It Is Only A Skirmish Not The War

It seems like everywhere you look in the news now there is something about trans. Whether it is about Caitlyn Jenner, discrimination cases that were setting on our favor, or school systems losing court cases to segregate us, it seems like everything is going in our favor.

Conservatives Ask How They Lost the Culture War Over Transgender Rights
Bloomberg
By David Weigel
June 5, 2015

On May 28, Sean Fieler wrote a warning about the transgender rights movement, directed to fellow social conservatives. The chairman of the American Principles Project worried that the movement had blown it on Bruce Jenner's story of gender transition.

"Rather than dismiss this change as a politically irrelevant story that belongs in the tabloids, Republicans should view it as a case study in the political power of principle," Fieler argued. "The idea is simple: Your sexual desire, not your biology, constitutes your identity... the rapidly growing acceptance of the previously marginal idea that underlies the transgender moment was only made possible by the Republican decision to opt out of this debate entirely."

Just days later, Jenner—who now asks to be identified as a woman named Caitlyn—became the biggest story in pop culture. She was the cover subject for the next issue of Vanity Fair, a strikingly beautiful woman who resembled Jessica Lange. (Lange herself seemed delighted by the comparison.) Within 24 hours, the debate among supporters of trans rights was not whether Jenner was brave and beautiful. That was obvious. The debate was over whether the media was celebrating Jenner because, as academic Marc Lamont Hill put it, "she conforms to tradition (sic) cis/and European standards of beauty."

In a way we are lucky that Caitlyn looks the way she does, it focused the attention away for everyone else who doesn’t integrate well in to society.

Republicans who have walked into this subject might as well have been walking over hot coals. After Jenner's "coming out" interview aired this spring, BuzzFeed's Rosie Gray asked former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum if the Olympian was a woman. "If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman,” said Santorum. “My responsibility as a human being is to love and accept everybody. Not to criticize people for who they are. I can criticize, and I do, for what people do, for their behavior."
[…]
The only Republican diving into the issue by choice was George Pataki, the socially liberal former governor of New York, who tweeted a rebuke to Huckabee and a defense of Jenner:

If someone chooses a path that's different than mine, we should respect it as opposed to mocking...

Therein lies the conservative dilemma, if they attack Caitlyn for their conservative base they disenfranchise the moderate voters, the candidates are walking a thin line.

But what will happen once the elections are over, will the Republicans still walk that thin line or will they revert to a full out frontal assault? That is why I say we won the skirmish but the battle isn’t over.