WASHINGTON — Efforts by House Democrats to extend federal civil rights protections to transgender individuals encountered determined opposition from Republicans who claimed the move would endanger women. The Republican argument sometimes verged on the outlandish, as when one congressman mused about President Trump becoming a woman.
“Transgender Rights Are Under Siege in Trump’s America,” read a headline late last year in the left-leaning Nation magazine, echoing a popular conviction among progressives. “Is it your position,” Buck asked Contreras, “that an Orthodox Jewish doctor whose grandparent was killed in the Holocaust be required to work with a Nazi patient?”
The core of the Republican argument at the hearing was that any fluidity in gender identity is a choice. That choice, they argued, would largely be exercised men attempting to masquerade as women. H.R. 5 “automatically privileges the rights of biological men over biological women,” as Rep. Collins put it, describing the bill as nothing more than “identity politics with no basis in science.”