Nenshi's Self-Righteous Crusade Helps No One

How To Actually Help Trans Kids

This weekend, Naheed Nenshi, in his quixotic pseudo-campaign for Alberta NDP leader, gave a speech. He gave it at a protest rally against Danielle Smith’s attack on the trans community. As a speech, it was great – it was a rallying cry that those who agree with him love. It’s the kind of speech of works really well to make people who already agree with him happy.

If you listen to the 9 minutes in full, you can feel something. You start to believe again, you start to feel things again, even in the hearts of the coldest, most cynical, most broken of progressive columnists. And then you remember that this policy isn’t somehow a perversion of what Albertans want, but it’s a set of policies that are absolutely supported by broad majority support.

The guy claiming that these policies are un-Albertan will be running for the NDP leadership. If he wins the leadership, that speech in Calgary will be amongst the reasons he cannot win an election. The broader left cannot get it through their fucking heads that we won’t win this fight, at least not on anything resembling a timeframe that we’d consider a win. By the time I die, will these changes be reversed? Sure. Will they be by the time  I’m 35? Probably not.

And they certainly won’t be if the only path forward for trans allies is to engage in the kind of deeply unhelpful preaching to the choir Nenshi did this past weekend.

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You know what would have stopped this attack on trans Albertans? Rachel Notley winning the last election. The moment she lost that election, this was inevitable. If you’re looking for people to blame for this, the geniuses who couldn’t figure out their poll lead was built on fairy dust and unrealistic results in non-urban Alberta that would never hold up in a campaign are a good place to start. And again, this isn’t revisionism or hindsight, there’s an entire fucking catalogue of my rants about this in addition to the thousands of others made both publicly and privately by others I knew about contemporaneously.

As someone who despite my Laurentian Elite perspective actually does understand Alberta pretty well, let’s have an honest conversation about what Nenshi is doing. His speech wasn’t about protecting trans lives, or trans children. It was about running for the NDP leadership, whose membership want to be told that they’re good and righteous and that Smith is acting “un-Albertan” by doing this.

Might he genuinely be stupid enough to think this is an issue the left can win? Maybe – after all, he did say that Danielle Smith wouldn’t do this to some high school students last year, so his understanding of this might be all wonky. Does the sincerity of his belief change the fact that he’s on the massive wrong side of public opinion? No.

Let’s just get something on the record, clear as day; I am not obligated to respect you and I’m not obligated to treat you with anything other than contempt if your way of protecting the trans community and their allies is to lie to them. Nenshi is lying to the trans community when he says they’ll win. Whether he knows he’s lying to them or just indifferent to the fact that he’s feeding them a bill of goods, we don’t have to treat this as a respectable or coherent opinion.

You know what trans kids in Alberta need? A progressive government, not a sermon on how the Conservatives are evil. You know what doesn’t help elect a progressive government? Calling a policy with fucking supermajority of the population support “un-Albertan” after losing an election in part because you were in a progressive bubble. All of the worst kinds of progressives are already rushing to give the verbal equivalent of a blowjob to Nenshi’s speech, a great sign that he did his job. But we don’t have to pretend that what he cares about will protect any trans kids.

Justin Trudeau supported, voted for, and vocally defended an anti-terror bill in 2015. Progressives lost their shit, but that decision helped him win the 2015 election by proving his seriousness and that he wasn’t just reflexively right wing. Voters like politicians who take idiosyncratic positions on some issues, because it’s seen as evidence they’re not rigid ideologues. You want to know what successful opposition leaders who lead their parties into office usually have in common? They took a big, bold decision or stance against type.

Blair fought the unions to show he was really “New” Labour, Cameron changed the Tory logo to show his environmentalist bonafides, Trudeau backed anti-terror legislation. Obama had the (political) advantage of a global economic crisis and a banking crisis 7 weeks from his first election, but even he knew he had to staunchly say that marriage was between a man and a woman, despite the left of the Democratic Party’s anger at that stance.

Should the NDP pass this for the government? No, and the health care stuff is easier ground to oppose in a way that won’t signal to the entire electorate you’re out to lunch commies, but there’s a lot of ways to oppose this without reaching Nenshi’s nauseating level of pious self-righteousness. Suggest an expert inquiry on how to balance student safety versus parental rights, focus your fight on protecting kids who have well-founded fears if they’re outed, and fight a battle where you can win.

This Alberta government has shown some willingness to back down from fights, but they do so when they sense political problems ahead. An issue where they have supermajority support? You can’t win this fight. What you can do is try and do is mitigate the effects by focusing on where you might have support, and set yourself up to win the next election. Nenshi’s speech and that kind of rhetoric doesn’t help the NDP in the Legislature try and get the government to make any form of concessions, and it doesn’t help to win the next election.

We know that the right thinks there is some weakness on vulnerable kids, because when Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce floated a parental rights agenda last year, he went out of his way to say the right things on those issues. Whether you think Ford and Lecce would protect vulnerable kids, clearly he thought this issue required a soft touch on those issues to avoid scaring off moderates.

Danielle Smith did the same thing by leading her video by saving she loves trans people and wants to protect them and all that soft-sounding language. They clearly know that outing trans kids who have reason to fear their parents knowing goes down badly amongst a segment of people who support the broader agenda. There’s a way forward to mitigating some of this, but that way is not attacking the Premier’s policies and by extension those who support them “un-Albertan”. You want the government to bother giving you even the courtesy of a meeting on this issue? That’s not helpful.

I know the kind of pragmatism that I’m proposing here doesn’t get the heart racing but smart tactics rarely do. Remember Mr. Hope And Change? Dude won re-election by blitzing every swing state with hundreds of millions of dollars attacking Mitt Romney not for his bad plans for the country but as a bad person for all the things he did as a private equity CEO. That’s not a criticism, but it is a reminder that what actually wins elections are not the things that work in a bad Sorkin world!

What so many people want is for this to work like it’s the West Wing and all that has to happen is everyone just wants things hard enough and the right lets it happen for no discernible purpose. Remember when Sorkin’s weird Defence Of Marriage Act clone gets pocket vetoed because Josh and Bartlet cares more about gay rights than the gay Republican congressman? Or how Bartlet gets a conservative Senator who hates him to enact his signature policy priority by asking him nicely? That’s how people seem to think the world works at this point, because “Naheed Nenshi calls Danielle Smith un-Albertan and that somehow stops these attacks on trans kids” is several levels stupider than even the dumbest Sorkin sub-plot.

If you actually want to protect trans kids you should run the fuck away from anyone more concerned with preaching to the choir than actually fighting for a progressive government. Winning is hard; winning in Alberta is a step beyond hard. Giving speeches designed to make yourself and your audience feel good is easy. Anyone who claims to want to protect trans kids who chooses the easy path over the hard work of electing a progressive government doesn’t deserve our time or our respect.