Democrats have a penis problem. Specifically, their problem is that they think a woman can have one.
It is Democrat Party dogma that “trans women are women.” The results of implementing this doctrine have been predictable, from males dominating female athletes to female prisoners having to share cells with male rapists to girls losing their privacy in bathrooms.
Consider the case of one Richard Cox — a man with the most on-point name since Anthony Weiner. Cox is a registered child sex offender who likes exposing himself to women and girls, and he found a loophole that allowed him to get away with it: He claimed to be transgender and then went on a tour of female locker rooms throughout Northern Virginia.
As one mother put it, “My nine-year-old daughter and I walked into the Washington Liberty women’s locker room on September 9, 2024, and we’re stunned to see a naked biological man standing among little girls and moms and changing after swim class.”
He had reportedly been doing this for months — the local ABC news affiliate found more than 10 separate incidents in various locations in 2024 — and the staff at this particular pool said this had been going on since the summer. But because the Arlington school board has a policy of allowing people to use locker rooms based on self-declared “gender identity,” Cox was permitted to loiter in the ladies’ locker room.
Cox was eventually charged with various crimes in Arlington. But had he not already been a registered child sex offender (and therefore not allowed to hang around in school locker rooms at all) he might still be at it. He had previously been doing similar things in next-door Fairfax County but was repeatedly let off by the Soros-funded Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano, who is now taking heat even from some in his own party. Better late than never.
But as bad as a lax prosecutor like Descano is, he is not really the problem here. Rather, the problem is the Democrat dogma that a man who says he is a woman is — in some metaphysical sense that overrides observable biological reality — a woman. In practice this means that any man who is not already on the sex offender registry can, by simply declaring a transgender identity, go into women’s locker rooms and more at will.
And many women have been cowed into being OK with this. What stands out the most in the stories of Cox’s trips into women’s spaces is how many women went along with it. Yes, some complained, but many did not. The most disturbing part of this story is not that a dirty old man went into the girls’ locker room. Rather, it is that many mothers seem to have acquiesced to a sexual predator leering at, and exposing himself to, their daughters.
Why was the women’s locker room not in revolt as soon as Cox walked in and exposed himself? How on earth was he not promptly subjected to a rough citizen’s arrest by any and all of the men at the pool?
We know the answer. In deep-blue Northern Virginia, some parents will offer their daughters as sexual prey rather than be thought “transphobic.” Leaders, from the school board to the county prosecutor, care more for “trans rights” than for the safety of children under their care.
But it is all for a lie, and they know it. Almost no one actually believes a woman can have a penis, a man can get pregnant, or any of the other absurdities preached by transgender ideology. They pretend to believe because everyone around them is also pretending to believe. There are few true believers in the temple of transgenderism, but there are many nonbelievers who will happily play inquisitor to the first person who openly admits to any doubts.
But there is more than fearful conformity at work here. Guilt also plays a role. To publicly acknowledge that transgender ideology is a lie is, for those who have supported it, to admit to complicity with grave evils — and to being a fool.
Furthermore, there is the nagging fear that turning against the transgender revolution will also force a reckoning with the sexual revolution from which it arose. Who really wants to try to climb back to the top of the slippery slope?
Reestablishing a sound normative anthropology does not stop at keeping penises out of the women’s locker room. If we acknowledge the reality of male and female, we must also consider how the sexes should relate to each other and to the children their union is ordered toward begetting.
Democrats deserve all the criticism (and electoral pain) they are getting over their embrace of transgender ideology. But we need to be willing to look at how we got here, and that is not a simple partisan narrative. Rather, the madness of the transgender revolution is just one more evil arising from the disaster that is the sexual revolution. And confronting that calls us to the work of cultural, familial, and spiritual renewal, which is often difficult and requires repentance. But it must be done.
A good, and not too difficult, starting place would be parents, even in Northern Virginia, protecting their children and not putting up with any more creeps around little girls.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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