An anti-LGBTQ hate group is attacking Joe Biden for supporting transgender people’s rights.
“Joe Biden is wrong to encourage gender transitions for eight-year-old children,” said Peter Sprigg of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council.
Related: Joe Biden makes a pledge to trans people: “I believe that Trans Lives Matter”
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Sprigg was reacting to comments Biden made at an ABC News town hall event this past Thursday, where Mieke Haeck, the mother of an eight-year-old transgender girl, asked Biden what he would do to reverse the Trump administration’s onslaught of anti-transgender policy. She specifically cited the transgender military ban and the Trump administration’s rollbacks of the Obama era protections for transgender people in schools, homeless shelters, and other areas.
“I will flat out change the law,” Biden said, explaining that he’ll “eliminate those executive orders.”
“There should be zero discrimination,” he continued, saying that Haeck’s transgender daughter should have all the same rights as her cisgender daughter.
Asked by a mother of a transgender child about what he will do to protect LGBTQ rights, former VP Biden says: "I will flat out just change the law." #BidenTownHall pic.twitter.com/0YCjM5Og4I
— Washington Blade (@WashBlade) October 16, 2020
Christian conservatives have been outraged over Biden’s response.
“No, no, no. If you have a child with gender conflicted feelings, you aren’t helping them by encouraging them to embrace body-denying propaganda,” tweeted Kenwood Baptist Church Associate Pastor Denny Burke. “Their body isn’t lying to them about maleness/femaleness. Don’t lie and tell them that it is.”
Over the weekend, Biden wrote a statement where he discussed the “unacceptable” number of Black and brown transgender women of color who have been murdered this year.
“These deaths don’t exist within a vacuum,” he wrote. “Dehumanizing government actions and rhetoric as well as a failure to address risk factors like domestic and intimate partner violence, underemployment and unemployment and poverty, housing insecurity and health disparities, put this community at risk.”
