
Out actress Mara Wilson, known for her lead role in the 1996 film Matilda, called out Donald Trump’s claim that he’s helping girls by banning transgender girls from participating in school sports.
“I know pointing out hypocrisy doesn’t matter anymore, but if there’s one person I wouldn’t want to be the judge of who goes into locker rooms, it would be the man who openly boasted about walking into dressing rooms of underage girls,” Wilson wrote.
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“What, exactly, is to be gained by using your platform to be cruel and exclusionary to” trans people?
She was referring to Trump’s 2005 statements on radio personality Howard Stern’s show bragging about how he would go backstage at the Miss USA pageant when he owned it to look at the contestants as they changed.
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“I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else,” he said. “And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore I’m inspecting it.”
“You’re like a doctor,” Stern responded.
“Is everyone OK?” Trump said. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
His words were corroborated by Tasha Dixon, Miss Arizona 2001, who told CBS 2 Los Angeles that Trump would often come “waltzing in” while contestants were changing into bathing suits.
“To have the owner come waltzing in, when we’re naked, or half-naked, in a very physically vulnerable position and then to have the pressure of the people that worked for him telling us to go fawn all over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention,” she said, adding that she believes that he wanted to own the pageant in the first place so that he could spy on women as they changed.
“I’m telling you Donald Trump owned the pageant for the reasons to utilize his power to get around beautiful women. Who do you complain to? He owns the pageant. There’s no one to complain to. Everyone there works for him,” Dixon added.
Four girls who participated in the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant said that Trump walked in on them while they were changing. They were minors at the time
“I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here,'” Miriah Billado said.
But this past week, Trump acted as if he is a champion of women’s and girls’ privacy as he signed an executive order to ban trans women and girls from school sports, directing the Department of Justice to prosecute schools that allow trans girls to participate in sports teams.
“It is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy,” the order states. “It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
Conservatives have been using the language of feminism as they roll back transgender rights, even as they remain uneasy with the idea that women have rights at all. One of the first executive orders that Trump signed last month was called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism,” which legally erased the existence of transgender people and did nothing to advance women’s rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has been one of Congress’ most outspoken opponents of transgender equality — going so far as to shout anti-transgender slurs at committee hearings — but she has faced backlash from others on the right who agree with her opposition to trans equality but don’t support women’s rights.
“Nancy Mace was literally a beneficiary of a DEI program. It’s a ridiculous and tone deaf thing to brag about in this moment,” conservative pundit Matt Walsh said, referring to how Mace was the first woman to ever graduate from The Citadel, a military school that banned women until a federal court forced it to accept women in 1995.
“We rightly lament the death of female-only spaces. But male-only spaces died long before, thanks in part to the efforts of Nancy Mace,” he continued.
“Feminism set the stage for transgenderism,” he wrote. “The feminists were the first to deny the fundamental and inherent differences between the sexes and the value of sex segregation in many aspects of society. Feminists are largely to blame for the very problem that some of them now campaign against.”
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