Johnson’s Response To The Trans Bathroom Fracas Was Cowardly

House Speaker Mike Johnson failed to answer a very easy question lobbed at him Tuesday morning. He was asked whether Rep. Sarah McBride, an incoming freshman lawmaker from Delaware who identifies as transgender, is a man or a woman. McBride is a man who presents as a woman, so Johnson’s answer should have been easy: McBride is a man.

But he couldn’t do it. Instead, he smirked and deflected. “I’m not gonna get into this,” he said. “We treat all persons with dignity and respect. And we will. And I’m not going to engage in silly debates about this.”

Johnson did, however, acknowledge that “there’s a concern about the uses of restroom facilities and locker room and all that.” Oh is there?

The background here is that Rep. Nancy Mace, who understandably doesn’t want to share a bathroom or a locker room with McBride, or any other man, introduced a bill stipulating that on Capitol Hill women must use the women’s facilities and men must use the men’s.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Johnson to have simply said, “McBride is a man and he will have to use the men’s facilities here in Congress. Just because he dresses as a woman or thinks he’s a woman doesn’t make him one. Next question.”

Johnson seems to think it’s still 2012 and Republicans need to accept, or pretend to accept, the underlying premises of the woke left-wing worldview. He has apparently missed out on the vibe shift that just delivered a landslide victory to President-elect Donald Trump along with the Senate and House to Republicans.

He also seems unaware that the trans issue is a giant loser that most people are slowly backing away from and want nothing to do with. An overwhelming number of Americans now agree on transgender issues. According to one recent survey, 72 percent of Americans think it should be illegal to give children under age 18 puberty blockers and “gender reassignment” surgeries. Just 13 percent think boys should be allowed to compete in girls’ sports, and only 19 percent think transgender propaganda should be taught in public schools.

What’s more, Trump won and Republicans have a majority in large part because of ads trashing Democrats’ transgender nonsense. After such a resounding victory, Johnson is now too scared to come out and state plainly that men are not allowed in women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill?

Perhaps sensing he was being mercilessly mocked for being a weak coward, Johnson quickly convened an impromptu press conference later on Tuesday to “clarify” and “walk forward” his earlier remarks. “For anybody who doesn’t know my well-established record on this issue, let me be unequivocally clear. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman,” Johnson said. He then made noises about treating everyone with dignity.

He prefaced these remarks by explaining that he had “rejected the premise” of the earlier question about McBride, “because the answer is so obvious.” But he hadn’t reject the premise, he simply refused to answer because it made him uncomfortable. He also never answered the original question, which was whether McBride is a man or a woman. If he had really wanted to reject the premise and answer the question he would have said, “I reject the premise of the question. McBride is a man, no matter how he dresses or what he calls himself.”

But even after his attempt to be “unequivocally clear,” he still hadn’t answered the specific question about whether McBride is a man or a woman, or indicated what would happen to Mace’s bill.

This shouldn’t be hard, and it’s frankly amazing that a Republican House Speaker, flush from a massive electoral victory that will leave the executive and legislative branches of government in GOP hands come January, would fail so spectacularly on this very basic question. Every single Republican should support Mace’s measure to ban men from women’s spaces on Capitol Hill, and anyone who isn’t on board should be shamed, mocked, and thrown out of office. That’s what Johnson should have said, and without a second thought. But he didn’t because he’s a mealy-mouthed coward who’s afraid of being called mean things by the corporate press.

For her part, Mace isn’t backing down. Asked about it on Tuesday, Mace said, “If … being a feminist makes me an extremist, I’m totally here for it. … I’m not going to stand for a man, you know, someone with a penis, is in the women’s locker room — that’s not okay.”

And for her trouble, Mace immediately started getting death threats from trans activists, one of whom said he wanted to find her in the women’s bathroom and kill her by bashing her face into the floor.

The time for tolerating this insanity is over. Americans should refuse to go along with the delusion that men who dress up like women are anything other than disturbed men who need professional help. And we should demand that our elected leaders show more spine on this issue than Speaker Johnson was able to muster on Tuesday. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.