02b U.S. Politics – Progressive

I started my career as a high school history teacher back in 1985. I taught my students about the Holocaust every year and was fortunate enough one summer to be selected for a special National Endowment for the Humanities seminar for teachers, led by Professor Lawrence Langer, a leading Holocaust scholar. Professor Langer came up with the term the “choiceless choice” to describe the no-win situations Jews were put in during the Holocaust, when there was simply no real choice to be made in the face of the genocidal Nazis. The idea has stuck with me for four decades.

It came to mind again when I read a recent Washington Post article following the Supreme Court’s adverse ruling in our case, BPJ v. West Virginia, on June 30, in which Julian Mark writes, “Critics, including some trans rights advocates, say the movement has rushed to tee up causes that the court’s 6-3 conservative majority is not ready to embrace.” While elements of the article were thoughtful, it is based on a flawed premise that warrants exploration.

First of all, the idea that “the [LGBTQ+] movement has rushed to tee up [trans] causes” is completely off the mark. There have been 2,446 bills designed to limit the rights of LGBTQ+ people introduced into state legislatures since 2022 — at least one in every single one of our 50 states — and 255 of them have become law in 27 states. The large majority of these laws are aimed at trans people. The LGBTQ+ movement didn’t “tee up” these laws: the opponents of the LGBTQ+ movement did, because they saw a political advantage to be won by picking on a small and relatively powerless minority and cynically exploited it. In other words, we didn’t pick this fight. We didn’t “tee up” trans issues. Our opponents did.