Lesbian activist icon disinvited from Gay Pride parade for supporting restroom privacy
A gay pride parade has
rescinded its invitation for a nationally known lesbian activist to be its
grand marshal, because she supports privacy in women's restrooms, showers, and
intimate facilities – a rift that further highlights the brewing conflict
between biological women and the transgender political agenda.
Miriam Ben-Shalom served in
the Israeli armed forces before returning to the United States and joining the
U.S. Army. However, she was discharged in 1976 after two years of service when
she publicly announced that she is a lesbian. She lost a lengthy court battle
against the Army in 1990.
She founded Gay, Lesbian
and Bisexual Veterans of America (GLBVA) and chained herself to the White House
fence on more than one occasion to protest the armed services' ban on open
homosexuals serving in the military.
When President Obama signed
the repeal of “Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Ben-Shalom - who was widely hailed
as a hero of the LBGT cause - was on hand to witness the event.
But the sexual revolution
moved on, and transgender issues have eclipsed homosexual and traditional
feminist concerns as the cause célèbre of
the Left.
While Ben-Shalom reportedly
did not write anything about the brewing national controversy over biological
men using facilities intended for women, biological males who identify as
women reported that she reposted items indicating that she supported separate
facilities based on biology.
“It was brought to our
attention that your Facebook page contains a number of posts asserting that
transwomen are a danger to young girls in public bathrooms and locker rooms,”
the Milwaukee Pride Parade Board of Directors wrote to her in April. “We cannot
have a Grand Marshal who has publically and repeatedly denigrated transwomen.”
She responded, addressing
her letter "To you bunch of Moral reprobates – so cowardly you can’t even
post a name.”
She affirmed that she does,
in fact, believe that “women born of women have the right to safe spaces
of their own.”
“I see that Milwaukee Pride
cares more about men than it does about women’s safety,” she said.
She concluded by saying,
“You are no better than the Army.”
Since being disassociated
from the pride parade, she has linked to the story of Maya Dillard Smith, the
African-American who quit as
leader of Georgia's ACLU chapterover its
transgender policy, commenting,
“More sanity kicked out from the world.”
Like Maya Dillard Smith,
Miriam Ben-Shalom is far from a conservative. She considers pro-life laws
part of the “war on women" (in her words). She calls herself a penis
exclusionary radical feminist (PERF) who believes "gender roles ought
to be abolished," because they are based on "binary stereotypes which
are artificial and not biological."
Yet hostility has
erupted as feminist, and sometimes lesbian, goals clash with those of the newly
ascendant transgender political movement. Transgender activists pressured
Cardiff University to cancel a speech by Germaine
Greer, a
'60s radical feminist leader, after she denounced the notion of transgenderism
as a form of patriarchal misogyny. Greer lambasted Glamour magazine's decision to name Bruce
Jenner its “Woman of the Year,” questioning the notion “that a man who goes to
these lengths to become a woman will be a better woman than someone who is just
born a woman.”
The Milwaukee gay
pride parade is scheduled for June 12.
