Democrats playing footsy with fascist Charlie Kirk over hating trans people. This is the party that's supposed to be the great defenders of LGBT people?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a pioneer for LGBTQ+ rights who decades ago upset leaders in his own party when he defied state law and issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples, suggested Democrats were in the wrong in allowing transgender athletes to participate in female college and youth sports.
“I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair,” Newsom said in his debut podcast episode of “This is Gavin Newsom.” “I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.”
Newsom’s comments on the issue roiling political debates nationwide came in a conversation with influential MAGA-world figure Charlie Kirk, the campus culture warrior who leads the organization Turning Point USA and is a close ally of President Donald Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr.
Newsom also agreed that the most politically destructive attack ads from Trump’s campaign featured Kamala Harris’ support for providing taxpayer-funded gender transition-related medical care for detained immigrants and federal prisoners.
“She didn’t even react to it, which was even more devastating,” Newsom said, suggesting upward of 90 percent of Americans disagreed with Harris’ position. “Then you had the video [of Harris] as a validator. Brutal,” Newsom added. “It was a great ad.”
Kirk challenged Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential hopeful, to speak out against AB Hernandez, a transgender high school track star from California whose triple jump event in the women’s competition is drawing fierce backlash from the right. Newsom said he has four children of his own — including two daughters — and noted that both he and his wife participated in college-level sports, she in soccer and he in baseball.
“I revere sports, so the issue of fairness is completely legit,” Newsom said. “And I saw that — the last couple years, boy did I [see] how you guys were able to weaponize that issue at another level.”
Kirk challenged Newsom over his use of the word “weaponize,” and Newsom replaced it with “highlight.”
On the one hand, we absolutely shouldn't abandon minorities just because it's politically advantageous. On the other hand, trans sports is one of those issues where there's legitimate debate to be had. And it's an issue greedily grabbed on to by conservatives as a cudgel to silence ALL requests for trans rights. Is this one issue, even if it is unfair, the hill we want to die on?
To be clear, on these more complicated issues it's important not to give up the long term fight. But by fighting with an "all or nothing" mentality, it seems we are ending up with nothing.
There is no legitimate debate. It's scaremongering.
But sure, "complicated issues" requires paling around with a fascist like Charlie Kirk and talking about how he's correct, backing down immediately when challenged on using "weaponize" to accurately describe conservative attacks on trans people and being asked to target and harass specific trans athletes based on nothing.
Just like "complicated issues" requires reaffirming conservative framing of immigration and adopting language about how immigrants are stealing welfare money and smuggling gangs requires further militarisation of borders and out of country processing of immigrants.
You're the useful idiot that the thin end of the wedge is for.
We use sex as a proxy for athletic potential in sports in order to keep things fair for women and men. Otherwise women's sports wouldn't exist at all because it's a biological fact that male athletes are absolutely stronger/faster/better at basically any sport. No whatever corner case you throw out has no bearing on the above fact.
The mainstream existence of trans-athletes shows that we need a different way to create competitive leagues (just sex isn't sufficient) so that trans-athletes can be included, but no one has an agreed upon solution for that yet.
And the conservatives scaremongering about this are definitely good faith actors who aren't just scaremongering and harassing a tiny minority of trans athletes who do not in fact represent some massive social problem that requires national level obsession with targeting and identifying trans people to harass, with Gavin Newsom hanging around with a fascist saying "yassss besty" as he literally directly refers to a specific trans athlete to target and harass them.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10641525/
Agreed. But remember Newsome and California in general have never been particularly "left" leaning even in the American sense. Newsome himself has always been extremely "pro-business," and other then some PR stunts he did for the (rich) gay community like 20+ years ago, he's been pretty indistinguishable from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even a very visible, and popular voter initiative like High-Speed rail has gotten nothing by lip-service which is why it will never be anymore then a pipedream as long as people like him are in charge of the California Democratic party.