"Love Has Never Been A Popular Movement"

“Donkey Frieze,” Franz Marc (1911) (Wikimedia)

I met Kamala Harris in the backroom of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles in the summer of 2019. I was then the media relations manager for the National Center for Transgender Equality and its electoral arm, the NCTE Action Fund which was leading a campaign focused on transgender rights in the pending 2020 presidential election. As part of this campaign, given the cheesy title “TRANSform The Vote,” the Fund sent invites to presidential campaigns for filmed and recorded sit-down interviews with our soon-to-be-ex executive director, Mara Keisling.

The narrow set of demands known as “transgender issues” had, by the start of the 2020 election, a vocal but tenuous foothold in Democratic politics, solidified by the anti-transgender policies of the Trump administration and the negative partisanship it invited. This also followed the Democratic move toward an identity-based coalition that adopted the rhetoric of social justice while rarely its material demands (call it “woke” if you want; I prefer Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s “elite capture”). Rather than being called out for being shallow, however, the Democratic inclusion of transgender politics had already been labeled by pundits and conventional wisdom as an unaffordable excess and, perhaps, a threat to democracy itself.

Before the 2016 election, Bill Maher warned Democrats that protecting transgender people from discrimination was a “boutique issue” untenable in an “Armageddon election…Let’s not die on this hill.” A Democratic official told The Washington Post “People in the heartland thought the Democratic Party cared more about where someone else went to the restroom than whether they had a good-paying job.” The political scientist Mark Lilla blamed not only trans rights but identity politics as a whole, writing in The New York Times that political analysis focused on racial and gendered systems of oppression had “distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing…How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them?” On Saturday Night Live, Weekend Update host Colin Jost referenced a feature on Tinder providing users with 37 gender categories: “It’s called ‘Why Democrats Lost the Election.’”

Transgender people’s rights and lives were then, as now, not defined as the material demands of a marginalized group but, for many liberal commentators, as a cultural luxury invented on Ivy League campuses, a pointless and alienating argument about rhetoric while the world is burning. Unmentioned in these takes and their 2024 iteration were the actual policy demands from transgender advocates which tended to focus on health care, housing, and protections from workplace discrimination or police violence. The effect of this ignorance was to break any semblance between transgender people and “real issues” that tend to dominate elections while opening the door for conservatives and reactionaries to define the arenas in which “transgender rights” could be slain.

“TRANSForm the Vote” was one of several efforts by NCTE and other organizations to reject this narrative and cement our place in the liberal coalition. Because transgender people ourselves make up just a fraction of the population, we did not and do not have the benefits of acting as a constituency like, say, senior voters and the AARP. “Transgender rights” has also never been fundraising dynamite, with just fractions of a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars raised in the fight for same-sex marriage going to transgender rights initiatives or organizations led by and for transgender people. Polling then, as now, showed voters split on policies like our access to public accommodations even while they broadly supported nondiscrimination laws.

The only real electoral test for transgender rights famously came from the 2016 North Carolina governor’s race which focused in no small part on Governor Pat McCrory’s support for a law banning transgender people from using public restrooms consistent with their gender identity. The law, HB2, was swiftly met with corporate boycotts that reportedly cost the North Carolina economy $3 billion. This was a blunt instrument that depended upon elite relationships moreso than building relationships among voters—which is why, I suspect, it couldn’t be replicated when the legislative attacks came not from one state but half of the entire map.

By the start of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, support for transgender people’s legal and social equality was effectively mandatory for any Democratic candidate—but it was very much a new muscle. This inexperience often showed in their virtue-signaling, like Julien Castro promising abortions to “transgender women” on a debate stage or Kirsten Gillibrand being forced to walk back opposition to insurance coverage for gender-affirming surgical care. These machinations and rhetoric could best be summed up as taking the position they felt would get them yelled at the least with a pre-Musk Twitter often driving the conversation. Many candidates, like Harris or her fellow prosecutor Amy Klobuchar, wore this language like an ill-fitting suit, likely unsure of why or how their political future would possibly hinge on positions like support for a third gender marker on passports.

As I recall Mara Keisling telling me at the time, the point of “TRANSForm the Vote” was not only to teach candidates how to perform transgender politics (no matter how loosely held) but “to teach transgender people how to do politics”—no matter what “transgender people” thought about the matter. The interviews with the candidates—from Bernie Sanders to Joe Biden to Harris herself—were plainly not intended to grill them on past missteps or host in-depth conversations about transgender policymaking, nor were they meant to connect transgender people’s concerns with the broader electorate. It largely served as a platform to help candidates “clean up” their platforms while positioning Keisling and NCTE close to whomever the winner would be—the sane voice above the rabble of online noise. The goal, in many ways, was to show Democrats that Keisling and NCTE knew how to play ball, that they could neatly fit into the current way of doing business without really changing much.

Kamala Harris joined us in that windowless hotel conference room for about ten minutes. I shook her hand and introduced myself—I’d be shocked if she remembered me. We traveled from DC to Los Angeles specifically to abide by her and Pete Buttigieg's schedules, both of whom spoke at a nearby SEIU forum, with a camera crew, makeup artist, and logo-covered backdrop. Harris’s record as a prosecutor made her a strange fit for social justice-minded audience these videos would be reaching and much of the conversation invited her to discuss steps she took as a prosecutor toward something like trans inclusion (if such a thing is even possible in policing), but a frequent focus of NCTE’s public and policy work was the violence police and prisons mete out against transgender people as a matter of routine practice. The interview was, in some ways, a pride flag on a cop car come to life. I was most interested to hear her work against the “trans panic defense” following the infamous 2002 death of Gwen Araujo in Newark, California, just outside her jurisdiction as District Attorney—perhaps the most sympathetic intersection of the ambitions of Harris and NCTE and the needs of actually existing transgender people.

When Harris was Attorney General of California, The state’s prison system had been sued by an incarcerated transgender woman over denial of gender-affirming surgical care in 2015 which, as the court in that case and many courts before and since have held, constitutes a cruel and unusual withholding of medical care under the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution. In her interview with Keisling, Harris was never asked about the policy outright. Again, discomfort was not the goal of these interviews. Nonetheless, she voluntary tried to distance herself from the discriminatory policy—portraying the corrections department as merely a “client” of hers—and took credit for the change in California’s policy that only came from a court-ordered settlement in 2017. Far from an act of good will on Harris’s part, it was a policy fought for and won by transgender people and for transgender people not through the political process but the court—where even the most unpopular views are supposedly due a fair trial. Harris neatly captured that victory and claimed it for herself.

While Joe Biden—who also took part in this interview series—went on to win the primary and the presidency, over $215 million in advertising dollars by Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign has made sure that is not what you remember about these videos. What you likely remember is Harris’s two-second endorsement of taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners, reaffirmed by her response to a 2019 ACLU questionnaire. These ads, in combination with Trump’s masculinist, blood-and-soil campaign for re-election, appeared to have helped turn out Donald Trump’s base while a slew of issues—inflation, Gaza, and Biden’s late exit from the race—depressed Democratic turnout.

I have not seen evidence the ads persuaded voters otherwise reachable for Harris or Democrats. This is why the Harris campaign failed where other candidates and initiatives facing anti-transgender ads succeeded, including most Democratic Senate campaigns that outran the presidential ticket and abortion ballot initiatives which anti-abortion activists tried to sink by conflating them with transgender people’s health care. Representative-elect Sarah McBride–herself a transgender woman and former spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign–outperformed Harris to become the first trans person in Congress, as did a transgender rights ballot initiative adding protections to the state Constitution of New York (including in the district of Rep. Tom Suozzi, though that hasn’t stopped him from blaming transgender athletes for Democratic woes).

I can’t say I’m surprised to see a repeat of the takes that followed 2016 scapegoating transgender people—and progressive politics more broadly—for the failure of a campaign that hardly featured any transgender people or progressive politics to begin with. After all, the same tired talking points were trotted out in 2020, an election Democrats won. I am shocked at the selective amnesia of the campaign we just all witnessed with our own eyes. For the majority of her time on top of the ticket, Harris repeatedly and loudly campaigned not for progressive or leftist votes but for the votes of a fading and minuscule anti-Trump Republican electorate. She went on tour with Liz Cheney, rejected opportunities to distance herself from the unpopular Joe Biden, and offered incremental neoliberalism to an electorate still shaken by the coronavirus pandemic, withdrawal of government aid, and ensuing economic fallout. As others have noted, the Biden-Harris administration now joins a lengthy list of incumbents around the world who paid the price, fairly or unfairly, for the COVID lockdowns and the economic shock that followed.

But for an elite class of columnists and consultants—a group Chris Hedges once referred to as “the liberal class”—transgender people and our rights made for an easy pivot away from a campaign that hewed closely to centrist demands, one that ran on the kind of identity-free plank many of these same people have staked their careers on. And while some have tried to claim that Democrats were still haunted by the social justice protests and campaigns of 2020, that doesn’t explain why 2020 is now the only electoral environment in which a Democrat defeated Donald Trump. Rather than face what that means for their priors, they’d rather heap blame on both an advocacy community and, by proxy, an entire class of people whose needs and views they can easily ignore and with whom they are rarely asked to share space.

Some, like Rep. Seth Moulton, want to pivot away from the areas of concern raised by anti-transgender politicians like the participation of transgender athletes. Far from a small sacrifice in favor of a larger good, however, sacrificing that ground is precisely what anti-transgender organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom are hoping will help them secure legal precedents necessary to roll back transgender people’s freedom altogether—including in an upcoming Supreme Court case challenging bans on gender-affirming medical care. Plus, there is no Republican coalition narrowly focused on the rights of transgender athletes, health care for trans prisoners, or any other singular “edge cases” (to borrow Ezra Klein’s term) open to compromise or a “healthy debate.” Count the nearly 1,000 bills introduced into state legislatures in the last five years or listen to Trump himself—the right perceives any inclusion of transgender people as an existential threat and is attempting to pose an existential threat to transgender people in turn.

While Moulton positions himself as bravely rejecting the demands of interest groups, he’s doing quite the opposite by giving far-right interest groups precisely what they want at transgender people’s expense. It’s not only electorally useless—it’s strategically disastrous for trans people ourselves. It’s also laughable to suggest the Democratic Party’s problem with special interest groups starts and ends with groups advocating on behalf of immigrants and transgender people.

After NCTE collapsed in a labor dispute at the end of 2019, I worked at the National Women’s Law Center for their income security and child care portfolio while Democrats debated pandemic relief aid and “Build Back Better”—an economically-populist (and, I would argue, explicitly feminist) set of policies including child care subsidies, universal paid leave, low-income housing, and the expanded Child Tax Credit. The package was largely killed (transformed into the “Inflation Reduction Act” and its decidedly masculine focus on manufacturing and construction) not by progressives, leftists, or other groups being scapegoated for 2024. It was killed by Joe Manchin, himself openly sponsored by moneyed interests with budgets transgender advocates will only ever dream of.

In the days since election day, I have been asked repeatedly about the possibility that voters supported the hatred and division Trump offered. In truth, however, it’s sufficient for Trump’s aspirations if they merely failed to vote against it. Donald Trump’s campaign was an orgy of hatred, a cacophony of dehumanizing rhetoric matched by a policy platform which, if fully implemented, will lead to mass acts of state violence against people already harmed by the status quo and the enrichment of billionaires and corporations poisoning our planet and our bodies. The promise of mass deportations alone threatens to normalize a level of state terror unseen in my lifetime. The militarizing of communities, the suppression of dissent, and the installation of laws, judges, and policymakers which will dig their fingers ever more deeply into our private lives was plainly not enough to convince enough voters to turn out against him. It would be foolish of anyone to doubt the appeal of strongman politics when contrasted with a hollow, shallow version of liberalism that fails to deliver on its promise of economic opportunity or the values that make up liberalism, classical or otherwise. Regardless of whether the anti-transgender ads persuaded new voters toward Trump, it’s clear they didn’t push many voters away, either, and it’s worth reckoning with why.

As the past five years of election outcomes suggest, efforts to turn voters’ ambivalence about the rights and health care of less than 2% of the population into outright hostility have not proven effective—But neither am I confident candidates running on blatant campaigns of our misery have paid a price for it. What that means is a broad swath of the electorate is made of the good people who do nothing, who see nothing about or for their own lives in those of transgender people and nothing at stake for them in our fight. This, after all, was the core message of Trump’s ads—a clear separation between “us” and “they/them.”

Rather than follow the advice of progressive messaging gurus like Anat Shenker-Osorio or Celinda Lake—naming and rejecting efforts to divide and inviting people into a movement based on equality and freedom—the response of Democrats was to flee from the issue altogether. Loosely held and quickly dropped, solidarity with transgender people as we face an ongoing assault on our bodies and freedom quickly became somebody else’s problem. Compare Harris’s answer in 2019, positioning herself as an active player in a policy change led by transgender people against her will, to her tepid response in 2024: “I’ll follow the law,” followed by a meek effort to push the stain of transgender people’s health care onto Trump himself.

Doing so validated the scandalizing tone of Trump’s ads and helped the GOP solidify transgender people as the other, the stranger, the entitled mascot of Democratic politics. While I’m thankful for those signs in the 2024 and past elections that voters are not as rabidly obsessed with demeaning us as the GOP hopes, the lazy and voluntary retreat by pundits and politicians in the face of that hostility leaves transgender people viciously attacked yet feebly defended. A politics of solidarity is so alien to some of our current leaders they can think of nothing better to do than abandon transgender people to an incoming administration certain to be stocked with sycophants and extremists determined to control our bodies and our lives. In doing so, they sacrifice not only a constituency or a population but some of the very values that supposedly undergird liberal democracy itself, the ones Democratic voters tell themselves they’re supporting and Democratic politicians claimed they were opposing Trump to protect.

“Love has never been a popular movement,” James Baldwin told an interviewer in 1970, “and nobody, really, wants to be free.” It would be foolish and ahistorical to suggest suppression of select outgroups and the false stability of autocracy has never had appeal. Trump benefitted from decades of austerity, ideology, and ignorance that leaves people and communities isolated, exploited, and ambivalent to the well-being of their neighbors, captured by the fear that freedom—other people’s or their own—is a dangerous thing and that a common good cannot exist. The answer to this is not to shrink our vision and, in effect, become more like Trump. The answer is a politics that rejects the false choice of “us” and “them,” a politics that recognizes individual freedom—for “us” or “them”—is our collective responsibility dependent upon our solidarity with one another.

Selling this is not a small ask, much less so in a political system flush with capital and firmly tied to systems of imperialism, exploitation, and degradation. As the feminist Ellen Willis wrote in 1979, “I realize that the kind of change I’m talking about amounts to a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude.” But those engaged in retreat are complying in advance, validating the reactionary tale of declension, an Icarusian failure of transgender people to know our limits and demand too much freedom. “But I think there’s no such thing as too much freedom,” said Willis. “Just not enough nerve.”