On Friday evening, 10 of the Democratic presidential candidates appeared in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at an event organized by various LGBTQ organizations to discuss the supposed “attacks” on LGBTQ rights by the Trump administration, and to answer questions on various related issues.
The topic of transgender rights has been a central component of the Democratic Party’s focus on intersectionality, often to the detriment of women’s rights as a whole. One short statement from Democratic front-runner Joe Biden at the LGBTQ presidential forum on Friday proved that the Left has lost complete sight of reality in their increasingly desperate attempt to pander to their radical base.
“...in prison the determination should be that your sexual identity is defined by what you say it is, not what in fact the prison says it is.”
In order to come close to accepting Joe Biden’s argument as valid, we must ignore multiple layers of logic, reason, and pragmatism. Even if we set aside the general debate surrounding transgenderism, and assume - for the sake of argument - that biological men can be women, and biological women can be men, Biden’s statement is preposterous when we recognize that he is calling for those who have committed violent crimes to be given privileges which will, inevitably, lead to an increased risk for their potential victims.
Prisons, by design, detain those who have broken the law. Some of these people have committed violent crimes, sometimes against women. With this in mind, it is obvious that this policy could easily be abused by men with malicious intent, thereby allowing rapists and murderers to voluntarily incarcerate themselves alongside their targets.
Given that there is no scientifically-supported method which can verify the sincerity of any claims of transgenderism, it is doubly absurd to require nothing more than dubious self-determination before placing potential predators amongst potential victims. The fact that Joe Biden cannot see that providing those who seek to harm women with the ability to continue to harm women based solely on a subjective and scientifically unsubstantiated gender status is either an indication of deep ignorance, or deep cynicism.
However, the fact is that Joe Biden’s ridiculous proposal is actually representative of the Left’s refusal to adhere to a logical hierarchy of “rights.” The Left frequently labels non-compliant speech as “violence” in an attempt to broaden the right to personal safety and override the right to freedom of speech. Similarly, when it comes to the debate surrounding transgenderism and transgender rights, the Left continually rank feelings over facts, and in this case, feelings over physical safety.
If Joe Biden and the Democrats enforce this absurd policy, they will actively place women in an increased state of physical danger, and they must be held responsible for the women who are abused, raped, or even murdered as a result.
We should step back and understand that the gender-segregated placement of prisoners under the protection of the state is not a matter of transgender rights, but of realism and pragmatism. While there may be transgender women for whom placement in a male prison would seem like an understandable nightmare, we must also acknowledge that there are men who will exploit this proposed system in order to continue abusing women. With this in mind, we must remain wary that the Left is willing to upend the hierarchy of “rights” on which our society is based in order to pander to a radical and vocal political minority, and are willing to sacrifice the physical safety of vulnerable persons in the process.