An LGBT rights bill needs to die — to help women.



That was the message Republicans brought to a rowdy congressional hearing on Tuesday, when conservative lawmakers and think tanks denounced the nondiscrimination bill with increasingly uniform charges of sexism.

The bill’s protections for transgender people, they contend, advance a “radical gender ideology” that will erase and victimize women.

“Women, lesbians, and families become the collateral damage of identity politics,” said Republican Doug Collins of Georgia, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Collins argued the Democrat-sponsored bill “codifies stereotypes and sexism,” and, “If the Democrats are determined to move this legislation forward anyway, we must recognize that it prioritizes the rights of biological men over the rights of biological women.”

The bill, the Equality Act or HR 5, would expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the landmark law banning discrimination based on race, sex, and other characteristics — to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

But because it bans discrimination based on a person’s gender identity, Collins and other Republicans contended Tuesday it creates an arbitrary distinction that lets men pretend to be women, blurring the line between sexes, and defines gender by mannerisms and attire. Or, as Collins put it, the bill “nullifies women and girls as coherent categories worthy of civil rights protection.”

The Christian right has criticized transgender rights for years, and falsely claimed nondiscrimination laws let male predators prowl women’s bathrooms, but the Equality Act hearing on Tuesday and its accompanying chorus on Conservative Twitter revealed an emerging discipline in their counter-messaging.