Jonathan Capehart:
Well, look, Governor Newsom is somebody whose credentials in LGBTQ rights were cemented 21 years ago, when he, against the advice of every Democrat in the country, issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
So this is not a question of whether he has thrown the community under the bus after two decades. But what this shows is, and what I wished he had done, because I actually listened to the podcast and this entire section. And he kept talking about fairness, which I get, but he didn’t talk more fully about, what exactly do you mean?
In the conversation with Charlie Kirk, I mean, the way he says no men in female sports, just the way he talks about that, we’re not talking about men in drag pretending to be women in sports. We’re talking about trans women, trans girls.
But what I really like and what I loved about this segment on trans athletes with Dr. Bradley Anawalt, he puts it — he says it perfectly. This is — that there’s a tension here between fairness and allowing people who want to play sports to play sports.
What we need to do is, as Americans, and certainly elected officials, have a more nuanced and thoughtful conversation. This is not a black-and-white issue. This is something that requires a lot of thoughtful — a lot of thoughtful conversation led by scientists, led by doctors, led by people who actually know something about this.
And the last thing I will say is, I — look, I’m an out gay man. I came up during the 1980s, when there was the AIDS epidemic and people were out in the streets saying, hey, we are here. “Will & Grace” comes along, and suddenly there’s a cultural change, a change in the country in how they viewed LGBTQ folks.
We need to have that same kind of cultural conversation when it comes to the T, one that is nuanced and thoughtful, and not sort of bombastic in the way that Charlie Kirk talks about.
