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I Have Questions, But Chait Says I’m Not Allowed to Ask Any

Per Jonathan Chait’s NY Intelligencer column, trans people who ask questions are risking the 2024 election

Tucker Lieberman
11 min readOct 18, 2024
black-and-white photos of Trump and Harris are the background to the article headline: How Progressive Overreach Gave Trump His Favorite Attack Ad. Harris’s 2019 campaign continues haunting her from the grave. By Jonathan Chait, who’s been a New York political columnist since 2011.
New York Intelligencer, October 17, 2024

Jonathan Chait has got another new opinion about trans people’s lives. “How Progressive Overreach Gave Trump His Favorite Attack Ad” appeared October 17 in the New York Intelligencer.

As the headline indicates, here Chait isn’t speaking primarily about principles or facts; rather, he’s speaking about what messaging is likely to win or lose an election.

In the US over the past month or so, Chait says, the Trump campaign has been airing attack ads accusing Harris of “having endorsed free gender-transition surgery for prisoners and immigration detainees.” This was part of a “suite of left-wing stances” she endorsed on an ACLU candidate questionnaire when she ran in the Democratic primary in the last election. “The dead hand of her 2019 campaign continues to haunt her,” Chait claims.

Chait says he doesn’t personally object to “prisons giving properly run transition care to prisoners who wish to change their sex” (thank you).

He says Trump isn’t “question[ing] one small program” (well, I am: what gender-affirming program? There’s just each person’s constitutional right to…

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

Cult classic. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." Editor for Prism & Pen and Identity Current. tuckerlieberman.com

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