Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson countered congressional scrutiny of his comments on transgender women by issuing a warning about political correctness.
“I think this whole concept of political correctness — you can say this, you can’t say that, you can’t repeat what someone said — is total foolishness, and it’s going to destroy our nation,” Carson said Tuesday at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on affordable housing.
Carson was responding to a question from Rep. Jennifer Wexton, a Democrat, who’d asked him about reports that he’d called transgender women “big hairy men” during a meeting with Housing and Urban Development staff last month.
Carson denied referring to transgender women that way and instead said he was relaying a story that he had heard from a women’s group in Alaska about the difficulty they were having with women’s shelters because sometimes men would claim to be women.
Wexton, who represents a Virginia district, responded to Carson’s denial by saying, “Very good. Thank you very much.”
