A Letter From California
For you to adapt at will for your representatives
Our friend Janet in California wrote a scathing letter to her various representatives, highlighting the media bias against gender-critical groups and the erasure of left-wing voices on this issue. If arch-left California isn’t on board with this stuff, how could Pennsylvania be?
Here is the text of the letter for you to adapt.
Dear XXX:
As a lifelong registered Democrat and Feminist, I wish to inform you that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election was likely in part to how divided Democrats are on the issues of gender ideology and the biased reporting of our legacy media which gave the public, including our well-meaning politicians, a distorted view of who were against certain policies and why.
For example, many news outlets highlighted Donald Trump’s “anti-transgender” ads as an example of how he was running on a “campaign of hate.” Though transgender issues were polled to be the least of the public’s concerns according to Gallup, you need to know that some Democrats have had concerns about certain transgender policies and have been walking away from taking favorable positions to them.
In November of 2023, Women’s Liberation Front conducted polling among Californian voters about their opinions about transgender issues:
Over 70% of Californians define a woman as someone “biologically born female,” while only 14% of voters agree that “anyone who feels or says they are” is a woman. A majority of voters (54%) support defining the word “woman” in law to protect women’s rights, with only 22.4% of voter opposing such laws.
Nearly 70% of voters disagree that “children should be encouraged to explore their gender, decide their gender for themselves and identify their pronouns as early as kindergarten,” and 63.5% disagree with allowing children “to undergo surgeries to try to change them to the opposite sex or take off-label medications and hormones.”
60% of Californians strongly/somewhat disagree that men should be allowed in women’s prisons with only 25% strongly/somewhat agreeing.
61% of Californians strongly/somewhat disagree that males should be allowed in women’s domestic shelters while only 24% strongly/somewhat agree.
64% strongly/somewhat disagree that males should be allowed in women’s changing rooms while only 27% strongly/somewhat agree.
Recently, San Jose State University has stirred a lot of upset over the inclusion of males on female-category sports, causing colleges across the country to forfeit out of concern for fairness and the safety of their players. There was polling from Gallup in June of 2023 that demonstrated that nationally, people were less favorable to males competing in girls’ sports from three years ago:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/507023/say-birth-gender-dictate-sports-participation.aspx
Public support for people playing on sports teams that were congruent with their gender identity dropped by 8 points (from 34% to 26%.) Support for people playing on sports teams that aligned with their birth sex rose by 7 points (from 62% to 69%.) And most importantly, Democratic support for allowing transgender athletes to play on teams that differed from their birth sex dropped, from 55% to 47%.
Newspapers like The San Francisco Chronicle and The Sacramento Bee and cable news networks like MSNBC would have you believe those voicing reasonable concerns about allowing male students who identify as girls to play on the girls’ teams were all “extreme right-wing bigots” but based on polling, many of those concerns were coming from the Democratic party whose values have not shifted.
Women’s rights groups such as Bay Area-based Women Are Real are left-leaning, but are often demonized as “anti-trans.” However, they state their position very firmly as “anti-discrimination,” while stating policies that allow males into girls’ spaces, sports, and prisons pose a very present threat and harm to the material health and safety of girls and women.
https://womenarereal.org/
It is largely the fault of the media for misrepresenting the views of the public, including the view of your own constituents here in California and nationwide.
You need to take note that Democrats are more divided on “transgender issues” for reasons that they do not agree with the idea that someone can be born in the wrong body. Women are being dehumanized and erased in language as “non-men,” “birthing bodies,” “menstruators,” and “pregnant people.” We are furious that rapists are being allowed to identify into our prisons to terrorize women under SB 132 and cover “affirming care” on our tax dollars. Democratic parents are disturbed by SB 760 setting the course for gender-neutral bathrooms for grades K-12 by 2026.
Don’t keep ignoring the voices of the 51% who are female and risk losing their rights to material health and safety under policies that are allow males to take away the rights and opportunities of girls and women and terrorize us in vulnerable spaces so long as he self-declares himself a “woman.”
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
(Name)
This is a great time for those of us who are only occasional letter writers to get a few letters out there! I personally am looking forward to writing a "happy retirement" letter to Bob Casey.
I wonder how many women are like me and, after leaving the Democrats because of the party's attempts to mandate the recognition of "gender identity," found so many other things to dislike about the party that it would be hard to go back? The censorship issue is a big one for me. Even if party leaders said, "Okay, we were wrong. Men aren't women after all. We still want to maintain the categories of 'hate speech' and 'misinformation' so that we can decide what you say in the future, though," I wouldn't go back. I suppose, most of all, I won't go back until the party starts holding real primaries. To me, the main point of being in a party is helping to choose its candidates and, by extension, its policies.