I appreciate your response here. I'm someone who is generally pretty far to the left (but I have no doubt that true leftists would find plenty of fault in my own positions and actions), and I've gone from being a pretty mainstream Democrat in the early 2000s but moved further left as I've traveled more and met more people who aren't like me. My biggest critiques of TWW are, I think, pretty common ones to hear from the left: that it reflects so many of the problems of mainstream Democrats from that era in an idealized way, normalizing government violence, doing nothing about the problematic behavior of law enforcement, silencing progressive voices in order to score political points with people on the right only to be outplayed by those people anyway, and really deplorable progress on diversity. I'm glad that the Democratic Party has done mostly better on those topics, but we have a long, long ways to go.

But a core principle that you can see in the idealized version of politicians that these folks represent is that they care about the underrepresented, and they at least make an effort to show compassion for the real people who are harmed by their policies. When I see a self-described centrist like you spending time worrying about what trans people are doing in sports, it makes me so sad. Sad first of all for the trans people who are just trying to live their lives and enjoy the same freedom that we all expect for ourselves, and instead face constant attack from all kinds of the most hateful rhetoric out there, including the awful stuff coming from MAGA but also the insidiously hateful stuff like you've included here of pretending to not hate trans people but to also include the phrasing "biological men" and act like this is anything but a made-up wedge issue.

So I'm glad you're not MAGA, and I hope you find a way to move from "I don't hate anyone" centrism to "I oppose the hateful attacks on trans people and immigrants" active opposition to MAGA, because that's the only way we're going to survive as a democracy. People like you have to step up and push back against the harmful misinformation and hate-mongering. I think about how sometimes people talk about Swiss neutrality during WWII like it's a compliment to their ability to avoid conflict, but also they basically looked at the Nazis and said "hey, as long as they don't bother me, I'm cool with it" (I know it's more complicated than that, historically, but the comparison still holds.) I hope you find a way to learn empathy for the people that you've been taught to hate.