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Comment by harimau777 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, generally speaking they actually haven't. Look at all the candidates who abandoned trans rights.

A voter who won’t vote for anyone but their perfect candidate is electorally useless in a country of hundreds of millions. Democracy is about compromise, and compromise often means nobody is particularly happy about the outcome because nobody gets all of exactly what they want.

Trans people want to exist without being harassed, assaulted or killed, without being classified as degenerates by the government. They're in the same social space that gay people were 40 years ago.

You aren't talking about compromise on fiscal policy, you're talking about compromise on basic human rights and decency. Accepting transphobia from the Democratic party just means the transphobes get everything they want.

There is a huge difference between being on the wrong side of an issue and choosing not to take sides. In a lot of America, the trans kid in sports thing has turned into a clusterfuck. We probably don't have the votes to see that through. That does't mean someone should be against making trans a protected class for employment, et cetera purposes.

>There is a huge difference between being on the wrong side of an issue and choosing not to take sides

Democrats aren't choosing not to take sides, they're choosing to take the anti-trans side because they feel (likely correctly) that it holds more political currency in the current right-wing authoritarian climate.

>That doesn't mean someone should be against making trans a protected class for employment, et cetera purposes.

But that's just the thing - they will turn against that for the same reason, naked political opportunism. Republicans seem to actually care about principles, odious as those principles sometimes are, whereas the Democrats are constantly trying to curry favor with centrists and conservatives because they're afraid to be labelled "leftist."

> Republicans seem to actually care about principles

Which principles straddle Reagan, Gingrich, Bush and Trump?

for some reason I can't replay to jumpcrisscross below, so I'll put this here: Just cuz you can't get everything you want, doesn't mean you should have no 'hard lines' you're not willing to compromise on. So no, the past 20-30 years of 'the lesser of two evils' doesn't cut it anymore. I've voted for Dems. my whole life, but if they don't get a lot more effective, I wont be doing it in the future. When they had all 3 branches of legislature, they couldn't get stuff passed - everything got gutted or given away (remember the last shutdown when people begged them not to cave ?). Anyway, here's hoping for more independents and BrandNewCongress to pickup steam.

> When they had all 3 branches of legislature, they couldn't get stuff passed

And why? Aren't you forgetting something?

Who is hurt most by a government shutdown? What does it solve? Would Democrats have gained something politcally or lost more support?

Look at the opponents of Democrats (the party), and where they stand on trans rights. Most Democrats support trans rights, almost no Republicans do. We can all close our eyes and wish we had a system that didn't reduce down to two parties, but at the end of the day we're all going to get either a Democrat or a Republican representing us unless you live in a hyper specific part of the country.

Earlier today I had to grit my teeth and vote for Josh Turek in Iowa, even though I think he's a shithead who threw trans people under the bus just to eke out a few more votes from conservative fence sitters. I could've made a protest vote, but the realpolitik of the situation is I'm either getting Turek or his Republican opponent, and I think Turek will do a much better job representing me despite his dumbass about-face on trans issues, whereas the Republican will be actively harmful.

So you think you are better? What have you achieved? Your own purity, at the expense of your trans friends' rights? "Yeah, you are hounded now by crass Republicans who use every lever of power to make your life hell, but at least I didn't vote for a Democrat who may or may not have lied about his support! Praise me!"

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