On Friday morning, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, added the pronouns “she/her” to her Twitter bio. She was pandering to transgender activists, who insist that Americans should not assume one another’s gender identity. The pandering did not go unnoticed. Miriam Ben-Shalom, the first lesbian to be reinstated to the U.S. Army after getting kicked out for being lesbian, wrote an open letter to Warren urging her to “stop with the pronoun silliness.”

“With civility and no ill-will: Please. Stop with the pronoun silliness,” Ben-Shalom wrote. “We know you are a woman. Perhaps a million trans-humans will not elect you. But common sense women could.”

Ben-Shalom brought up real concerns that transgender activism is harming women across America.

“Instead of pandering to the trans lobby, may I respectfully request that you look at what women are losing in terms of sports, safety, medical services, parental rights, and basic human rights, such as the right to privacy, not to mention the horrors of medical experimentation on children by trans-supporting Big Pharma and Big Medicine,” she wrote.

“I am not a conservative woman; I am an independent who cares about what is happening in our country and I am a veteran. Please do not discount what I have written,” Ben-Shalom concluded.

Dear Dr. Warren: With civility and no ill-will: Please. Stop with the pronoun silliness. We know you are a woman. … Posted by Miriam Ben-Shalom on Friday, July 19, 2019

Feminists like Ben-Shalom have joined with conservatives in opposing transgender activism. As she noted, the push for transgender “inclusion” means allowing biological men who identify as women into women’s sports, women’s restrooms, and more. When it comes to the law, transgender activism means removing children from the custody of their parents disagree with a transgender identity.

Many instances of transgender “inclusion” are even more grotesque. A mother who identified as a male and had taken hormones to appear masculine arrived at a hospital with abdominal pains — she was in labor. Yet because the doctors saw she was marked as a man, they discounted the idea that she could be giving birth. She lost her baby. Worse, the doctors decided the fault lay with them — they should not have assumed that a man wouldn’t be pregnant!

Those who identify as transgender have later rejected that identity, but not until after hormones and disfiguring surgery. Many of these people are victims of abuse during childhood, but doctors prescribe potentially dangerous hormones and surgery for transgender identity, rather than giving them the counseling they need to accept their bodies.

Activists have also rushed to silence critics of the transgender movement, with feminist journalist Meghan Murphy permanently banned on Twitter. A Ph.D. psychologist and expert in gender dysphoria also found himself banned for expressing an opinion unpopular with transgender activists. Even the director of media for the Heritage Foundation, Greg Scott, was banned on Twitter for this issue.

Many 2020 Democrats have endorsed the pro-transgender Equality Act, despite a broad coalition of feminists, pro-life advocates, and religious freedom activists uniting against the legislation.

“If sex is construed to be gender identity, what that means is that nearly all sex-segregated spaces — colleges, sports, dormitories, and women’s rights in general — will utterly disappear. They will completely disappear,” Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) lawyer and spokeswoman Kara Dansky told PJ Media in January. “It means effectively that women and girls will no longer exist as a coherent category worthy of civil rights protection, and that is an absolute disaster.”

When President Trump reversed Obama’s policy on transgender identity in the military, many far-left groups compared Trump’s policy to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” the policy allowing homosexuals to serve so long as they kept their homosexuality secret. Ben-Shalom spoke out against comparison, saying that she, as a lesbian targeted by “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” found the comparison offensive.

Warren is not the only 2020 candidate to engage in transgender virtue signaling. Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro — notorious for making an absurd comment on transgender issues during the first Democratic debate — lists himself as “He/Him/Él,” including the Spanish word for “he” and “him.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also features pronouns on his Twitter bio, listing “He/him.”

These Democrats may think they are only alienating conservatives by endorsing transgender activism, but Kara Dansky and Miriam Ben-Shalom are not conservatives, and they’re not alone in pushing back against transgender activism.

Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.