Elon Musk has a problem

One of Musk's many sons (he's a determined, heedless procreator) turned out to be not a boy but a transgirl -- and he can't seem to face the facts. So his idea of trying to help MAGA win Senate and Congressional races this year is to charge Dem candidates with being pro-trans. 

Most of those Dems are only notional, unenthusiastic, supporters of gender equity; it's just noise to them. So when Musk beats them up, few tell the bully to F-off and most weave and dodge. (Amy Acton who is running to be Ohio's governor seems an actual trans-phobe; most of the rest of them are just politicians who are too ready to adjust to whatever they think constituents might like.)

Thing is, as Erin in the Morning reports, this is not really a winning pitch that Musk is buying with his millions. 

This week’s ad spend is largely driven by [Musk's] America PAC, which has dropped $100 million on anti-transgender ads targeting Democrats. “The PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking because that’s been a much less prominent theme in GOP Senate ads so far this election cycle, per AdImpact, which tracks political advertising,” Axios’s Mike Zapler reports. “On its face, the strategy is at odds with what voters say they want candidates to talk about. Concerns about the economy dominate; trans and LGBT issues barely register.”

Zapler’s point is correct. Anti-trans ads may scare Democratic candidates, but among the general public, polls consistently show that voters rank transgender issues among the lowest-priority issues they care about and vote on, with less than 1% of respondents naming “wokeness/transgender issues” as a top issue. Regardless of the public’s specific views on topics such as transgender people’s access to bathrooms or gender-affirming care for transgender youth, voters decide their ballots far more on issues such as housing affordability, gas prices, and jobs. 

Democrats who decide to capitulate on transgender issues in response to these ads, as some have, risk alienating their progressive base while gaining nothing from Republicans, who will simply move on to hitting them on another trans-related issue.

Nevertheless, anti-transgender advertisements will saturate the airwaves for the next two months as the election draws near. For transgender people, that means constant exposure to hateful messaging, running alongside the evening news and football and appearing on the internet without warning. These ads do incredible damage to unsuspecting viewers. They paint transgender people as predatory and disgusting to a national audience in a cheap attempt to win votes, and every viewing raises the temperature of the hate and abuse directed at a community that is already a target. 

Meanwhile, Democrats face a decision point of their own: capitulate and lend these ads credibility, or defend the transgender constituents being used as bait. So far, in some of the states Musk is targeting, they have chosen the former, and the ads have not stopped.

Musk is a sick puppy -- a damaged man with lots of money acting out his underlying fear that spewing his semen might not guarantee his immortality. You too will die in God's time, Elon; get over yourself. Life is better over here in the real world.

Internal refugees and the return of the ballot measure wars

Transgender folk are fleeing to blue states. This didn't begin with Trump coming back into office; aggressive persecution in red states revved up the push out at the beginning of this decade.

Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis provides a statistical picture.

The American Transgender Refugee Crisis
If this were occurring abroad, to an ethnic minority, we would call it ethnic cleansing. 

... Annualized, what we are seeing is a displacement rate of roughly 15% a year. And because trans people are largely not fleeing blue states (which means that the pool of leavers would actually be the 47% of trans adults who live in the 29 states with at least one restrictive law), the rate among trans people in the states doing the persecuting is closer to 29%. Nearly a third, in a year.  

... the sheer scale of this movement is breathtaking. Hundreds of thousands of trans people have had to flee persecution within the borders of the United States ....

... To put this in perspective, the last time an American subgroup migrated at these rates was the Great Migration, in which roughly 6 million Southern Black people fled Jim Crow violence and repression. This occurred over a period of decades, in the face of political repression, systematic violence, and legal apartheid. In its fastest decade, the 1940s, 1.5 million left the South—against a Southern Black population of roughly 10 million. Black America fled Jim Crow at about 1.5% a year, at a time when baseline inter-state mobility was higher than it was today. Trans America is fleeing red-state persecution at ten to twenty times that. ....

This should be seen as appropriately alarming to every decent person in the country.

... trans people who cannot afford to run are forced to hide.

Since November 2024, 55% of transgender adults report taking steps to be less visible as an LGBTQ person in their community—at work, at school—compared to 24% of LGBTQ people overall. This is what “eradication” looks like in practice. Instead of forcing the trans person to leave the state, the fascists are forcing the trans person to leave themselves. ...

To subject some of us to this level of terror -- along with migrants and all people of color -- is simply not okay.

• • •

In general, many Democratic politicians know they have to hold the line on trans rights -- however little actual sympathy they may feel. But those who break ranks with trans rights should feel heat. It's sad to see this happening in Ohio where there's an actual contest for governor: Top Ohio Democrats retreat on trans issues, leaving some transgender activists feeling abandoned.

I can begin to understand Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur's defection; she's ancient, a good labor stalwart, and yet uniquely continues to hold a district that has been redrawn many times by Republicans to make it more hostile to her. But for the Democratic candidate for Governor, Amy Acton, to adopt a transphobic trope about "boys playing in girls sports" crosses the decency line.

• • •

Meanwhile, it seems that the trans haters are experimenting with the ballot box. In five states --Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Washington -- citizen initiative petitions have put anti-trans measures up for a vote this fall. This feels awfully familiar to anyone who lived through the gay marriage wars of the early 2000s. For a long time during that period, fear and ignorant revulsion enforced by initiative succeeded across the country -- until it didn't. Before the Supreme Court got around to upholding gay marriage, very blue states had legalized marriage and then voters in Colorado repealed one of these bans which they had passed a decade earlier -- marking the turning tide.

Erin in the Morning warns of this new danger from the transphobes and other all purpose MAGA zealots.

... For transgender people who have sought refuge in blue states to escape the bans spreading through Republican-controlled legislatures, these measures represent a new and more direct threat: the possibility that their neighbors, not distant lawmakers, will vote to strip their rights.

Erin's description of the Washington state proposition suggests to me that it might well encounter successful opposition. 

... a ballot initiative funded by conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood would institute a K-12 sports ban—and require every girl who wants to play to have her sex verified by a doctor first. The measure’s language is explicit: to be eligible, a student must provide a statement from her health care provider “that verifies the student’s biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” That requirement applies not to transgender students specifically but to every girl in the state who wants to play any sport with a sex-separate classification—from basketball and soccer to cheerleading, bowling, and golf.  ...

Yeah, sure -- subject every girl child to physical sex verification! I can imagine some resistant kids and parents. 

Washington state has a proud history of fighting terrible initiatives. I'm pretty hopeful about the voter's finding their way to turning down this one. 

The Missouri trans-hate initiative is a sneaky one. Republican pols have added the anti-trans stuff to an anti-abortion measure as a sweetener. Considering Missouri voters passed a citizen measure protecting abortion rights a couple of year ago, they've got resistance to overcome. Might transphobia get a new batch of abortion restrictions across the finish line? Read about Missouri trials and tribulations here.

• • •

Something delightful to close this catalogue of horrors; how about a little joy? Here's Dylan Mulvaney, a transwoman who appeared in a beer commercial and has been subjected to unrelenting persecution by MAGA bigots ever since, delighting in being herself: 

What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience. And they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has zero contingency on what they can provide for me, because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self, and every day since. And sharing that with the world? It’s just icing on the cake. But they don’t want me to be able to share that, because it would mean young people realizing that if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.

You go, girl! 

A warning by way of Britain: no deathly compromises

It feels as if it were going to be a more than usually unsettled few days, this coming week between the enormous LGBTQ+ freedom marches here in San Francisco and President Toddler's dumb and dopey July 4 appropriation of our national founding in DC over next weekend. 

As I come out of my rhinovirus brain fog, here's a warning from last week that I don't want to miss. 

Erin in the Morning: News and discussion on trans legislation and life provides just what the tagline of the substack says it will. This is news we need to attend to. And with MAGA bigots ascendant, this is news no one should ignore. So I pay attention when Erin issues a warning.

Reflecting on UK politics, where the governing left-leaning Labour Party has succumbed to a rightist-inspired panic attack on trans folk, Erin demands that here in the US, Democrats must find more spine. Deposed Prime Minister Keir Starmer's weaselly accommodation of his country's trans-hating bigots didn't win him any real allies or save his fumbling leadership.

... I often write about Democrats here in the United States, and I often criticize them for taking stances that capitulate to far-right framings on transgender people. In recent months, I lambasted eight House Democrats for voting to hand Trump more power to pull funding from schools that support transgender students. I slammed Gavin Newsom and Xavier Becerra for their retreat on transgender sports and, in Newsom's case, for floating the idea that trans people should wait until 25 to transition—a position with its roots in UK-based anti-trans activism. I've even criticized progressive icon and Mayor Mamdani for limiting his new clinic to patients 19 and older, using Trump's executive order age cutoff in what amounts to a retreat from his promises to use every tool at his disposal to fight for trans youth. 

Many have wondered why I have just as many sharp words for Democrats who retreat as I do for the Republicans driving the attacks. Starmer's resignation today should help explain why.

One of my biggest fears is not the Republican Party. They are the devil we know—terrible, and they will take every step to target trans people in the worst ways imaginable. 

But in the United States, we have one thing the UK no longer does: our major left-of-center party has not abandoned us. At least here, the harm can still be reversed. Executive orders can be revoked. Rules can be rewritten. Democratic-held states can serve as islands of refuge and support for transgender people, and a future Democratic administration can undo what this one has done. 

That is only true so long as the Democratic Party remains willing to fight for us. What happens if the only alternative party in the United States follows Labour's path and embraces transphobia too? Where does that leave transgender people?

The greatest danger to transgender people in America is not another two years of Republican rule. It is the potential for a cancer to grow inside the Democratic Party—one that whispers to its leaders that the vulnerable and "unpopular" can be thrown to the wolves in exchange for survival. 

But what the pundits pushing this strategy never tell those leaders is that there will never be enough to feed those wolves.  

There is no amount of concession on trans rights that will satisfy the other side. The ads will still come. And they will not stop at trans people… immigrants… disabled people… LGB people. 

One by one, each group will become the next "strategic sacrifice," until you are left with a party that has abandoned every community that once believed in it—all in pursuit of a political center that doesn’t even exist. You sell your soul, and all you have left are empty platitudes and a collapsing future. 

My emphasis. We aren't there yet. We have a choice about whether we will allow our panic about Trumpism to undercut our affirmation of human rights for everyone. And we can demand brave choices from our Democratic politicians. We are all in this together. 

• • •

It was nice to read a political journalist writing for a broad audience draw similar lessons in an account of Trump's gladiatorial follies on the White House lawn. Noah Berlatsky publishes at Public Notice. He has no truck with the racist malignant masculinity of the big hunk who celebrated his victory by shouting "Michelle Obama is a man." He sees scam.

... Even if the disgusting smear is not new, it highlights the ways in which the status, dignity, and rights of marginalized people are intertwined. The attack on trans people is not just an attack on trans people; it is also, and deliberately, an attack on Black women, on women of color, and ultimately on all women, on all Black people, and on the political party which the majority of all those groups call their own.

Some Democrats have wavered in their support for trans people during the Trump presidency. But this kind of smear directed at a Democratic party leader at a White House event should make it abundantly clear that throwing trans people under a wheeled conveyance will inevitably mean allowing said conveyance to run down and decimate large parts of the coalition. We need to fight back for everyone if we are going to fight back for anyone, because it is the right thing to do, and because fascists, in their hate, do not distinguish between us. ...

Again, the people may have to lead the pols on this -- but if we insist, we can!