Listen, I'm not saying we should let leopards eat people's faces, but we should at least be able to discuss it

On Representative Seth Moulton and tent sizes

(Thumbnail image from https://x.com/SykesCharlie/status/1773356409754685598)

It’s always nice to see my state in the news, but frequently that coverage is too positive for my taste. I can only read so much about the Celtics’ incredible championship run last season or about how Drake Maye has looked better than Caleb Williams so far this season* before it starts to get old. Thankfully, Representative Seth Moulton has taken matters into his own hands and provided us all with some negative Massachusetts press (finally).

Not content to live with a failed bid to unseat Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House in 2018, a failed presidential campaign, and negatively impacting the US evacuation from Afghanistan, Moulton made headlines again in the wake of the election with his theory of why Democrats lost. Democrats, he says, are out of touch with the electorate, and the primary example of this he gives is the discourse around trans athletes. He doesn’t want trans girls playing girls sports, and he doesn’t think that discussion should be out of bounds. In the wake of his comments, many pieces have been written agreeing with him and criticizing the backlash he’s received, which to some (me) makes it seem as though this discussion is not, in fact, out of bounds, but for the moment let’s actually take a look at his arguments.

First up is the actual question of whether trans people should be able to play for a sports team that aligns with their gender identity or not. I highly recommend this article from Parker Molloy as an overview of the topic, but I want to note something that the piece raises here as well. Moulton and his echoers would have you believe that the position of the left is that there should be no rules whatsoever regulating the participation of trans athletes, regardless of whether they might have an unfair advantage. The problem is that basically nobody is actually arguing this! The article explains that the answer to whether any specific athlete has an unfair advantage depends on various factors, but it’s certainly possible. Rather, the argument of the left is: there are many situations in which trans athletes definitely do not have an advantage, so, in those situations, just let them participate! For the other situations where it’s murkier, the athletic governing bodies can create rules and judge individual cases to ensure fairness - better yet, this is exactly how it already works. If fairness is the concern, it doesn’t really seem like that question is out of bounds to discuss. If the Representative has an issue with a specific rule of the NCAA or IOC (or any other organization), I encourage him to raise that issue. Anyone want to make a bet on whether he could name a specific rule that is causing unfairness and needs to be changed? No?

The obvious conclusion here is that it isn’t about fairness at all**, but whether trans people are allowed to be part of society more broadly. One only has to look around the country at the various other anti-trans bills to see the end goal of the movement. Does Representative Moulton have thoughts on any of those issues? He didn’t include anything in his recent comments, so it’s hard to say. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that he sides with trans people on every issue aside from athletics, and simply wants to split that issue off for discussion. Is this feasible? Can we separate out the question of athletic participation from the rest of societal participation? This seems challenging if we step through the logic of it all. Questions of legal protections for identities and groups, questions of rights - they’re kind of an all or nothing deal. It isn’t like discussing health care policy, where I might favor a single-payer system and you might favor a public option, but we can both exist in the same political party. You either think that the gender identities of trans people are valid, or you don’t. You think that trans people deserve rights and legal protections, or you don’t. There’s no halfway position we can compromise on. And if you start from the assumption that gender identity is valid and follow the logic from there, I don’t see a way to split off the sports question that doesn’t become self-contradictory. If we blanket ban all trans people from participating in sports based on their identity, the obvious implication is that the identity isn’t valid, that it isn’t real, which opens the door right back to all the other discriminatory and exclusionary laws. Yes, we can have rules to enforce fairness, and we do. But those rules have to be exceptions to a default position of participation.

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Second, we have the question of whether this type of discussion should be out of bounds. Again, we’re having the discussion right now, so it seems inaccurate to describe it as currently being out of bounds, but let’s read between the lines here to what Moulton is really getting at. When he says that we should be able to have this discussion, he means that nobody should be able to yell at him online for saying this. That nobody should “demand” he apologize for his statement or, presumably, run against him in the next Democratic primary because of his stance. What the shape of discussion should be instead is less clear, because neither Moulton nor anyone else asking for open debate is willing to actually stake out a clear policy position. I can’t speak for anybody but myself, but I have to believe that he would’ve gotten much less backlash if his statement had pointed out an actual specific instance of unfairness and suggested an actual specific policy change that would remedy it. As is, the desired policy change is left as an exercise to the reader. So let’s (again) do the work to figure out what he might mean. I can think of three general positions he might argue for:

I’ve already discussed the first one here - this is the current status quo and I think any specific change to improve fairness would be an acceptable suggestion to make that wouldn’t prompt backlash. Either the second and third, I suspect, is the position that Moulton believes. However, he doesn’t want to this say outright because of the backlash it would correctly invite, since (per the logic I walked through above) these positions are incompatible with a belief in the validity of the gender identities of the athletes***. What’s the other option here? These are broad positions, but I think they cover the whole range of possibilities. What’s left to discuss?

Since his call for discussion includes a preemptive response about backlash, I want to talk about how we (we being people who care about trans rights) should respond to comments like those from Representative Moulton (or Matt Yglesias, or whoever). I think he’s actually correct, descriptively, that the default mode of response over the past five to ten years has been to call out the transphobia of the remarks and ask for a recanting and an apology. I’ll be fully honest here - I don’t know whether this tactic is working or not. I understand the arguments for it, that the “debate me!” crowd is often operating in bad faith and not really looking for a real conversation, so there’s no point in wasting the energy. It’s comparable to the anti-vaccine movement in the way that they are “just asking questions” and “looking for discussion”, but refuse to hear or see the hundreds of times those questions have already been discussed and answered. I get the temptation to just not engage. My concern is that it doesn’t feel like we’re winning this fight. The article linked above from The Washington Post cites this Gallup poll showing that a large majority of the country believes position 2, and that the majority has grown over the past few years. My belief, more of a hope really, is that this is largely driven by a lack of information or familiarity on the issue. I frankly don’t believe that most Americans know much about (or even just know any) trans people****. If that is the case, we’re missing opportunities to spread better information if we don’t include it in our responses. It’s not about convincing Moulton or any of the other discussion-seekers. It’s about convincing anybody else who might be watching. We need more people in our tent, and we need to show we can bring them in without kicking trans people out.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this point. I’m sure there are plenty of people and groups out there already doing exactly what I’m calling for. As with most of what I’ll be writing here, this exercise is mostly me working out my own thoughts on the matter. The media also deserves plenty of criticism here, both the discussion-seeking columnists and the reporters, who choose which of the responses to amplify. As far as I’ve seen, they’ve chosen to broadcast only the less nuanced responses - and heaven forbid they add any of this context on their own. Even that only applies to more centrist or left-leaning sources - the right-wing media ecosystem is a whole separate problem that’s too large to cover here*****. Ultimately, where I’ve landed after thinking through it and writing this up is more of a situational suggestion: decide whether to engage and respond case-by-case by whether the person seems to be operating in good faith and by how many other people might be exposed to better ideas and information.

My best guess is that the majority of the population who don’t really understand the details of the issue includes a good number of reporters and elected officials. At minimum, it doesn’t feel to me that most elected Democrats are particularly comfortable talking about trans rights (shoutout to Governor Andy Beshear for bucking the trend), and so it comes off hollow, generic, and inauthentic. The rhetoric operates at the level of abstractions like freedom and equality, which are wonderful ideals, but don’t do much to reassure voters with very concrete (if incredibly misinformed) concerns. Elected Democrats need to do a much better job of spreading the basic facts to allay those concerns, and they need to do a much better job of making a case for why trans rights benefit everybody. Just saying “you should care about other people” doesn’t seem to be enough to grow the tent, even if it should be. They need to be making a positive case for inclusion and pluralism in a way that’s authentic to them.

The party is now discussing (apparently) whether Democrats should jettison their support of trans rights as a method of getting more votes, given results like the Gallup poll I referenced above. Personally, I find this idea morally abhorrent, but I also think it’s just idiotic. It ignores the influence of right-wing media, which will continue to tag the party as supportive of trans rights even if they don’t do anything to actually support trans people. It assumes that the position of the voters can’t be changed by anything , which doesn’t bode well for any of the other messages the party hopes to drive. More fundamentally, it misunderstands the paths back to power that are available to the party. Trump and the right have been infecting this country for years and years with a zero-sum, every-person-for-themselves mindset. Aside from the ethical concerns, it simply doesn’t make strategic sense to fight them on that ground, because they’re much better at it. The only path available to Democratic politicians is to make the counterargument and shift the fight onto our ground, to tell the story of how protecting each other makes us all better off, to drive a message of solidarity. It doesn’t have to be the same message for all of them, either. Moulton can make a case that discriminatory policies harm national security if we reject qualified people from the military for being trans. A more business- or tech-minded candidate can make a similar argument for non-discrimination in hiring. Senator Sanders can talk about how we need everybody to come together to fight back against the millionaires and billionaires. And any or all of them can (and should) call out the game that the right is playing: elected Republicans want to you to worry about a small handful of trans athletes so that you won’t notice them using your tax dollars to line their own pockets.

Representative Moulton wants more discussion? Well, here it is. Are we done?

*Jokes aside, I think they’ll both be great once the situation around them improves. Rookie performance doesn’t always predict the future well (see Manning, Peyton).

**Real shades of Gamergate here in the constant “actually it’s about fairness in high school sports” refrain, which needless to say was also, uh, not true.

***Also worth noting that option 2 here has just as much, if not more, risk of unfairness and competitive advantage - again, see the article from Parker Molloy for a great explanation.

****Part of what makes the whole debate over trans athletes so infuriating is exactly this. The actual numbers involved are very small.

*****I’ll be writing and thinking a lot about this topic in future posts.