Update, February 8, 2026: I’ve updated the title of this essay from “On Kitchen Tables and Cultural Issues.” “Bread and butter” is the more commonly used and recognisable phrase among politicians and writers: the February 2, 2026 issue of the New Yorker features an article “One Direction,” by Charles Duhigg, that argues left organising does not work because organisers focus too much on matters like trans rights as oppossed to “bread and butter” issues. (Of course, it’s the New Yorker, which thinks liberal groups like Indivisible are the left when they are at best progressive, but that’s a different subject for another essay.) I’ve also added a few lines about recent proposed anti-trans legislation in Kansas. Trans rights affect us all, no matter how we identify.
There are a few different ways that liberals and even leftists like to dismiss certain matters that they view as extraneous to whatever they think of as real politics. One is to bring up “kitchen table” issues, as politicians like Rahm Emanuel, Elissa Slotkin, Raja Krishnamoorthi and many others have done. They may differ slightly on what they mean: Slotkin and Krishnamoorthi bring up economic issues like paying for education and groceries, while Emanuel raises matters like immigration, crime, homelessness and drugs. To be clear, and for those who may not know of his neoliberal policies, Emanuel is not here attempting to shore up support for immigrants, people swept up in the criminal (in)justice system, homeless people, or people who need treatment for drug addiction: he is positioning all of them as elements that need to be swept aside and perhaps effectively disappeared (he may want to emulate Gavin Newsom who joyfully demolished homeless encampments with his own hands).
What unites all these politicians is the idea of a mythic American couple sitting around a kitchen table and desperately trying to pay the bills: Ozzie and Harriet, to use Emanuel’s example. For such people, life is consumed by “bread and butter” concerns of simple survival: putting food on the table, an occasional night out at the movies, new shoes for children at the start of the school year, and so on. This talk is inevitably accompanied by the heavily coded phrase, “cultural issues,” sometimes accompanied by the term “identity.” To be clear, again, these politicians are not signalling any support or sympathy for identities or cultural issues of any sort. What might these be? Abortion, race, trans identity and healthcare for trans people (the very idea!), gender in any form, matters related to race or immigration status: the list is endless. In their eyes, and in the eyes of too many cultural commenters, the only people without an identity are cisgender, heterosexual, white males. Everyone else has an identity from which the world needs protection, apparently.
But whose kitchen table is this, where such issues never come up?
It is, in the year 2025, entirely possible that Ozzie has come out to Harriet as a trans woman, and that Harriet has looked her new wife in the eyes and said, “I still love you, and I am with you, unless you decide otherwise.” Eventually, perhaps, Harriet finds another romantic interest and this is, to her surprise and delight, another woman, Linda. She remains deeply attached to her now former spouse and co-parent, and they still share the same roof. Their sons shrug and roll with their parents’ revelations—they’ve grown up around queer and trans kids all their lives. Soon, a new and expanded family takes shape as everyone explores their new realities, and David and Ricky revel in the advantages of a three-parent structure and the new siblings they acquire through Linda, who is still close to her ex-husband.
Such families are hardly unusual: the Williams Institute estimates that 19% of transgender adults in the U.S are parents; around 2.8 million adults and youth identify as transgender. Given all the difficulties in gathering data around a vulnerable population—many of whose members end up in transitional and precarious situations upon coming out—the numbers are likely to be higher. But even if there were fewer trans individuals and families, we would still owe them the same social safety nets that we claim for others. And such family units are more than likely also sitting together at a kitchen table of some kind and worrying about bills. Counselling and healthcare costs related to their transition are often a huge financial burden for trans teens and adults, especially with recent and massive cuts to gender affirming care everywhere. As with cis families and individuals, trans people are feeling the brunt of job cuts and rising costs, and they experience homelessness at much higher rates than the rest of the population. In Kansas, lawmakers are seeking to “mass-invalidate the driver’s licenses of every trans person in the state,” according to Assigned Media. Consider what it would mean for anyone to be denied the right to drive and what the far-ranging effects of that would be on trans individuals: a loss of freedom of mobility, especially in states where public transportation is not widely funded, a lack of access to income-earning opportunities, the knowledge that one is simply less than human in the eyes of the law, and so much more. How is this anything but a bread and butter issue?1This segment on driver’s licenses added on February 8, 2025.
Trans families and individuals do not exist in vacuums: they are also affected by crime, by addiction or other drug issues, and by immigration. Like cis people of all ages, they may suffer violence, or be violent themselves, or be immigrants, or need rehabilitation programs that work. Politicians like Slotkin and Emanuel, two of the coldest liberals out there, only imagine their voters as people adversely affected by crime done unto them, or as people whose jobs have been “taken away” by immigrants: appallingly, they never seem to think of immigrants, drug users, and people committing crime as among those they want to serve. Their complete lack of compassion for anyone who does not fit the Ozzie and Harriet stereotype tells us everything we need to know about how they imagine the world we live in. Over and over, they tell the media and anyone who will listen that “we” have to compromise on “cultural issues.” What they really mean to say is, “We need to dump women, trans people, non-white people, and, oh, those immigrants have got to go.”
Whom do they even stand for? Whom do they serve? What is the world they imagine?
David Nelson, the elder of the two Nelson boys on Ozzie and Harriet would go on to marry June Blair in 1961 and have two sons with her before they divorced in 1975. (The show, an early form of reality television, was based on their real-life family), His second marriage to Yvone O’Connor Huston brought him three children, John, Eric, and Teri from her first marriage: he adopted all of them. One of the most popular family shows of the television era was The Brady Bunch, which began a mere three years after Ozzie and Harriet ended in 1966, and it featured a blended family of eight. While both shows were more stereotypically wholesome by today’s standards, audiences watching them were always aware that families, whether they sat around kitchen tables or habitually broke them in bursts of domestic violence, included individuals who changed and evolved with the times, and who always discovered new desires and ways of finding their places in the world. Politicians like Emanuel and Slotkin need to stop evoking the “kitchen table,”a relic of an unchanging and static time and, instead, think expansively about the vast array of people they serve and represent.
See also:
Who’s Left?: A Taxonomy of Sorts
You Cannot Separate Identity from Class and Economics
Compromise or Surrender?: Leave No One Behind
On Class, Identity, and the Working Class
Image: “Freedom from Want,” Norman Rockwell, 1941
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