“This sounded like a slur to me.”
Secretary Ben Carson has been making vile, unprompted, transphobic remarks to Housing and Urban Development employees, some of whom were “shell-shocked” by the brain surgeon’s bigotry. Agency officials also say Carson repeatedly mocks transgender people.
Carson, who frequently presents himself as a deeply Christian man of faith, called transgender women “big, hairy men,” and claimed they are trying to access women’s homeless shelters to cause occupants harm.
“While visiting HUD’s San Francisco office this week, Carson also lamented that society no longer seemed to know the difference between men and women, two of the agency staffers said,” according to an extensive report in Thursday night’s Washington Post. “Carson’s remarks visibly shocked and upset many of the roughly 50 HUD staffers who attended Tuesday’s meeting, and prompted at least one woman to walk out in protest, the staffers said.”
Carson, during the San Francisco meeting, addressed HUD employees in “a rambling hour-long speech about HUD initiatives that they described as ‘stream of consciousness.'”
During that speech Carson said “transgender people should get the same rights as everyone else, but they don’t get to change things for everybody else.” Those remarks echo ones he has made before.
He also told San Francisco HUD employees women’s shelters should turn away transgender women. One staffer told The Post, “this sounded like a slur to me.”
Carson’s talk became even more disturbing, two of the staffers said, when he started waxing nostalgic about the past when, in the words of one staffer, there were “just women and just men.” The HUD staffers said he sounded incredulous when he mentioned that people no longer know the difference between genders.
“His tone was kind of like ‘how crazy is that?’” another staffer said.
“For him to come to San Francisco and say this, it was unbelievable. People were just shell-shocked,” one staffer added.
One HUD official described Secretary Carson’s comments about transgender people as “dismissive and joking,” and called it “disrespectful of the people we are trying to serve.”
The Post’s lengthy report includes actions Carson has taken against transgender people during his tenure at HUD, and transphobic comments he has made in the past as well.
Read the entire article here.