The Anti-Anti-Trans Election

Yesterday's elections were obviously big wins for the Democrats, and big losses for the forces of far-right authoritarianism. As a preview of the midterms, they give hope. Not because every Democratic policy is a good one. Many aren't. But because right now what matters most is ensuring a future for American democracy, which the GOP is committed to destroying.

What stood out as a particularly hopeful sign in yesterday's results was the complete failure of the anti-trans project. Erin Reed has a good overview.

"A Stunning Rebuke Of Anti-Trans Politics"—Dems Win Elections Nationwide Despite Anti-Trans Ads

As election results poured in on Tuesday night, it became clear that Democrats were winning nationwide against anti-trans opponents.

Taken together, the results amount to a resounding rejection of the notion that Democrats must soften—or stay silent—on LGBTQ+ rights to win. The Republicans who built their campaigns on anti-trans and anti-queer messaging, convinced that bigotry was a shortcut to victory, will not be holding the levers of power. And despite the pleas of centrist consultants urging Democrats to abandon transgender people, it was those who targeted them who saw their electoral fortunes collapse on Tuesday night. For the first time in years, transgender Americans can take a breath and see evidence that the wave of anti-transgender panic aimed at them may finally be receding.

The fact is, the anti-trans moral panic, and the bigotry that took advantage of it, was always concentrated primarily in two small groups. Elites saw trans rights as part of the woke wave that unsettled their (imagined) place in the social hierarchy. They hated that, and that hatred got expressed in calls for Democrats to abandon trans people to the right-wing wolves. I wrote about the mechanics at play here:

Elite Complicity in the Rise of Fascism - Aaron Ross Powell's Blog

America's elites downplay Trump's authoritarian fascism out of a corrupt sense of class consciousness and solidarity.

The second group is the extreme social reactionaries represented by groups like Libs of TikTok. They aren't the high status coastals, but are much lower down the social status pecking order. They represent the gutter bigots who've always plagued American culture and politics, and who have felt more empowered since Trump made it okay to be a gutter bigot in public life.

But together, those are small numbers. And even if many more Americans have some concerns about trans identities, maybe about fairness in sports or in risks around medical procedures, those concerns aren't motivated by fear of declining status or by being quintessentially hateful people. And those concerns turned out to be ranked rather low compared to the economy or federal thugs beating up innocent men, women, and children.

Yesterday was a good sign that, while there's still a lot of work to do in establishing both trans rights and trans social equality, and while there's still a good deal more bigotry in the country than any of us but the bigots would like, America's not a grim a place as it looked. Our job now is to keep that progress going.