An Open Letter to Zohran Mamdani

Govern for the majority, and reality

Dear Mr. Mamdani,

You moved me to do something I’ve never done before: voted for a candidate outside the Democratic party.

Actually, I wasn’t voting for anyone. I was simply voting against the Democratic party moving even further to the left, after watching its long march away from regular people—and common sense—for the past decade.

I share your enthusiasm for creating an affordable New York City, and your horror at much of what Donald Trump has wrought. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for 30 years; there’s nothing I’d like more than to own a home here. Heck, if that segment of Jews makes good on their threat to leave New York, maybe vacancy rates will increase and housing prices will go down.

In all seriousness, as much as I share some of your values, there are others I reject. Even though I’m only Jewish in the way my grandfather described it—”they’ll count us as Jews when they come around for the camps next time”—I fear your anti-Zionist rhetoric. That’s not because I’m a Zionist, but because I don’t want a mayor who rejects constituents because of their beliefs—or insists on imposing his own beliefs on his constituents.

Where that concerns me the most is when it comes to gender. You’ve promised to devote $65 million of our city’s budget to “protect gender-affirming care” and “provide gender-affirming care to New Yorkers who seek it.”

You promise to:

• Develop and support virtual and telehealth GAC and delivery of GAC treatment by

  community health providers

• Add GAC to New York Health+Hospitals VirtualCare.

• Establish a City-based GAC Access Hub to direct those seeking GAC to providers

  based on their individual situations.

• Provide aftercare, home health support, and respite housing.

• Support health programs like Callen-Lorde Community Health Centers COIN Clinic (Cecilia’s Occupational Inclusion Network).

And you insist on holding “private hospital systems denying GAC accountable.”

In other words, you plan to strong-arm hospitals and clinics into offering interventions for which there is no good evidence and no medical consensus. There is nothing in your platform about detransitioners, who are routinely denied care. You want to make New York City a sanctuary, but some of us require sanctuary from the idea that a child who doesn’t conform to stereotypes requires psychological and medical interventions.

You say you’ll be mayor for all, yet if I identify as asexual—which, considering I am a middle-aged lady, I could easily do—I am considered oppressed, and you’ll direct $87 million to give me special housing and services?

In your victory speech, you claimed your ascent signaled the end of the politics for the few, and the rise of the politics of the many. And yet, you are devoting so many resources to a tiny portion of the population, and insisting that we comply with their—and your—belief system, that some people are born in the wrong body, or that we all have a gender identity.

If you really aim to govern based on the many, then you’ll move away from these ideas, because the majority of Democrats don’t support them. I appreciate that you have sidestepped a bit toward the center. And I also understand that you have been raised in a world where these beliefs are proffered as truths. But you need to understand gender identity as a belief, not a fact—one that the vast majority of Americans don’t share.

How will you govern in a way that protects gender nonconforming children from the messages that their bodies are wrong? And how will you govern for those of us who don’t share these beliefs?