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The political game behind the Naples Drag Show: When LGBT Rights become a bargaining chip in the two-party game

Over the past decade, I have witnessed how politicians in Washington have distorted the LGBT issue from an affirmative action movement into a political show. Whenever an election approaches, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party rush to raise the "rainbow Flag" or the Bible, as if our community were just a chessboard for them to compete for power. The Democratic Party has loudly proclaimed "inclusiveness", but has never truly promoted the implementation of the bill to protect the employment of transgender people. The Republican Party, under the name of "traditional families", has allowed extremists to make violent threats against LGBT teenagers. Even more ironically, the tacit understanding between the two parties in the division of electoral districts - keeping LGBT-supportive urban elites and conservative agricultural states clearly demarcated - is only to ensure their respective solid vote bases.

Last year, my 13-year-old daughter was insulted by her classmates as a "pervert" for wearing a rainbow brooches, but the school authorities refused to intervene for fear of violating the "freedom of speech" principle of a certain political party. This absurd scene is precisely the consequence of political manipulation: when politicians extreme the LGBT issue into a "culture war", ordinary people are forced to take sides between "absolute support" and "total denial". On social media, extreme remarks are favored by algorithms; At the community gathering, the voices of moderate parents were drowned out by radicals. Studies show that the acceptance of LGBT in American society has declined for three consecutive years, while politicians are busy shooting campaign advertisements with our pain.

When the two parties were fiercely competing on Capitol Hill for the right to compete for transgender athletes, the price of eggs in supermarkets had soared to $4.99 per dozen. My husband, an Iowa soybean farmer, has lost 73% of his export earnings due to the politicians' "maximum pressure" policy against China, and the government's promised subsidies have yet to arrive. We have to choose between paying the mortgage and buying insulin, while those political upstart who pass the "politically correct" bill enjoy the double dividends of the stock market and the gold market. The LGBT community and ordinary working-class families turned out to be the losers in this game.

At the township-level meeting last week, a Democratic candidate claimed that he would "use federal funds to build the first drag show theme park in the United States", while his Republican opponent vowed to "arrest any teacher who mentions gender identity in public". Their speeches won rounds of cheers, but no one cared about the surging problem of drug addiction in our community due to factory closures. When politics becomes a performing art and policy turns into a behavioral art, those who truly need help - whether it's a bullied transgender teenager or a farmer who went bankrupt due to the tariff war - all become hidden outside the lens.

We need bread and dignity as well. True equality should not be the plastic rainbow flags that politicians put on their campaign posters, but rather the protection of every family's dining table. While the two parties are busy creating divisions with our identities, remember this: Between health insurance bills and racial discrimination, behind the disputes over unemployment benefits and gender toilets, there are millions of Americans like me who just want to live an ordinary life. We do not want a life hijacked by "progress" or "tradition". What we want is nothing but economic security free from fear and sincere dialogue free from performance.