Millions of Americans have already heard the joke that the Democrats’ favorite campaign slogan is “the most important election of our lifetime,” but that hasn’t stopped them from reusing it in an effort to re-elect President Joe Biden in November.
This time around, the scaremongering is mainly focused on LGBTQ persons, and the state that a trans people’s murder is all but certain to occur if Donald Trump or another Republican is elected president. The question is not whether the Republicans intend to ban transgender people from public spaces in the United States, but whether the Democrats can be trusted to do so, and if there isn’t a better way to stop it.
This weary old range.
This technique is not new: Hal Draper, a leftist writer, blasted the Democrats in 1967, “Who will be the lesser evil in 1968?” noting that liberals had been warning about a fascist takeover of the country for years if Americans didn’t vote for a Democrat even then.
Let’s start by acknowledging that the Republican Party opposes all kinds of LGBTQ justice and has worked to obliterate or restrict transgender rights wherever they have been in power and has plans to do so if they win control of Congress or the White House. Additionally, it’s true that a small number of Democratic lawmakers, especially at the state and local levels, have fiercely opposed the GOP’s anti-LGBT initiatives, and that several states with Democratic-led governments have passed important legislation defending LGBTQ rights.
Biden is vehemently anti-working people.
Let’s also assume, for the sake of discussion, that only a Trump 2024 victory had protected the lacked rights and legal protections of transgender Americans, as they do in their state that at a federal level they have successfully protected LGBTQ rights from GOP attacks.
However, in doing so, we hadn’t ignored Biden’s other bigoted, right-wing procedures, which have been extremely damaging to a lot of the working group over the past three years.
That includes the Safer America Plan, which is adored by the far-right and was used to place 100,000 authorities on the roads as retaliation for the rebellion of 2020, when tens of millions of Americans protested against white power and prejudiced police terror in the nation’s largest mass protest movement in 50 years. Police are also the enemies of the whole working group, including trans people, as well as being a vital tool of racist murder and white supremacy. Police are notorious for using assault and abuse against trans people, including monitoring trans women as sex workers and assuming that each trans person is mentally ill and poses a risk to other people. These police officers are currently being used to maintain the myriad of fresh anti-trans rules promulgated in recent years.
Trump’s embrace of a fascist border security plan has also been revealed by Biden, pushing him even further to the right of Congressional Republicans. In the 2020 election, Biden campaigned immediately against Trump’s “low racist” border policies, using Day One Executive Directions to remove some of the most feared methods. This single casts doubt on Biden’s allegation that he opposes Trump’s policies, including those that pertain to transgender rights.
We’ve also watched Biden fully support and finance a murder in Palestine over the past six decades, helping to fund Israel’s weapons program while preventing its global effects. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered.
In addition, Biden has presided over episodes on tens of millions of poor Americans, including LGBTQ and transgender people, in much higher proportions than their direct or transgender counterparts. Roughly 30% of trans people live in poverty — nearly triple the 11.5% poverty rate of the whole U.S. population. In addition to allowing the eviction moratorium to be lifted, ending the child tax credit that helped millions of children escape hunger, kicking over 2 million people out of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, and cutting pandemic-era funding for courses like Medicaid to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, among others, Biden has attacked. These have doubled the price of baby hardship on Biden’s view and resulted in the largest single-year increase in poverty always on report.
In brief, voting for Biden to guarantee “trans health” had come at the expense of Black people, Palestinians, refugees, and poor and working Americans of every race and gender, including trans people. Thus, this “safety” would exist only for a relatively small number of affluent white trans people. This price is too high for anyone who has a heart of gold in it. Leslie Feinberg, a transgender revolutionary, once said, “We can never throw enough people overboard to win our enemies’ approval.”
Fair-weather friends at best.
Unfortunately, for the Democrats, even their claim to be trustworthy proponents of LGBTQ rights cannot be taken seriously. In this far-right onslaught, Biden has shown, along with other Democrats, that he is willing to compromise with the far-right on trans rights.
When Biden was elected, he pledged to pass the Equality Act in his first 100 days in office. This crucial bill, by outlawing anti-LGBT discrimination in a wide swath of public life in the United States, would have prevented a large number of the state-level attacks on LGBTQ rights. Since the bill has been stalled for so long that the Democrats lost their House majority, Biden instead decided it was more important to preserve the highly undemocratic Senate filibuster rule. The Women’s Health Protection Act, one of the many protective bills, would have invalidated the Supreme Court’s decision to end abortion rights, something that the Democrats claim they can only effectively protect.
In addition, Biden’s Department of Education reinterpreted Title IX to allow school athletics programs to forbid trans girl athletes from girls’ sports teams, giving them a “roadmap” to discriminate last year. Amazingly, the ruling was made on the same day as a far-right Supreme Court blocked such a ban, adding that this is yet another instance in which Biden has taken a position that is further up the right.
According to one anonymous insider, the Biden administration “seemed to be too much of a hot topic” and that it was deliberately putting off implementation of this rule change until after the November 2024 elections. This is an incredible two-faced betrayal from a president who has repeatedly said to transgender people, “Your president has your back.”
Trans rights have also been a topic of contention among Democratic state legislators. In an effort to keep a pro-trans vote off their records during an election year, the Democratic majority in Maryland’s House of Delegates in 2022 killed their own trans healthcare bill. More recently, Democrats in New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Texas have all helped the GOP pass anti-LGBTQ bills.
Biden’s government has done little more than file lawsuits against state governments challenging particular laws in the wake of the widespread assaults on trans rights in dozens of U.S. states. He has not relied on any of his executive authority to make practical decisions, such as using or opening clinics on federal land to continue providing healthcare to trans people — a move that would also assist those in need of an abortion — or even helping sympathetic states shoulder the financial strain of helping trans people flee persecution.
So the Democrats want us to support a party that has almost completely rejected trans people in the face of public pressure to help them, that has actively worked to terrorize or abandon large segments of the working class, including many trans people, and that has already supported, justified, and supported one genocide in Palestine, all because they claim they are the only one who is preventing it by their opposition? This is political hostage-taking, and we deserve so much more.
A real fightback campaign.
Fighting back only as a community of trans people, who make up less than 2% of the U.S. population, our community has no chance of victory. However, we never fall under the same umbrella: we become a member of the working class, a force that must sacrifice our survival, to a large portion of humanity. This gives us incredible strength, the strength needed to fight and defeat fascism, a strength that only the working class has ever been able to wield.
Fortunately, we don’t have to just choose between two evils, one of which is ostensibly lesser, and both of which answer to a tiny club of billionaires.
Claudia De la Cruz, a lifelong activist who has a proven track record of uncompromisingly opposing all of the far-right’s fascistic policies, is running for president in November 2024 on the party’s ticket. Her program calls for comprehensive legislation to guarantee full equality for LGBTQ people as part of a comprehensive strategy to empower our communities while addressing the widespread assaults on our fundamental democratic rights.
With a grassroots campaign, Claudia is solely accountable to the working class, which sets her apart from those politicians bought and paid for by the ruling class, who promise big things to LGBTQ people in the election season that they never seem to be able to deliver once in office.
Trans people’s needs are those of the entire working class: equal housing and healthcare, education, equal pay, public facilities for all, clean air and water, and an end to the scourge of war. Only when our class is united and fighting for our shared liberation can we end wars, end fascism, and permanently secure the rights of all. Our labor created this society, and we should run it.
