‘I guess my question would be: Why just the Secretary of Education? Every arm of the government reaches trans people in one way or another. The Secretary of Defense would be expected to have input on whether trans soldiers should be admitted to the military. The Secretary of State might have some ideas about how to restrain foreign governments from persecuting their own trans citizens.
If we’re going to be as nutty as to grant random members of minority communities veto power over cabinet appointments in the name of identity politics, we might as well go whole hog.
Does she understand, by the way, that other minority groups will also understandably demand a veto over her nominees via some designated representative if a veto is granted to a trans person (or to someone from a different group)?
One way she might answer that would be to note that interest groups of all sorts already have vetoes to some degree over cabinet officials. For instance, a Warren donor with a yearning to be Secretary of Labor would have a major problem getting nominated if the AFL-CIO opposed him or her for whatever reason. Isn’t this the same thing? Well … no, because (a) the AFL-CIO has a clearly defined leadership that’s empowered to speak for it and (b) they’re a major constituency within the realm of policy governed by the Labor Department. Warren’s proposal would grant an unusual right of refusal to a single niche among the huge array of constituencies involved in American public education. And it would limit that right to a single person, chosen basically at random.
In fact, I think she has a specific trans person in mind, the one who asked her a question about education policy at a town hall in October. That child is nine.’
