Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson defended his remarks about excluding male-to-female transgender people from battered women’s shelters.
The Washington Post had reported on Sept. 19 that unnamed HUD staff members had complained about Carson mentioning concerns about “big, hairy men” trying to use women’s bathrooms during an agency-wide meeting in San Francisco. The staff members “interpreted the remarks as an attack on transgender women,” according to the Post.
“It was pretty demoralizing and mortifying for many of us who work here and are about serving everybody,” an unnamed HUD staffer said, according to the outlet. “A lot of us have questioned the department’s rationale on its proposal to strip away the equal access rule. For him to come to San Francisco and say this, it was unbelievable. People were just shell-shocked.”
Carson told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that he was actually citing others’ complaints.
“I quoted a group that came to me, and they were very upset, and they said, ‘You know, a big hairy man came in here, and he says he’s a woman, and that upsets us because many of us are trying to escape that,'” Carson told Carlson. “But the political correctness says ‘You have to say what we want you to say,’ and that will destroy freedom of speech.”
Carson went on to explain that the local women’s shelters should judge themselves whether they would admit a transgendered person to their strictly sex-segregated centers.
“What we’ve decided to do, first of all, we’ve upheld the 2012 equal access law,” Carson said. “We have no intention of changing that, but in terms of that broad definition of gender being whatever you say it is, we said we’re going to leave that to the local jurisdictions.”
“It is hardly surprising that Ben Carson would blatantly dehumanize trans people in his official capacity,” Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David said late Thursday, according to Politico.
Despite all the commotion, Carson, undaunted, explained his motivation on Friday in an email to the HUD staff, obtained by Politico.
Carson said, “Our society is in danger when we pick one issue (such as gender identity) and say it does not matter how it impacts others because this one issue should override every other common-sense consideration,” Carson wrote, and added, “We must always be vigilant not to override the common sense of our fellow Americans.”
He then stated, “My belief system tells me that all people are valuable, and we should recognize and try to cultivate dignity.”
