Donald Trump appoints anti-transgender activist Bethany Kozma to ’empower women’
The Trump administration has appointed an anti-transgender activist to empower women – despite her constant efforts to deny their rights.
Last year, Bethany Kozma started a campaign to overturn President Barack Obama’s guidance allowing trans students to use the bathroom of their choice.
Trump overturned that guidance earlier this year.
And Kozma has now been added to the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
USAID supports programmes abroad which have the stated aim of supporting LGBTQ equality.
Kozma’s official title will be Senior Adviser for Women’s Empowerment, despite having worked for months to restrict and deny trans females the freedom to use whichever bathroom they want.
Kozma, who served as a White House staffer under President George W Bush, launched the United We Stand campaign in July last year to fight against trans rights.
Writing on The Daily Signal, a conservative news site started by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, she engaged in the kind of scaremongering used by anti-trans activists all over the US.
Kozma said: “Our message was that this radical agenda of subjective ‘gender fluidity’ and unrestricted shower and bathroom access actually endangers all.”
Using similar rhetoric to anti-LGBT politicians in North Carolina and Texas, Kozma warned that Obama’s decision meant “predators could abuse these new policies to hurt children”.
And she voiced the fallacy that “a boy claiming gender confusion must now be allowed in the same shower, bathroom, or locker room with my daughter under (President Obama’s) transgender policies.”
The Heritage Foundation has been embroiled in several legal battles opposing LGBT equality, and has claimed that anti-discrimination laws grant LGBT people “special privileges”.
Kozma’s United We Stand campaign was supported by groups like the Family Research Council (FRC) and Family Foundation Action (FFA), which both openly boast of their anti-LGBT stances.
The FRC writes on its site that “homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed.
“It is by definition unnatural, and as such is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects.”
And the FFA positions itself as virulently opposed to same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption and abortion.
Austin Ruse of the anti-LGBT Centre for Family and Human Rights told BuzzFeed News: “Bethany Kozma is a lovely, sweet woman who just happens to believe that girls with penises just ought not to be showering next to girls without penises.”
