The question of gender is fundamentally linked with the future of our democratic world and we would be I think making a

mistake by imagining that it's simply identity politics or that it's

fragmenting the left or that it's an artificial notion.

It is not.

Hello and welcome to Wises happening happening with me your host Chris Hayes.

I remember back right in the weekend before the midterms in 2022 reading a piece by

Dave Wigle in Semaphore and he had gone to the kind of big closing rally in Michigan

for the Republican ticket for all the statewide offices and you know this was I think the Friday before election day and this tends to be you know with this sort of big close like you're getting everyone ready for Geo TV and one of the people that was a headliner at

this rally for the statewide Republican ticket was a swimmer, an ex-swimmer named Riley Gaines, who is a champion swimmer at the University of Kentucky,

who has sort of made a name for herself subsequently as campaigning against trans athletes because she was mad that she had to compete against a trans swimmer.

And Riley Gaines become the sort of cause lab for people that are deeply invested in keeping trans folks out of competitive athletics or forcing

them to compete in a gender that's not their avowed gender.

And I remember reading this dispatch and being like that's a weird bespoke issue to close your statewide campaign on.

Like there's lots of stuff going on, you could run on inflation, you can, you know, you could run about the aftermath of all the things

happening in 2022 as we were coming out of the pandemic and all the disruptions and

supply chains. But like, I remember thinking like, is this going to work?? Well it didn't work in Michigan where

Democrats swept the state but it hasn't stopped Republicans and

Conservatives from trying. They have been incredibly invested in fighting this battle over gender specifically about trans folks

specifically and trans youth but more broadly a kind of battle against what they call gender ideology, the belief that gender is not innate, that gender is fluid, that folks can have different genders than their biological sex,

that those are different categories,

and not only are they fighting those conceptions,

but fighting anyone introducing,

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