Democrats Say Literally Anything About the War on Trans People Challenge

The party is completely ignoring Trump's efforts to wipe trans people off the face of the earth.

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You probably recognize the creepy skeleton grinning in the picture above this paragraph. It’s your pal and mine, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, at the New York City Pride parade last year.

Chuck LOVES going to Pride! Here he is way back in 2001.

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And staring kind of menacingly at the camera in 2007…

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…And in 2019. Look how happy!

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Schumer loves Pride so much that he picked a picture of himself at the parade as his Twitter picture.

Message received: Chuck Schumer and queer people go together like peanut butter and jelly. He’s Mr. Ally. Or, as the signs his staff carry around with him say (you can see one in the picture at the top of this post), he “supports the LGBTQ+ community.” Woo!

Which is why it’s…interesting that, as far as I can tell, Schumer has had literally not one word to say about the most sustained attack on the aforementioned LGBTQ+ community in living memory: the Trump administration’s relentless effort to remove trans people from the face of the earth.

I know this because I went through an entire month’s worth of tweets, BlueSky posts, and press releases from Schumer, and couldn’t find a single mention of Trump’s executive order banning gender-affirming care for people under 19; or his order banning trans people from serving openly in the military; or his order forcing trans women and girls to play on men’s sports teams; or his trans bathroom ban; or his order declaring that there are only two sexes; or his orders attempting to force schools from supporting trans kids; or the viciously bigoted way Trump speaks about trans people. It’s as though none of it has even taken place.

I’m happy to admit that I might have missed something (maybe there’s a massive TikTok campaign about this???), but I’ve looked many different times. If there’s some big Schumer crusade happening, it’s happening in considerable obscurity.

The one thing Schumer has commented on is the government’s effort to erase trans people from the official history of the Stonewall uprising.

The Stonewall thing is evil and awful, obviously. But it’s also symbolic. The other orders are having very, very real consequences on people’s lives, and the Senate’s top Democrat—the one who “supports the LGBTQ+ community”—has completely ignored every single one of them.

What’s more, Schumer’s lone post actually puts him in the lead when it comes to the Democrats. I also looked through the social media accounts and the press releases of every Democrat in Senate and House leadership—a total of 16 people—and, apart from that one Schumer post, found zero mentions of Trump’s attacks on trans people. Elizabeth Warren? Zero (though she did retweet one post about gender-affirming care from the attorney general of Massachusetts). Bernie Sanders? Zero. Hakeem Jeffries? Zero. Chris Murphy? Zero. Cory Booker? Zero. Zeroes all the way down. Nor could I find any hint that any of this stuff is happening on the official Democratic Party website. Again, I could have missed something, but this is a full-throttle, nuclear-level assault on the civil and human rights of a marginalized group from a community that the party purports to stand with. It shouldn’t be this difficult to find even one statement about any of this!

I did find this revealing little video that Murphy—who is now being crowned as the next Democratic comms guru—posted from an interview he did with Hasan Minhaj, in which he pointedly noted that “just because I have some people in the coalition who don’t agree with me on guns or don’t agree with me on every aspect of the kind of civil rights protections I want doesn’t mean that ultimately we won’t have more success in passing either civil rights protections or tougher laws on guns in this nation if we grow a bigger tent.” He didn’t say the word “trans” in the clip, but he didn’t have to. I’d love to see the math on “getting more politicians who hate trans people is actually going to help us be nicer to trans people”—as we all know, that strategy worked really well with abortion!

Of course, we all know the reason why Democrats are throwing trans people so thoroughly to the wolves. They decided the second that Donald Trump won the 2024 election that those icky trans people were the symbol of the party’s capture by decadent, culturally alienating radicals—and that, to reconnect with Real America, Democrats needed to ditch all that weird gender shit and get back to talking 24/7 about the price of eggs.

Now, the price of eggs is important, and I’d readily concede that it’s probably an issue more people in this country care about than trans rights. But a) nobody is really pretending otherwise, b) the political prominence of an issue is not the litmus test for whether that issue is worth defending, and c) the ultimate message that Democrats are sending right now is that they are OK with Donald Trump’s mission of wiping trans people off the map. That’s not a very shocking turn of events—there’s a reason you should never trust politicians to be guardians of your rights out of the goodness of their hearts—but it’s certainly a disgusting turn of events.

So here’s my proposal: those Pride parades that Chuck Schumer and all of these other Democrats love going to? Maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to attend until they show that their “support” for the LGBTQ community isn’t complete bullshit.