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(LifeSiteNews) – A moment from Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the impact of the Supreme Court’s June 24 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade has gone viral, with Senator Josh Hawley getting into an extraordinarily bizarre exchange with University of California-Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges on whether or not men can get pregnant. This exchange was illustrative of a number of things, including the difficulty the Democrats will have attempting to use the fall of Roe to motivate their base. But first, the exchange, which was so revealing it was worth transcribing in full.
Hawley asked Bridges to clarify what she meant the phrase “people with a capacity for pregnancy,” querying whether she meant “women” by that phrase. Bridges went on the offensive immediately.
This is a real exchange that just occurred in a United States Senate hearing where a Democrat abortion witness accuses @HawleyMO of causing violence because he said that only women can get pregnant. pic.twitter.com/eyu7v4mdCm
— American Principles 🇺🇸 (@approject) July 12, 2022
“Many cis women have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans man who are capable of pregnancy as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy,” she responded.
Hawley: “So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue?”
Bridges: “We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.”
Hawley: “So your view is that the core of this right then is about what?”
Bridges, eyes bulging: “I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens trans people up to violence.”
Hawley: “So you’re saying I’m opening people up to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?”
Bridges: “I want to note that one out of five transgender persons have attempted suicide…”
Hawley: “Because of my line of questioning? So we can’t talk about it?”
Bridges: “Because denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist is dangerous.”
Hawley: “I’m denying that trans people exist by asking you if you’re talking about women having pregnancies?”
Bridges: “Do you believe that men can get pregnant?”
Hawley: “No, I don’t think that men can get pregnant.”
Bridges: “Then you’re denying that trans people exist. Thank you.”
The exchange lasted a moment more, with Hawley asking if Bridges treated her students with this sort of hostility, and Bridges telling him that he should join them because “you might learn a lot.” But the key moment occurred at the end of the exchange. The Democrats are attempting to rally their base for the November midterms by telling Americans that the GOP is attacking women’s rights. But whenever their spokespeople get out in front of the cameras, they end up arguing about…whether or not men can get pregnant.
More politically astute operators would recognize that instead of berating the GOP over abortion, they are instead willingly getting sucked into an argument about a tenet of gender ideology that few people actually believe and even fewer people actually care about. And yet, the Democrats are so captured by the fringe of their party that many seemed to believe that Bridges had won the exchange rather than Hawley. How do they think the average American views a debate in which the Republican asks a Berkely professor about whether abortion is a woman’s issue, and the professor responds by using the fictitious concept of male pregnancy as her litmus test for whether or not the Republican is a good faith actor?
The reality is that the Democrats have strangled themselves in the ever-expanding web of intersectionality and can no longer get out even if they want to – much to the increasingly vocal frustration of long-time liberals such as Bill Maher. If the Democrats seek to pivot away from issues such as whether or not men can get pregnant, they will find themselves accused by the Human Rights Campaign and the AOC wing of the party of contributing to trans suicides by “denying their existence.” (As I’ve written before, this is ridiculous. Nobody is denying that people who identify as transgender exist. What we dispute is that one can actually change their sex, and that men can get pregnant – something virtually everyone agreed upon until 15 minutes ago.)
Progressives have decided to make every culture war issue a matter of life and death, and now the Democrats may have to die on the “men can get pregnant” hill.
A secondary issue here that needs reiterating is that this exchange is also another good example of how the trans movement operates. There is no discussion. There is no debate. There is only the demand that everyone accept their ideological premises or be accused of having blood on their hands. Anyone who denies any of the tenets of gender ideology publicly faces these accusations – I’ve been accused of violence simply for writing columns like this one. But with the fall of Roe and the realization that the extremists driving the Democrat clown car have no intention of slowing down, some of the saner liberals are realizing that this strategy cuts both ways. There is no room for dissent anymore. Join, or die.
