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.
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.