Obama's Appointee is Not a "Cross-dresser"

By Hanna Rosin

We try to be patient with the right’s enduring queasiness about homosexuality, but then every once in a while they drop one so obnoxious it makes you want to assign their kid the gay teacher on purpose. The Family Research Council’s latest crusade—Stop Obama’s Cross-Dresser Protection Bill—launched this morning. Of course there is no such thing as the “Cross-Dresser Protection Bill.” What the Christian right group is referring to is the following:

On New Year's Eve, when most Americans were waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square, the Obama Administration dropped another bombshell in its agenda to radicalize America by appointing its first openly "transgender" person to a high federal post. "Transgender" is an umbrella term for anyone who "expresses" a "gender identity" contrary to their biological sex at birth-in other words, men who claim to be (and dress as) women, and vice versa.

Note the spy-boudoir scene setting, the military metaphor, the extraneous Dr. Evil-style parentheses. Now, either it was a bombshell or a stealth maneuver; it can’t be both. The truth is that the administration was very low-key about the appointment of Amanda Simpson as a senior technical advisor to the Commerce Department, which is hardly a visible post. She has worked for many years in aerospace and defense, and convinced Raytheon, where she worked, to adopt gender identity into its workplace policies. She also ran for a House seat in Arizona. If Raytheon, not a bastion of pro-gay radical thinking, can handle it, so can the federal government.

Now for the true yokel insult. Amanda Simpson is not across-dresser. She had a sex-change operation. If you think for a moment about what that entails, you should bow before that intense level of commitment, not mock it.