Will Bunch: Transgender wars are a test of whether our humanity can trump focus-group politics

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/transgender-rights-2024-election-democrats-20241121.html

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Like most people in the community she fights for on a daily basis, Philadelphia’s Naiymah Sanchez didn’t sleep at all on the night of Nov. 5. It wasn’t only because Donald Trump’s second election would intensify her work as trans justice coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. It was also the personal anguish that the 41-year-old transgender woman felt knowing Trump had been elected, in part, by spending millions of dollars on TV ads that dehumanized her and people like her in shocking ways American voters had never seen before.

“I took it very personally,” Sanchez — who spent years as an activist around tough issues like combatting prison rape before joining the ACLU-PA in 2017, right after Trump’s first election — told me this week. “They voted against me. They wanted to harm me.” She noted how many voters seemed to respond positively to the GOP’s openly anti-trans rhetoric, before adding: “We rest, and then we fight again.”

While Trump’s narrow but decisive win over Democrat Kamala Harris is still Topic A, the early fights over the president-elect’s off-the-wall cabinet picks and TV debates over just how anti-democratically the Trump regime might govern are still an abstraction to most Americans. It’s very different in the transgender community. There, leaders like Sanchez are having gut-wrenching conversations with people wondering if they need to accelerate major life moves, like gender-affirming surgery or a legal name change, before an openly hostile government arrives on Jan. 20.

Indeed, fears of what life might be like under Trump 47 for at least 1 million transgender Americans already began to hit home this week when the community’s one bright star on Election Day — a victory for the first-ever transgender member of Congress, Delaware’s Rep.-elect Sarah McBride — quickly became a symbol of the GOP’s determination to turn ugly campaign rhetoric into harsh governing reality.

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