It's 'Blame Trans People' Season Once Again

DC insiders are rushing to scapegoat trans people rather than take responsibility for their own failures.

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Thank god for the New York Times. Without it, where would Beltway lifers go to pretend that all the problems within the Democratic Party are someone else’s fault?¹

Over the weekend, the Times generously gave space to longtime Senate aide and DC insider Adam Jentleson, who—surprise surprise—thinks Woke destroyed Democrats:

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.

[…]To cite a few examples, when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test, despite the fact that current law already gave prisoners access to gender-affirming care. This became a major line of attack for Mr. Trump in the closing weeks of this year’s election. Now, with the G.O.P.’s ascent to dominance, transgender Americans are unquestionably going to be worse off.

I can think of another thing that could make trans people “unquestionably worse off”—op-eds in the New York Times framing their human rights as dangerous fringe issues rather than what they are owed as people on this planet.

The op-ed goes on from there—blame immigrants! Blame young people at nonprofits! Blame, for some reason, the FTC! You’ve heard it all before, and it’s available everywhere right now. (“I don’t want to be the freak show party,” one Democrat told Politico on Friday.)

Let’s put aside for a second that the evidence is spotty at best that anti-trans messaging played a decisive role in defeating Democrats, or that most Democrats running in tough swing state races actually won despite this hate campaign, or that Kamala Harris ran as far away as possible from trans people. Those are all salient points, of course, but they’re not the main issue.

The main issue is: why is it always marginalized people who have to pay a price for the failures of the powerful? And why do powerful people never have to pay any price at all?