On Substance and Signaling, in Trumpland, Topeka, and Beyond

[This is an extensively rewritten version of an essay I wrote for Kansas newspapers last Sunday.]

In a recent substack post, my old friend Damon Linker made an obvious, but still important, observation:

One thing I think I and many others got wrong during the first Trump administration was to spend far too much time allowing ourselves to be triggered by things the president was saying—in his social media feed, at rallies, and in press conferences….[T]here’s a reason why journalists…began to joke about the importance of taking Trump seriously but not literally. That’s because he frequently communicated in a very different way than presidents usually have, often speaking from anger and in an off-the-cuff and ill-informed way. In many cases, his primary goal was to trigger the libs rather than clarify what his administration would be doing in the near future. That made his comments a distraction from what his administration was actually doing or aspiring to do.

Trump is, in many ways, a unique case (though it seems likely that such won’t be the case in the future, unfortunately). Generally speaking, our democratic political culture, in terms of how the public and the mass media internalize and reflect the ways in which representatives--both those in office and those hoping to be elected to such--seek votes and articulate priorities, has organically come to recognize that some statements from politicians are “mere” signaling, whereas others are “actually” substantive.

I put those qualifiers in quotation marks because, among the many other democratic ills which Trump’s influence on our political culture over the past decade has introduced, the recognition of even basic value distinctions like those—specifically, the idea that signaling a position to one’s political allies is, well, just that: a matter of positioning, rather than a matter of substantively working towards an actual, achievable solution--is harder than ever. Still, the assumption that some statements made by politicians need to be taken literally, even if they aren’t serious ideas, remains a hard concept to many voters to accept without resistance, because it runs directly against our inherited experience, going back through the whole history of America’s struggles to make mass democracy work, regarding what responsible government even means.

This may seem like I’m dressing up a mundane reality of democratic politics into something more weighty than it deserves to be. Because all politicians lie, right? So who cares that the lies of Trump, and an unfortunately large number of those who have followed his example, seem categorically different? Elected representatives spending their time on meaningless bills or resolutions that show their support for causes promoted by major interest groups or another donors, rather than getting down to the business of building actually substantive legislation—isn’t that just to be expected?

Maybe. But still, I care in particular about these sorts of lies, because they help to make the distinctions upon which much of the public’s ability to connect to their own elected representatives depend upon even harder, necessitating both 1) changes in the way the media does its work, such as Damon describes in his above-linked post, and 2) even more work on the part of those who the substance of legislation affects more directly.

As an example, consider the ongoing arguments over medical support for individuals who identify as transgender, since these debates are particularly rife with serious concerns that are based on matters that are not, in fact, literally true. To put it another way, these are our elected leaders taking actions that some might justify as “merely” signaling serious intent, even though there is little or no literal substance “actually” behind their intentions.

Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson recently affirmed that, with the Republican legislative majority even stronger after the 2024 elections, the leadership will bring back the push to ban, among other types of gender-affirming care, transgender surgeries sought by those Kansans who are under 18 years old. The last effort to do so ended with a veto from Governor Laura Kelly and a veto-override attempt which failed by only two votes. It’s reasonable, now that they have additional votes on their side, that the Republicans would try again. Why? Because the significance of the signal doing so would send, a signal of their “seriousness” about the threat of young people being pushed into receiving surgeries when they’re too young to know whether it’s what is best for them, hasn’t changed.

Of course, the literal reality of the situation, the actual substance of the subject of the proposed legislation, hasn’t changed either. (Note: I recognize that there are other gender-affirming concerns tied up with this, regarding the availability of puberty blockers and other medications to minors, but since Masterson himself led with the extreme issue of transitional surgeries, I’m comfortable treating that as a separate issue.)

I know many legislators, and I sympathize with how difficult their job can be, particularly those on the state and municipal level. On the one hand, they are closer to their constituents, and can more directly hear and respond to many diverse local appeals. But on the other hand, their funding, the parties which structure most of their ability to reach out to voters (and thus both do good work as well as protect their jobs), so profoundly entwined with America’s nationalized media environment, and with major interest groups and organizations that usually care little for specific local budget or policy matters, and instead are focused on creating signals that serve primarily to rile up or placate key donors and constituencies across the country. I can understand a politician coming to the reasonable conclusion that have to play the signaling game, if only to make sure they have the opportunity to also focus on the difficult, substantive matters that may actually affect those whom they represent most.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t members of the Republican super-majority in Topeka who, for a variety of reasons, may well be sincerely concerned—maybe even horrified—by the prospect of someone under the age of 18 receiving gender modification surgery, and see banning such as a necessary action in the name of public health or morality. I’m sure more than a few fit that description. But most of them, I suspect, are actually well-read enough to recognize that they are crusading symbolically against an almost non-existent concern.

Here is where the literal substance of the matter gets serious. There’s no definitive evidence of any Kansas medical center ever performing complete gender transition surgery on a minor, and nationally the numbers for such surgeries, according to data reported by the American Medical Association, are incredibly low: out of all gender-affirming surgeries in the United States in recent years, perhaps 2 out of every 100,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 15 and 17, and 1 out of 1,000,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 13 and 15. Beneath that age, the number is zero. So, as I wrote, an almost non-existent concern.

(Another note, for the record: after an earlier version of this piece was published in Kansas newspapers, I was contacted by a concerned individual who insisted that my information was wrong; that gender re-assignment surgeries have in fact been performed on Kansans under the age of 18. The data which this individual relied upon had been collected by Do No Harm, an organization devoted to “protecting health care from the disastrous consequences of identity politics.” Their reported information on Kansas lists a total 22 “surgery patients”(though their breakdown of hospitals actually record a total of 25; I’m unsure why three are excluded); they obtained that information by looking at insurance records, focusing on claims that involved procedure codes which are used for “confirmed surgical gender transition procedures,” though they allow that those procedure codes could have been used for “surgeries related to intersex conditions” or “congenital conditions or other non-gender transition-related reasons.” I appreciate the additional information, but 1) since I don’t see any breakdown in the ages of the minors who supposedly received these surgeries, unlike the information from the AMA, and 2) since there is apparently no way to effectively distinguish between corrective and elective surgeries among these numbers, to say nothing of there being to no way to capture the individual complexities and differences present in any of these instances, and 3) since a total number of 22, or even 25, surgeries performed in a state with a total of nearly 706,000 people under the age of 18, is a number so much smaller than even the national number, that I can’t see how sticking with my judgment of this proposal being an act of signaling in regards to an essentially non-existent phenomenon can be faulted.)   

To return to my main point: when Senator Masterson says that the Republican super-majority are going to do something, we need to take him seriously. There’s a serious message they (the Republican leadership, certainly, and presumably at least some other members of the caucus) want to send regarding the disapproval the Republican majority feels toward “transgender ideology,” and connecting it to the issue of minors receiving gender-affirming surgery is a major part of the signal they intend to send. But is there an actual, literal, substantive basis for them spending time on sending this message? The answer there is, on my review of the data, no.

This pattern—when the data and the message don’t match--holds for many other issues as well. The number of transgender athletes seeking to play sports competitively in the category of their chosen gender is tiny, yet everyone seems to have a story about some transgender woman with an unfair advantage at their daughter’s high school. It’s the same for illegal immigrants, who are far more law-abiding than the rest of the population, yet every story about an undocumented resident who commits a crime will be shared over and over and over again.

On a certain level, one must simply accept this as a political reality, one that the type of lies and misinformation which our President-elect has specialized in, is only making more complicated. It is true that most people, lacking both the time and inclination to become experts regarding any given matter, depend upon—and make decisions upon—the conveying of key signals, whether involving law or morality or anything else. This is something that interest groups have long known and made use of—and which too many politicians have come to rely upon in preference to the unglamorous, necessary work of finding substantive compromises on actual, literal concerns. As for those who do have expert information on what is literally happening—often because they actually are one of the people being symbolically discussed (a person with sexual dysphoria, perhaps, or a Dreamer, or more)—the battle to call attention to the actual data, and introduce substantive arguments to push back against the signally, is never-ending. But also necessary, all the same, and never more so than today.