Being fair to the kids… or some of them, anyway

I saw an article from The Advocate quoting Pete Buttigieg responding to questions about transgender athletes, taken from a longer interview with NPR’s Morning Edition.

The question was part of a larger conversation about Democratic party messaging, asking if/how Buttigieg’s approach would differ from the party’s. His response:

I think the approach starts with compassion. compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them, like wondering, wait a minute, I got a daughter in a sports league. Is she going to be competing with boys right now? Right?

And just taking everybody seriously. And I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party, for example, around sports, where I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as as as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports.

When interviewer Steve Innskeep asks: “Meaning the parent who’s complained about this has a case in your opinion?”

Sure. And that’s why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington, trying to use this as a political pawn. When President Trump says something like “no boys in girls sports,” which is a phrase that they use. […] I think that chess is different from weightlifting and weightlifting is different from volleyball and uh you know, middle school is different from the Olympics. So that’s exactly why I think that we shouldn’t be grandstanding on this as politicians. We should be empowering communities and organizations and schools to make the right decisions.

I included the entire quote here both to be as fair as possible to Buttigieg, and to make a larger point about the way he answers questions.

On the surface, this seems like the most Buttigiegian response ever, and it follows his typical strategy:

Address the question directly instead of dismissing it or giving a quick-and-quotable sound bite

Lead with an emphasis on compassion, trust, empathy, and communication, to show he’s thought about the issue from multiple sides and isn’t just falling back to a standard party line

Shut down more asinine voices in the party (like Rahm Emanuel, whose assholery was the prompt for the question in the first place) without mentioning them directly

Steer the topic towards a criticism of the GOP’s failings, starting from the top of the party, and call it out as political grandstanding

Toss the hot potato down to the community level

For all I know, Buttigieg finished this answer thinking he’d nailed it. This is typically the kind of thing he gets exactly right, and is a large part of why I’ve been so vocally (and occasionally, financially) supportive of him in the past.

Which is why it’s such a colossal disappointment that he got this one so spectacularly wrong.

He’s correct that right-wing politicians are using this as a political pawn for grandstanding. He’s also correct that this was an issue for communities and organizations, before it got turned into a political pawn. But it has been turned into that, and he flat-out failed to respond correctly.

There is only one correct response: full-voiced and unequivocal support of transgender people of all ages.

Again, this is typically the kind of thing he gets right, a combination of political savvy with thoughtful integrity. So it’s disappointing that here, he failed on both counts.

It would’ve been politically savvy to recognize that this is a controversy that has been created entirely by right-wing bigots to get political favor from bigoted voters, and to simply say as much. Say “compassion for families, for transgender people, especially young people” and leave it at that. Full stop.

The entire rest of Buttigieg’s response is like watching him willingly run full-speed into a lawn full of rakes. Just like Obama will never be forgiven by some people (read: me) for his “pre-evolution” comments about marriage equality, Buttigieg’s extended comments about the concerns of “fairness” should have been kept to himself, and he gained absolutely nothing by voicing them. It will not win him points with anyone, and will only piss off the people that might have supported him (read: me).

Even worse than that, though, it’s a failure of integrity, because it’s astoundingly hypocritical. I don’t think his impulse to “both sides” everything is insincere or purely political; he’s made it the thesis driving his entire political career, stressing that we can only solve our problems by communicating with and trusting each other.

Assuming he actually believes what he’s saying here, and he’s willing to treat LGBTQ civil rights as issues that need to be addressed one letter at a time, then that calls into question his insight on any political issue. Because this is clearly, obviously, blatantly just a direct repackaging of the exact same bullshit that was used against gay men and lesbians for decades, to turn us into a similar wedge issue to win votes.

Normally, I wouldn’t consider it valid to mention a person’s sexual orientation in an argument. But Buttigieg has brought it up multiple times in multiple TV appearances, and I still have yet to see a single interview or television segment where he doesn’t mention his husband and their kids.

So you’d assume he’s extremely familiar with hearing questions of basic civil rights treated as if they were a controversy, demanding that we show the most compassion for the people who are the least affected.

If a gay person wants to serve in the military, is it “fairness” to deny that, insisting that it will make their colleagues uncomfortable?

Is it “fairness” to allow gay people to serve in the military as long as they’re sure to never, ever acknowledge their orientation to anyone, and they’re always wondering whether it will ruin their career if anyone finds out?

Is it “fairness” to refuse to recognize and protect marriages between gay couples, because some straight people who are completely unaffected might oppose it?

Is it “fairness” to refuse to allow gay men and women (like Buttigieg’s husband) to be teachers, because some parents allege that children aren’t safe around queer people?

Is it “fairness” to refuse to allow gay couples to adopt, because some people believe that children need a mother and a father figure to grow up well-adjusted, despite any legitimate evidence backing up this nonsense claim?

Buttigieg and his husband also like to mention their home in TV and social media appearances. Would it be “fairness” to say that they’re limited in which states they could’ve moved to, because of the “compromise” that some states were allowed to refuse to recognize their marriage as legitimate? Would it be “fairness” for some states to deny them health coverage under their “roommate’s” policy? Would it be “fairness” for some states to call their right to parentage into question?

Transgender people of all ages are being subjected to the exact same bullshit that other marginalized groups have been subjected to for decades. Reframing it with nonsensical “concerns” about fairness in athletics is a wholly fictional invention designed solely to allow bigots to deny that they’re bigots.

If a parent is concerned about their daughter competing in a sports league against trans students, then the correct response is not to show them compassion or pretend that their concerns are in any way legitimate. The correct response is to tell them flat out to stop being such shitty parents.

If your daughter is a whiny loser, you don’t fix that by showing her how to be a bigoted whiny loser. You fix it by explaining that being in a sports league is all about learning cooperation, healthy competition, personal achievement, and losing gracefully. There have been whiny losers in sports for far longer than right-wing assholes have been losing their shit over personal pronouns.

There have been “unfair” matchups in kids’ athletics for far longer, and kids who can absolutely trounce everyone else, regardless of whether their gender is the one assigned to them at birth. That is why kids go into sports in the first place, to learn how to be part of a team and how to healthily interact with other people. The point isn’t to win, you whiny, immature, chodes. It’s insulting to expect anyone to show “compassion” for the kinds of assholes who are the villains in 90% of teen summer movies.

Which is what makes Buttigieg’s response cross the line from “extremely disappointing” to “infuriating:” not only does it take the right-wing bait, but it shows a failure of integrity by giving compassion to the people who least deserve it, and denying it with a meaningless hand-wave to the people who actually deserve it.

Where’s the compassion for parents having to consider uprooting their family and moving to a different state, because of increasingly tyrannical and despicable limitations on health care, or even simple acknowledgement of their children’s true gender?

Where’s the compassion for the kids who are being subjected to all of this completely unnecessary bullshit during the most tumultuous period in their lives? Why should they have to give a solid damn about the people actively working to make their lives worse for no reason?

I have no doubt that Buttigieg and his defenders (and I used to be one, remember) will insist that this was just part of a much larger conversation, that it’s unfair to focus on this while ignoring the sentiment behind the rest of the interview, and that it’s focusing on a relatively small issue at the expense of the much larger and more complex issues going on while the nation is in crisis.

Both NPR and Buttigieg put the focus on Democratic messaging and the inadequate response to the current administration. The transcript hosted on NPR doesn’t even include or mention the question about transgender people in athletics.

But if you can’t handle the most basic questions of right and wrong, then you’re unequipped and unqualified to answer more complex questions of right and wrong.

That’s why this one conversation has dashed all of my hopes for being personally progressive but advocating for a centrist government. In the past, even as my own views have shifted gradually leftwards, I’ve maintained the opinion that being centrist is crucial to federal government. We’re equipped to change administrations every four years, but we shouldn’t be expected to tear down and rewrite the core values of our country every four years. We shouldn’t have to be spending our lives riding the pendulum back and forth between left and right, where years of stress, misery, and uncertainty depend on a fraction of a percentage of the popular vote.

But as we’ve seen so many times that you’d think I’d know better by now, basic questions of right and wrong are kryptonite to centrist politicians. This could and should have been a slam-dunk for Buttigieg, but he refused to forcefully speak out in defense of the people who need it the most.

One of the ideas that Tim Walz campaigned on was being able to compromise in politics without compromising your integrity. It’s so simple that it just feels like a sound bite, but as it turns out, it’s the most important thing.