"Kamala is for they/them .."

I won't say I told you so

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

“Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.”  

By now you’ve likely heard about the Republican ads with the killer slogan about Kamala Harris’s support for transgender policies. Credited with shifting tens of thousands of voters in swing states, one of the ads focused on Harris’s pledge during the 2019 presidential campaign for taxpayer funded transgender surgeries for undocumented migrants and for prisoners, a fact Donald Trump referenced in the presidential debate.

“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison,” he ejaculated. This “wildest sounding attack line” was “basically true,” gaped The New York Times.

Kamala is for they/them. Much about American politics is mysterious to me as an Australian accustomed to preferential and compulsory voting, but I can explain the undertow of these nine words. Why even I had found myself succumbing to their power. In the lead up to polling day I would catch myself day-dreaming about a triumphant tangerine Trump vanquishing everything I hate about the “left,” which is these days pretty much everything. In the aftermath of his victory, I’ve felt heavy and panicked as if my secret revenge fantasises had somehow manifested Trump 2.0. (Hey why not get in on the grandiosity — it was me! I made this happen!) 

I’ve felt so heavy, I’ve struggled to write this piece; day after day I tried and failed and could but sit, staring into the abyss of the next four years before finally surrendering to the inevitable and renewing my subscription to The New York Times. Should I reinstate The Washington Post, it’ll be a sign things are truly apocalyptic. 

She is for they/them is a slogan of political genius not because voters care about trans issues as such. Few people care about trans issues as such. Indeed the ad works because so few voters care about trans issues as such whereas Kamala is for they/them: seemingly more concerned for criminals and illegal aliens wanting sex-change operations than for law-abiding Americans doing it tough. 

She is for they/them, for the criminals, which is why cities in blue states have become dystopias where pimps and drug addicts own the streets and Walgreens are locking down fish sticks, and people fear the whole country might go that way because the they/them mob want to defund the police.

She is for they/them, for the Queers for Palestine, for the pampered brats from Columbia University et-al, the ones who disrupted traffic and blocked streets, and occupied a building on an Ivy League campus and took a janitor hostage and demanded Uber Eats as “humanitarian aid.” The they-them mob shilling for terrorists and burning American flags, she is all for them.

She is for Queers for Palestine, or at least she hesitated to criticises they/them even when they heckled during her speeches. “I hear you,” she said. “They have a point,” she said. Their point being what exactly? What legitimate point were the flag-burners making, exactly? Does she even love America? Does she love the American democracy she and her tribe insist is under threat? If yes why does she and her ilk let the they/them mob preach to Americans in schools, universities and government bureaucracies that the US is a rigged simulacra of democracy, an irredeemable place of cisheteronormativesettlercolonialwhitesupremacy?

She is for they/them, for the people who hate America so much they love above all people who aren’t Americans at all, or else why had the Biden-Harris administration allowed millions of undocumented migrants to cross the border, clog up cities, claim benefits, compete for working class jobs and drive down working class wages? 

Photo by Ömürden Cengiz on Unsplash

She is for they/them, for the over-educated products of Ivy League colleges who play linguistic games with reality and force everyone else to do likewise, and pity the janitor or any other hard-working American who trips up and says the wrong thing because they soon find themselves out of a job. Offend the they/them mob and your children go hungry. 

She is for they/them, for drag queen story time, for the “educators” and snake oil salesmen coming for your children. She is for the hawkers of “liberation,” indoctrinating kids barely out of nappies that they can posses a “gender identity” at odds with their “presumed sex at birth.” She is for putting tampon vending machines in boys’ toilets. She is for the people who will trans your kids at school without your even knowing because you’re a dangerous transphobe, a danger to your teenage daughter who is really a teenage son but you’re too bigoted to see it. And when as a natural result of all this your child starts demanding puberty blockers or hormones — risky and experimental treatments according to various European health authorities but her administration lied to the American people and insisted the science is sound, while at same time demanding the public trust them on the science of climate change — and you resist the idea, the they/them mob might notify the child protection authorities to have your child removed from your care because you’re a harmful, dangerous bigot. 

She is for they/them, she is taken in by fantasists, conmen and psychopaths, like the sex offenders and baby-killers and the other lowlife who discover their authentic female selves just in time for their criminal trial where they claim the torment of really being a woman made them torment women and children. She implies ordinary people are gullible for supporting Trump when arguably he’s the most authentic bullshit artist on the planet. Maybe he should come out as a woman; that would set the cat among the they/them pigeons. 

She is for they/them, and yet she insists she’s a better person than Trump, insists her tribe is more moral than Trump’s tribe but then why does she and her tribe not care about the kids who will grow up to be sterile and sexually dysfunctional thanks to the experimental treatments, not care about the women prisoners forced to live alongside violent male sex offenders, not care about the women athletes, the swimmers made to compete against males, cheated out of their medals and adding insult to injury, forced to accomodate a 6-foot-4 intact man in their changing rooms and when they complain that this makes them uncomfortable they’re punished by the authorities for being bigoted and transphobic. All very well to support a woman’s right to choose when anyone can choose to be a woman and be recognised as such no questions asked.

She is for they/them, and if you think that means her tribe is courageous and kind in the interests of a vulnerable minority, you’re wrong. The opposite is true: appeasing the self-appointed advocates for a vulnerable minority by imposing unpalatable rules on everyone else only exposes that vulnerable minority to a populist backlash. Exposing a vulnerable minority to a populist backlash is neither courageous nor kind.

She is for they/them, for the Hollywood liberals and celebrities and A-listers, of whom the rest of us are barely worthy to breathe the same air.

She is for they/them, for the clever-clever journalists at the liberal-left media who are either totally on board with they/them or, worse, too scared to inform the public that they/them are emperors with no clothes. She is for the clever-clever journalists who cried when Trump won first time round, cried their eyes out even though Trump was good for business, even though subscriptions to The Times soared tenfold within a month of Trump’s victory, and what are ordinary Americans to make of people who cry when their jobs become more secure? (For your political misery porn, tune in now to MSNBC; it’s a 24/7 wake.)

She is for they/them, for the over-educated minorities who invent problems for themselves; she is not for the hard-working every-day Americans struggling to make ends meet.

And if she believes a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man and anyone can be neither man nor woman or both man and woman and it’s just a matter of how people feel on any given day, if she honestly believes such nonsense how can anyone believe she grasps the daily reality of millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet in a cost of living crisis? And if she spouts blatant falsehoods such as a man can be a woman how can anyone believe anything else she says about anything at all, and the answer is, they can’t — and sometimes you get the feeling she and her tribe just hope people won’t notice these policies that let men be women and children be the opposite sex but if that’s the case, they’re dead wrong. Because people are noticing. Big time. 

People are noticing not just in America but also in Germany and Spain and Norway and the Netherlands and New Zealand and Canada and Australia, and almost everywhere. Almost everywhere identity politics on steroids is a problem for the centre-left, corroding trust in institutions, turning public life into a purity cult.

A great social democratic movement has been hijacked by reality-denying extremists such that it no longer speaks to the ordinary working people the movement was meant to serve, and someone somewhere must summon the courage to call time on this madness so that tangerine demagogues are no longer seen as sane alternatives or else it’ll happen again and again — new Trumps will sprout from the stumps of old Trumps — to the unrestrained glee of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and every other repressive autocrat cheering on the West’s implosion, and I won’t say I told you so, though I guess I just did.