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She's accurately identifying the state of play. The right isn't gonna accept trans people no matter what at this point, when you start calling people pedophiles the conversation is kind of over.
I don't think the tactics of trans activists matter that much electorally. Us political obsessives can fight all we want about trans people but electorally it's all gonna get swamped by abortion/inflation among normies.
When you openly and blatantly state your intent to convert people's children to an ideologically driven belief system backed by the power of the state, then no conversation is possible. Arguably it never started.
"We don't have to convince YOU of anything, we'll just teach your kids to hate your beliefs and we may convince a few of them to undergo invasive surgery to alter their very personal identity, against YOUR wishes."
Explain to me how there's any room for negotiation when such a position has been moved to the forefront of one side's platform?
Thats the default though. 60 years ago kids were being indoctrinated into an ideological system with the backing of the state, whether their parents liked it or not. And 40 years ago, and 20 years ago.
Arguably the issue with America right now is not that kids are being indoctrinated but that they are not all being indoctrinated the same way. Thats how you get a cohesive polity. Too many states, too many systems. Call it a civic religion, a shared mythos or whatever. The point is what you are complaining about is not new, every kid is getting indoctrinated into something.
The fight is over what. But the sholip on not having kids indoctrinated at all sailed a long time ago. But
60 years ago it wasn't at all surprising that a Nixon or a Reagan could win 49 out of 50 states running on a platform of US civic religion.
A religion that academics, imagining themselves to be somehow more worthy than everyone, have always deeply resented and accordingly have spent the last 60 years trying to undermine and destroy.
Academics didn't undermine it. Its own inconsistencies and the number of people excluded from it did I think. In practice if not in theory.
I think a version of it can still stand, the shining city on the hill, but it has to be less exclusionary, probably less wrapped in actual religion.
It's nowhere near as exclusionary now after successive waves of accepting other groups - so why doesn't it reconstitute itself?
The answer is that academics and progressives continue to problematize it as fundamentally racist and sexist* and to push more atomizing forms of identity and a replacement civic cult (Pride, the "LGBT" nation).
* To give one of many examples: the 1619 project was made recently to attack the founding story of America. It wasn't published in NYT in the 1950s or in the Jim Crow era.
Do they problematize it? Or are they seeing actual problems? Are they pushing more atomizing forms of identity or were their forms of identity not accepted so they rebelled? Have they succeeded in convincing everyone their forms of identity should be accepted on the shining city or is that still ongoing with significant numbers of hold outs? Chicken or egg?
They problematize it.
I just edited my post to add an example: The 1619 Project is a deliberate and historically dubious attempt to problematize the founding myth of the US. The problems of 1776 I think are pretty obvious, there was no need to go looking for trouble. But apparently it's not enough to simply point out those undisputed issues.
They're pushing it. In a variety of ways. Even if we put aside that their refusal to countenance ROGD and their pushing of pronouns may lead to kids adopting it.
Just their general denigration of straight,white males and their pushing of AA gives people a reason to adopt other identities in progressive spaces. The funniest and most out there examples of this are of course people who claim to be a totally different race (usually Native American or First Nations) so they can get some sinecure.
They've made serious gains with gays, blacks, Latinos and so on. Many smaller and more recent minorities (e.g. Indians) honestly have no need of a movement as intense as the Civil Rights movement
There are obviously issues but those issues do not prevent appealing to the promise of the civic faith of the US -MLK did it in far worse times . They don't want to. They have a general cultural bias against patriotism and see it coded as right-wing and they believe in the idpol view of focusing on ever more specific minorities and consider stuff like "I don't see race" that fits with the civic faith problematic.
Also, they have serious problems they apparently can't solve (the most important of which being the black achievement gap) and their solution is to destroy standards and the basic ideal/goal of the country as meritocratic as a result.
Serious gains is not enough. If you want the shining city on the hill as the tied civic religion (from these groups perspective) it must be near universal. The ongoing culture war is evidence the battle has not been won. Gay marriage could be gone in a snap.
Going from being ostracised to merely tolerated is not enough. To be part of the shining city on the hill that they would want to valorize they must be as accepted as anyone else. And in large swathes of America this is not the case.
Blue Tribe Americans are less patriotic than Red Tribe this is true in my experience, but they are still much more patriotic than average citizens of most other nations. So that isn't on its own a problem, part of them accepting the new city on the hill is being proud of it. They are not patriotic because they see flaws in their own nation.
Thats the key, they are not currently as proud of America as it is, but they could be of an America as they want it to be.
I am a straight white male in academia, I am told the wokest area of all, yet I do not feel denigrated at all. Most of my colleagues are still straight white males, then straight white females. I just don't see that denigration even here in what should be its heart. My boss is a straight white man, his boss is a straight white man.
"I don't see race", requires with those races (primarily black communities in the US) to have moved past previous (and current) mistreatments. They haven't. My ex-wife still tells how her mom lost 3 babies with a white ob-gyn and her last was born with a needle in his skull, she is convinced the doctor tried to abort him too. When she avoided doctors entirely she had 5 healthy babies. The trauma is not from academia, but from the communities themselves. Wounds are still generationally fresh. Handed from one to the other.
Color blindness is still the end goal I personally think, but it isn't plausible from where we are right now.
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