Republican elected officials are being fascists, and there are few things that fascists love more than attacking small, vulnerable populations.

They do this because scapegoats make useful distractions from their failures, and also they are hateful assholes. In addition, they are implacable, so they can never be appeased. They are dishonest, so you can’t trust them, and compromising with them is a path to being a sucker.

With all that in mind, I implore the Democratic Party, please stop playing footsie with throwing trans people under the bus.

Whatever the Democrats who are urging the party to find common ground on trans bigotry with GOP hatemongers think they are doing, it will likely not work. For starters, one of the battlegrounds the Republicans have chosen to fight on is high school and college sports (they ALWAYS choose the battleground and the stakes, something the Democrats must get better at).

For starters, the amount of importance placed on this issue is an insane ratio. Trans athletes are not common, including in college sports.

The other battleground that they have chosen is this strange idea that they are “about the kids,” and this means “protecting” cis girls from trans girls and preventing transitional therapy for those under 18. The idea that Republicans care about kids is laughable. If they truly cared about them, they wouldn’t have SNAP cuts in their spending bill.

Democrats engaging them and admitting they have a point is a huge mistake. They are not going to stop at sports, because it’s not about the kids, it’s about hurting people. Oklahoma Republicans went on and on about protecting kids, and their anti-trans legislation ended up covering people 25 and under. You cannot appease nor negotiate with people who lie, are full of hate, and have no respect for you as a Democrat.

So, what’s the answer for how Democrats should handle the trans issue? We might want to ask Omaha’s new mayor.

In Omaha, Republican Jean Stothert went all in on Trumpian anti-trans thinking and made it a part of her campaign. Her opponent, new Omaha mayor John Ewing, did not ignore it, or make it appear like he too was ickied-out by trans folks. See the featured image of this post above for an example of the ads that Ewing’s campaign ran.

There has always been a weird, creepy side to Republican obsession with trans teens, which includes genital inspections. I don’t know about you, but given their history of weird sex scandals, I’m not sure I would want some Republican dude “inspecting” my kids’ junk. Just sayin’.

I imagine that if Ewing had high-paid political consultants like the Democrats had during the Harris campaign, he’d be steered away from calling them weird, which is what happened to Tim Walz. Like Walz, Ewing pounced on the weird side of the GOP and portrayed his opponent as strange and obsessed with others’ genitalia. He combined this with “real kitchen table issues,” in this case, the bane of every city mayor, potholes.

Fortunately, Ewing didn’t receive any tsk-tsking from his campaign staff and he won by saying his GOP opponent has a weird obsession with bathrooms at the expense of everyday issues that affect everyone. Is there something here for national Dems to learn from? I think there is.

For starters, Democrats can paint the Trump administration as obsessed with hating a very small group of people at the expense of improving the lives of all Americans. Ewing did it with a hyper-local issue, car-shaking potholes. There’s no real reason that Democrats can’t do this with Medicare or the huge DOGE cuts putting people out of work.

Another key point is if Democrats are supposed to focus on Working-Class Issues or Real Americans or whatever it is that throwing trans people would achieve, what do these people who say that think trans people are? Are trans Americans all super-wealthy elites? This is something I imagine they might find bitterly funny. Why are working-class Americans always coded white? Is the idea that there are working-class trans people so much of a reach? If it is, then doesn’t that clearly make “working-class” much less about economic status and much more about some vague concept of what an American really is (read: straight, Christian, and white).

I am not saying that a majority of Democratic elected leaders are sacrificing trans people for right-wing votes. But there are enough of them doing this that makes it concerning. Safe to say, there’s a good chance that such actions will not be judged well by history.

The last word goes to Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.