New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) said Saturday that Democrats have lost sight of the important economic issues facing working-class Americans as the party works to rebuild itself after a devastating loss in the 2024 presidential election.
“The party, as a whole, has lost its focus on working people,” Mamdani said in an interview with MS Now.
“People want to know: What are you going to do for rent? What are you going to do for housing? What are you going to do for gas? What are you going to do for groceries? We have to have answers to that.”
Issues like housing affordability, the cost of healthcare and rising gas prices should be at the forefront of the party’s focus, according to Mamdani, rather than ideological battles that distract from what matters to most Americans.
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Do not take the “Trans Bait.”
MAGA has nothing going for it, so Trans rights are the only thing the they have, because it doesn’t gain votes from anyone, and it loses center and independent votes. So they will try to steer EVERY conversation to Trans Rights, and we have to IGNORE it, not engage, and pivot to one of the many MAGA problems, and keep the conversation there.
Do NOT respond to any Trans Bait, and insist on talking about Corruption (Weaponization Fund, Ballroom, Pool, Arch, etc.) Treason (Jan 7, Weaponization Fund), Pedophilia (Epstein Files), Incompetence (War, Affordability, etc), and more.
Don’t breed
“I believe Democrats believe exactly what Fox News says they believe” would have been a more succinct, more honest post.
Who cares what the actual science says, you’re a trust your gut type, aren’t yah? If the science says trans women have no advantage, that doesn’t matter, because “underThunder” jacks off to trans porn and views trans women as men. So we just have to go with their assumptions, science be damned.
Have you read any of the 3 studies I’ve mentioned in my comments? Maybe they’re over the head of a 12 year old.
Yes. And they contradict your claims. You just vomited studies without even reading them.
Wow, you just have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about do you? Is vomiting fox news talking points all that Republicans can do nowadays? Do better.
While your larger point is worthwhile, this part is indistinguishable from the positions where it “seemed obvious” that africans not as smart as europeans, or that women were not as mature as men, or that the poor were less deserving of the rich.
Trans women who go through HRT are essentially indisinqyusihable in ability from Cis women. There may be a reasonable bar in some sports for trans girls who are old enough to have undergone male puberty and aren’t on HRT or puberty blockers, but blanket bans aren’t at all supported by science.
Personally, my response is “these are children.” Yes, our daughters should be free from being assaulted by fully mature men. But so should our sons.
I agreed with the post until there might be a reasonable bar part. When a person switches hormones the body follows. The whole concern about trans folks is also truly rooted in bigotry, not sportsmanship. Let’s not forget that part.
What I mean when I say ‘it seems obvious to me’ is that based on the results of reputable scientific investigation it seems clear that trans women retain some degree of biological advantage over people born female.
Which studies? Done with what methodology? And what are the rebuttals against their claims? Did the study differentiate trans women who are not on HRT, newly on HRT, and on HRT past the several year adjustment period? Same question, for age at which HRT or puberty blockers began. And does the reported difference fall outside the expected range for feminine athletes? Did the study include a group of cis boys or cis men as contrast? Were trans boys and trans men also included to show the presumable equivalent disadvantage?
There have been some infamous studies recently done by transphobes and cited as evidence of their bigoted viewpoint. Science thankfully doesn’t itself care about politics and these studies will either be refuted or confirmed as more science is done.
And as I alluded to before, even if merely having been assigned male at birth gave some advantage in competitive sport, that advantage is entirely irrelevant to scholastic activities and only relevant to professional conpetitions if it puts trans women substantially outside the range of expected competitors.
“That advantage is entirely irrelevant to scholastic activities”. Did anything I say have anything at all to do with academics?
The studies I reference are Strength, power and aerobic capacity of transgender athletes: a cross-sectional study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (2024), Body composition, exercise-related performance parameters and associated health factors of transgender women, cisgender women and cisgender men volleyball players by the NHI (2024), and Transsexuals and competitive sports in the European Journal of Endocrinology (2004). You can look up what you want to about each. Though the results generally say that strength metrics equalize over time, some skeletal metrics and residual lean mass differences remain even after several years of hormone therapy.
And since you decided to focus only on the trans issue in my comment I should remind you the thrust of my argument was in regards to Democrats putting identity politics before good governance.
Yes. In America – the country which the Democrats are a political faction of – the only places where government has standing to regulate the specifics of sport as such are in those leagues attached to schools. Professional and recreational leagues are only governed by employment and public-access law.
~(You’re free to, say, create a private club that allows only white men and play whatever games you want. You just won’t get any tax breaks or liability protection, and would have a hard time renting stadiums or selling coverage of your matches)~
I’m sorry, I thought my position on the matter was clearly While you may have a valid point regarding the democratic party’s over-reliance on identity based anti-bigotry and their messaging to non-aligned voters, the sole supporting example you provided of either was phrased in a way that I found so odious and wrong-headed as to render whatever else you said irrelevant.
Throwing minorities under the bus is neither good governance nor good politics. Especially when said minority is facing prohibitions so ornerous that they could be fairly described as genocidal.
~(Although genocide is not strictly possible for any LGBTQ+ letter since trans and queer humans have existed for as long as humans have and would reappar naturally even if you killed every last living example.)~
You didn’t even read the fucking articles you linked. You just googled articles for trans athletics and vomited them here, assuming they would back your claims.
From your first paper:
So the first article contradicts your claims and explicitly says there is no evidence to justify sports bans.
The second paper you linked contradicts your claims. You’re full of shit.
I’m surprised you spelled ‘you’re’ correctly.
Science doesn’t support your belief that trans women have physical advantages. Do you understand the role that hormones have and the effects on the body?
Whether the comment you responded to is based in reality or not, you’re playing into the described perception by responding this way. The best response to someone who clearly doesn’t give a shit about trans people, and won’t no matter what you say, is something like:
Don’t go along with the culture war bullshit. That’s the only strategy they have. Talk about real solutions to real problems and you will win others over. Probably not the person you are talking to, but that rarely happens anyway. Others listening or reading will take notice. That’s exactly what people like Bernie and Mamdani do. It’s why people listen to them. They don’t get sucked into some pointless debate about hormone levels with people who are only bringing it up to distract from real problems.
This is a great point. Thanks for stating it. I am often too easily roped into these kinds of arguments. Logical ones are so much better.
Have you heard the phrase “irreconcilable differences”? It’s argued this way because support for trans rights, abortion, human rights in general, or fascism versus democracy are not negotiable positions. There’s no middle ground or compromise that can be made on issues like these. I agree with you though that the Democrat party does not actually represent the working class.
AGREED! YOU are Right and EVERYONE else is WRONG! Which is EXACTLY why Democrats with YOUR Viewpoint keep
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I believe the condescension you mentioned is real, but it’s magnified tenfold because we’re all trapped in media echo chambers. Most normal people aren’t obsessing over these niche topics, but the media and political machines weaponize them to keep us divided.
It perfectly exposes the hypocrisy on free speech on both sides. The left’s online gatekeepers treat disagreement as a moral failing, effectively chilling free speech through social conformity. On the flip side, the right screams about censorship while using state power to ban books, police classroom speech and insist that Christianity is the only acceptable religion. Both parties rely on these culture wars to control what we can say and think, all while abandoning any real, material help for the working class.
Republicans have just done a better job of identifying the issues facing everyday people and campaigning on them, but they rarely have a plan to actually fix them. Spencer Pratt’s website for LA mayor is a great example of this. While he highlights the exact issues hurting regular people, there is zero substance or realistic plan on how any of it actually gets done.
You’re absolutely right that most people wouldn’t give a second thought to these topics if right wing media, in particular, makes it seem like these issues are the most important things in the world and society will collapse if we don’t do something.
It’s sad you got so downvoted and only had one reasonable reply. Trans people should be free to do what they want of course but I find it hard to disagree with you in that they would have a biological advantage in certain sports. But I’m sure it can work both ways, a trans man could have a biological advantage in other areas. But like the other person said, no one really cares about those things except the media.
And this is why we don’t put civil rights up to a “gut check.” You’re simply wrong. You have a bigoted belief that trans women have a male sex, so you assume that trans women perform the same as cis men in sports. Your bigotry blinds you to reality. Your gut is just a bigoted assumption. The actual science shows that trans women do not have advantages over cis women in sports. Or the advantage is so minute that it’s dwarfed by advantages like the income of your parents.
In Alabama, when they were considering bans on youth transgender therapy, one of the GOP senators made them do a study. It turned out that over the past decade there were, on average, something like 5 minors undergoing any kind of gender-affirming treatment. 5. In the whole state of Alabama. They decided it wasn’t worth implementing a whole government oversight system to oppress that few people.
Now think about how many of the people, under 18, are both self-aware enough to realize they’re trans-fem (because no one raises a fuss about trans-masc athletes) and super excited about competing in women’s sports. We are talking about a handful of people across the whole country.
And that’s what makes them such a great wedge issue for the right. Essentially no one has personally encountered a transgender youth athlete, so they can make up whatever stories they like, based on “sounds reasonable.”
Meanwhile, competitive sport is essentially all about rewarding genetic freaks. People with some gene mutation that lets their muscles work faster, lets their blood carry more oxygen, lets the build mass faster. If you worry about the biological advantage that a chemically suppressed hormone might have, you’re starting down a path where you have to police what other biological traits might give someone advantage. It’ll be “too tall to compete in basketball.”
just want to note that trans masc athletes are de facto banned from all competitive sports because they take testosterone, a performance enhancing substance that disqualifies them from competing. thats why no one talks about them. as soon as you think about including trans mascs in mens sports you open up a whole messy can of worms about policing hormone levels, which spills over into womens sports and leads to a fundamental reexamination of sport as a whole, leading back to your point about sports rewarding inherent genetic advantages.
honestly i think sports and structured competition in general is fundamentally flawed. taken to its logical conclusion it becomes a technological competition, which people introduce more and more convoluted rules to prevent, ultimately undermining and corrupting the original purpose of the competition. you can see it in every single sport; swimming banning fancy suits and swimming underwater too far, cycling banning aerodynamic optimization, running banning fancy shoes, vehicle racing banning all kinds of technology, etc. every sport runs into it eventually, and our bodies are just the next untapped frontier for technological improvement. taken to its logical conclusion one questions why we bother with sports at all, if we aren’t going to seek ever greater improvements.
Reality is non consistent with your claims of biological advantage.
Thank you.