Link: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/iowa-dem-josh-turek-releases-anti

On Saturday, Oct. 24, Josh Turek, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, released a new ad targeting transgender people—perhaps the worst anti-transgender ad of the entire election cycle to come from a Democrat. The ad begins with Turek talking about his disability and the importance of not discriminating, before immediately turning to adopt discriminatory policies toward transgender people. One such policy is a sports ban, a position sadly becoming increasingly common among high-profile Democrats in competitive races, and one that alone would have made this yet another newsworthy anti-trans ad. But Turek then goes further, advocating for a new policy: a proposal to ban federally funded gender-affirming care in the United States, one that would impact a substantial number of transgender people and make their care difficult to impossible to receive.

Imagine trans rights being the thing you chose to chicken out of in an attempt to get undecided voters.

What a piece of shit

The depressing thing i fear is that polling on trans rights must be bad enough that some dems feel this is a position that benefits them. Newsom seems to think it benefits him, slimy amoral scumbag that he is.

The dems don't want to accept any responsiblity for the perception that they're not meaningfully different from fascists, but they also want to throw trans people to the wolves when they're already one of the most murdered groups in society.

I'm curious how our federal government currently funds trans specific medical treatments.

Paraphrasing from elsewhere...

Here are some thoughtful questions I'd like to see the US Senate-hopeful from Iowa, Josh Turek, receive during this campaign season:

• Would he shake the hand of a person who is HIV-positive? Would he use the same toilet after them?

• What does he think about gay couples adopting children?

• What does he think about public schools employing homosexual men as teachers?

These are all bad faith questions, loyalty tests, that were once lobbed at politicians. Their effectiveness relied on the inaccurate and undeniably cruel presumptions that gay people are inherently unclean or unfit to care for children.

For a while this worked. Fearful of abandonment by a prejudiced constituency, would-be leaders hemmed and hawed and furrowed their brows at these kinds of questions. At best, they would find strategic ways to dodge them. At worst, they would give in to laziness, play along with those cruel presumptions and pander to a popular false narrative.

Eventually all of those narrative were found to be false, cynically constructed to prey upon fears against those who can not help but look and act different than the majority. It took the bravery of millions of people, risking their livelihoods and relationships, sharing their inner lives and living their truths to shatter those falsehoods. It took a lot more than a single child's insight to prove that emperor was wearing no clothes.

And here we go again. Another time, another false narrative: segregating transgender girls is fair and right.

This may feel like it makes sense, just as it may feel risky to use the same toilet seat as a person with a life-impacting sexually transmitted infection. But in both cases, two important facts cut them down to size: a) they're both completely false, and b) the scenarios presented aren't happening often enough for any of it to matter in the first place. They're veiled attempts to codify prejudice into law, plain and simple.

Please instruct Senate-hopeful Turek that his party is not the one that does that.

But Gender Affirming Care is already way too hard to get and pay for.

Check yourself before you Turek yourself. 🖕

We're not getting our passports back in 2028

Do you think there's a bunch of people who won't vote republican, but will vote dem if they're just transphobic enough?

Just Iowa things.

Sitting in that chair, playing someone who understands discrimination and fairness because you can't walk or please a woman, and using the way other people perceive you to say:

"Really it's the trans women who are oppressing the cis women. The trans women are oppressing all of us with skyrocketing insurance rates, and by making us look at them."

Is disgusting, cowardly, and shows us that Josh Turek's biggest disability, is the fetid rot of a person he is.

They see the fight for trans rights as "Not worth fighting", and I worry they're right, especially with polls showing public support for trans rights is dropping and women's rights groups view trans women with suspicion.

Calling for a ban on federal funding for trans care isn't "not fighting".

This is the same shit we saw in 2023 when democrats campaigned on military spending and migrant caravans. You can choose to ignore random shit the republicans are running with, you can tell voters why its fucking stupid, but if you try to triangulate your position to be closer to the republican one, you make it look like the republicans were right all along.

This dipshit is literally campaigning for republicans at this point.

Medicaid is distributed to the states and funds a lot of trans healthcare. It saves lives.

"Really it's the trans women who are oppressing the cis women. The trans women are oppressing all of us with skyrocketing insurance rates, and by making us look at them."

“Wheel chair bound people are oppressing able bodied people with skyrocketing building cost due to mandating ramps and elevators thanks to the ADA; and by making us look at them.” Incredible someone can’t see this same warped logic applied to them.

The primaries are over.

I voted for someone other than Turek but Turek won anyway.

So what happens now?

Turek is horrible in this regard, but I have to vote for him anyway because he wants to TRY to ban transgender care, emphasis on TRY while the other party wants to do worse.

Everyone needs to get this through their heads.

Go talk to american muslims who couldn't vote for Kamala because she supported Israel.

Not voting perpetuates more harm than voting for the bad guy who is less bad.

Voting third party at this point in the election cycle perpetuates more harm than voting for the bad guy who is less bad.

THE FACTS ARE SIMPLE:

One of two people will win this race.
There is no other outcome at this point.

This primary was decided by votes, not anti-bernie-level dnc trickery.

You have to vote for the one who will hurt you less or it will get worse than even this.

I hate everything about it, but this is very simple: at this point anything other than a vote for turek is a vote for escalating harm to trans people to levels even higher than what turek wants.

That is all there is to it.

Go vote.

Do not let this rhetoric stop you from turning out to vote.

That is what the people behind the machine want.

This should be a learned lesson at this point but people like Erin are somehow still getting spun up by propaganda and failing to see the simple, shitty, crushing truth here, which is that an anti-trans democrat who only wants to ban things because his donors tell him to is still more pro-trans than any other option we have at this point in this one race.

When people take this hard stance with trans rights (almost always men IME) it sure does feel like they’re saying “you’re gonna have to make trans people illegal so I stop watching trans porn. It’s the only way”

Not shaming anyone’s kink, just seems like a self control problem to me

It's just consultants. The audience and constituents that are being listened to are just consultants. Most people don't give a fuck about trans people cuz they are such a tiny minority. Neoliberal consultants have seen the success of conservative culture war narratives and have adopted the, "can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy because they don't want to do the actual work beating culture war narratives would require, which is pushing progressive policies.

I know this is Iowa. I know it's always a stretch to court poorly educated people because appealing to ethnocentric bias and anger is always easier.

One can hope this is a bait-and-switch thing that we often see happen in the reverse way with dipshits like Sinema or Fetterman but I seriously doubt it.

This is honestly such an easy issue to navigate if you frame it around individual freedom and redirect the conversation to war, gas prices, cost of living etc.

Will this one get removed like the previous times?

Then how is he any different from his opponent? Wow, it’s such a mystery why the Dems keep losing elections…. 🙄

"It's not about supporting only your ideal candidate, it's about picking the direction you want the country to go"

Fucking both of these roads lead to ruin I'd like to turn around but that's not a fucking option.

What a wildly stupid idea.

Fucking plant.

Hypothetically, would this DOJ even bother investigating the assassination of a Democrat? Asking for a hypothetical friend.

I don't know what the polls say on this issue, but if the Democrats throw trans people to the wolves, it's because their "donors" said to; polling is only relevant if Amazon agrees.

For example, polls show support for term limits is 83%; it doesn't matter, because Meta doesn't want term limits. I could list ten issues with over 80% support from all Americans; they've wanted these very basic no-brainer things for DECADES.

Just like labor discovered long ago, Democrats (or Rs, bOtH sIdEs, etc) will abandon any issue for enough "donations".

100% he feels weird about his chub when watching peg porn - now he wants us to feel bad too. I am convinced this is always the issue with anyone who is on this side of history.

There was a massive study from princeton over a decade ago showing that since the end of the civil rights era, not a single piece of public policy reflected public opinion.

The conclusion was that there is no evidence that the US is a democracy, and it explicitly said we've functionally been an oligarchy since the 70s.

Peg leg porn, what will they think of next? Eye patch por... oh... oh wait never mind.

Well said. The number of people who seem to think that there’s some magical other option for another, more progressive candidate to pop up on the ballot is frustrating.