Transgender advocates nationwide are pouring huge amounts of money into northern Virginia to defeat a veteran state legislator, GOP Rep Bob Marshall, who openly opposes the transgender ideology.
Democrats, transgender donors, gay political groups and the establishment media have united behind Danica Roem, who says he is transgender. He has changed his legal sex from male to female via Virginia’s paperwork-only sex-change law. He appears in public as a woman, complete with make-up.
Roem “is a guy who thinks he’s a girl who wears a dress,” said Marshall told Breitbart News. But in his Manassas district, “a lot of people don’t know … they think [the candidate] is an odd-looking woman. “
By openly opposing the Democrats’ transgender ideology, “I am the Number One target of the Democrats” in the 2017 elections, Marshall said. “If they beat me, this will put [conservative] Representatives in the closet for years,” he said, because many business-backed GOP legislators are already reluctant to fight against the cultural priorities pushed by wealthy progressive groups, including transgender donors and their business allies.
The state’s GOP leaders are ignoring the transgender issue because of the state’s business community, said Terry Schilling, a political strategist at the American Principles Project. “Democrats, they know Republicans are [unwilling to fight] on this .. so they will go far out there because they think they will suffer no consequences,” he said.
Marshall is trying to raising funds to keep pace with Roem’s heavy spending. “I would like to raise half of what he gets … [because] 27 percent of Democratic supporters back away when they find out about this guy’s background.”
Throughout the campaign, Roem has simultaneously claimed that his campaign has nothing to do with his claim to be a woman, but has also insisted that sexual minorities deserve to be represented in the state legislature. “My [sexual] identity should not be a big deal… [but] there are millions of transgender people in this country, so we all deserve representation in government,” Roem told Virginia radio-host Larry O’Connor in September.
The transgender ideology says the government must compel Americans to treat a man as a woman (or vice versa) if he says he has an opposite-sex “gender identity,” even if the man has not taken any female hormones or undergone genital cosmetic surgery.
Transgender activists want the federal government to wipe out the different, overlapping and complementary civic expectations for men and women in a two-sex society. These expectations include sexual privacy in single-sex showers, fair play in male or female sports leagues, safety in women’s shelters and a variety of single-sex status markers, including different male and female ideals for appearance and accomplishment. The activists’ goal is a “gender-free” society where the government suppresses civic or social distinctions between men and women, girls and boys, no matter how popular or beneficial.
Radio host O’Connor challenged Roem about the political implications of his support for the transgender ideology, and Roem responded by saying (at 17.40) that kindergarten children should be taught in an ”age-appropriate” fashion that children can change their sex.
Is it age-appropriate? What is the way that it is being taught? Do you have real people who are coming into class to talk about it … Are you talking about someone’s anatomy, or are you talking about ‘Hi, this is someone who is five years old, this person is transgender,’ and then we just explain ‘This is what that means,’ and that’s it. We’re not going to be talking about people’s anatomy and their private parts and any of that stuff in front of children.
A small but rising number of children do declare themselves to be members of the opposite sex. If their parents agree, they can take sterilizing drugs before puberty, change their appearance and then use hormones and genital surgery to live as members of the opposite sex.
But if the kids avoid drugs before puberty, nearly all embrace their own sex, say medical experts. Also, a growing number of youths “de-transition” out of transgenderism.
Marshall is a 13-term conservative in the state’s GOP-majority legislature. His accomplishments include the sponsorship of the state’s constitutional amendment preserving marriage as a two-sex, family-focused institution. That success cut from the state’s constitution when the U.S. Supreme Court redefined marriage in June 2015 and forced states to treat single-sex relationships as identical to the marriage of complementary male-and-female couples.
Since the court’s 2015 decision, gay-advocacy groups have allied with wealthy transgender donors to promote the transgender ideology. In 2016, for example, then President Barack Obama tried to establish the ideology in federally funded schools and to exclude parents from shaping their children’s’ decisions. That effort has been reversed by President Donald Trump, who has directed that the departments of justice and defense reject the transgender ideology.
Polls show the transgender ideology is unpopular, especially when imposed on children. In 2017, Obama admitted twice that his promotion of the ideology helped defeat Hillary Clinton.
However, most Americans also have sympathy for transsexuals and will politely ignore their quiet use of single-sex bathrooms. Transgender activists oppose the Americans’ live-and-let-live culture, and want the federal government or the courts to validate and enforce the claims of people who say they have changed sex.
Marshall’s willingness to call out Roem’s sexual agenda has made him a national target for well-funded, influential and media-magnified allies of transgender activists, gay advocacy groups, and progressive journalists. For example, a June article in the Washington Post quoted the head of a progressive donor group:
“What we have seen ushered in is a vast degree of tolerance for bigotry, for hatefulness, frankly, since the November elections,” Moodie-Mills said. “And, this is an opportunity for us in the LGBTQ community to push back and say, “No, we’re going to stand up against bad actors; we’re going to make sure that we get rid of people who do our community harm.’ And, so Danica is really our first swing of the bat.”
Samantha Allen, a supportive reporter at the Daily Beast, admitted the core political problem in Roem’s campaign —the candidate is running a stealthy pro-transgender campaign while presenting as a conventional candidate:
Roem wishes her gender identity weren’t relevant to politics. But she knows it is—especially when she’s running against a delegate who introduced extreme anti-transgender bathroom legislation in Virginia earlier this year which would have restricted restroom use based on “original birth certificate.”
“Representation absolutely matters,” Roem says. “How wonderful a world it would be if identity politics didn’t have to exist at all! But the fact of the matter is that when you have non-transgender, white, straight, male Republicans crafting laws about gender identity that don’t include [transgender people], then you’re leaving out the segment of the population whom those laws will adversely affect in the first place.”
On October 29, the Washington Post posted an article endorsing the transgender ideology and backing Roem’s claim to be a woman, saying:
A new campaign mailer paid for by the Republican Party of Virginia repeatedly refers to Danica Roem, a transgender woman seeking election to the state House of Delegates, as a man and accuses her of making her identity part of the race …
Marshall, who has declined to debate Roem, has pushed unsuccessfully for a state “bathroom bill” that would dictate which restrooms transgender people would use in public buildings.
The state legislature, including the GOP leadership, has largely ignored Marshall’s sexual-privacy bill, which would allow women to exclude men who say they are women from women’s bathrooms and showers at public facilities, such as swimming pools.
The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their two-sex civic society around the idea of “gender” has already attacked and cracked popular social practices.
For example, the gender claims have shifted rules or practices about different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, practices to help teenagers, women’s expectations of beauty, culture and civic society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, and children’s sexual privacy.
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