Why Ted Cruz Is Defending Transgender Bathroom Bills

During his appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was asked to respond to a video posted by Bruce Jenner in which he uses a women’s bathroom at a Donald Trump-owned hotel.

In the clip, Jenner, a transgender former Olympic gold medalist, claims to be using a public bathroom at Trump International Hotel. He repeats the claims of the Republican presidential front-runner that he would be able to use whichever bathroom he chooses.

At the end of the video, Jenner said, “Thank you, Donald. I really appreciate it. And, by the way, Ted, nobody got molested.” Tapper said he wanted to give Cruz the opportunity to respond to the video and claims of LGBT activists.

“I want to give you an opportunity to respond to people, to individuals like Caitlyn Jenner, transgender Americans who think your web video and comments on the campaign trail are making them all out to be child molesters,” Tapper said, using Jenner’s transgender name.

Cruz responded, by saying that in his view the issue isn’t about “right or left or Democrat or Republican,” but rather about common sense. He said it “doesn’t make sense” for grown adult men to be “alone in a restroom with a little girl,” calling it the “height of political correctness.”

“Frankly, the concern is not the Caitlyn Jenners of the world,” he said. “But if the law is such that any man, if he feels like it, can go in a women’s restroom, and you can’t ask him to leave, that opens the door for predators.”

Cruz said he “spent a lot of years” dealing with child predators—who he called “sick individuals”—within the legal system. He said that term doesn’t necessarily apply to transgendered people.

“But there are predators in the world,” he said. “And just saying that, if you’re a man, you can go in the girl’s restroom if you feel like it opens the doors for criminals.”

Tapper argued that wasn’t what the LGBT-pushed ordinances and businesses policies would do, but Cruz quickly corrected him.

“The law doesn’t specify transgender,” he said. “It’s whatever you feel like at the given moment. And, in fact, that was Donald’s position.”

Cruz said the entire issue goes to a broader question about his primary opponent. Suggesting Trump was attempting to “perpetuate the biggest fraud in the history of electoral politics,” he said the GOP front-runner was pretending to be an outsider when he’s “the ultimate Washington insider.”

“His whole shtick is that he tells it like it is, he speaks the truth,” he said. “And yet he also told us he could be the most politically correct person on Earth. This is the height of political correctness for Donald Trump to say, ‘Yes, let grown men in the bathroom with little girls.'”