David Marcus: Calling Rep. Sarah McBride 'mister' isn't impolite, it's just reality - Fox News
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By  Fox News

Published March 12, 2025 2:24pm EDT

Chaos erupted in Congress on Tuesday, when a Republican "misgendered" a fellow House member. But maybe it was really just a case of a politician doing the unthinkable: telling the truth.


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Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, chair of the  Committee's Europe Subcommittee, referred to Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., as 'Mr. McBride,' sparking a heated exchange that brought the hearing to a crashing halt. Ranking Democrat Bill Keating, of Massachusetts, rode to McBride's rescue.

"Mr. Chairman, you are out of order!" Keating thundered. "Mr. Chairman, have you no decency?" he harumphed, channeling the well-worn phrase from the 1950s McCarthy hearings. "This is not decent."



Now, we all understand that if we meet a trans person at a party or a ballgame, we can work around the pronouns and not be a jerk about it. But a congressional hearing is not a private event, it is the official public speech of our government. It should reflect objective reality.

In other words, Self did exactly the right thing to do in that official situation so as not to publicly sanction a delusion.



From left: Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas; Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del.; and Rep. Bill Keating (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images | Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Over the past decade, since around the time orange became the new black, our society has struggled with how to show deference to those who wish to live as the gender they aren’t while pursuing public policies that protect women.

But that was always the wrong question. That kind of accommodation for the idea that human beings can transubstantiate their gender was always going to bind us in the knots we face today regarding , or women-only spaces such as prisons, shelters, and restrooms.

It is as if many Americans, including many conservatives, have been saying, "Okay, this is pretend, but we will go along with it as long as nobody gets hurt."

The problem is that the simple acceptance of the delusional position that everyone can choose their own gender hurts lots of people, not least of all children and young adults who are seduced by the almost godlike power of supposedly overcoming nature itself.

> "It is because of adults in the room who entertained the lie that I was born in the wrong body and needed to transition that I now suffer from irreversible damage to my body."                                     — Prisha Mosley

As it turns out, the following day in Calgary, I ran into a protest against the policy of putting men in women’s prisons, and we talked about how, 10 years ago, people were nervous about questioning the quasi-religious trans ideology even in private conversation. Today, reality can be proudly spoken, and should be.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued convincingly that language is not merely the vessel of our thoughts, it is the driver of our thoughts. Once we allow the words "man" and "woman" to mean something other than what biological reality dictates, that choice drives us to the madness and irreversible consequences we are seeing now.

Perhaps all of our efforts to accommodate the lie of transgenderism over the past decade have come from a true place of caring and kindness. But it doesn’t matter, it is hurting people badly, and it has to stop right now.



Will the process of restoring reality on this issue lead to awkward and even volatile moments and situations like we saw in Tuesday’s congressional meltdown? Absolutely. Will those who defend truth be called bigots? Without question.

But when we hear stories like that of Prisha Mosley, and so many others whose lives were forever altered by the insidious lie of transgenderism, we know that whatever slings and arrows come our way, acceptance of the lie makes us complicit.



David Marcus is a columnist living in West Virginia and the author of "."

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