Transgender Advocates Appropriate Identity of Black Slaves

Queen Jean leads a weekly protest in support of trans people in Washington Square Park on
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Transgender advocates have been taking the identity of women piece by piece — and now are trying to wrap their cause in the identity of black Americans who were slaves in the 1800s.

“We’re calling it kind of the ‘rainbow Underground Railroad,’” said Bob McCranie, a real estate broker based in Dallas, Texas, who is now offering to help transgender advocates flee from states — such as Texas — where legislators have adopted popular laws to protect kids from transgenderism.

“We’re trying to get people out quietly and get them to someplace where they feel safer,” McCranie told KFOR.com, appropriating the language used before the civil war to describe the networks that helped smuggle enslaved blacks to the northern states that barred slavery.

The pre-civil war Underground Railroad was run by “abolitionists activists who would have safe houses for people, particularly slaves fleeing the South … To compare gay people in Texas leaving the state to the Underground Railroad should be offensive even to people who are gay,” scoffed radio host Erick Erickson on June 16.

“Kudos to Mr. McCranie,” said Erickson. “The one guy who’s not fleeing the awful state of Texas is the realtor making a boatload of cash off the fear of these other people! … What a genius marketing scheme!”

“What we discovered was we got so much response from other states that we decided to expand and become ‘Flee Red States,’” McCranie told KFOR. “We’ve helped 27 groups of people so far get out.”

The KFOR.com article quoted one of McCranie’s clients, Paul Lewis, who is moving to Michigan, saying:

That’s not the Texas I grew up in. My Texas was you are proud to be from here. You helped your neighbor. You were loving and kind, and you’re turning into something else because my Texas doesn’t feel that way anymore. I feel more hate brewing in the state than I have my entire life, and your decisions are making it worse.

McCranie, however, is not the first activist to appropriate black history for a sex-related cause. In 2006, U.S. progressive created a pro-migration group, Rainbow Railroad:

Rainbow Railroad was founded in 2006 as a volunteer-run organization by a diverse group of LGBTQI+ activists and human rights defenders who wanted to do more to address the levels of violence LGBTQI+ people face worldwide. Our name harkens back to the Underground Railroad — a network of activists in the 19th century, who assisted Black folks escape enslavement in the American South.

The group is now working with Canada’s government to transfer people from Africa into Canada’s economy.

Polls show that a strong majority of black Americans oppose the transgender claim that a person’s legal sex is determined by their “gender identity,” not by their male-or-female body. For example, Pew Research reported in February 2023:

About two-thirds of Black adults (68%) say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth. A smaller share say the opposite: that someone can be a man or woman even if this differs from the sex they were assigned at birth (31%).

Black adults (68%) are slightly more likely than the general public (60%) to say that gender is determined by sex …

And about eight-in-ten Black adults who attend religious services at least once a week (84%) say gender is based on sex assignment at birth. This is higher than the shares among those who attend monthly or a few times a year (63%) or who seldom or never attend (57%).

Transgender activists have been wrapping their gender-trumps-sex demand in many identities, including lesbian, soldier, woman, cleric, and athlete.

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