The Democratic Party suffered the assassinations of three of the 20th century’s most iconic and respected leaders — one of them a sitting President — all within just five years during the 1960s. Those shocking murders had to be processed alongside the escalating war in Vietnam, whose whole rationale was the fear posed by the Cold War between the US and the USSR. The violent deaths of JFK, RFK and MLK seem to have also killed the party’s optimism and faith, turning it inward and wary.
Yet despite the existential chaos and trauma, Democrats labored for the next decade or two to achieve most of the civil-rights goals ever dreamed of. To its eternal credit and against formidable, often nasty, opposition, my ‘birth party’ fought the good fight on behalf of every worthy underdog. ‘We’ stood on principle even when doing so made us vulnerable, such as by defending the free speech rights of our adversaries and the due-process rights of criminal defendants. Hell, ‘we’ voted to raise our own taxes!
It was in this resolute spirit that I, now a public-school kid in San Francisco, traveled across town on a muni bus each morning to attend fourth grade at a Spanish-English bilingual school where most of the students were just learning English. As a native speaker recently arrived from the suburbs, I was promptly deputized by my teacher as a sort of apprentice to help the ESL kids. Uneasy about this turn of events, my parents found another option, a Chinese-English bilingual school on an even farther-away bus route, which they hoped would be a better fit. In all, we tried out four public schools over two years before admitting defeat and enrolling me in a private school where I would struggle (and mostly fail) to catch up to my new, better prepared classmates.
The story I choose to tell goes like this: while I wasn’t advancing academically in fourth and fifth grade, I was learning important lessons about the world. At the Spanish-speaking school, I made one friend, Sally, who invited me to her house. It was a one-bath shotgun shack in a dicey neighborhood near our school, where Sally lived with eight family members. As she ushered me in the front door she said, brightly and earnestly, “It’s big, huh?!,” which made me wonder what kind of home her family had left behind in Mexico such that she would be so proud of this place. I felt intuitively that I could never reciprocate her hospitality. My house was ‘regular', neither a Nob Hill mansion nor a showy Victorian; just a tidy stucco on a quiet, leafy street; but compared to Sally’s life, mine was a parallel reality that looked positively lavish. I couldn’t imagine exposing her to the chasm of random life chance that separated us. It didn’t matter, because I would soon exit her school, and we wouldn’t see each other again.
Whatever was the impact of my two-year academic learning loss, I do believe I gained meaningful social insights from the experiment. That said, I don’t think it’s exactly what the equity-in-education masterminds had envisioned. Their noble aim was to vanquish the race and class differences that had forever perpetuated an uneven distribution of opportunities to succeed in America. We children were meant to wipe that slate clean and guide the nation to a more just future, simply by learning side by side. It still doesn’t sound ridiculous to me; it just didn’t work.
What I understand now is that social engineering is a zero-sum gain that flows to the disadvantaged as it flows away from somewhere else. If you and I are told to run a mile in tandem so as to arrive at the finish line together, you will almost certainly have to slow down to accommodate me, since I’m not a runner. Similarly, where there’s an ‘achievement gap’ in a socially diverse classroom, the resolution will involve some lowering of performance at the top. That this isn’t the stated goal will be unimpressive to all but the saintliest ‘donors’ — i.e., those who donate some measure of their own success to instantiate justice of some kind.
In her book, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, Kara Dansky disabused me of the impulse to make excuses for the Democrats I’d helped elect: for instance, my local congressman, Representative Mark DeSaulnier. He’s a long-serving incumbent who occupies a ‘safe seat,’ like many of his colleagues. He hasn’t faced a serious election challenge since he first won office in 2015, but that never bothered me: I’d met him, heard him speak at PTA conferences, and found him to be a smart, decent guy.
So, when I wrote to him personally in 2021, I assumed he’d appreciate hearing the arguments for correcting and improving H.R. 5, known as the Equality Act, before voting ‘yes’. The draft legislation had fallen into the ‘trans’ activist trap wherein reasonable-sounding language obscures the encroachment of ‘gender identity’ upon the sex-based rights of women and girls. He needed to know.
In addition to forwarding an email provided by Kara Dansky’s group, I composed my own letter explaining how and why I had come to interrogate this matter in depth. I described the specific destabilizing blows inflicted by the ideology upon my family. I then listed the known health risks of every treatment currently offered to alter the healthy bodies of ‘trans kids,’ and finished with these observations:
Members of Congress can be forgiven for voting on measures involving ‘trans healthcare’ without knowing all of these facts. It’s very much by design that our collective non-knowing is the prevailing reality. All of us, from the average citizen, to the pediatrician, to the school superintendent, all the way up to the halls of Congress, rely on a chain of trust. Here, the links of that chain include medical researchers, policy analysts, leaders of professional societies, journalists, and so on. Most of the time the chain is strong enough to withstand doubts as well as the knee-jerk assumptions of the uninformed. Occasionally though, it’s not. Cautionary examples occur often enough, yet not often enough for us to detect a pattern that we need to deconstruct: consider the "Satanic Panic," which led to preschool teachers being convicted of sacrificing animals and children. It was a perfect storm of normally rational actors turning scorchingly irrational in response to the actions of their fellow-travelers in the chain of trust.
We are at a tipping point right now. Parents like me are finding communities online, and those connections are growing exponentially, much as the social contagion of ‘trans’ ID spread among our kids. What alarms me now is more than the fate of H.R. 5. I’m watching MSNBC, CNN and even PBS, as they cover the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, and I’m hearing “pregnant people” and “people who need abortion care,” and I’m recoiling, turning it off, because the presumption that all of a sudden it’s not really women who get pregnant is infuriating.
I get annual-fund letters from Planned Parenthood and the Trevor Project which go on for pages while scrupulously avoiding the words “woman” or “girl.” Many members of Congress are, by adopting this Orwellian Newspeak, assaulting us verbally just as we’re bracing for a looming attack by the Supreme Court. I can’t give to Planned Parenthood anymore because they have become the purveyors of the drugs that would nullify my daughter’s one chance to ever know a biological family member — i.e., her own child. I’m worried that Republicans will be seen to have got this one thing right, and that fact will obscure everything our party has ever got right.
Even if you still reject my argument, I will vote for you again next year. In the universe of liberal Democratic parents of ‘trans’-identifying kids, though, I’m increasingly in the minority. I just needed to say this, and I hope it lands.
Respectfully,
Jennifer Poyer Ackerman
The Kara Dansky-authored form letter I’d forwarded got a two paragraph auto-reply email from Rep. DeSaulnier, while the above letter got no reply. None. The only way I could explain this was to assume the congressman somehow didn’t see my email. Maybe a young staffer detected a whiff of transphobia and hit delete, or maybe there was a technical glitch, but I couldn’t let it go. More than a year later, I attended a ‘constituent walk-and-talk’ that was held an hour’s drive from my home, just so I could hand him a printed copy of the same letter while genially speculating the first one must have ‘got lost in the shuffle somehow.’ I imagined getting an effusive apology email within hours, but of course that didn’t happen. Two weeks later I got a voicemail from a staffer in his DC office, informing me Rep. DeSaulnier had read my letter. That was the response.
In The Reckoning, Dansky writes, “Democratic Party leaders have betrayed and abandoned women and girls by abolishing the category of sex in the law and throughout society.” Though the book was published months before the death blow landed on the ‘affirmative care’ model at the hands of Dr. Hilary Cass in Britain just days ago, Kara Dansky could see the writing on the wall as she was writing her book. When news of biological reality finally reaches our shores, she predicts this reaction from elected Democrats:
[They] are going to tell us that they didn’t know. That they couldn’t have known. That the science has changed in ways they couldn’t have anticipated. Don’t believe them. Don’t let them get away with it. They knew. They have known all along.
She’s right. In Mark DeSaulnier’s auto-reply to my form letter, he declares:
“I am a strong supporter of the Equality Act, which would make discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation illegal. Both society and the law must value the lives of others and treat every person with respect and dignity regardless of who they are, what they look like, who they identify as, or who they love. Furthermore, Members of Congress have a responsibility to ensure that the civil liberties of all citizens are upheld, as is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”
He knows the facts I spelled out in my letter, and also what I noted above: social engineering is a zero-sum gain that flows to the disadvantaged as it flows away from somewhere else. He chooses to pretend men with ‘woman identities’ are disadvantaged, while women, by this logic, are the advantaged parties in tension with those men. Relieving the tension requires us to subordinate or ‘donate’ our rights to any man who claims to have a ‘woman identity.’ If we refuse? DeSaulnier and the other Congressional Democrats will just take them from us. The gain has to flow from somewhere.
Democrats who will denounce a man to shreds once he’s revealed to have attended a college party in blackface thirty years ago are somehow oblivious to the same insult when it mocks women today:
US Assistant Secretary of Health Admiral Rachel (Richard) Levine’s public display of woman-face somehow serves to elevate his power and prestige, which he then employs to disempower women and girls.
As a thought experiment, see if you can picture the late former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright addressing the United Nations while wearing dark makeup that specifically mocks another race.
Now imagine members of the mocked racial group eagerly donating back some of the ‘privilege’ conferred by their ascribed genetics while praising Secretary Albright’s ‘courage’ and granting her full membership in their racially defined legal category. Because of her offensive makeup.
Now you’ve got a visual that represents the incomprehension and disgust I feel for the Democratic Party right now.
Look, I never complained about the two-year derailment of my early education in the service of a liberal political fantasy.
I was unprepared in 2016 to recognize that my daughter’s middle school had been reprogrammed and was intent on reprogramming her, so I didn’t complain then, either.
I had identified for so long and so personally with the Democratic Party that I resisted becoming a ‘single-issue voter’ in 2022. I did complain to my Congressman, but then I voted for him even after he ghosted me. That’s embarrassing. My bad.
But there are limits to my studied masochism, and I’m turning off the donor spigot now. My mistake was believing I had to ‘identify’ emotionally with any label: for years, I criticized identity politics while subscribing to it myself, as though the problem was with all the other groups. This condition, described by Yascha Mounk as the ‘identity trap,’ is deranging and counterproductive. It leads politicians to believe their actions and/or inaction, their votes and their responsiveness to voters are of little consequence. It probably serves as a disincentive to engage in critical analysis, which can in fact complicate your life.
But the alternative to critical thinking is facile thinking, and there’s nothing worse than that. Moreover, it’s a move Democrats perform clumsily. For all our annoying qualities, we’re naturally more inclined to overthink, debate around the edges and nerd out rhetorically. So if we’re told to go sell an idea that has all the sturdiness of a wet paper plate — Gender-affirming care saves lives! Trans women are women! — we might not make the sale. Our audience might even turn away in disgust.
At some point, I’ll have to confront the practical implications of being a free agent politically in 2024. Good times! Please stick around in case I need to be talked off the ledge. To be continued…
The primary benefits of the social engineering zero-sum game don't even flow to the authentically disadvantaged - they typically flow to people who are well off and just happen to tick the correct minority box. It is mostly well-positioned minority members who are able to take advantage of these mechanisms. Your story is very indicative since it clearly shows progressive parents immediately revert to self-interest-ode when they are the ones who have to pay the price of their progressive policies (ie your story of being disadvantaged by a multicultural school). It is the working class people who can't move their kids to private schools who really pay the price however.
Rob Henderson has noted that the modern progressive elite's concept of equality/equity is to make sure the 1% is composed of a representative of the substrate population, not make sure there is a level playing field for all. Needless to say the majority is pretty miffed by this, as they are by the continual rubbing-our-noses in it. "We're gonna do what we want and there is nothing you can do about it deplorables!" is the new motto of parties such as Dems, ALP (Aus), Liberal (Can) & Labour (UK).
Yes, yes, yes!