I reject the premise of your question.

Democrats are already sacrificing climate targets, asylum seekers, and Palestinians. Yet another sacrifice on the pyre?

At some point you’re just voting for Republicans.

Trans rights are human rights, and how you treat anyone in your society is how you treat everyone. Democrats were scared in the '80s and '90s to support gay people for this exact reason, and instead of losing elections they started winning because people realize gay people are people. They lost elections because they weren’t brave enough to stand with the courage of their convictions, and in my opinion that’s what they deserved.

So, in this hypothetical we have a time machine, and can see not just if Dems lose but also what the consequences of that loss are. Further GOP court-packing? Loss of human rights for other vulnerable groups? Or maybe just a continuation of the status quo? With the time machine, we would know. Because the Dems winning or losing is not a good or evil in itself, but the consequences could be.

But, real word time now, we can’t know all the consequences of our actions. We should always try to achieve the best results we can, of course, but you can’t do something you know is wrong (like stay silent on trans rights) in the hopes that an evil now will lead to a greater good later, or prevent a greater evil. That’s my take, but what else can you expect from a virtue ethicist?

This kind of post just shows why I think politicians are spineless cowards. If winning is everything to anyone, they should stick to investing in a stock market.

You know, this is actually a really engaging question, though I think the limited scope and parameters hinders things. And that title is accidental rage bait (which I think the down votes are a symptom of).

So, I’m going to ignore the “would you rather” aspect of things and just engage with the post in a way that interests me. If that’s not interesting to you, cool beans, read no further :)

First, I’m right with you. Trans rights are human rights, period. Secondarily, screw anyone that doesn’t like it, because trans rights cost nobody anything.

Now, the question that’s here leads fundamental questions about politics as a whole. Does a bloc need to campaign on all of its goals? If so, how active does that campaigning have to be to satisfy the members of that bloc and/or others that might align with it? Then, how are voters supposed to tell what the bloc’s real intent is? Finally, is it smart to campaign on a hot button issue when a race is close? There’s some side questions to those, but I think that’s the core set of issues here.

Now, I’m a practical motherfucker. I’m perfectly fine with campaigning smart, and playing off of opposing fractions’ issues. But I’m only going to support that bloc/party/faction if I can trust them to be playing smart instead of just ignoring the issue.

Take that to the current US election run. The lead candidate has historically been an ally in at least minor ways (and in some major ones) to trans people. The veep candidate is relatively well known for it too. So I would weigh the odds of them at least maintaining their overall stance on the subject being good. So, if they choose to soft peddle, or outright avoid letting the topic become an attack vector, I think that’s smart politics, and I’m okay with that.

Barring revolution, all changes are incremental and require work as well as time to make happen. I would wish for people as a whole to live up to the golden rule and be decent across the board, but I know that if you wish in one hand and shit in the other, one will fill up faster. So it’s a matter of steady pressure on each front as manpower, resources, and alliances allow. Voting for the least bad, or partially allied bloc is rankling, but a political reality since there aren’t enough people willing to have a revolution, and even those that are willing can’t really agree on what the new paradigm should be.

All of that is ignoring the fact that the U.S. is stuck with a two party system that is constantly leveraged for more control, more power, and more money for a very limited range of people. Those people, the ones actually running the parties, do not give a fuck about the people of the U.S. They’ll pick up or abandon any cause as needed for their real goals. Every politician is part of that, whether they want to be or not.

That means, for us, the ones not steering the ship of the US, that we have to pick our battles carefully, and carry along anyone we can at each stage of the fight. If that means voting democrat currently to achieve a long term goal, that’s the mess we’re in. And we work with that party over time, pushing them in way we want, expanding human rights as the easiest way to ensure profits and power.

It’s why LGB turned into LGBT, then LGBTQ, and whatever the next iteration is. Different, but related interests aligning to give smaller groups more power as a voting bloc. Power by numbers. If 2% of the population is bi (number chosen for the example, not accuracy), that’s ignorable. But you add 2% that’s gay men, 2% lesbians, 2% trans, and you start having enough numbers to be a factor in all elections, so long as they stay fair and legally operated. Even with gerrymandering, you can’t completely ignore a big enough bloc.

Right now, there’s zero point in campaigning hard on trans issues. Democrats are the only viable party, and they’ve shown willing to be allies overall. They pander enough to their base as it is, and anything else is a waste of resources. They push for swing voters and a handful of states because that’s the political reality. So that’s their focus, and it should be.

The smartest play is to shrug off objections to trans rights. Just ignore them as not being worthy of discussion. Let Republicans and other opposed people burn their fuel up on a mission they’ve already got a base built for. Republicans can’t radicalize any more than they doorway already have. But you can let them run their mouths with hate, and fire up their opposition to vote for the lesser evil.

There’s multiple strategies to employ to passively make it known the campaign is allied, and they’re doing that. Check out The Advocate, and some of their reporting about Harris. When you can get the press to do the work for you, why waste resources? They know that Harris/Walz has enough history of supporting LGBTQ issues that the press and organizations that focus on those issues are going to back them.

By simply not saying those articles and editorials aren’t true, they say that they are, or at least that’s the impression they want to give (and it’s pretty true from the stuff I’ve seen).

Harris’ campaign loses nothing by staying passive, but would also gain nothing by going active.

Now, I am not a Democrat, and haven’t been for decades. I’m way further left than Bernie Sanders, and he’s as far left as anyone that’s run democrat gets. But I’m also not a vote abstainer. Not so much because of presidential races, though I cast my vote there anyway. It’s the senatorial and house races, plus state and local races that matter more to me. There’s races at those levels where campaigning for trans rights makes sense, but others where it doesn’t.

That’s very important because during presidential years, people bloody well forget that once you get past voters that only vote for one of the two parties, votes count more. There’s more reason to carefully decide what to campaign on, and try to draw in anyone that’s likely to swing your way that isn’t a base voter.

Harris winning is not a guaranteed democrat win. If the Senate shifts, even if the house shifts, the national stage can mean the dems lose overall.

As a Dutch citizen I just want to kick the shit out of this post and all it stands for. Seriously your system is broken. Period.

How does public facing statements make trans people vulnerable? Legislation is the power of legislators.

Being quiet about an issue during the campaign makes little difference if they are supportive in office.

Being strategically quiet during a campaign is a good strategy, if only they were smart enough to use it on even more divisive issues, like the genocide.

I’ll give you a different perspective. I don’t vote in the US elections (given the impact on people in other countries maybe we should) so I won’t focus on the Democrat/Republican thing but on the reasons for selecting a specific candidate.

Step 1 - deal breakers. Determine if the proposed policies cause any immediate regression in what is already achieved. Rolling back existing trans rights, banning abortion, stuff like that.

Step 2 - vibes. This is the critical one. Don’t immediately look at positive policies you want implemented. Look at how a candidate winning would move the Overton Window .

After this election there will be more, and who wins today moves the general vibe of the entire political system. It sets a base for policies of future candidates who might not even know it yet.

Step 3 - narrowing down. Now if you have several candidates that pass step 2 equally, you can look at the specific policies. Generally you can expect any politician to overpromise (khm lie), but usually they try to achieve at least some of the stated goals.

In two-party electoral systems basically you can’t often reach the step 3, but you do have primaries so it can be applied there.

I want trans rights for my fellow country trans people, but honestly… YES! Because fuck giving in to the red hat wierdos that want to take away everyone’s rights.

The idea that actual swing voters, who are largely tuned out of 99% of available information, actually care about specific policies is overstated on all but a tiiiny subset of issues (which trans rights are not one of). Virtually no specific policy actually impacts electoral success on non-base turnout voting on its merits, it’s all campaign organization and media vibes, so I’d argue this is a false choice, largely. Nobody who isn’t already on a side cares about your platform, they care if you’re visibly embarrassed about your own platform (as democrats usually are about the 1% deviation from the GOP free market absolutism they dare in most cycles).

Whenever the Republicans have campaigned on anti-trans bullshit they’ve lost. It’s getting more and more common for cis people to have trans people casually exist in their lives, and are therefore less likely to be a raging bigot

This post feels a little like bait, but that said:

To me, this is not even a question. It doesn’t feel great to say, but the only correct response is to choose Pathway 2. There’s a lot of things at stake in this election but one of the things on the chopping block if the GOP wins is trans rights. We’ve seen what they do when they have full control (look at Florida - that’s their vision for the whole country); securing a win for them just to maintain a moral high ground on this one issue will only make things worse for trans people. Trans rights being left “in a vulnerable position” is far better than trans rights being eliminated completely. That’s not even taking into account any of the other problems this would cause.

Anyone choosing Pathway 1 is not thinking through the ramifications of their choice. That said, it’s a stupid premise for a discussion, for exactly the above issue. For there to be an interesting moral dilemma, there has to be a dilemma, and there’s only one here if you’re not thinking about it past the surface.

To be clear this is purely in response to a hypothetical and I’m not in any way suggesting actually taking that course of action in reality. I in no way believe there’s enough single-issue swing voters for the democratic party being pro-trans-rights to make a lick of difference in the actual outcome.