We can beat these crotch checkers

It’s been a bad few weeks for America’s book banners and crotch checkers.

Bolts, in a typically excellent local election preview for May, focused on school board races in Katy and Fort Bend, both in Texas:

In Katy, the school board passed a policy restricting the rights of trans students on a 4-3 vote in 2023, prompting a federal investigation. Board president Victor Perez, a driving force behind the policy and behind book removals, is seeking a second term.

In Fort Bend, a book-banning policy that the school board adopted last year has been described as among Texas’ most restrictive. It passed on a 5-2 vote, and this spring two seats are up for grabs, both occupied by members in that majority. Conservatives will keep their working majority if one of their two candidates wins.

For the results, we go to the Texas Tribune:

Conservative school board candidates across Texas suffered an array of defeats in Saturday’s local elections, marking a clear setback for the Republican-aligned movement to shape how grade school curriculums and library books confront issues of race, sex and gender.

Mere weeks later, there was an even more thorough defeat for the crotch checkers in Omaha, Nebraska, of all places. 

The longest-serving mayor in America, Jean Stothert, ran a campaign pulled straight out of the fever swamps of one of Donald Trump’s anti-trans rants:

One TV ad from the Stothert campaign claimed that Ewing “stands with radicals” in favor of “boys in girls’ bathrooms and sports,” according to the Omaha World-Herald. Separately, a mailer paid for by the newly-formed PAC Omaha Leadership Fund — itself funded by another right-wing, anti-abortion PAC called “Common Sense Nebraska” — claimed that Ewing wants to “transition minors without their parents’ consent” and is “backed by radicals who will allow men in girls’ sports and bathrooms…”

These smears were invented based on standard Democratic policies, which take the solid position that trans people are people deserving of equal rights. And they’re what every Democrat should expect to face after the perception that Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s raging transphobia helped them in the 2024 election.

How did Nebraska Democrats respond?

They called out how deeply freaky this obsession with strangers’ crotches is.

And the Democrat, John W. Ewing Jr., won—in a landslide.

Trans hate worked once, and it’s played out

It’s unclear if MAGA’s trans hating helped them in 2024—evidence points to other issues being decisive, including a global anti-incumbent trend, inflation, and the colossal fuckery of a “Kennedy” who looked just like his beloved dad endorsing a Republican. But their trans attacks clearly didn’t hurt them, at least not enough.

This made 2024 more of an exception, as Republicans who’ve centered crotch checking have generally floundered anywhere that wasn’t deep red.

What made the last presidential election so different?

The $45 billion Elon Musk summoned to elect Donald Trump. Tens of millions were spent on ads demonizing Kamala Harris for her stands on trans rights that she’d made years ago. And—we forget this now because it has become the hell we’re stuck in—Musk’s gutting of Twitter’s moderation, which Zuckerberg has aped at Meta, has allowed for the mass dissemination and normalization of vicious anti-trans propaganda—something you generally had to seek out to find before 2023.

That’s the landscape every Democrat will face going forward. And it’s baffling some Democrats and triggering other opportunists like Gavin Newsom to believe this is an area where Democrats can sell out their base.

Fortunately, we know what a loser this approach is because Keir Starmer (which may be Welsh for Gavin Newsom) is piloting this kind of anti-trans bigotry from the left to abysmal results:

When you abandon your base and the moral high ground, you win over no one.

But you do convince some people that the braying reactionaries you’re aping are making some good points, while confirming to your base that you're a coward unworthy of their support.

So what do we do?

The issue of trans rights is baffling to some of us old people just because it’s new and because of our ingrained bias against anything that doesn’t strictly conform to 50s ideas of gender. 

We can (it’s easy for me as a cis male to say) have some room for people of good faith who are generally trying to figure out what this new freedom looks like. Not sure if someone is acting in good faith? Ask them if they think trans people should exist (as they always have). You’ll know if it’s worth your time right there.

But we also cannot do what Harris and Walz generally did in 2024, which was let Republicans define us on this issue and turn it into a free-floating horror show of bigotry.

There are two big arguments that every Democrat can start with that put Republicans on their heels:

1. We believe that everyone has the right to live their best lives, no matter what horrible things Republicans say about them.
2. These crotch checkers are obsessed with your kids’ junk while they’re junking your kids’ education, health care, environment, and anything that really matters.

Think the "sports" issue is more challenging because it immediately conjures up JK Rowling’s fantasies of trans girls and women elaborately concocting ruses to commit the sort of abuse that cis men like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth commit every day, all the time?

You can say: I believe every kid has a right to play sports.

There may be exceptions because education is all about exceptions. Still, we can trust schools to make these decisions on a case-by-case basis because there are so few cases, as few as five transgender athletes in the entire nation, according to one count. 

It’s important to those kids, who have a right to play sports!—but as a nation, it’s a blip compared to the actual problems we face.

It’s ingrained

I don’t mean to suggest that trans bigotry will be easy to defeat because it’s wired into one of America’s most ingrained hatreds, the hatred of women.

Elon Musk’s overwhelming obsession with trans people syncs entirely with the GOP’s “strict father” worldview, as defined by George Lakoff. He believes he, as the father, gets to decide the gender and fate of his trans daughter, who is living a much happier life after disowning him.

Here’s how Lakoff lays out the strict-father worldview:

• God above Man
• Man above Nature
• Men above Women
• Whites above Nonwhites
• The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak)
• The Rich above the Poor
• Employers above Employees
• Adults above Children
• Western culture above Other cultures
• U.S. above Other countries
• Christians above Non-Christians
• Straights above LGBTQ people

Many of the same people who don’t believe that trans kids should play girls' sports don’t think girls' sports should exist. Many of them don’t believe that girls should go to school at all, or have birth control, or be able to say no to anything.

So it just takes a few sentences to expose how these crotch checkers care about anything but the power to check crotches. And when decent people see these book-banning freaks running our schools, they almost always revolt and kick the crotch checkers out ASAP.

But you don’t always get a few minutes. And the system is being rigged to make it harder to expel the bad actors. That’s why we need to go on the offensive and start framing these obsessions before they come back to bite us again.

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