GOP Defends Women’s Rights as Democrats Vote for Transgender Ideology

Protesters blow whistles during a transgender march in downtown Zagreb on March 30, 2019.
DENIS LOVROVIC/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

All but seven House Democrats voted Friday for a bill which ends legal and civic rights for women by allowing men who say they are transgender to freely use women’s legal rights, sports leagues, institutions, and private spaces.

The radical policy pushed by Democrats ensured that only Republicans in the House debate defended the rights of women and girls to have female-only civic institutions, including sports clubs, private bathing, and shelters.

Democrats applauded themselves for voting to free individuals’ from civil society and from biology and repeatedly denied the GOP arguments that the legislation would endanger religious freedom, children’s health, parents’ authority, women’s rights, and female sports. Seven Democrats dodged the vote, while 228 Democrats voted to change the legal definition of women.

The legislation, dubbed H.R. 5 or The Equality Act, is unlikely to get through the GOP-led Senate. But it marks the Democratic Party’s almost unanimous support for the revolutionary claim that every American must accept that each person’s legal sex will be determined by the individual’s current choice of “gender identity.”

The Democrats added the transgender ideology to a bill which extends current anti-discrimination law to gays and lesbians.

The few GOP legislators who spoke during the debate were largely silent about the extension of rights for gays and lesbians. The handful of GOP legislators who spoke mostly focused their criticism on the legislation’s attempt to override portions of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act and on the gender ideology’s impact on women and women’s sports.

The GOP leadership stayed out of view. GOP Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, for example, did not speak against the legislation — even though it would make it legally risky for parents or doctors to question a child’s claim to have an opposite-sex “gender identity” or deny an unhappy teenager’s demand for risky sex-related medical treatments.

Medical experts point to growing evidence that sex-related medical treatments are very hazardous to teenagers, including teenagers who would likely be gay or lesbian.

In contrast, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer emotionally backed the extraordinary “gender identity” legislation that blurs the evolved legal and civic distinctions between women and men, boys and girls.

The GOP leadership’s absence suggests it will not provide campaign funding when GOP legislators who oppose the ideology are hit with millions of dollars in last-minute attack ads by the small number of pro-transgender billionaires who are pushing the “gender identity” ideology. At least one of those billionaires has threatened to stop donations to the GOP if the leadership protects the use of biology to determine the sex of a person.

Eight Republicans voted for the gender ideology. They included Oregon Rep. Greg Walden, Indiana’s Susan Brooks, Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzgerald, Texas’s Will Hurd, as well as John Katko, Tom Reed, and Elise Stefanik from New York.

However, the eight-member GOP vote for the transgender claims counts as a partial success for a series of conservative organizations amid passivity from GOP leaders and GOP donors, and amid hostility from progressives, gay advocacy groups, the established media, and the well-funded transgender advocacy groups. Without the conservative groups, many additional GOP legislators would have gone along with the establishment pressure.

The GOP legislators who led the opposition included California’s Rep. Tom McClintock, Missouri’s Rep. Vicky Hartzler, Arizona’s Rep. Debbie Lesko, and North Carolina’s Rep. Virginia Foxx.

Hartzler, a former track coach, said:

This bill legalizes discrimination, government-imposed, top-down discrimination against those with time-honored views of marriage and gender. … [it will] dismantle female athletics … men are taking home the gold in women’s sports.

Lesko said the bill:

It would allow anyone, at any time, to declare that he or she is a member of the oppo sex without any medical or psychological diagnosis … It would erase women’s and girls’ rights by requiring facilities, such as schools, churches, dormitories, domestic violence shelters, homeless shelters, to allow biological males who identify as women, in women’s bathrooms, women’s and girls’ shelters, women’s and girls’ showers, and in women’s locker rooms. This will indeed violate women’s’ privacy and can ultimately violate their safety … [it] will eliminate women’s and girls’ sports … will also require, require, doctors to provide sex change surgeries and sex change hormones to adolescents without parental consent and without a medical or psychological diagnosis. This could permanently sterilize young girls … Congress should only pass laws that protect women, not threaten, silence or abandon them.

McClintock said that bill is intended to prevent children from getting good medical advice against sex-altering surgery and is intended to ensure that girls cannot exclude males from their sports. “This is the brave new world that House Democrats propose under the name of equality.” He said:

This bill harms people in so many ways – destroying safe spaces for women, undermining women-owned business, intimidating the free exercise of conscience. But let me concentrate on only one aspect — the destructive impact it has on women’s’ sports. Wherever these laws are imposed, biological males have begun to dominate women’s competition. Listen to 16-year-old Celina Soul of Connecticut: “Eight of us lined up at the starting line, but when six of us were only 3.4 into the race, two girls were already across the finish line. What just happened? Two boys identifying as girls happened. Fair is no longer the norm. The chance to advance, the chance to win has been all over for us. I missed the chance to compete in the NE championship this past season because of this … this policy will take away our medals, record, scholarships, and dreams.”

Rep. Doug Collins, the top-ranking GOP member on the House Judiciary Committee said:

Allowing men to compete against women in sports. … is demoralizing because it makes [women’s] talent irrelevant. …

Never before in American history has a political party tried so dramatically to rewrite the federal civil rights laws to include an undefined, self-referential ideological term called “gender identity” in the U.S. code, applicable to literally any entity that receives federal assistance, including elementary schools, colleges, and healthcare centers.

Foxx warned the legislators, saying: “This a classic something of passing something now and figuring out what it means later. if the devil is in the details, we are in for a lot of devilish surprises.”

Established media outlets ignored the purpose and likely impact of the transgender ideology.

“The House passed a bill Friday, 236-173, extending federal anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ Americans,” Politico announced. “The House on Friday for the first time approved legislation banning anti-LGBT discrimination in a 236-173 vote,” said TheHill.com.

The Washington Post spotlighted Democratic Rep. Katie Hill denying that men are using claims of being transgender to enter women’ sports. “This is fearmongering about transwomen playing in sports … I can tell you no trans person is trying to game the system to participate in sports,” she said in response to an amendment from Florida Republican Rep. Greg Steube.

The Post‘s video did not include comments from GOP representatives or any of the many video clips of men winning women’s sports competitions.

Background Facts and Figures on Transgender Ideology:

In general, the transgender ideology says a person’s sex is determined by their “gender identity,” not their biology. The ideology also insists that men and women are more or less identical, and it objects to the public’s view of the two sexes as simultaneously different, complementary, and equal. The transgender advocates want to impose their ideology on Americans by establishing “transgender rights” laws, which would require the Department of Justice to penalize individuals and groups who insist that women and girls are different — and have different priorities — than men and boys.

Transgender advocates claim that two million Americans say they are transgender to a greater or lesser extent. But very few people who describe themselves as transgender undergo transition surgery of the genitals. Only about 4,118 Americans surgically altered their bodies in hospitals from 2000 to 2014 to appear like members of the opposite sex, according to a pro-transgender medical study. A Pentagon report commissioned by former Defense Secretary James Mattis said that “rates for genital surgery are exceedingly low- 2% of transgender men and 10% of transgender women.”

The transgender movement is diverse, so its different factions have competing goals and priorities. It includes sexual liberationists, progressives, feminists who wish to blur distinctions between the two sexes, and people who glamorize the distinctions between the two sexes. It includes high-profile children, people who are trying to live as members of the opposite sex, troubled teenage girls trying to flee womanhood, and people trying to “de-transition” back to their sex. It also includes men who demand sex from lesbians, masculine autogynephiles who say they are entitled to women’s rights, parents eager to support transgender claims, wealthy donors, politicians, political professionals, revenue-seeking drug companies, and medical service providers.

Polls show the transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents. In 2017, former President Barack Obama told NPR that his promotion of the transgender ideology made it easier for Donald Trump to win the presidency.

Multiple polls show that most Americans wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex, even as they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that people’s legal sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by biology. A U.K. survey shows a similar mix of sympathy for people who say they are transgender alongside lopsided opposition to the ideology.

Yet the gender ideology is rapidly gaining power, aided by huge donations from wealthy individuals and medical companies. In Ohio, for example, in February, a judge forced parents of a teenage girl to give up custody so she can begin a lifetime of drug treatments and surgery that will allow her to appear as a male.

The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of “gender identity” has already attacked and cracked many of the popular social rules that help Americans manage the cooperation and competition among and between complementary, different, and equal men and women.

These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, children’s safety, practices to help teenagers, health outcomes, women’s  ideals of beauty, culture and civil society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, military culture, and children’s sexual privacy.

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