Gearing Up For An Exciting Four Years Of Endless Trans Discourse

Democrats have spent the last few weeks scrambling to find a simple explanation for why they lost this month’s election, one that doesn’t require them actually doing any real reflection on why voters were so uninterested. And it seems as if they have settled on two core ideas. First, they need their own Joe Rogan. Which is wrong, of course. And, second, they’ve decided they probably don’t care about trans people anymore.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) spoke to the centrist TERFs over at The New York Times last week, coming out against trans children in sports. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” he said. (What if your girls are just bad at sports, Seth?)

Moulton got some flack from Democratic leadership about his anti-trans comments, but he’s not the only Democrat getting louder about this stuff. I mean, the Harris campaign was already not really doing much for trans voters. And I think it’s safe to assume that, at the very least, Democrats are going to go very quiet on the trans issue as they start gearing up for 2026 and elections beyond. But before we go further into why the Democrats seem so eager to jettison trans rights from their platform, we have to look at what voters actually care about right now (SPOILER: It’s not trans people).

Data is still coming in about what really moved the needle during the election, but, at this point, it seems like the economy was the number one issue. Pew had it at the top of a survey they conducted in September. As did Gallup in a poll taken around the same time. Pew didn’t even have transgender rights ranking high enough to include, while Gallup had it dead last on their list, with the majority of voters calling it unimportant. Now, Republicans can’t really say much about the economy other than “no more taxes” or whatever because they plan to spend the next four(?) years shoveling money at the various oligarchs they work for. And Democrats can’t either because, well, uh, they’re working for the same oligarchs, apparently. Which may explain why both parties want to distract us with endless discourse about 0.6% of the population instead, you know, student loan forgiveness or something.

But there’s another point here that is important to hit — one that connects the Democrat’s recent fetishization of Joe Rogan and their growing ambivalence about the horrors the Republican Party has in store for America’s trans community. Democrats, after crashing out on Brat Summer, are desperate not to be relevant, but feel relevant, and transphobia plays real well on social media. If we accept the idea that one of the main forces that drove Elon Musk to buy Twitter was resentment over his daughter coming out as trans — and I do, because I find the pettiest, dumbest reasons are usually the closest to the truth — then it’s reasonable to view Musk’s entire X project as one to, as he has often put it, defeat “the woke mind virus.” He can dress it up however he wants, by claiming he’s actually defending free speech or protecting birthrates. But the heart of Twitter’s transition to X is about demonizing trans people for, as we’ve seen by his installation inside the palace court of Mar-A-Lago this month, political gain. And I think that Democrats, unable to accept hard truths about how badly they missed the mark, are, frankly, jealous.

Republicans are already launching anti-trans political stunts, like the measure from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) this week that would ban transgender women — specifically trans Democratic Rep.-elect Sarah McBride — from women’s bathrooms in the Capitol Building. And Republican representatives are celebrating Trans Day Of Remembrance by posting “‘Transgender women’ are men,” to the frothing applause of X losers. Because in a fractured information environment, where traditional news barely exists and content created to enrage the internet’s most vocal freaks has replaced it, Republicans have smartly realized that nothing matters if it can’t be screenshot or clipped. They are clearly going to push some ridiculous anti-trans or anti-immigrant measure every week for the next four years, regardless of who gets hurt in the process or whether voters actually even care.

And the really frustrating thing is that Democrats could just as easily use this playbook against them to actually support trans people and, of course, America’s greater LGBT population that are absolutely next on the chopping block. I mean, Democrats that actually did do well this election have even said that being pro-trans helped them quite a bit at the polls. Liberal politicians could delete their X accounts, set up shop on platforms like Bluesky or the probably-no-longer-banned TikTok and start loudly screaming about how weird the right’s obsession with trans people is. Because social media discourse is headless, the algorithms that promote it just want conflict, and Democrats still don’t get that. If you want attention you actually have to pick a fight — or even just pick something you’re willing to fight for.

Did Tumblr actually turn teens trans?

This week’s episode is, sadly, a lot more relevant than it was when we recorded it a few weeks ago. Joining us on Panic World is Vera Drew, the director of The People’s Joker, one of my favorite movies this year. When we asked her to come on to debunk the right-wing conspiracy theory that Tumblr turned a generation of kids trans, Vera said she’d be up for being a guest on the one condition that she could argue that, yes, Tumblr probably did help her realize she was trans. It’s a great episode. You can check it out wherever you get your audio content or you can just click here.

A Fascinating Observation

Right-Wing Attention Around Bluesky Is Getting More Intense

On Monday, I wrote about the growing right-wing fascination around Bluesky. It has significantly increased this week. Far-right YouTuber The Quartering tried to make an account on the platform before he was suspended yesterday. And former Kiwi Farms users have tried to create what appear to be blocklists as a way to trick people into automatically banning prominent trans users.

That last report comes from a non-profit called End Networked Harassment, who has responded to the fascist invasion of Bluesky by creating a moderation list that automatically filters any sort of content or terminology popular on Kiwi Farms. Though, making things even more confusing, now Kiwi Farms users are making Kiwi Farms blocklists to muddy the waters.

This is going to be a really interesting space to watch over the next few months as Bluesky’s profile increases. The website invested a huge amount of time into both an open developer ecosystem and moderation tools. So if you care about the future of how we moderate speech online, Bluesky has already become the new frontier.

Oh, while we’re on the topic, Bluesky has also led to its first posting-driven-job-loss. Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, resigned this week after she went on a tear on Bluesky about Trump voters being fascists.

Pokémon Pocket TCG Is Making A Lot Of Money

Per IGN, the new Pokémon trading card mobile game has made about $120 million in the last month. Not from me, it hasn’t. I haven’t spend anything on it yet, thankfully. (I don’t have the gambling brain shape, but I do have a real sickness when it comes to in-game micropayments.) That said, I have definitely noticed that without spending any money the game really starts to slow down after about two weeks.

If you’re looking to get started on it, you should head over to Polygon, who have a good guide to the best decks for competitive play right now. Also, what the heck, wanna play against me? Here’s my friend code: 6857-8477-6393-1361. But be advised, I am rocking a very aggressive Articuno Ex deck and a Gengar Ex deck that will drive you insane. Also, I pulled this bad boy this morning.

Does Viral Media Need An Apex Predator?

X user @molochofficial made a very interesting point this week, writing, “It’s increasingly clear that Ellen DeGeneres was an environmentally significant apex predator in the media ecosystem; she’d have extracted all entertainment value from the Hawk Tuah girl in a thee-minute segment and banished her back to anonymity.”

This is not dissimilar from an idea I’ve been kicking around forever that I call the Harambe Cycle, which is that if memes are too edgy or weird for brands to co-opt, like Harambe, they last in the discourse much longer than they should and turn rancid.

This is one of those things where you probably can’t actually ever get a satisfying answer to “what if?” If DeGeneres was still culturally relevant she probably wouldn’t have actually been canceled the way she was. And the fact no one has replaced her in the chain is probably proof that TV is no longer the prism through which Americans are learning about the internet. Which actually leads to a slightly more uncomfortable conclusion. The future of media is here and it looks like this:

A Beautiful YouTube History Project

I love this. It’s a project created by developer Riley Walz. It pulls every YouTube video published between 2009 and 2012 that uses the default naming system from old iPhone video uploads, img_etc. The result is beautiful, haunting, funny, and sort of magical. Like staring into a security camera of the past. You can check out the full project here.

Penus Hortz

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a very good meme.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***