Ben Carson may have made some hairy comments about the transgender movement, but the Left is the party guilty of weaponizing transgender rhetoric, not the Housing and Urban Development secretary.
After the Washington Post ran out-of-context quotes from Carson last week, many prominent liberals immediately decried him as a bigot. Even though he clarified his comments a day later, that wasn’t enough for any of them. They had already decided to run with the winning “Trump administration official is transphobic” narrative.
According to the Post, Carson told staffers he was worried about “big, hairy men” infiltrating women’s shelters, in a comment that some of them interpreted as an expression of transphobia. That was all the context about the incident that the paper provided before going on to villainize Carson for lamenting “that society no longer seemed to know the difference between men and women.”
A slew of presidential candidates took shots at Carson. Sen. Elizabeth Warren called his comments “transphobic” and implied that he should resign: “If Secretary Carson is not willing to do his job and protect all Americans experiencing housing insecurity then he shouldn’t have his job.”
Sen. Kamala Harris said the comments were “harmful to the LGBTQ+ community and just downright cruel.” Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro took the argument a step further, claiming that the comments could even lead to attacks against trans people: “19 Black trans women have been killed this year because comments like Ben Carson’s normalize violence against them.”
But Carson’s comments, understood correctly, do no such thing. Carson made clear in a memo to staff the next day that he was not belittling transgender people and was describing an actual situation that had already occurred. In fact, his clarifying stance sounds moderate, and it should be every conservative’s position on the issue:
The prominent Democrats who called for his resignation seem silent on the clarification, yet the media brazenly characterized his follow-up comments as transphobic. According to the Post: “Another HUD staffer who did not previously speak with the Post said Carson’s email ‘just made it worse’ and ‘put salt in the wound, because this description of transgender people is offensive.'”
Carson wasn’t saying all transgender women are predators. To the contrary, he appears to be concerned about finding safe shelters for both biological women and transgender women, taking into account their individual needs while being concerned at how some people might try to game the system. There’s nothing bigoted about that. In his statement, he further clarified:
This is exactly right, but at the moment common sense is in short supply on this issue. Carson made the mistake of stepping on a progressive landmine. In May, HUD proposed a rule that would allow federally funded homeless shelters to make transgender women share bathrooms or sleeping quarters with men. Carson’s aim, he said at the time, was to “make sure everybody is treated fairly.” The proposal has marked Carson with a black spot, so those who recently condemned him aren’t interested in understanding his meaning. They just want to vilify the Trump administration official who called for rolling back Obama-era policies.
The Left argues that by merely pointing out problems that arise among transgender women and biological women at homeless shelters, Republicans are being “transphobic” or spouting “harmful” rhetoric. They’re basically demonizing anyone in the nation with an ounce of common sense. Their aim is just to shut down discourse by prioritizing identity politics over the demands of specific situations. That’s a lot more harmful than anything Carson has said or done.
