On Saturday, former Vice President Joe Biden again gave the lie to the idea that he is a moderate who can bring Republicans and Democrats together to beat Donald Trump. The former vice president championed the transgender movement, which insists that biological men who claim to be women should have access to women’s bathrooms, women’s sports, women’s shelters, and more. Liberal feminists have joined conservatives in pushing back on this madness.
Biden did not just celebrate this movement — he called it “the civil rights issue of our time.”
“Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights,” the former vice president tweeted.
Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.
— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020
Sure, this tweet may merely represent a shameless attempt to pander to transgender activists. Even so, Biden’s strong language is noteworthy. While he supports a broad range of far-left reforms to American law — a public option for health insurance, mandated taxpayer funding for abortion, paid family leave, stronger environmental regulations, and many other issues — Biden said transgender activism outweighs them all. It is “the civil rights issue of our time.”
While prominent liberals and Democrats have championed transgender ideology, many liberals have spoken out against it. Radical feminist Kara Dansky, a spokeswoman for Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), has condemned it as “a men’s rights movement,” because men can invade women’s spaces by claiming to identify as women. Lesbian feminist Julia Beck had found herself booted from the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ commission for “using male pronouns to talk about a convicted male rapist who identifies as transgender and prefers female pronouns.”
“It doesn’t matter that he sexually assaulted two women in a women’s prison after being transferred there on account of his ‘gender identity.’ Oh no, it is far more criminal for me to call a male rapist ‘he’ than it is for him to rape,” Beck argued.
Across the pond, a feminist movement called “Get the L Out” marched at a London pride parade behind a banner reading, “Transactivism Erases Lesbians.” Specifically, they argued that transgender activism is fundamentally incompatible with lesbianism. In fact, they accused transgender activism of propping up conversion therapy and rape culture.
Transgender activism “erases” lesbians by promoting their “social transition,” encouraging women who are less effeminate and attracted to other women to identify as straight men, “thus favouring the pretence of heterosexuality over lesbianism … a form of conversion therapy.” Transgender activism also pushes harmful experimental drugs on these lesbians, the group alleged. (Charlotte Evans, a woman who once identified as a man, explained why transgender identity seems particularly seductive to feminist women who believe the Patriarchy still dominates society.)
Miriam Ben-Shalom, a left-leaning Independent, has spoken out against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for adopting the transgender trend of identifying her pronouns. She condemned the CW show Supergirl when it endorsed transgender identity.
Ben-Shalom was the first lesbian to be reinstated to the Army after getting kicked out for her sexual orientation. She had been booted from the Army due to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy, which allowed homosexuals to serve in the military so long as they remained quiet about their sexuality. LGBT activists compared this to Trump’s policy allowing transgender people to serve in the military so long as they lived in accordance with their biological sex over their gender identity.
“As one who helped bring the end to the ban on LGB military service and DADT, I am offended that a mental aberration is being compared to being a sexual human being,” Ben-Shalom told PJ Media last year. She insisted that the decision not to endorse transgender identity in the military “isn’t like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell at all.” She would know. She argued that at least seven of the conditions that disqualify people for military service apply to transgender people.
Left-leaning feminists like Kara Dansky have stood side-by-side with pro-life and religious freedom advocates in opposition to the pro-transgender Equality Act.
“WoLF has been doing advocacy on the Hill to counter the narrative that the Equality Act is a civil rights issue,” Dansky told PJ Media. “We have discovered that women across the political spectrum share a lot of common ground when we talk about protecting the privacy, safety, and rights of women and girls.”
Transgender activists have repeatedly threatened and harassed the women who speak out in this way. The day before Biden’s tweet, Oxford University attached bodyguards to a female feminist history professor who received credible threats from students due to her opposition to transgender identity.
Even worse for Biden, there is a growing backlash against transgender activism on the state level. Eighteen states currently prohibit biological males from competing in women’s sports, and seven more state legislatures have introduced laws to protect the fairness of women’s sports. After the high-profile case of 7-year-old boy James Younger — whose mother said he was a girl and planned to carry out genital mutilation against him — states are considering laws to prevent doctors from giving out experimental “transgender” drugs that some endocrinologists warn actually give kids a disease.
This is the movement Biden claims is “the civil rights issue of our time?” Really?
Biden tweeted this the day after Donald Trump became the first president to address the March for Life in person. Abortion involves the intentional killing of an unborn human being, with unique DNA. Medical advances have enabled doctors to perform life-saving surgeries on babies inside the womb. Ultrasound technology has opened a door for mothers to see the lives of their unborn babies.
Abortion disproportionately kills black babies. Transgender activism disproportionately sterilizes people with autism. Both of these horrifying trends echo the eugenics movement.
Furthermore, many formerly transgender people have come forward, expressing their deep regret at having mutilated their own bodies. A 19-year-old man who underwent surgery to turn his male genitals into female genitals described the result as a “Frankenstein hack job.” Transgender star Jazz Jennings had dangerous complications in his own surgery, resulting in large scars across his legs.
This movement is “the civil rights issue of our time?” Does Joe Biden, beloved by the black community among Democrats, really want to go there? Black pastors have long spoken out against comparisons between the LGBT activist movement and the civil rights movement.
Now Biden is idolizing a movement that subverts women’s rights to privacy, pushes “conversion therapy” for lesbians, targets gender-critical women for harassment and violence, seeks to redefine language and erase biological understandings of sex, and victimizes children by pushing dangerous experimental treatments upon them.
And this is the Democrats’ “moderate” option.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
