Amanda Simpson is believed to be the first openly transgender presidential appointee, after being named senior technical adviser in the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, where she will monitor the exports of U.S. weapons technology.
But she fears that the Right will ignore her thirty years of experience and degrees in physics, engineering, and business and focus instead on her gender:
But what gnaws at her, she says, is the fear of being labeled a token who was hired because of her sexual identity rather than on her merits.
"Being the first sucks," she told ABC News.com. "I'd rather not be the first but someone has to be first, or among the first. I think I'm experienced and very well qualified to deal with anything that might show up because I've broken barriers at lots of other places and I always win people over with who I am and what I can do."
...
"[There will be] questions like: Is this a token? Are you here to do a job or just to fill a quota or appease other people? In that regard it makes it a bit more difficult," she said. "I'm sure I will have to do and intend to do a far superior job than any other person. But I'm sure I will always be second guessed."
And of course that is exactly what is happening:
"Simpson's nomination was forwarded through to President Obama by a gay activist group, making it appear that this appointment of a male-to-female 'transgender' activist to a high level Commerce Department position to be payback to his far-left base for their political support," Monica Schleicher, spokeswoman for Christian group Focus on the Family, said in statement.
"Efforts to promote 'transgenderism' in public policy deconstruct one of the most fundamental concepts known to mankind. It renders gender, the most basic organization of social systems, completely meaningless. In doing so, activists like Simpson are asking the rest of society to radically reorder the ways in which the culture makes reasonable and rational accommodation for the two genders," she said.
And predictably Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera are likewise outraged:
"Is there going to be a transgender quota now in the Obama administration?" asked Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth. "How far does this politics of gay and transgender activism go? Clearly this is an administration that is pandering to the gay lobby."
According to most estimates, "transgender" individuals account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of the population. Yet, LaBarbera said, they have convinced the Obama administration to affirm their position that gender is fluid and changeable.
"We should consider what transgender activism is about," he said," which is essentially recognizing civil rights based on gender confusion."
Matt Barber, associate dean at Liberty University, said the appointment "boggles the mind."
"This isn't like appointing an African-American in order to try to provide diversity and right some kind of discriminatory wrong," he said. "This is about political correctness.
"President Obama, before he was inaugurated, told the world that he had signed off on every single demand of the homosexual-activist lobby."
LaBarbera said it's just another way to normalize homosexuality and transgenderism.
"It's always the incremental change that keeps moving forward and keeps getting more radical," he said. "It's hard for the American people to keep up."
You know, I can at least understand the "logic" behind the right-wing opposition to appointees like Kevin Jennings or Chai Feldblum since they were placed in positions at the Department of Education and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission respectively where they could theoretically have an impact on policy in a manner that the Religious Right would oppose.
But Simpson is at the Commerce Department monitoring the export of U.S. weapons technology ... and apparently transgender people shouldn't be getting jobs in the federal workplace. The Right's opposition to her is nothing more than flat-out bigotry.
