Why Is It So Hard For Democrats To Protect Transgender People?
Have they not learned that it doesn't matter what they do, Republicans will just lie about it anyway?
Dr. Amy Acton is running for governor in Ohio this year, and she’s gotten better luck than most Democrats have had in the state for over two decades now. Republicans, feeling completely untouchable, nominated Elon Musk wannabe Vivek Ramaswamy to be governor, and anyone who watched him during 2024 knows that he is quite unstable and will do nearly anything to garner attention. This, in a year where Republicans are feeling the heat for destroying everything good in our country, should’ve been an open lane for Acton.
Alas, Democrats can’t stop punching their own base in the face and telling them to like it.
In a Toledo Blade article covering the Supreme Court’s decision to allow transgender sports bans, Acton said this:
“I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law,” Dr. Acton said.
“As a doctor, public servant, and a mom, I will always stand up for fairness and protect kids’ health and safety,” she continued. “While my opponent tries to divide us, I’m laser-focused on issues that matter most to Ohioans: lowering costs, cracking down on corruption, and cutting taxes for working families.”
This sounds no different than a Republican. Cutting taxes, ending corruption, protecting the kids, blah blah blah. What is the point of being in an “opposition party” if you’re going to say the same bullshit with a gentler tone? What happened to standing up for the rights of the oppressed? Because make no mistake about it, transgender people are under serious oppression in this nation, and conservatives are continuing to push the line to see how much they can get away with before facing resistance—at a time when they’ve already seriously harmed transgender people’s basic ability to live in America.
Let’s get a few things clear right now.
It is not a choice to be LGBTQIA. You do not make choices as to who you are attracted to, you just are. You do not choose your personality, your soul, or whether you are more feminine or masculine in the way you speak or feel. You don’t choose these things. You especially do not choose being an LGBTQIA person in a world that actively oppresses you, behaves violently towards you, discriminates against you, and does everything it can on most days to make your life a living hell. Who would choose that? Who would choose to be someone that will struggle with higher risk rates of poverty, addiction, depression, et cetera—not because there is anything inherently wrong with LGBTQIA people, but because the world is so hostile to them that it’s impossible to not have those struggles.
There is MINIMAL transgender participation in sports. Being transgender is cited by conservatives as a way for “men” to succeed in sports as a woman where they couldn’t as a man. Putting aside the egregious “comedy” White Chicks, as a general rule, men do not do this. Why? See item #1! Winning a sports championship by pretending to be a woman is not worth the trauma inflicted by the world. What good is it to compete for, say, a minor conference championship in volleyball when a teammate outs you, sues the school for allowing you to play, and you get so many threats you end up leaving campus and finishing your degree online? And guess what? San Jose State University, the school where transgender player Blaire Fleming competed, didn’t win the championship! Multiple schools forfeited their matches against SJSU, because they suddenly thought a mid-ranked team was at an unfair advantage when Fleming was outed, and SJSU still lost in the championship game. Does this sound like a choice anyone would make?
The NCAA reported last year that there are TEN TRANSGENDER ATHLETES OUT OF 500,000 TOTAL ATHLETES. Ten! It is the most absurd thing to be upset about, because for all of the grifting mileage that Riley Gaines has gotten out of her swim meet with Lia Thomas, a transgender woman competing in the female events at an NCAA meet, everyone keeps forgetting a really salient fact:
RILEY GAINES AND LIA THOMAS TIED FOR FIFTH PLACE!
Fifth place doesn’t get you a medal at the Olympics or a trophy at the World Cup. Fifth place doesn’t advance you to a runoff in elections. Fifth place is losing. You lost. Lia Thomas and Riley Gaines tied despite Thomas’s supposed “advantages” of being much taller and more muscular, and NEITHER OF THEM WON, so why in the holy hell does anyone care? SJSU lost despite the supposed unfair advantage Fleming gave them, and not only that, but they lost 3 sets to 1. It’s incredible how these complaints proliferate despite minimal evidence of any actual advantage gained. There’s no actual harm either. It’s a sham to “defend Christian/traditional/American values” but lest we fail to mention it…Conservatives do not give a single damn about females in sports.
Again, this claim of “keeping men out of women’s sports” takes place while those making it keep citing children’s need to be protected—but adults (men and women) do not compete in children’s sports (boys and girls). Why are they conflating the two? It’s simple: people like Riley Gaines want you to think some grown man put on a skirt to compete in tennis against your 14 year old daughter, which is not how it works, nor has it ever been like that. Adults do not compete against children. I also know that I’ve personally watched an all-state girls basketball star beat two starters on a conference championship winning boys basketball team in one-on-one games. If a woman can play against a man in a setting like that, tell me how is it that everyone is so afraid of transgender athletes?
It’s because billions have been spent to get the public focused on this so the billionaires can continue to bleed us dry and further grow their bank accounts.
Conservatives are actively sabotaging Title IX, and have been hostile to it for a long time, despite the fact that RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON, hardly some flaming liberal, signed it into law! He gets the credit for it even though women representative in Congress wrote it. He gets the credit for it despite not caring all that much personally about women having equality in the workplace and in sports. He signed it, and history rewarded him despite all that. But the people who succeeded him in conservative politics have been on a crusade to destroy it ever since, because it protects equality, and they hate that. They undercut women at every turn in their policies and their desire to subordinate women’s sports to that of men is expressed near-daily. Why would you believe them when they say they want to protect women? Why would you believe them when they claim to care about the “sanctity of women’s sports?” It’s not like they protect them in any other way, least of all from the rapist-in-chief they trip over each other to venerate!
Finally….It does not matter the stance you take, it doesn’t matter if you mirror their words and vote for their discrimination laws, Republicans will always claim Democrats voted for child sexual abuse, for letting men play in women’s sports, and all the rancid crap they say every time.
In 2024, Colin Allred took the bait and lost his Texas Senate race. Sherrod Brown, who’d been a progressive stalwart and a sitting Ohio senator, took the bait and lost to a goddamn millionaire used car salesman. Acton said the Republican position was the same as hers on transgender people in sports, and what did Republicans say about her in response?Ohio Senate President Rob McColley (R., Napoleon), Mr. Ramaswamy’s running mate, said every Democrat in the legislature voted against House Bill 68. “Does Amy Acton agree with the liberal extremists in her own party?” Mr. McColley said. “If the press was doing its job, it would ask her.”
They don’t care! They lie as naturally as they breathe. Their party, IN OHIO, endorsed Rodney Creech for the state legislative seat he currently and he won his primary, which would be totally normal except that Creech was accused of sexual abuse by his own daughter and ex-wife, and had to gall to say it was “parental alienation!” Even worse, a year ago the state house speaker had urged him to resign and he was stripped of his committee seats, but five months ago, after he brazened the whole thing out and dodged a criminal indictment, he was restored to his committees and endorsed! Another Ohio Republican, Congressman Max Miller, is in the midst of divorcing the daughter of the above-mentioned used-car salesman cum senator (Bernie Moreno), whom he battered multiple times over a short marriage. Despite her presenting photographic evidence of his beatings, he was also renominated!
Tell me your party does not care about women without telling me they don’t care about women.
Dr. Acton had a real opportunity to speak the truth, to say that the cries over transgender people in sports is a distraction by a party that is protecting sexual and domestic abusers. She could have led by saying her focus was on protecting all of Ohio’s citizens from billionaires pushing AI to take their jobs, from extreme poverty in swathes of the state that is driven by the collapse of their factories over the past four decades, and from abusive government agencies who want to inspect their children’s genitals before they can play sports, which is what laws such as Ohio’s permits.
Amy Acton could have taken the moment to point out that transgender people have always been with us, and are a small, vulnerable subset of humanity that deserves the same basic freedoms as anyone else. They’ve been losing their passports and driver’s licenses and jobs and civil rights protections because Republicans enjoy abusing the powerless. They’re being used as scapegoats for American ills the same way the Hitler and the Nazis used the Jews in that manner. Instead of calling that out, or refusing to play the game on GOP terms, she told a major newspaper in the state with her whole chest that she would enforce their shitty discrimination law, a law so bad that the current Republican governor vetoed it, only to be overridden by the creeps in the state legislature, like Rodney Creech, who molested a young female relative and got away with it, shamelessly.
If it’s a close election, the loss of support from the LGBTQIA community and young progressives may end up being a deciding factor. If the people who are most dedicated to volunteering and door-knocking and phone-banking sit this one out because the Democratic candidate threw them under the bus for expediency, it will be another own goal by Democrats, who have spent the past fifty years punching the left in the face and wondering why they lose so goddamn often.
Principled stands matter now more than ever where one side is outwardly, proudly misogynistic, racist, and fascist. Principled stands matter more to voters now than ever because so many politicians have taunted them the past two years with their profiteering and insider trading and Kalshi/Polymarket betting and cheering as normal people trying to live their lives are executed by ICE without provocation. If elections didn’t matter, Donald Trump wouldn’t be trying so hard to get rid of them, to subvert them, to take our faith in them away. It’s difficult enough to mobilize people when they feel beaten down, and when these average people push through and do it anyway, those they put their faith in punch them in the face as they see hope within reach.
It’s infuriating, and it’s long past time for it to end. I won’t hold my breath on it happening, but I’m still calling for Acton to apologize for her careless treatment of those who’ve been abused enough.