Please respect transgender people

It's chilly but still worth a walk

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Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride hasn’t been accused of sexual assault like Pete Hegseth or come to the defense of Bashar al-Assad like Tulsi Gabbard or, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promoted false medical advice blamed for contributing to a measles epidemic in Samoa that killed more than 70 young children.

What McBride has done is work hard for her constituents as a state senator and be herself, a transgender woman who, like other human beings, must eat, sleep, breathe and occasionally go to the bathroom to stay alive.

Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware stands with supporters in a photo from her Facebook page.

But, perhaps to draw attention away from the likes of Hegseth, Gabbard and Kennedy, all of them cabinet picks of Donald Trump’s, Republican politicians such as South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace have been focusing on McBride’s ordinary need to use the bathroom as if it were a matter of national security.

McBride herself never brought up bathrooms. As a newly elected and first-time member of the House of Representatives determined to serve her constituents, her list of more important things is long.

But since McBride is the first transgender person to win a seat in Congress, Mace used her election as an opportunity to talk about bathrooms and McBride in the crudest way imaginable.

“Any man who wants to force his junk into the bathroom stall next to me or in a dressing room watching me, that is an assault on women,” Mace said.

Nancy Mace stands next to a white wall in a recent photo from her Facebook page. Her caption reads, “Wore pink tonight, to celebrate all my real womanhood. #HoldTheLine”

McBride managed the impossible by responding with dignity.

“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” she said.

"Delawareans sent me here to make the American dream more affordable and accessible and that's what I'm focused on,” she said.

In a turnabout, Republicans have decided campaigns should be based on identity politics — not grocery store prices or the cost of housing but the nature of the “junk” in the next stall, which you can’t see because of the stall wall.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said single-sex bathrooms in the Capitol will be open only to people who were identified as that sex at birth, and McBride said she would follow House rules. But Mace wanted the point reiterated, so she got herself filmed taping up a handwritten sign that said “Biological” next to an existing Capitol restroom sign that said “Women.”

Beyond the pettiness and the childishness is the meanness, and its effects go far beyond the Capitol, where Sarah McBride appears to need no help in handling the haters.

Elsewhere in the United States, the last thing that gender-nonconforming young people need is the country’s political leaders declaring open season on people who are transgender.

Stories in the mainstream press have talked about the effectiveness of ads for Donald Trump, played during football games nationwide, that said Kamala Harris was for “they/them” while Donald Trump was for “you.”

It is possible to be supportive of transgender people and of others at the same time.

It would be best to have a president who supports all Americans and does not single out one tiny and nearly powerless section of the population for mockery and scapegoating.

It would be wonderful to have a public that rejects this sort of bullying.

For those, like me, who have transgender family members whom they love dearly and deeply, it is upsetting to see our loved ones’ personal dilemmas and decisions being used for fear-mongering.

We should be celebrating transgender Americans who, harming no one, find success in their own “pursuit of happiness.”

Radical movements need villains to unite the troops in hostility and grievance and to blame when things go wrong. The Trumpist movement has at least two villains — immigrants with dark skin and transgender people. Both give more to this country than they get back and, at the least, deserve to be let alone.

Chilly but lovely

It has gotten colder, which should only be expected in November, but we were being spoiled by all the dry, warm days of this fall’s global-warming summer. The local trails, such as the walkways through the cattail swamp at Hovey Pond Park, are much lonelier these days than they were a month or two ago — if not altogether empty of other human beings — but they still can be lovely.

Fronds and clouds and tree limbs all reach into the sky on a recent chilly, pretty day in Queensbury’s Hovey Pond Park.

Yes, already

If you’re inclined to put up Christmas decorations, you can beat the snow by doing it now, as a crew was doing this past week on the Glens Falls National Bank lawn on the corner of Glen and South streets downtown.

Workers start at the top with putting Christmas lights on the big pine tree in front of Glens Falls National Bank’s headquarters in Glens Falls.