If You Can’t Campaign on It, How Can You Achieve It in Office Either?

You can’t shove aside an inconvenient group of people during a campaign and expect to be able to address their needs in office.

Yesterday, former Democratic speechwriter and political commentator Adam Jentleson had a guest essay in the New York Times.

He includes a refrain from the election postmortems:

“…when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test, despite the fact that current law already gave prisoners access to gender-affirming care. This became a major line of attack for Mr. Trump…”

His complaint and his solution

The general complaint:

One organization asked one question to one candidate. Five years later, she lost an election.

The solution provided:

Since (in hindsight) this particular question had no winnable answer, the group should not have asked it. (Or, once it was asked, perhaps the candidate ought to have ignored it, changed the subject, fled the room?) Going forward, Democrats should instead “give voters basic information” on issues including “Medicare, health care, prescription drug pricing, abortion rights…”

However, some of us are trans

Jentleson seems to be saying that the word trans should not have come up in 2019 — indeed, not even the ACLU should have asked one question about trans people — and that trans should never again come up in 2025 or beyond.

This is difficult because, if you are trans, then basic information on issues including “Medicare, health care, prescription drug pricing, [and] abortion rights” are unavoidably trans-related when they apply to your trans life.

• I’m too young for Medicare now, but I’ll qualify in 20 years. That is, assuming Medicare will still exist and being trans won’t disqualify me following Project 2025.
• Of course I need health care in…