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California Governor Gavin Newsom "completely aligns" with Charlie Kirk on trans athlete issue, and agreed about restricting gender affirming care for prisoners and youths, in podcast
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- Title
- CA Gov Gavin Newsom "Completely Aligns" With Charlie Kirk On Trans Issues In Podcast
- Authors
- Erin Reed
- Word count
- 792 words
Reasons why I don't vibe with "this isn't worth fighting over" or "Dems have to stop supporting trans people so loudly" sorts of arguments.
Trans rights are human rights. Full. Stop.
I'll probably get in trouble for this, but frankly speaking, adequate moderation is the solution. But that's not going to happen, because there is a fundamental mismatch between what is an acceptable amount of "asking questions" on Tildes. Years ago I tried to address this specific issue more broadly as I also saw men entering threads about sexism to decry "not all men" and white folks entering threads on POC troubles to debate the merits of affirmative action or whether 'black lives matter' or 'defund the police' are "the right messaging".
There's two problems at play here. The first is fragility, and an inability for folks to see words which theoretically could include them as anything but a direct attack on them. When the thread is talking about sex offenders and someone makes a statement about men and you are not a sex offender, the statement is not directed at you and coming into the thread to mention this does nothing but make the space hostile to minorities.
The second is that on the continuum between absolute free speech and safe space, Tildes frankly isn't very far towards the safe space side. Tildes does a great job at keeping out the obvious nazis, but I've seen my fair share of problematic users who don't get removed for a very long time until they finally create enough drama to get kicked out or slip up on how they word things. To be clear, not all users need to be removed, and in the case we're talking about here it's more about deleting comments which are noise, distracting, or frankly just people rehashing the same tired old discussion. Every single lgbt person in this thread likely has a resource list of scientific papers, websites, blogs, etc. touching on this issue and a half dozen other ones that always get brought up and explicit recognition of this and moderation to keep this place a bit more on the safe space side would go a long way to making this less exhausting to queer folks and make them less likely to flee this website. Threads like these always devolve into the minority doing the heavy lifting of educating the majority who think they know a thing or two about the issue and who are quite frankly arrogant enough to think they are an expert.
May I suggest another solution: make ~lgbt non-subscribed by default, also to anonymous users.
I sometimes (like now) bump into these discussions, like for instance when I'm browsing tildes without a logged in account or when I'm reading through my RSS feed, which is also non-logged-in. My logged in account is not subscribed to lgbt precisely for the reason people complain about here.
So when I see these threads, the impulse to react and comment comes almost immediately and the thought process of "what the fuck am I doing here right now" comes after, if at all. This is both a weakness of myself (but not an uncommon one) and also of the type of application this (and every other social media site) is.
I remember that post and have thought about it a lot recently as I've seen an influx of comments similar to some of the ones that are in this thread. In fact, I was already looking it up before I read the highlighted portion of your comment where you mention it was you that posted it.
That post helped me change the way I think about my interactions on this site. Looking back four years later, I still feel conflicted about the best approach to dealing with certain comments/commenters, specifically in broader groups like ~society. (I also cringe at some of the things I said in that thread. That's not relevant, but I had to get it off my chest) I know I want to be that "line of defense" that addresses a problematic or ignorant comment. At the same time, I also want to try to meet the person where they're at and give them an opportunity to examine the issue without feeling like they're instantly being shut down because I feel like most people can change their mind. But here we are four years later and it just feels like it's getting worse. It's very frustrating.
I just wanted to come back and cosign all of this. I am very frustrated with how these threads go down every time and yesterday I just about walked away while throwing a lit match behind me.
I'm going to ask the question, and I know it's going offend some: Is this hill we're willing to die on?
I don't mean gender-affirming healthcare, restroom rights, listed sex/gender on IDs, and trans existence, period. I support all of that. I agree that trans rights are human rights, full stop. But I'm talking particularly about trans folks in sports.
Personally, of all the trans issues -- and FWIW, I am not trans; I don't think I know a single trans person -- sports is one area where even me, a pretty liberal person, is like "Hmmm..." I don't know what my thoughts are on this. I definitely see both sides and I think both sides have cogent (and sometimes not cogent) arguments.
But it surprises me how much time we're spending on this. Now I'm your typical online-too-much nerd, so maybe that's why I don't care about sports so much. I barely played any organized sports growing up. Unless one considers marching band, which is moot since it's mixed-sex, team-based anyway. As such, I don't equate trans people's access to sports to these other issues that trans folks face. Which IMO, are far, far more important. Though maybe since I'm not trans, I'm wrong.
Now I could see an argument that if you, or rather we, cede the ground on trans access to sports to the right, they'll just come for something more. At the same time, that's basically the same strategy that the right uses with 2A. I think it's wrong when they use it for that; I think it's wrong when we use it for whatever on "our side."
Idk. I think there are lot of people who would be willing to support trans rights, if this part were dropped...for now. We can always fight for more later. But this idea that it's all or nothing, makes no sense to me. Women's rights weren't done this way. Rights for racial minorities weren't done this way. Gay rights and marriage equality weren't done this way either. It's also been a slow burn, for better or worse. So why are we doing this here? And why with sports of all things?
Trans people in sports is so small of an issue. Trans women and girls don't dominate women's sports and trans men are outright ignored, but they often end up dominating women's sports due to being trans men. There were already guidelines and restrictions for Olympic and other high level sports that addressed length of time on hormones, transition, etc. but it's deeply ironic that the people who would gut Title IX in a minute claim to give a damn about women's sports and we're believing them. If everything in the world were otherwise equal except sports, I'd probably be able to live with that, but we never made it there, so I don't see the point in pretending.
In addition to the point in the other reply to you about how they've already come for more rights, both nationally and at the state level - Texas has a bill that would ban gender transition, the federal government doesn't recognize gender transition anymore - cis folks are hurt by this too.
Statistically a cis girl is going to be harassed for being too tall/strong/skilled or not "feminine" enough looking for more often than they'll catch actual trans girls. I've seen plenty of videos of cis "stud"/butch lesbians harassed in bathrooms, because they record when the police are called on them. Even if one didn't care much about trans folks it should be a clear line from trans rights to human rights.
But yeah, I'm non binary, and since being called "she" doesn't make me kill myself, that means I'm one of the privileged people in the trans umbrella. But many people, including kids are not going to survive being forced back into a closet.
I can die metaphorically to stop people from dying literally. Arguably I'm ethically obligated to.
This is just classic GOP misdirection where they find a wedge issue that they know people don't really understand, or doesn't affect that many, but "feels bad" to a lot of "regular" people and then they just hammer it over and over and over and Democrats are then forced to their back foot, alienating some portion of their constituents, and have to concede these "small things" to the GOP mindset, which then in turn sets things another step backwards and gives the GOP wins with their Christian base.
They did this with interracial marriage back in the 60s/70s, gay rights in the 80s/90s, and now trans rights here in the 2020s. Yet again an old playbook that still works and people eat it up.
The flip side of that is by bringing attention to these issues they often backfire in the long term because once people get used to the idea they think "wait, that isn't so bad." But that then pushes the GOP on to the new thing to be bigots about.
Trans athletes is a bit different though. The entire argument here is whether trans people can participate in women's sports. Not sports in general as there's almost no one talking about men's or coed sports, this is strictly about women's sports.
The issue is that as a society we've long decided to accept and embrace an exclusionary practice, yet are now needing to deal with nuance on that exclusion. The problem is that the exclusion was for a very real and physical reason, women do not perform as well physically as men. Or rather, testosterone is a performance enhancing drug and some people produce much higher amounts than others. It's a very real threat that athletes with higher testosterone levels can more easily dominate the field. It was always a threat as many genetic women also produce higher test, but not one that society was forced to acknowledge.
So we could adopt a testosterone limit, and some sports have, but that requires invasive testing which is infeasible for minor sports groups. It would also cut out many very definitely women from a supposedly women's sports. We could stop caring about the differences like we do with paralympic sports, but that means records and accomplishments are not as prestigious which is demoralizing to many. We could end the segregation but that will leave almost all women out of competition.
None of these solutions are appealing though. That's why the genetic cutoff is so easy to argue for. It aligns with the general idea of the original segregation while still being maximally inclusionary in a strictly exclusionary system. The issues are that people don't fit into that "simple" genetic box as often as high school biology would imply meaning we'd need even more rules and more invasive testing than testosterone testing required. It also means random people yelling at others for not being woman enough to compete as competition causes everyone to seek ultimate fairness. And all of this mentality can occur from even the most trans friendly advocates, once you add in the bigots then the problems all get worse.
So it really is an unsolvable problem to have a fair and easily understood competition based on gender exclusivity. The best solution would be not caring so much about fairness but human history has shown that competition sports hold an immense power over society so that's really unlikely to be viable. So we'll rage on about what should be something so minor yet is now dictating countless laws and legal systems. And stuck in the middle are the women who aren't "woman enough" whether they're trans or not.
I think the greater problem here is that people are trying to legislate these positions. The sports organizations already have regulating bodies. They can decide for themselves how to deal with the issue. The way the right represents it makes it seem like they are afraid of trans people for far more than outcompeting AFAB women and girls and are trying to metaphorically nuke them from orbit.
But trans athletes are incredibly rare, so the more logical thing to do is to simply do nothing and not spend the effort on it. If one of those organization believes that it’s going to be a problem then they can figure it out for themselves. Having the federal government act does far more to hurt marginalized people than it does protect the masses.
People on the left want to legislate it too though. Trans allies are not happy when sports organizations discriminate against trans women by excluding them. So everyone is riled up which has caused a wave of elected officials to legislate on this very topic. It was a cornerstone platform topic on both the right and the left this election. We aren't getting out of this now without government interference.
Anecdotally, I haven’t heard a single person advocating for such legislation. I know there are almost certainly such people out there, but I have to believe it’s a fairly fringe position even in comparison to the people who want to legislate a ban.
They more complain about the civil rights of trans overall and seek to make trans a completely protected class. That would forbid discrimination in women's sports and in other women's groups. So while they may not call it out directly, the goal of absolutely no discrimination covers that case which means it must be legislated.
I do understand all of this, and I would agree to some extent, but more to the point I was making (and probably not very clearly or explicitly, so my fault there) is that this is such a minor problem that we're out here arguing over removing a certain type of person from society based on a minuscule amount of people - in other words it's a made up problem.
There are not a bunch of men going through everything required to become a trans woman just so they can dominate women's sports. That does not happen.
In my state they've made a huge deal about this in high school sports. There are about 10 trans women in high school athletics in a state of 10+ million people.
So as u/Akir said, let the sports organizations regulate this as they see fit. Doing this through legislation is the wrong place as it leads to worse overall outcomes that affect things outside of sports.
Notably, there also aren't AMAB and intersex folks going through everything required to become a trans woman just to sexually harass women in bathrooms. There are quite literally more republican legislators who have been arrested for harassing women in bathrooms than trans women.
Unfortunately, this doesn't stop legislation - there are bathroom laws in many states.
I agree it's largely a non issue. Intersex has always been around and mingled in women's sports. The push to make transgender a protected class does mean the topic has to be settled on the legal field though. If trans are protected, then they must be allowed to compete. There could possibly be a carve out made to protect them in all but a few cases but that legislation goes nowhere. Neither Dems nor GOP will accept middle ground proposals. So their sports committes are forced to accept trans players or trans have all of their protections removed. It's cruel and completely overblown, but that's the state of things in the legal/legislative world right now. And the GOP currently has the tempo so I expect we'll see a incredibly sharp rebuke of trans rights as we already see in Texas.
The sports committees have regulated intersex and trans people before usually requiring a period of time on hormones for transition to happen and when those have been in effect there's been successful inclusion of trans women (and men and intersex people of all genders) in sport.
There are some universities that cannot offer sports scholarships, so they find ways to offer specific academic scholarships to athletes. I think this is a different issue than trans athletes in general.
On that front, I would argue that if universities are now able and willing to pay athletes, they should not be giving out scholarships to those students that are getting paid.
I'm going to ask my fellow cis people here to put themselves in the shoes of trans people for a moment.
Imagine that your identity has been under widespread, direct attack in the US for years now.
Imagine that legislatures across the United States are considering nearly 700 bills in THIS YEAR ALONE against people like you.
Imagine that the President himself tried to deny your very existence by executive order.
Imagine that you're more afraid for your future now than you ever have been in your own life.
And then imagine coming here and seeing people go "but trans people in sports is UNFAIR!"
Even if it is -- even if we give the people arguing that full-fledged credence on that point -- the unfairness of that doesn't even come CLOSE to the unfairness that trans people are facing right now. It's the tiniest drop in, unfortunately, the biggest, shittiest bucket.
The absolute last thing that trans people need right now is to have to defend themselves.
And the absolute last place they should have to do that is a place, like here, that is meant for them.
So, cis people, I mean this wholeheartedly: if you have concerns about trans issues, then I encourage you to put trans people first in those concerns. They are the ones who need it, who are hurting, who are the subjects of an immense and utterly devastating unfairness.
We as cis people have the luxury of being able to ignore that and separate ourselves from it, but trans people never get a chance at that emotional distance. PLEASE factor that into your words and your actions, especially here.
After reading the headline I expected that Gavin Newsom fumbled some gotcha question as a guest on an unfriendly podcast. IT WAS HIS OWN PODCAST. Not only that, his first episode. That presumably he CHOSE to publish after it was recorded and edited.
It would be cool if establishment democrats would just retire to a life of wealthy ignominy rather than finding more ways to completely fuck up. This feels so far beyond a simple mistake or misjudgment though, the only explanation that makes sense to me is that his strategy to win back power is through hate.
Most people aren't smart enough to chart their own path and will simply copycat ("ball chasing" to use sports terminology). I suppose Gavin Newsom thinks he should act more like a Republican to stay relevant.
In every interview I have ever seen with Newsom (even the ones where he is saying things I agree with), I have gotten the impression that he is a disingenuous slippery snake. I would not be surprised to see him flip sides if it kept him in the spotlight.
As a Californian, Newsom is far from my preferred candidate although I think he has been a decent governor.
I really want the Democrats to field a presidential candidate who has won a sharply contested election against a credible republican candidate at least once.
I’m a Californian too, and I agree with you that Newsom has done an all right job, but for me on he comes across as way too slick and insincere. I doubt I’m the only one who feels that way, and since as far as I can tell most people vote based purely on their feelings, I don’t think there is any way he could win a presidential election.
I’ve typically described him as a cardboard cutout of a presidential candidate.
I've often used the term "default politician" when referring to him.
I internalized that as "if the default (placeholder) profile picture was a person" and it gave me a chuckle.
Even if you set aside his bad takes on trans issues, it sounds like he never pushed back on Kirk at all. A complete pushover.
It seems like he’s setting himself up for a 2028 run as a moderate. He’s already going to lose for being from California alone.
What a spineless sack of shit.
Seriously. Even if you feel like you have to give ground on an issue, don't ever agree that they've been acting in good faith.
As a CA resident, I just submitted a complaint on his site about this, and asked for a response. We'll see what his comment answerers say.
I have two concerns about liberals throwing in the towel on it:
It’s the first step backwards. It’s the first step to replacing the reality of sex and gender with the fiction of sex alone (that “sex” includes expectations of gender expression, but only certain prescribed expectations).
It’s the first step to making it ok to call boys in middle school “flaming __” again because they happen to do ballet. It’s the first step to making it ok to harass coworkers again, e.g. “Real men don’t knit, what are you a __?” It’s the first step to “Real women don’t __, real women (pick trad wife gender-based expectation).” And somehow it will be permissible because “they’re not talking about sex, it wasn’t sex based. that’s just gender.”
Boss thinks real men shouldn’t have long hair and you’re a man who likes to have long hair? Tough shit.
Boss thinks real women shouldn’t wear pants, and you’re a woman who likes pockets? Tough shit.
Somebody once said something along the lines of “you might not feel it now because you have oceans around you, but you will…god bless you.”
Holy fucking shit, this guy just gets worse and worse. I figured centrists would continue a rightward turn, and that it will lead to defeat after defeat in national elections.
As long as there is credible evidence that hormone replacement therapy can allow for an equivalent and fair environment for athletic competition, there should be no issue. Without that, including people who have transitioned in high level, financially and sometimes historically significant events for the sake of inclusion becomes problematic. Fairness should at least be considered in the discussion of legislating competition.
Where has it not been regulated? Where are the trans women dominating a women's sport? Because the sports that allow trans women to compete still have very explicit rules about those things, others have since banned them but had rules in place before.
Or is it an imaginary problem with a scapegoat, like 100 years ago?
I'm sorry, but I've always thought this is one of the worst arguments I've ever seen, and you are very unlikely to convince anyone with it. Just because something hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it won't happen, or that it's okay.
I think it's a good reason that we shouldn't be having giant national discussions on the topic, and evidence that it's just culture war BS, but we don't have human clones yet and most people agree that should be illegal. Cybercrime laws were passed before there was significant cybercrime. The logic on that argument just doesn't check out, but people use it all the time.
There were and are policies on trans people in international sports based on data. Then people got upset and more of those sports banned trans people.
If that were the whole of my argument then perhaps you'd be right that it doesn't convince anyone. But my post was more than a sentence long.
Of course, we regulate behavior all the time based on past behavior. Cybercrime laws are also changed after significant cybercrimes that skirted the original laws. So I think it's not the worst argument to say "this isn't even a problem" when someone raises the specter of fairness over trans people competing.
Also, I don't love comparing trans people participating in sports perfectly legitimately to crime, but have indulged it here for the sake of the metaphor. However, it presupposes that a trans woman competing in a sport is inherently engaging in an unfair or criminal action.
Honestly, given your wording and the comment you were responding to, I wasn't entirely sure what direction your argument was going, other than in that one part. Plus, it's my least favorite argument on this whole issue, and a stark change from how liberal/progressive arguments are generally supposed to be based on sound logic, and this is argument is "we haven't seen x so it must not exist." Honestly, it feels like an argument that someone opposed to trans athletes would strawman, yet it's the most common argument I see. Definitely wouldn't pass the steelman test.
I won't touch the rest of what you said.
I was going to break it down point by point, but since you're not engaging with the rest of the argument I don't see why. I'll still probably put more effort into this post than I should, but even after sitting on it, I think you're both wrong and dismissive.
It's weird to complain about it being like a strawman when you yanked one sentence out of one comment among many on this post and tried to treat it like it's bad simply because it's your least favorite.
The reason I included it here is because it undercuts the supposition that there's an existing lack of fairness in sport. It's not an "I haven't seen it, so it's not happening." It's a "There is zero evidence that this is an active actual problem." Men aren't pretending to be trans to win women's sports, access women's bathrooms, etc. and trans women consistently, despite fearmongering, fail to dominate in womens' sports. (And when women dominate in those sports they're frequently accused of being trans anyway.)
I don't understand your takes on this post in general, and I think "not touching the rest of what I said" is demonstrative of failing to engage on substantive points rather than complaining about a single sentence in which you have actually somehow misconstrued the intent of.
And like @Gaywallet said, this is, once again, exhausting. I don't care if you don't like the point. If people want to suggest a lack of fairness in sports, they should demonstrate where that unfairness is occurring and not legislate on hypotheticals. There already exist regulations to address fairness as much as possible in sports, and the current executive order punishes even a trans girl from playing sports at age 7, much less a teenager at 16 or a professional athlete. It's made up drama and it's not really happening. That is why I say "show where it's happening."
What would be so bad about a trans woman being good at a sport? What part of that isn't "okay"? Is the thought of cis people not dominating every single sport too terrible to contemplate?
Comparing real people, who are victimised by discriminatory laws globally, to human cloning and cybercrime is ludicrous and insulting.
If you're going to echo far-right transphobia, at least mix it up a little.
Given that doping is a much more prevalent and pervasive issue in competitive sports than trans individuals, it seems rather strange to me to focus so heavily on trans folks. There are also plenty of developmental and genetic influences that can be considered unfair, and which also objectively provide a much stronger benefit to performance than having gone through puberty in a "male" body (given at least 1-2 years of estrogen therapy prior to entry into women's sports). In many cases the athletes never went through puberty because they were on blockers, but that's strangely absent from a blanket ban. There's also essentially zero focus and very little about trans men in these discussions.
I put "male" in quotes because there are plenty of intersex individuals and plenty of variation in terms of what puberty looks like for folks who are assigned male at birth.
As an aside, it's not surprising this thread has turned into yet another debate about trans athletes in sports. There's a lot more going on in the article than the title, and this is the ~lgbt community. It's rather tiring to have to engage in these discussions every single time. It sometimes feels like this community exists just to be attacked and that's rather depressing.
Even amongst trans people, the sports issue is controversial. It's a good wedge issue unfortunately. Newsom is an idiot for giving Kirk power and pretending he's engaging in good faith.
I think it's worth noting that not a single trans person brought up the trans sports issue. Every single comment was about the general lack of support. The only people in here trying to litigate what's okay and what's not are not trans or lgbt folks.
Notably, your comment also lacks any positive encouragement, any explicit sympathy towards trans folks or any recognition of anything else discussed in the article. In isolation, it would be difficult for someone to read your comment and have any idea whether you are an ally or not.
I would also mention that your comment ignores the other conversations on the exact same subject which are making more or less the same points you are. Why does it need to be restated multiple times throughout these comments?
I encourage you to ask yourself whether you think that might make folks feel like they are being attacked?
To be clear here, I know nothing about you and I'm not making any judgements about you, I'm just trying to help you understand how this thread might make a trans person feel. Now take whatever feeling you think they might have and amplify it by the endless news coverage of how trans people are losing rights, losing passports and being persecuted in the United States right now and add that anxiety and fear into their lens of perception and current emotional state.
I'm not trying to convince them. I'm standing my ground that this is wrong and these are human rights and yes I'll die on the hill. This thread was not about swaying anyone's beliefs, those messages can be done elsewhere.
"What would be so bad...." is dismissive, because the concern is imaginary. It's not working because the "other side" is lying loudly and repeatedly. And it doesn't seem to matter how often you say "they're lying." The vast majority of those people, and the ones in office in particular, do not give any damns about womens/girls sports. They would erase Title IX in a minute. They don't actually care about safety in bathrooms because they don't prosecute the men that assault women in bathrooms. I'm not going to pretend that I can reason them all out of this position. Every thread in ~lgbt does not need to be a "be nicer to the people who oppose your rights so they can maybe consider not opposing them in the future" fest.
A trans athlete being good at women's sports because of innate characteristics due to coming of age in a male body would be frustrating to other competitors. That just doesn't seem to me to be a good enough reason to argue about it one way or the other.
The argument can also be flipped around pretty easily.
I agree it's a heavily manufactured issue that barely affects anyone, however it is also an issue that helped the Republicans win the last election. So you have progressives demanding that Democrats sacrifice themselves on a literal molehill.
People need to realize that progressives and liberals have an increasingly vanishing ability to set the narrative at all. Winning elections matters more than being right in the current environment, and things are only getting worse. I do not think we should be abandoning anyone but also maybe don't get baited into talking about an issue that is very unpopular and affects barely anyone?
FWIW I also add I don't agree with Newsom and I would've thought starting a podcast by hosting Kirk of all people would only be something rightwing grifters would do, but here we are I guess.
I didn't say it's unregulated, I'm just unsure that the regulations currently correspond with available science. If competition can be fair with more people included and the science supports that then I have no issue.
I'm going to encourage you to look into it yourself. This thread is quite over done at this point and I'm not up for educating.
The next person platformed by Newsom, Steve Bannon.
Absolutely wtf.
Ok I cannot find a verifiable source for this so.... I'm gonna hope it's fake but the episode would drop tomorrow so I guess we'll all find out together.
And it's the next episode on Spotify so that was legit. Wtf.
He's term limited as governor, so he's aiming for the next step up the ladder to president: right-wing podcaster.
@cfabbro this headline seems misleading to the point of being disingenuous. Newsom said they completely aligned on transgender participation in women's sports, but the headline sounds like it's on everything. The other comments point out reasons Newsom was being shitty, but the headline is still purposely misleading.
Did you read the article? Newsome capitulated to Kirk's framing on a whole host of trans issues, not just sports.
Not only that, but after having listened to the full podcast episode myself, Newsom was fawning over Kirk all throughout. He even mentioned at the very beginning how his own 13 year old son loves Kirk. And it was definitely more than just trans people's participation in sports that he agreed with Kirk on.
It was fucking nauseating to hear Newsom agreeing with pretty much everything Kirk said about Kamala Harris, pronouns, "wokeism", Black Lives Matter, the "defund the police" movement, prohibiting gender affirming care for prisoners and youths, etc.
The only fucking things Newsom even slightly pushed back on was Kirk trying to claim that "porn" was being shown in schools, and Kirk saying that teachers should be fired for not snitching on LGBT+ kids to their parents. But for everything else he either agreed, or just let Kirk absolutely steamroll him without challenging any of the bullshit Kirk was spouting.
So yeah, unfortunately, I don't think the title really needs changing, @updawg.
I still think it's wrong to leave a lie. He expressed a lack of agreement while capitulating. Weak-willed, slimy, and seeking only to not distance voters, but absolutely not "completely aligning on trans issues." If you want to fight fire with fire, then false headlines will help set a narrative the way the Right does it, but it's patently false and not actually setting a narrative as much as further fracturing the Left (note that splitting from someone bad who claims to be good isn't bad)...I don't have a problem with exposing someone for being a liar who won't stand for anything, but I don't think pushing more lies is the appropriate way to do so. Especially when the difference is literally just adding a few clarifying words.
It's not a lie though. Newsom literally says "I completely agree with you", "I totally agree with you" and "I completely align with you" regarding the "fairness issue" of trans athlete participation in women's sports. So what clarifying words would you suggest?
That's an issue. The post title makes it sound like he was saying trans people are a disgusting affront to God.
I would make it something like he "'completely aligns' on trans women in sports." Alternatively, I would suggest a title about him providing a platform for Kirk to spread hate, but that's a larger change.
Did you actually listen to the podcast? Because he agreed with Kirk on more than just trans athlete participation in women's sports. He also agreed with Kirk about Kamala's support of gender affirming care for prisoners and teens being problematic. And he also said that "youths should be off limits" and "we have to be more sensitized" to all the bullshit issues Kirk brought up, like Kirk equating gender affirming care to "butchery under the guise of healthcare" and "chemical castration". So, IMO, your suggested title would actually be the misleading one by downplaying how much he agreed with Kirk on.
That's (almost) all in the article. Agreeing that something wasn't a good political move isn't the same as being "completely aligned."
I changed it to:
Which combines the title with part of the lede which gets a bit more specific about what else Newsom agreed with Kirk on. Acceptable compromise?
❤️
I think he was wrong to even have the dude on his podcast and I think he let him talk without pushing back and I think it was all awful. But capitulating isn't the same thing as saying you agree and I think it's wrong to use a direct quote to imply something he didn't say—that they completely align on trans issues. Newsom did a really shitty thing, so let's point out what he actually did.