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Steele has had it with those who are blaming transgender people for Democrats' election loss.
Comedy writer Harper Steele is fed up with those who are blaming transgender people for Kamala Harris’s loss of the presidential election to Donald Trump.
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“I don’t give a fuck about those people,” Steele, a trans woman whose post-transition cross-country trip with her friend Will Ferrell is the subject of the Netflix documentary Will & Harper, recently told Variety. “Trans people are not the canary in the cave. You know what I mean? We’re not here to be the sacrifice that we’re going to make so the rest of us can live. That’s fucked up … I can make compromises, but trans people are not a compromise.”
Democratic U.S. Reps. Tom Suozzi and Seth Moulton have criticized their party’s support for trans athletes, especially trans girls and women, participating in sports under their gender identity.
“What I’ve said is consistent with the views of the majority of Americans, but it’s shut out of the Democratic Party debate,” Moulton, of Massachusetts, told reporters Monday, according to Boston’s NBC affiliate. Earlier, he had told The New York Times he wanted to protect his daughters from getting “run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” Suozzi, of New York, has made similar comments.
Joe Scarborough and his panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe have also blamed Democratic support of trans rights for Harris’s loss, as Donald Trump made opposition to gender-affirming care and trans inclusion in sports a signature issue of his campaign. But polls have indicated that this wasn’t a big issue for voters and that they hated Trump's anti-trans ads.
Meanwhile, Steele, The Advocate's September/October cover star, with Ferrell, is having none of it, hence her comment. And while she’s not happy with the election results, she would make a cross-country trip again. “I’d go across by myself right now,” she told Variety. “There are bad actors, but I’m pretty good at noticing bad actors. I’m sure it’s more dangerous today than it was three months ago and two years ago or whatever, but I’m not afraid to go across my country. It’s still my country. They’re not taking that away from me.”
“I will remain hopeful that the middle of the country does not really care as much about trans people or queer people as the politicians and the press make us think they do, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t bad actors,” she added.
She is “reasonably scared,” however, about the possibility of bans on gender-affirming care, even for adults. It’s been reported that trans people are building up their supplies of estrogen and testosterone. “If I ran out of my estrogen, it would destroy me,” Steele said. “These are literally life-saving drugs for me. It would be devastating.”
She wants trans youth to know that they are seen and loved, and everyone to know that the rollback of rights under a new Trump administration and a conservative Supreme Court won’t stop with trans people. “They rolled back Roe v. Wade; they’re going to roll back gay marriage,” she said. “They’re going to start going back and people are going to be in closets again, and people are going to be hiding. We just have to put things out like Will & Harper and better things than that more and more.”
