Human and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson caused a stir at a meeting in San Francisco this week with comments that some interpreted as transphobic.
HUD officials were outraged when Carson mentioned how “shelter operators and women’s groups had told him that homeless women would be traumatized if ‘big, hairy men’ walk into shelters identifying as women,” the Washington Post reported, citing several staffers. He also reportedly complained that society no longer knew the difference between men and women, staffers said.
Carson sparks controversy
Carson, a former neurosurgeon who is known for his conservative views, was visiting San Francisco’s HUD office during a tour of the state to assess California’s homelessness crisis.
The HUD staffers told the Post that many people in the meeting of 50 were upset, and at least one woman walked out of the room, after his “big, hairy men” remark.
A senior HUD official denied that Carson used derogatory language towards transgender people. “The Secretary does not use derogatory language to refer to transgendered individuals. Any reporting to the contrary is false,” the official said.
The official said that Carson was talking about men who pretend to be women to gain access to battered women’s shelters, and was not singling out transgender individuals. The comments came during a “stream of consciousness” speech that Carson prefaced by saying that “transgender people should get the same rights as everyone else, but they don’t get to change things for everybody else.”
Those in the audience became even more disturbed when Carson began to reminisce about the days when, as one staffer described it, there were “just women and just men.”
A woman stood up and challenged Carson when he made the “demoralizing and mortifying” claim that gender definitions have been the same for thousands of years. A staffer told the Post:
It was pretty demoralizing and mortifying for many of us who work here and are about serving everybody. 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.
One staffer was offended by Caron’s insinuation that transgender women are men, “and they should not be housed in single-sex shelters — like we shouldn’t force people to accept transgender people in this context because it makes other people uncomfortable.”
Democrats, LGBT activists denounce Carson
Former HUD secretary and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro criticized Carson over the comments, saying, “19 Black trans women have been killed this year because comments like Ben Carson’s normalize violence against them. As HUD Secretary, I protected trans people, I didn’t denigrate them.” For context, Castro famously brought up the pressing topic of men who identify as women needing abortions during the Democratic debates.
Reacting to the Post’s report, Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) called on Carson to resign, claiming that by “allowing shelters to discriminate against transgender Americans, the Secretary is putting lives in danger.” The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT activist group, also slammed Carson, saying he has “spent his career in politics expressing disgust toward the existence of transgender people.”
Carson has attracted controversy in the past on account of his traditional views on gender. During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Carson described transgender individuals as “abnormal” and said that transgender people should not serve in the military. The HUD secretary has also come under fire for a May proposal that would allow HUD-funded shelters to turn people away on religious grounds, and that would require transgender people to use the sleeping quarters and bathrooms that correspond with their sex.
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