Transgender activists spent $60 per vote in Virginia to defeat conservative Delegate Bob Marshall.
Danica Roem, a man living as a woman, got 10,800 votes in Manassas Park City and Prince William County after spending more than $600,000 in direct donations — mostly from transgender political groups — and getting plenty of support from local media. Thirteen-term Marshall’s campaign was largely ignored by business donors, such as the local Chamber of Commerce. The lack of funding made it difficult for Marshall to highlight Roem’s radical agenda, which includes pushing the transgender ideology in kindergartens.
“This is what happens when the radical transgender lobby pours more than $600,000 into a small state race and conservative donors largely sit the race out,” said Terry Schilling, the executive director of the American Principles Project. He continued:
Democrats cruise to victory and claim a mandate on an issue they were too afraid to outwardly campaign on. Delegate Marshall ran an incredible race and did the best he could, but ultimately, with the news media cheering hard for Danica Roem and the transgender lobby purchasing a small state race for the absurd price of $60 per vote, defeat was inevitable.
Conservatives will continue to lose ground to the radical transgender lobby until they learn that the only way to stop the bleeding is to engage in politics. As Frank Cannon and Maggie Gallagher wrote today at First Things, culture is downstream of politics. When you win elections, you send a powerful signal that drives change in the culture. The transgender lobby, following the lead of the gay rights movement, knows this, which is why they spent so much money on a seemingly inconsequential state race nobody cared about.
The real story here is a story of political malpractice as the conservative movement failed to defend one of its best allies in Bob Marshall. When will conservatives wake up and fight the obvious fights?
Marshall was targeted partly because he opposed the transgender ideology, and called for legislation that would allow women to exclude men who say they are women from women’s public bathrooms and showers.
Advocates for the transgender ideology celebrated Roem’s win, which marks the first time person who claims to have switched sex has won a statehouse election in the United States.
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.
Polls show the transgender ideology is unpopular, especially when imposed on children. In 2017, Obama admitted twice that his promotion of the ideology helped Donald Trump 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.
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.