Democrat Refuses to Attend Women's Event Because of Transgender Moderator

A Democratic congressional candidate from Rhode Island is refusing to participate in his own party's candidate forum due to the moderator being transgender.

Republican-turned-Democrat Allen Waters is vying for a 1st Congressional District seat, which includes all of Bristol and Newport counties and most of the city of Providence. He said today that he will not participate in the July 24 forum hosted by the Rhode Island Democratic Women's Caucus due to Reverend Donnie Anderson overseeing the event.

Republicans and Democrats vary widely when it comes to transgender rights, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll of 1,089 U.S. adults conducted in May. Approximately 82 percent of Republicans said efforts in the U.S. to promote the rights of transgender people are "going too far"—a sentiment also shared by the majority of political independents. About 47 percent of Democrats said the promotion of rights is "not going far enough."

"I do not recognize Reverend Donnie Anderson, a biological male, as a woman in the Democratic Party," Waters wrote to the Women's Caucus, according to WLNE-TV in Rhode Island.

He added that as a father of "two beloved, Black teenage daughters," he doesn't want biological men to "compete with them as women in traditional biological female spaces."

Anderson, 75, is a biological male who first questioned her gender at age 9 in 1956 during a conversation with her mother. The conversation didn't go well, she told Newsweek via phone, and she did not officially come out until six decades later at the age of 69.

Aside from being the chair of the caucus, she has spent a large portion of her life as a minister—including presiding over a congregation at Pilgrim United Church of Christ in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She said part of the reason it took her so long to come out was due to the possibility of not being able to be a pastor anymore, not to mention what it would say to others like her who want to live and work in different professions.

"So, when I see someone like Mr. Waters make the kind of comments he did, and say what he said, he denied us being transgender as a legitimate form of humanity," Anderson said, referring to his statement as "sheer ignorance." "He's one of these people who don't have any clue what it's like for us to be who we are...For six decades, I lived in a self-imposed closet."

She also questioned why Waters, who previously ran as a Republican against U.S. Senator Jack Reed in 2020 and U.S. Representative David Cicilline in 2022, is now running as a Democrat. Waters' words are not only damaging to her, she added, but injurious to trans and nonbinary youth who are working through their own issues and mental health-related situations.

But on his Twitter page, where he describes himself as a "Kennedy Democrat" with an #AmericaFirst agenda, Waters doubled down on his stance by posting a picture of himself with his two daughters with an accompanied statement.

"I am standing up for my daughters, and I stand up for your daughters and every grown biological female in Rhode Island who wants to be stood up for," he wrote. "Biological males do not belong in your sports and not in your safe spaces. The only real women are you. Peace and love."

In a previous tweet, he referred to the LGBTQ community as "a political invention that has grown far greater than the sum of its somewhat disparate parts." The tweet referenced an image and quote by Malcolm X, reading, "A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything."

A Gallup poll released Tuesday shows that more Americans now than in 2021 (69 percent compared to 62 percent) say transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender.

Fewer respondents also endorsed transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity, 26 percent now compared to 34 percent in 2021. Among Democrats, there was an 8-point percentage drop—55 percent to 47 percent—between 2021 and 2023 on the issue of whether transgender athletes should be able to play on teams that match their identities.

"There are many things in life we don't understand," Anderson said. "But just because we don't understand it, we don't have to reject it. That's what I'd like to tell people like Mr. Waters."

Newsweek reached out via email and phone to Waters.