Democrats Sink Women's History Museum Bill Because It Wouldn't Include Transgenders
A once-bipartisan proposal to establish the location of a women’s history museum failed when lawmakers could not define a woman.
According to ABC News, House Democrats rejected the bill on Thursday after Republicans amended its language to ensure that the new Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum recognized only biological women — in other words, women.
Had it passed, the bill would have located the new museum on the National Mall.
Instead, the amended language led to a partisan battle in which Democrats, joined by some Republicans, defeated the bill, 216-204.
“The Museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women in the United States,” the amended version read in part.
Also in the amended version, the Republicans added that the “Museum may not identify, present, describe, or otherwise depict any biological male as a female.”
Democrats objected.
“It was a simple bill. You kind of ruined it with your trans obsession and your culture wars,” Democratic Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez of New Mexico, chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, said earlier this week.
However, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican from New York, the bill’s chief sponsor, called Democrats’ opposition a “disgrace.”
“Perhaps the party that is opposing a women’s history museum on the National Mall because they want to have transgender exhibits — maybe they are the ones who are trans obsessed,” Malliotakis said.
The New York lawmaker also called it “ridiculous that we are arguing over this.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson echoed those sentiments.
“Why are they backing out? Simply because the bill reinforces an objective truth that a museum for women, get ready, should showcase only women,” Johnson said.
The defeated bill would have merely established the museum’s location on the National Mall. Congress approved the creation of the museum in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Nonetheless, a handful of Republicans joined Democrats in opposition because those GOP dissidents objected to the museum on principle.
“We say we need to unite this country, but then we isolate every group,” Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, said.
Meanwhile, Democrats also objected to the amended bill, they said, because it gave Trump too much authority.
“They amended the bill to give Trump and his allies unregulated power over what content and which women can be included in the museum, and the museum’s location,” Fernandez and other members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus said in a statement, per Politico. “A museum about women, fought for and supported by women, should not be controlled by one man.”
According to ABC News, however, Republicans countered that the bill merely gave Trump the ability to relocate the museum should the National Mall location prove problematic.
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