Sometimes We Actually Make Progress
Running for office involves talking a lot about problems.
Housing is too expensive. Childcare costs too much. Our transportation system needs improvement. Healthcare costs keep rising. Our politics doesn’t always work the way it should.
It can be easy to get pessimistic when you only look at the problems. One of the things that keeps me optimistic is remembering that sometimes things really do change.
Consider transgender rights.
When I was growing up, transgender people were routinely treated as a punchline.
This wasn’t some distant era. How I Met Your Mother, one of my favorite shows in my 20s, repeatedly used the possibility that a woman might be transgender as a joke. In one 2011 episode, two characters literally play a game based on trying to identify which woman in a group of models is transgender.
That was only fifteen years ago. However, during the 2010s, transgender Americans became more visible. and medicine increasingly treated transgender healthcare as healthcare.
I got to see that change happen.
My dad is a urologist at Boston Medical Center. In 2016, he was part of the team that established BMC’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, the first comprehensive academic transgender medical center of its kind in New England.
I remember at the time thinking that was pretty cool. My dad was expanding his practice to a new field of medicine even though there was still political controversy about it.
In 2024, that turned from feeling like social change and more like demagoguery. Donald Trump and other Republicans lied about it and tried to make a marginalized community the target of political attacks.
But the response has heartened me. Democrats didn’t simply give up on it. I’ve received questionnaires during this campaign from organizations whose primary missions have nothing to do with transgender rights and nevertheless they ask candidates where we stand on transgender equality.
That’s significant.
It means transgender rights aren’t being treated as some niche issue affecting somebody else’s community. Increasingly, at least on the center and left part of the political spectrum, they’re understood as part of a much larger principle: people should be able to live their lives with dignity, and medical decisions should be made by patients, families and doctors.
I don’t want to declare victory on this fight. I’m definitely seeing only a small part of the issue and I’m in one of the most progressive parts of the country. There are transgender Americans who are frightened about what their government might do. Progress can be reversed, and rights have to be defended.
But it is good to take a step back and notice what has changed.
A generation ago, transgender people could be casually mocked on mainstream television and almost nobody thought twice about it.
Today, after an intense national political campaign targeting transgender people, I’m seeing organizations across Massachusetts make clear that transgender rights are part of the basic commitments they expect from candidates for public office.
That’s progress and everyone who helped make that progress happen deserves enormous credit.
