MILWAUKEE, June 9, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – A gay pride parade has rescinded its invitation for a nationally known lesbian activist to be its grand marshal, because she supports privacy in women's restrooms, showers, and intimate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 chapter over 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.