Ben Carson may have made some hairy comments about the transgender movement, but the Left is the party guilty of weaponizing transgender rhetoric, not the Housing and Urban Development secretary.

After the Washington Post ran out-of-context quotes from Carson last week, many prominent liberals immediately decried him as a bigot. Even though he clarified his comments a day later, that wasn’t enough for any of them. They had already decided to run with the winning “Trump administration official is transphobic” narrative.

According to the Post, Carson told staffers he was worried about “big, hairy men” infiltrating women’s shelters, in a comment that some of them interpreted as an expression of transphobia. That was all the context about the incident that the paper provided before going on to villainize Carson for lamenting “that society no longer seemed to know the difference between men and women.”

A slew of presidential candidates took shots at Carson. Sen. Elizabeth Warren called his comments "transphobic" and implied that he should resign: "If Secretary Carson is not willing to do his job and protect all Americans experiencing housing insecurity then he shouldn't have his job."

Sen. Kamala Harris said the comments were "harmful to the LGBTQ+ community and just downright cruel." Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro took the argument a step further, claiming that the comments could even lead to attacks against trans people: "19 Black trans women have been killed this year because comments like Ben Carson’s normalize violence against them."

But Carson’s comments, understood correctly, do no such thing. Carson made clear in a memo to staff the next day that he was not belittling transgender people and was describing an actual situation that had already occurred. In fact, his clarifying stance sounds moderate, and it should be every conservative’s position on the issue:



"During a recent meeting with local staff in San Francisco, I made reference to the fact that I had heard from many women’s groups about the difficulty they were having with women’s shelters because sometimes men would claim to be women, and that HUD’s policy required the shelter to accept — without question — the word of whoever came in, regardless of what their manifested physical characteristics appeared to be. This made many of the women feel unsafe, and one of the groups described a situation to me in which ‘big hairy men’ would come in and have to be accepted into the women’s shelter even though it made the women in the facility very uncomfortable. My point was that we have to permit policies that take into consideration the rights of everybody, including those women — many of which have suffered at the hands of male domestic abusers — who believe there are men who might hurt them.”



The prominent Democrats who called for his resignation seem silent on the clarification, yet the media brazenly characterized his follow-up comments as transphobic. According to the Post: "Another HUD staffer who did not previously speak with the Post said Carson’s email 'just made it worse' and 'put salt in the wound, because this description of transgender people is offensive.'"

Carson wasn't saying all transgender women are predators. To the contrary, he appears to be concerned about finding safe shelters for both biological women and transgender women, taking into account their individual needs while being concerned at how some people might try to game the system. There's nothing bigoted about that. In his statement, he further clarified:



“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. I think we have to look out for everyone, and we need to use our intellectual capabilities to find common good rather than attempting to always stir up controversy through identity politics.”



This is exactly right, but at the moment common sense is in short supply on this issue. Carson made the mistake of stepping on a progressive landmine. In May, HUD proposed a rule that would allow federally funded homeless shelters to make transgender women share bathrooms or sleeping quarters with men. Carson's aim, he said at the time, was to "make sure everybody is treated fairly." The proposal has marked Carson with a black spot, so those who recently condemned him aren't interested in understanding his meaning. They just want to vilify the Trump administration official who called for rolling back Obama-era policies.

The Left argues that by merely pointing out problems that arise among transgender women and biological women at homeless shelters, Republicans are being "transphobic" or spouting "harmful" rhetoric. They're basically demonizing anyone in the nation with an ounce of common sense. Their aim is just to shut down discourse by prioritizing identity politics over the demands of specific situations. That's a lot more harmful than anything Carson has said or done.