Joe Biden believes it is natural and immutable that some eight year-old children want to transition to living as the opposite sex.
The transgender issue has, in less than a decade, exploded from the furthest fringes of the American consciousness to become yet another litmus test for membership in polite liberal society.
People who, perhaps eight years ago, hadn’t a clue that they were being called "cisgender" for identifying as the gender of their birth now take it as an article of faith that all people have a "gender identity" that may or may not bear any relation to their biological sex, or even to the concept of men and women at all.
They unquestioningly accept that people’s "gender identities" are inborn and unalterable and must be unequivocally accepted and affirmed without question, and that "healthcare" for many people’s "gender dysphoria" includes radically invasive surgeries that can include the removal and reconstruction of genitals.
Americans, of all political persuasions, are a compassionate people.
Activists have constructed a massively exaggerated narrative about an "epidemic of violence" against transgender people, but it bears little relation to reality.
Those indentifying themselves as transgenderr are killed at a rate only about one-third of the U.S. population as a whole, and instances of transgender people actually being harmed because of their gender identity are significantly lower than that.
Americans do not hate transgender people. They by and large want to accommodate people’s desires for how they wish to live, even when they are unfamiliar with them.
But, children are different.
Despite that widespread compassion, there is no context in which being a-okay with eight year-old boys "transitioning" — wearing girls clothes, demanding that schools and classmates treat them as a girl, undergoing hormone therapy that prevents a normal puberty, and ultimately undergoing surgery that will render the child sterile and mutilated — is anything other than an extreme position.
It is, in fact, an unimaginably extreme position, one that remains controversial even among LGBT activists — and one that would have been inconceivable even when Joe Biden was vice president.
And yet, it is the position that Joe Biden has chosen, presumably under the influence of a younger generation of progressive activists.
At his Philadelphia town hall, a mother of "two daughters" — the youngest of whom is eight years old and "transgender" — asked Joe Biden a question on transgender policy.
ABC introduced the mother as "a physical therapist from State College, PA," neglecting to mention that she is married to a Democratic county committeeman who ran for the state legislature last cycle.
Biden not only saw nothing wrong with an eight year-old boy transitioning, he openly mocked the idea that an eight year-old might be anything other than 100 percent earnest, justified, and biologically compelled in expressing a desire to live as a girl.
"The idea that an eight year-old child . . . decides ‘you know I decided I want to be transgender, that’s what I think I’d like to be,'" Biden said dismissively.
This type of transgender triumphalism — extended even to third-graders — is no longer mere campaign season posturing. Biden was equally clear about what must be done.
He would “simply change the law.” There must be "zero discrimination" over transgender eight year-olds — which means, in practice, "zero tolerance" for anyone raising the slightest objection to an eight year-old boy being raised as a girl because that’s how he "identifies."
The Democratic nominee for president, running as a moderate, has staked out such an extreme position on child gender transitions, it would have been unimaginable the last time he ran for office.
Noticing this tectonic shift in the Democratic Party is not "hateful," it’s due diligence.
You’re not alone in noticing.
Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas, a 2008 presidential candidate, and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. An ordained Southern Baptist minister, Gov. Huckabee was host of the number-one rated weekend television show Huckabee on the Fox News Channel from 2008-2015, as well as host, from 2009-2015, of The Huckabee Report, which aired three times daily on nearly 600 radio stations across the nation. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the popular weekly talk show Huckabee, which airs on TBN. Read Mike Huckabee's Reorts — More Here.