come out as trans or present as their gender identity without getting fired.

This is something Conservatives should be able to sympathize with, but they seem to be under the impression that cancel culture is something brand new that's only getting applied to Conservatives, rather than the default state of the world that's been applied to trans people and minority communities for generations in America. I mean, I'm genuinely sorry about Conservatives getting harassed on Twitter or losing their jobs, that must be really scary. They should try getting kicked out of their households by their parents and becoming homeless just because they dated the wrong person.

But whatever, to the extent Conservatives are only trying to believe things, fine. They can do that, go ahead. They just need to stop threatening business owners with jail time over their bathroom policies, they just need to stop threatening doctors with legal punishments if they provide affirming care to trans children. It's wild for Republicans to be complaining about cancel culture at the same time that they're passing laws that threaten to take away doctors' medical licenses just for telling a kid that trans people exist and they might be one.

My beef with Conservatives is not that they have "wrongthink", Conservatives can believe whatever they want. My beef with them is that they are actively going out of their way to hurt people that I care about, and that it really seems like the cruelty and suppression of the communities I care about is the entire point of their laws.

----

> From a french person pov, the polarity and violence between is literally insane considering you guys mostly agreee on important (to me) issues.

This might be just skewed reporting in France. Republicans and Democrats currently disagree on a large number of issues, including health care, unions, minimum wage, environmental policy, election policy, voting rights, economic policy like tax rates, stimuluses, and unemployment. Even stuff that really should be bipartisan like ranked choice voting doesn't seem to be.

So yes, partisanship is real, it is getting worse, it is concerning both on the Democratic and Republican side of things. But also no, there are real fundamental disagreements here on almost every single aspect of how to run the country. If the "real issues" you're looking at are stuff like workers rights and the economy, Republicans and Democrats do not agree at all on that stuff. The conflicts there are (imo) entirely legitimate: they're actual policy differences based on real differences of opinion on how to fix things.