Guide Encourages Activists to 'Force Team' Trans-Identified Males with Racial Minorities

A controversial guide for trans activists advises them to 'force team' the demands of trans-identified males with the historical struggles of racial minorities.

The guide, written by the Transgender Law Center and Lake Research Partners – a political strategy and public relations firm – is called "Transgender Youth and the Freedom to Be Ourselves: Building Our Choir with a Race-Class Narrative." Lake Research Partners is a Democratic Party operative firm that lists itself as a "lifetime achievement award" recipient from the American Association of Political Consultants.

Acting as a manual for activists, the document encourages trans issues – such as eliminating single-sex spaces, allowing biological males to participate on women's sports teams, and granting minors access to trans medicalization – to always be associated with other group's struggles, specifically those of racial minorities. According to the guide, this is due to their focus groups having associated transgenderism primarily with white people.

"... comments indicating many participants largely associated being transgender with being white, or associated acceptance of transgender people with whiteness," the document notes, going on to state that: "We found several effective paths towards interrupting this othering framework and increasing empathy and a sense of shared fate and community with transgender people, especially among Black, Latinx, AAPI and Indigenous audiences."

The guide goes on to encourage trans activists to evoke race while discussing trans-related issues.

One of the strategic points goes further on the plan to crush opposition to the demands of trans-identified males, advising trans activists to “call out the villains” by "exploiting divisions across race." It then provides an example of associating trans youth with Black students who are academically penalized for their hair, or female students who are told their clothes don't meet dress codes.

In a recent article for 4W, Black Marxist-feminist writer Jennifer Seiland has decried the constant references to racial minorities by trans activists in an attempt to bolster their arguments, noting: "The tactic is a brilliant one... after all, if one succeeds in obfuscating the meaning of “woman,” then on what basis can any woman, even those who aren't but self-identify as such, be excluded?"

On the hotly contested issue of males competing in women's sports teams, the narrative guide encourages activists to "connect the attacks on trans woman athletes to the long legacy of discrimination against all women athletes." The guide states that amongst its focus groups "this message both shifted our audiences from an individual to a collective mindset and disrupted transphobic conceptions of transgender girls and women as actually male." It goes on to give an example quote of framing:

"Women’s sports have never existed on an equal playing field. For too long, we have devalued women’s sports, and we see this in the way that professional women athletes are underpaid compared to men and how transgender women athletes are targeted, attacked, and forced out of their sport. And instead of striving for equality in sports, certain politicians are distracting us from the real issue by blaming transgender women, instead of helping make sports a better place for all women."

A recent poll has shown that 1 in 3 Americans "strongly oppose" biological males being allowed to play on women's collegiate sports, with 56% of U.S adults expressing a belief that trans-identified males have an inherent competitive advantage.

Do you want to bring the "gender madness" to an end? Help us write about it! 4W is able to pay our all-female staff and writers thanks to the generous support of our paid monthly subscribers.

Enter your email below to sign in or become a 4W member and join the conversation.
(Already did this? Try refreshing the page!)