“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Massachusetts Democratic Representative, Seth Moulton, told the New York Timesin the wake of Donald Trump’s victory.
“I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” he continued, “but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
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Following these remarks, Moulton’s campaign manager and top advisor, Matt Chilliak, resigned in protest. The School Committee in Salam, Moulton’s hometown and district, also denounced his comments.
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“We are a district whose values are belonging, equity, and opportunity, and we serve all of our students,” said state Rep. Manny Cruz (D), the vice-chair of the School Committee.
Cruz added, “This is not the time to be scapegoating our kids for the failure of national Democratic politics.”
Scapegoating indeed. In addition to targeting undocumented immigrants for bringing about the ills of the nation, Trump and MAGA Republicans – acting within their autocratic divide-and-conquer scapegoating tactics as tyrants do – have further weaponized and inflamed fear and hatred toward transgender people.
Donald Trump has a long track record of fearmongering – defining Mexicans, for example, as “rapists,” “drug and human traffickers,” and “gang members” who engage in high rates of crime on the U.S. side of the border.
In the past year alone, the Republican Party spent approximately $215 million in TV network ads, some of which they broadcast during National Football League games, targeting trans people for posing a threat to women’s sports and for consuming taxpayer funds to undergo gender-affirming care while incarcerated. These ads, however, failed to mention that these procedures were also mandated by law during Trump’s first term in office.
Moulton doubled down on his comments about trans girls in sports even after receiving backlash: “I stand firmly in my belief for the need for competitive women’s sports to put limits on the participation of those with the unfair physical advantages that come with being born male,” he claimed. “I am also a strong supporter of the civil rights of all Americans, including transgender rights. I will fight, as I always have, for the rights and safety of all citizens. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and we can even disagree on them.”
Moulton, who retained his House seat unopposed, has contradicted his previous positions on trans rights and trans athletes specifically. First elected to Congress in 2015, he is a member of the Congressional Equality Caucus, which among other issues, promotes LGBTQ+ equality. Previously, Moulton had vigorously supported trans athletes playing on sports teams that best align with their gender identity.
The Human Rights Campaign endorsed Moulton’s 2024 reelection campaign.
In both 2022 and 2023, Moulton cosponsored the House Democrats’ Transgender Bill of Rights, which among other civil rights protections, would assure trans athletes the right to participate on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
Moulton voted against a Republican-backed bill to bar transgender student-athletes from sports. Rep. Greg Steube’s (R-FL) bill, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, would have changed Title IX to recognize sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
Many questions remain. Do Moulton’s latest comments against trans athletes in school sports crepresent hypocrisy of the first order? Or has Moulton come to the side of others who are scapegoating trans people for his own political gains and out of concerns for his party?
Speaking on the topic of trans people on MSNBC Weekends with Alex Witt, Moulton declared, “The Democratic Party is out of touch with the voters”:
“I was speaking authentically as a dad about one of many issues where I think we are out of touch with the majority of voters,” he stated.
He continued by blaming the progressive wing of the Democratic Party “for shaming us and trying to cancel people who even bring up these difficult issues,” saying it also shames the voters.
He claimed that his party needs to listen to the voters “on all these issues that were telling us the truth.”
But were the voters telling the Democratic Party “the truth” in their overwhelming support for the Republican Party in the 2024 elections? Or was the electorate broadcasting its biases and hatred of trans people and other marginalized people as a reflection of the Republican Party’s fearmongering and scapegoating?
Is Moulton being pragmatic in his assessment that support of trans equality is a losing strategy in the current political climate? If he considers this as pragmatic, he must accept the backlash against his statements since he is colluding in a movement to divide and conquer the electorate by placing upon the political alter the human sacrifice of a significant percentage of the population.
A more important and urgent critical question must be addressed: Should people’s civil and human rights be able to go up for a vote in the public square, in state and national legislatures, and in the courts – all to be decided by “the majority”? Unfortunately, rather than the basic human rights conceived as automatic in our founding documents, majority rule is tradition in the United States.
Legislators and the electorate voted whether to “grant” voting rights to formerly enslaved males, to all women and to people of First Nations. They voted on who can and cannot marry, who can attend school, and who can hold jobs without discrimination. They voted on bodily autonomy, control of one’s reproductive healthcare, and many other rights.
In 1790, for example, the newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which excluded all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans, the latter whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited this land for an estimated 35,000 years.
The Congress did not grant Native Americans rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though Asians continued to be denied naturalized citizenship status.
Alexis de Tocqueville, French political scientist and diplomat, traveled across the United States for nine months between 1831 and1832 conducting research for his epic work, Democracy in America.
He was astounded to find a certain paradox: On one hand, he observed that the U.S. promoted itself around the world as a country of “We the People,” where freedom and tolerance were among its defining tenets. On the other hand, he witnessed profound issues of discrimination and prejudice toward marginalized people.
Though he favored U.S.-style democracy, he found its major limitation to be its stifling of independent thought and independent beliefs. A country that promoted the notion that majority rules was effectively silencing minorities by what Tocqueville termed the “tyranny of the majority.”
This is a crucial point because in a democracy, without specific guarantees of minority rights, there is a danger of domination or tyranny over marginalized people.
How much longer would the institution of slavery have continued in the United States if it were left to the states to decide by majority vote based on what the voters were telling them was their “truth”?
Would interracial couples be allowed to marry today in all states if it were left to each individual state to decide based on what the voters were telling them was their “truth”?
How much longer must we wait for people nationwide to have the freedom to control their bodily autonomy since the majority of Supreme Court “justices” took away this right and left it to states to decide based on what the voters tell them is their “truth”?
We must not leave anyone behind on the sacrificial altar, no matter how politically advantageous or pragmatic, no matter what the majority of voters tell us is their “truth.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, the great civil rights leader, wisely stated that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. added: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
That is the truth.
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