How did the transgender revolution conquer so much territory so quickly? There are many answers to that question, but one of them is simple: Careful planning and strategic messaging. Consider, for example, this recent report released by the Transgender Law Centre advising trans activists on how to respond to recent push back to their political agenda.
Here is how they describe the growing movement by parents and their allies to halt the indoctrination of children, and the laws being passed across the United States protecting female-only spaces:
The right has exploited ignorance about transgender people and our lack of an affirmative, race-forward message to advance anti-trans attacks, further splinter and impugn the left, and sabotage progressives on a broad range of issues. Over the last ten years, Republicans in state legislatures have increasingly turned to anti-transgender rhetoric and legislation as a powerful complement to their arsenal of racist dog whistles used to whip up fear and consolidate power. In 2021, they have refined this strategy in the form of a moral panic over transgender youth, introducing over 100 bills across the country to criminalize medical care for trans youth and bar trans young people from participating in school sports. Recently, they have paired these attacks with fear-mongering about Critical Race Theory, mobilizing their base with a potent mix of racist and transphobic tropes. Progressives cannot ignore these attacks hoping that simply sticking to economic issues alone will save us. Our appeals on any topic will always be filtered through the noise of this unrelenting fear-mongering and scapegoating on the right.
Trans activists, in other words, are claiming that the GOP decided to go all-in on demonizing transgender people in order to score points at the ballot box. The reality is the other way around: The GOP has been forced by the grassroots to address an issue that has been cropping up in public schools and resulting in an unprecedented surge of children seeking sex changes. This isn’t fear-mongering—this is, as Abigail Shrier detailed so thoroughly in her book Irreversible Damage, the reality on the ground.
It is also delusional for these activists to claim that the Democrats are focusing on economics to the exclusion of LGBT issues. Joe Biden has promised the LGBT movement everything on their wish list, and then some—in fact, the reason the Democrats are struggling is that they are doubling down on culture war issues while ignoring their traditional blue collar base. Trans activists cannot countenance the fact that people see their movement as dangerous, and so they revert to delusion and deceit.
This report also lays out the trans movement’s strategy for fighting back, and it is enlightening stuff:
New research by ASO Communications, Transgender Law Center, and Lake Research Partners finds that we can cultivate resistance to these attacks, build cross-racial solidarity, and advance a shared vision for the future by weaving together our shared values, experiences, and demands across races and genders. This new approach builds on the Race Class Narrative to tell a convincing story of how our opposition uses strategic racism and transphobia to harm us all; and how, by coming together, we can ensure we all have the freedom to be ourselves and support one another. Using a Race Class Gender Narrative, we can mobilize our progressive base (particularly Black, AAPI, and Gen Z audiences), marginalize our opposition, and move persuadables across race.
In short, they are doing precisely what the gay rights movement did—they are attempting to claim the mantle of the Civil Rights movement. Just as the gay rights movement sought to make their agenda about immutable identity rather than lifestyle or a political agenda, the trans movement is also seeking to piggyback on our current conversations around race. Not “born this way,” of course—because for trans activists it is precisely the opposite. They seek to escape the bonds of biology, and they wish to restructure society around them to ensure that they can do that and have everyone play along.
Here is how they lay out the strategy:
How do we combat this? Here’s Rod Dreher’s suggestions:
First, we have to face that we are against two very powerful arguments in contemporary American life: 1) equality for all self-identified minorities, and 2) the value of “authenticity”. If the trans movement can make these arguments work for them, they win.
What arguments do we have on our side?
First, most people, even pro-trans people, believe that gender is rooted in biology. Second, most people believe that biological males who identify as female do not belong in women’s sports, because it makes competition unfair to women.
What should our messaging response be, then?
My initial thoughts:
We need to do a far better job of explaining why biology matters. We need to explain, over and over, why we cannot simply refute biological truth by force of will. The other day I was talking with a lawyer friend, who was explaining how the gender binary is embedded throughout the law, in ways that most people never think about. He was saying that the trans movement is going to radically affect many legal structures — and nobody talks about it.
We have to start talking about it, in detail. We have to push through the subjective “we just want to live and let live” appeal that the pro-trans report suggests for its side. There is no such thing as “live and let live” when to give trans people what they want, the entire corpus of the law has to be rewritten, based on a biological fallacy — something that most people understand is a biological fallacy!
Many Americans are living with this cognitive dissonance, not wanting to harm trans people, or make their lives unnecessarily harder, but also believing that the basis for the trans claim is fundamentally false. We have to compel people to see the biological, scientific reality here, and to make clear the danger of making laws and public policies based on a biological lie. But we can’t do it by demonizing trans people.
We also have to refute at every point the claim of trans people to share the narrative of women’s liberation and racial liberation. This means we are going to have to explain why a trans identity is not like being a woman or being a person of color — conditions that are rooted in biological reality. We can use the situation with biological males taking over women’s sports — something that most people already oppose — and say that this is the necessary outcome of accepting the trans narrative. To be specific, if the law agrees with trans people’s concept of gender, then there will be no way to protect women’s sports, or anything else for women.
Read his entire post if you’re interested–it’s quite helpful.