“Liberals, It’s Not About Being Nice”
“Next to race, issues facing transgender Americans are perhaps the next most commonly cited wedge issue splitting sanctimonious Democrats from the rest of the country. Historians will likely take great interest in the question of how the plight of a population facing a wave of violence and staggering poverty was framed so casually and easily as the froufrou obsession of wealthy liberal arts students and coastal elites. In the present, major outlets and voices on both sides of the political divide insist diffidence is sensible. “ ‘Gender identity disorder’ was considered a form of mental illness until recently,” Alexander writes, “but today anyone hesitant about transgender women using the ladies’ room is labeled a bigot.” In his post-election essay, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” Columbia professor and author Mark Lilla, a liberal himself, agreed that “America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.”…
A poll by the Public Religion Research Institute last year found that a majority of Americans oppose laws that would force trans people to use the restrooms that correspond with their birth identities… The fact that a story about Republicans in Raleigh imposing their will on localities that disagreed with them, and then losing an election as a consequence, fed a narrative about Democrats fatally overreaching on identity politics is, in fact, perfectly emblematic of the dynamics animating punditry about the attitudes and dispositions of liberals and the left.”
Related: “A man shouts racial slurs in a Seattle Starbucks. The silence is deafening”; “Take It From A German: Americans Are Too Timid In Confronting Hate”; “What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism”; “Nice, decent folks”
