Civil rights advocates, including the Human Rights Campaign, are calling on former New York City Mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg to apologize for transphobic remarks he’s made in the past. In a video published by BuzzFeed News (since set to private on YouTube), recorded at a business development forum hosted in Manhattan last March, Bloomberg says, “If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people.” (Daily Kos did not view the full video before it was hidden; its authenticity has been verified by NBC News.)
One clip from the video has gone viral on Twitter.
According to NBC News, his campaign said that Bloomberg, who was not then running for president, was discussing how other people may see transgender people, not expressing his own views. “And so you can understand where somebody like Trump comes from. You can understand when you look at the Democratic Party, they are so far left that two years ago there was nobody on their side who would take these positions,” Bloomberg says.
For a Democratic candidate to use conservative rhetoric about transgender people in an attempt to appeal to what they assume are moderates’ values, however, can be seen as a deep betrayal not only by transgender people themselves, but also by every other marginalized group that is worried its rights will be tossed onto the chopping block next. “We expect all pro-equality candidates, including Mayor Bloomberg, to create policy solutions to end the epidemic of violence our community faces, not use the same talking points our opponents use to dehumanize transgender people and justify their own hateful beliefs,” HRC President Alphonso David said in a statement on Tuesday. “Words matter and Mayor Bloomberg should apologize for using language that demoralizes and dehumanizes members of our community.”
If this video controversy sounds familiar, it’s because this has happened before. In another video, this one recorded at Oxford University in England in 2016, Bloomberg is shown using the phrase “some man wearing a dress” in discussing supposed Midwestern attitudes toward bathroom access for transgender women. "They are not opposed to you having some rights, but there's a fundamental disconnect between us believing the rights of the individual come first and the general belief around the world, I think it's fair to say, that the rights of society comes first," Bloomberg said. "You want to know is somebody a good salesman, give them the job of going to the Midwest and picking a town and selling to that town the concept that some man wearing a dress should be in a locker room with their daughter.”
“I don’t know what progressive means,” Bloomberg said in the 2019 appearance. Maybe Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders will make what it means to be progressive clear to him at tonight’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas.
Bloomberg’s recently unveiled LGBTQ equality plan, including protections for the transgender community, can be found here.