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Dems with anti-trans views are on the ballot. What should pro-trans voters do with them?
(www.helenwebberley.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
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politics
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So anyway I'm withholding my vote from anti-trans dems. Downvote all you want it's not happening.
Well that’s dumb, because Republicans are obviously worse for you than Democrats.
Do you think of yourself as an ally to the trans community?
Yes
I had zero doubt that you would!
And yet, prominent, knowledgeable political thinkers within the trans community, people who obviously understand the issues affecting our community better than you do, are saying that Gavin Newsom-types are so bad for us that we're at a point where we can't vote for them in good conscience.
And then you waddle along in here and say that's "dumb". 👏👏👏
The transgenders are stupid and you are smart. If you were our leader we'd probably all be fine, and we'd don't he stuff you wanted us to do.
Do you think trans people all get together and say "wow that guy's really fucking us out there, but we gotta suck it up or else it's gonna get even worse"? Is that the vibe, in your experience as an esteemed ally to whom the trans community is forever indebted? Or do you think maybe we all want Gavin Newsom and Rob Sand to get fucked in the ass and die, on a level you can't comprehend because you aren't personally affected and your self-proclaimed allyship is cat diarrhea?
Look back on your stupid comment in ten years and let me know how well it aged, liberal.
You don’t speak for all trans people. Just the dumb ones.
No. Most trans people disagree with you.
Most don’t vote, or vote third party? Doubtful.
Ur gay
Luckily you are a minority within your minority. Most trans people I know understand math.
No I'm not. I know more and cooler trans people than you do.
Quick math quiz for you:
Which is greater?
A) -1
B) -3000
C) These numbers are the same
You must really hate trans people if you're willing to help a Republican win.
I am a trans person and I understand my business better than you. You can vote blue no matter who all you want. I'm a leftist bitch.
You clearly don't understand how math works though. You can do what you want, but a non vote is the second most anti trans decision you can make in the general.
On one hand, you have a candidate that is anti trans in sports and on the other you have someone that wants to block hormone therapy, and child care, and wants to send trans people to mental institutions. You decision supports the latter.
Like I said, you must really hate trans people.
Nothing self-proclaimed allies like more than lecturing trans people how stupid they are.
Their identified gender has nothing to do with my comment on their lack of understanding math. The reality of how FPtP voting doesn't care about gender.
You've already been told by trans people why you're wrong. You just think you know better than us. "Math" is no cure for your ignorant hubris.
Again, the math doesn't care if you're trans or not. I understand the emotional belief that not voting is somehow justified, but it's flawed in reality. If you can't wrap your head around how in the general election, one of two people is going to win, and one is clearly worse than the other, then yea, I do know better than you.
It's ignorance to believe that math and reality care about your feelings.
Like I said, the person (and this extends to you) can do whatever they want, but at the end of the day, a protest non vote supports the worse candidate in FPtP. It's factually provable math.
If you think I'm just blowing smoke or being ignorant or whatever, tell me, would you rather have trans people excluded from sports or would you rather have them denied medical coverage and forced into mental institutions? There is no third option, you have to live one of those realities. Tell me how that's ignorant hubris instead of just making emotionally charged bullshit statements.
For some Republicans, sending them to mental institutions would be the milder end of what they want to do. Letting the 7MM and Project 2025 go buck-wild with this country will not spell good things, that is for sure.
Serious question, not trying to argue, I just want to understand: What do you expect to gain by not voting/voting third party in this particular election? Is it a matter of principle for you, or is there another reason? And are you really unafraid of having more Republican representatives vs Democrats?
I ask because this choice has always seemed like an obvious one to me, but I'll admit I'm looking at the question through a lens of cold logic. Also while I am a minority, I'm not trans, so I assume there is a perspective here that I'm not seeing.
The reason you can't understand this issue is because you are incapable of looking more than one election ahead into the future.
No, you're looking at it through the lens of propaganda. It is not cold logic to believe that a politician in the Democrat party is inherently obviously better than a politician in the Republican party. The two parties are PR campaigns of the rich elite. The psychographics of the voting population are broadly segmentable into groupings that can be assigned to one party or the other and remain consistent enough to fit their campaign. Using cold logic, the Ds and the Rs are sharing the responsibility of maintaining an ultraviolent genocidal oligarchic international EuroCentric Christian white supremacist patriarchal empire.
Obama is literally out here this week saying the Ds need to stop campaigning on material conditions and focus on moral narratives about we can all live together in this country. He and Biden were the ones that created the policy framework, headcount, budgets, and private contractor relationships that Donald Trump is using to terrorize cities with ICE. Obama/Biden appointed the exact same man that Trump appointed to be deportation czar. And Obama came after Bush 2 but continued Bush 2's war campaign to destroy 7 countries - Libya was the 6th that Bush couldn't get to, so Obama and Clinton took care of destroying that sovereign nation. Iran was the 7th, and Obama couldn't get to it so he negotiated the JCPOA and then Trump demonstrated that the military strategists were already planning to destroy Iran they just needed more time.
What else does cold logic tell us? Did Biden know Trump was a fascist threat? Sure seemed like he was talking about it mostly openly. What did Biden do? Well, he had the full unredacted Epstein Files. He could have launched a federal criminal investigation into Trump. But he didn't. He just sat on it. And then he fucked the primaries. He did nothing at all to stop Trump, to reduce his available toolset, to play politics. Nothing. Biden saw Trump with a knife and a bunch of people saying "he's got a knife" and said "watch out for that guy, he's got a knife" and then left.
What else does cold logic tell us? Corporate profits are higher under Democrats. Democrats regularly say one thing on TV and then vote with their Republican colleagues. Democrats support mass domestic surveillance, Israel genociding Gaza, increased military spending, increased police spending, using police against the homeless, mass recialized incarceration, and yes, they even support anti-trans sentiment.
That's logic. Blue no matter who is not logic, it's emotional.
Those are all fair points; I can't argue any of them, at least not with my level of understanding. I would even agree that Republicans and establishment/neoliberalism Democrats are ultimately rolling up to the same folks to get their marching orders, even if their outward facade paints them as opposing factions. I would argue, though, that while the Democrats you describe represent the same brand of fascism as the Republicans they (ostensibly) rail against, they do push it in a noticeably slower, less heavy-handed way than Republicans do. That doesn't sound like much of a benefit, but I would think it offers progressives a chance to shift the Overton window back to the left during the eras when Democrats are in power; more of a chance than they'd have during a Republican administration like this one anyway, where people are constantly overwhelmed with the avalanche of blatant corruption and intentional cruelty directed toward them. A slower-moving disaster is an objectively better situation than a fast-moving one, because you at least have more time to try to stop it or get out of the way. That's the cold logic I was referring to in my original comment.
But like I said, I'm not really here to argue. I just wanted to ask a question, the one you skipped right over: What do you expect to gain by either not voting or voting third party in this particular election? You've given a salient explanation of why Democrats aren't much better than Republicans as leaders, but you haven't explained why picking an unlikely third option (or not picking one at all) is the best choice.
So let's answer your question. I expect to gain nothing. Which is exactly what I expect to gain if I do vote for them.
There's a sense in which the process of "power" shifting from one brand to the other brand is much like people buying store brand vs name brand of the same product made by the same manufacturer. People buy the one or the other en masse because of larger economic trends driving their buying behavior. Individuals making deliberate choices to "not pay the brand tax" is such a small component of aggregate buying behavior it's not even worth modeling.
In this way, the old adage "it's the economy, stupid" is saying that people don't really win elections because conscientious voters who are thoughtful and strategic do things - people win elections because of larger economic and social trends. Yes, in individual small swing districts conscientious voting can sometimes become large enough to have a measurable impact, but not in most races, not in most districts, and even among swing districts, not that often.
Instead what's happening is the 2 brands work to temper the psychological needs of various groups of the American population, serving to create us/them dynamics within the population that serves to divide them against each other and enlist them in maintaining the very powers who oppress them.
Like what happens in these discussions. We are all being oppressed by the entire political system, and yet some of us believe that others of us are paid Russian or Chinese trolls or that we're actually Republicans because we are trying to keep the focus on the total political system. What we need is to band together as a single group, not as separate groups who fight on the terrain of ballots, but a single unified group of the people against the oligarchs and that means fighting against their mechanisms of control. Party politics is one of those mechanisms.