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If you ask this consulting firm, Democrats aren’t unpopular because they compromise with Republicans to maintain their corporate interests — it’s because they talk about the rights of LGBTQ+ people and other minorities too much.
Centrist think tank Third Way recently released a list of words it believes Democratic politicians should avoid, referring to them as “wildly out-of-touch social positions.” The list includes even neutral community descriptors such as “LGBTQIA” and “BIPOC.”
“The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness,” the group wrote. “To please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.”
Words on the list include: privilege, triggering, othering, microaggression, holding space, body shaming, subverting norms, systems of oppression, cultural appropriation, existential threat, the unhoused, food insecurity, housing insecurity, person who immigrated, birthing person, cisgender, deadnaming, heteronormative, patriarchy, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, allyship, and incarcerated people.
Third Way insisted that it is “not out to police language, ban phrases or create our own form of censorship” — though its list is eerily similar to Donald Trump‘s list of banned words. His administration issued the guidance after he signed executive orders removing all references to DEI in the federal government, as well as mandating that the federal government deny the existence of trans people by recognizing only two sexes despite the scientific and medical consensus that sex is a spectrum.
Trump’s banned words include: advocate, assigned at birth, assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth, biologically female, biologically male, Black, breastfeed + people, breastfeed + person, chestfeed + people, chestfeed + person, female, females, feminism, gender, gender based, gender based violence, gender diversity, gender identity, gender ideology, gender-affirming care, genders, immigrant, LGBT, LGBTQ, men who have sex with men, MSM, Mx, non-binary, nonbinary, people + uterus, pronoun, pronouns, segregation, sex, sexual preferences, sexuality, they/them, trans, transgender, transsexual, and women.
Both Third Way and Trump take issue with gender neutral parenting terms, with the former specifically criticizing “birthing person” and the latter banning terms like “breastfeed” or “uterus” if the word “person” is attached to them.
There is no evidence to suggest that supporting legal rights for trans people have cost Democrats politically. Whereas Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign largely ignored trans issues, the GOP spent over $215 million on anti-trans attack ads — about $77 for every trans person in the U.S. — which a post election study showed had no impact on voters’ decisions. Only 18 percent of registered voters in a separate September Gallup poll said candidates’ positions on trans rights is “extremely important” to them.
While some Democrats have attempted to distance themselves from the trans community by using the same GOP talking points about “men in women’s sports,” many have harshly condemned the strategy as not only cruel, but short-sighted and ineffective. Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker said during an April party dinner: “Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants — instead of their own lack of guts and gumption.”
This article originally appeared on Advocate: Democrat consultants tell politicians to stop using terms like ‘LGBTQIA’ and ‘cisgender’
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