Sue Lani Madsen: I-1552 puts in spotlight transgender agenda
It was the former drill sergeant on a February 2017 Heritage Foundation panel discussion who announced, “Biology isn’t bigotry, biology is the truth.”
In her opinion, the transgender agenda is not about bathrooms, but about male violence and patriarchal domination of women. She doesn’t care if you call her a bigot.
Miriam Ben-Shalom has unimpeachable progressive credentials. As a drill sergeant with the 84th Training Division of the U.S. Army Reserves, she went public as a lesbian in 1976, was discharged, and took her fight for reinstatement to the courts. Ben-Shalom was an early crusader for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights and named one of the 31 icons of LGBT History Month in 2015 by the Equality Forum. Then in 2016 she was disinvited to be Grand Marshal of the Milwaukee Pride Parade for not celebrating the transgender agenda. And now she is a co-founder of the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition.
The coalition brings together “radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives (who) are tabling our ideological differences to stand in solidarity against gender identity legislation, which we have come to recognize as the erasure of our own hard-won civil rights.”
Ben-Shalom’s partner in Hands Across the Aisle is Kaeley Triller Haver, communications director for Just Want Privacy and a force behind the drive to gather enough signatures by July 7 to get I-1552 on the Washington ballot.
I-1552 spells out how schools should accommodate students “who consistently assert to school officials that their gender identity is different from their birth sex or gender, and whose parent or legal guardian provides written, signed consent to school officials.” It lifts recent rules about who pees where in all other settings.
The rules issued in December 2015 by the governor’s appointed Human Rights Commission specifically prohibit the common sense option of suggesting to a man with a full beard and no sign of physical transition that he use a separate changing area instead of showering with girls at a pool. The girls’ needs are ignored. As a childhood sexual abuse survivor, Haver understands the consequences when girls are not taught to set boundaries for privacy.
I-1552 has been characterized by its opponents as authorizing “strangers to check a person’s sex at birth before allowing access to certain restrooms and locker rooms.” At a Thursday night presentation in Spokane, Joseph Backholm of the Family Policy Institute of Washington labeled it a straw man argument. “Of course no one is interested in that,” Backholm said. He expressed frustration with this common mischaracterization of the initiative. I-1552 leaves specific protections for students in place while allowing businesses and clubs the flexibility to respond logically to the expectations of their patrons and limitations of their buildings.
Backholm’s “Gender Revolution” presentation covered more than I-1552. He traced the transgender rights explosion to the June 26, 2015, Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. After years of pushing for same-sex marriage, advocacy groups on the left needed a new reason to exist.
But progressives are not uniformly behind the new LGBT agenda. Mary Lou Singleton, founding member of the radical Women’s Liberation Front and longtime advocate against oppressive gender stereotypes, also participated on the Heritage Foundation panel. Singleton has objected to the gender-identity movement telling her it is transphobic to call her clients women and girls.
The backlash for speaking out has been vicious. As a home-birth midwife, she does not announce a sex at birth, pointing out it’s obvious. Singleton has faced calls to pull her professional license. Her crime? Refusing to honor the preferred pronoun of a serial child rapist.
Singleton wants “sex stereotypes (to be) abolished rather than codified into law as male and female.” She emphasized the resistance to the transgender agenda must be based on reason and science. “We are a dimorphic species,” said Singleton, who sees transitioning children with powerful hormone therapies as a human rights atrocity. “We’re sterilizing 11-year-olds because they want to shop in the wrong aisle at Toys R Us? This is insanity.”
Radical feminists and conservative Christian women agree. One can question gender roles without ignoring material reality and scientific certainty. The Bible says we are created male and female. Biology confirms it.