Rachel Levine, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, is still a man regardless of any claim to be a “transgender woman,” says Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
“Dr. Levine, who is a biological male and — regardless of what he says — he’s a he,” Ellis said in an August 11 interview with Breitbart News’s political editor Matt Boyle, on Sirius XM Patriot Channel.
“That’s just that the scientific biological facts that men and women are born male and female, and you can’t change that no matter what your feelings suggest, how you mutilate your body, or how you seek to identify,” Ellis said, adding that she was speaking about her own views, not the campaign’s views.
Ellis is in the news because Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tim Wolf, lashed out at her on August 10 for dismissing Levine’s claim to female status.
Ellis had criticized Levine’s claim to healthcare expertise by highlighting Levine’s decision to appear in public as a woman.
In her radio interview, Ellis pulled no punches.
“No matter what Dr. Levine wants to identify as, his handling of the coronavirus [and] all of the failures between him and Gov. Wolf, they can be attacked and in their own right,” she said. Their policies have “been a failure just like Gov. Cuomo is handling the nursing homes in New York, just like you know the failures of other Democrat-led states.”
Levine’s claim to transgender status is also open to criticism, Ellis said:
The second issue is that you have to have a person who demands to [call] those of us — who want to speak truth and simply acknowledge biological facts — to call us bigots and say that this is hate speech just because they don’t prefer it because the truth is somehow offensive to them. Well, we are still in America, and we still have the God-given right to not only have our own sincerely held belief but also we can speak fact in truth.
It’s not just my belief that Dr. Levine is a biological male. Empirical [science] supports that … I think it’s ridiculous that there’s so much hatred and vitriol, and I [am expected] to back down simply for speaking truth.
To be called a bigot for simply acknowledging scientific fact is both tragic and hilarious. The truth of biology shows that human beings are created immutably male and female. Yet in our post-truth society, the progressive leftists not only demand that we affirm patently false facts, but also demand we not offend people who insist on speaking their lies. Otherwise, we are called insensitive bigots and required to apologize.
I won’t apologize; our constitution still protects our fundamental God-given right to speak and affirm truth, and I’ll continue to stand firm speaking and affirming truth.
This should not be so controversial in 2020. But this is the leftist radical agenda that wants to silence anyone they disagree with — and they will not tolerate anything that does not advance their narrative and doesn’t celebrate their own false lies.
I had no idea that [reponse] would go as viral as it did, but I am willing to stand up and stand firm, simply for speaking truth. Frankly, that shouldn’t be so controversial, but I’m glad to see that others have rallied behind that and are supporting that. I hope that I encourage others to simply stand firm in truth.
I hope that Dr. Levine will recognize that truth is truth and will eventually, you know, come to the realization that the only thing that brings anyone joy and meaning and understanding is to understand the truth of the Word of God and embrace Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to recognize that God created him male.
That’s for a purpose, that’s for design, and that’s part of the biology that God has given to him. That truth is immutable. It doesn’t change.
I, personally, just in my own personal capacity and as a Christian myself, we’ll be praying for Dr. Levine to recognize that truth and to hopefully find meaning in the Lord Jesus Christ as his own personal Savior. The only thing that will reconcile all of these issues is for us to come back to the foundation of the truth of the world that God presented to us because he is our Creator. We are human beings made in His image, and as such, we all have inherent dignity and worth being made in His image.
So far, President Donald Trump has not raised the transgender issue in the 2020 election, despite much polling evidence that many people see it as a problem.
Notably, most transgender groups sought to minimize coverage of the exchange, partly because many Democrat strategists realize that open advocacy for transgenderism alienates suburban voters. One of the few groups to respond was the Pennsylvania branch of the pro-transgender Human Rights Campaign, and the response shifted the focus from Ellis towards the November election:
The transgender ideology has a harmful impact on society, Ellis said:
We’re seeing all kinds of challenges with the transgender movement because, you know, you’re seeing that biological men are … harming women.
By entering women’s sports and dominating — because male physiology and characteristics, of course, can dominate women in sports — but then also … invading the privacy of bathrooms, invading the privacy of battered women’s shelters — you know, women who have have been harmed and are victims of violence and domestic abuse. … There was the case out of Alaska where a battered woman shelter [was] sued to try to have a transgender, quote unquote, woman — but a biological man — be placed overnight with biological women. You can see the harm of this particular ideology play out in the reality of life. This is something that is very harmful.
You’ll also see the transgender movement affecting children … When you know parents are providing hormone therapy and even transgender surgeries that are botching and harming irreparably children’s bodies. This is something that has a practical harm and effect on our lives and on others.
This isn’t just something about women’s rights and having this dialogue and saying it’s offensive for a man to identify as a woman — I mean that’s true — but the harm goes even so much further than that when you’re talking about invading the sanctity of these little children and their bodies.
Non-religious women also oppose the transgender ideology, Ellis said:
JK Rowling and others are standing up for the irreparable harm. Yet, even people like her are being villainized and attacked by these radical leftists. I applaud her for standing firm on just the truth of biology and the harm that the transgender movement is trying to assault onto America and worldwide.
Transgender Background:
In general, the transgender ideology says a person’s legal and civic recognition as a man or a woman is determined by their “gender identity,” not by their biology.
The ideology also insists that men and women are more or less interchangeable, and it objects to the public’s view of the two sexes as simultaneously different, complementary, and equal.
Polls show that transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents. In 2017, former President Barack Obama told NPR that his promotion of the transgender ideology made it easier for Donald Trump to win the presidency.
Multiple polls show that most Americans reasonably wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex, even as they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that people’s legal sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by biology. A U.K. survey shows a similar mix of sympathy for people who say they are transgender alongside lopsided opposition to the ideology.
The transgender movement is diverse, so its different factions have competing goals and priorities. It includes sexual liberationists, progressives, feminists who wish to blur distinctions between the two sexes, and people who glamorize the differences between the two sexes. It includes high-profile children, people who are trying to live as members of the opposite sex, parents trying to transform their feminine boys or masculine girls, troubled teenage girls trying to flee womanhood, and people trying to “detransition” back to their sex.
It also includes men who demand sex from lesbians, masculine autogynephiles who say they are entitled to women’s rights, alpha males who insist they are the natural leaders of women, parents eager to support their children’s’ transgender claims, wealthy donors, politicians, political professionals, revenue-seeking drug companies, surgeons, and medical service providers.
Transgender advocates claim that two million Americans say they are transgender to a greater or lesser extent. But very few people who describe themselves as transgender undergo cosmetic surgery of the genitals. Only about 4,118 Americans surgically altered their bodies in hospitals from 2000 to 2014 to appear like members of the opposite sex, according to a pro-transgender medical study. A Pentagon report commissioned by former Defense Secretary James Mattis said that “rates for genital surgery are exceedingly low- 2% of transgender men and 10% of transgender women.”