Caitlin Ochs / Reuters San Francisco HUD employees say they were shocked and offended by Carson’s remarks. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is defending transphobic remarks he made earlier this week, accusing the media of spreading “blatant mischaracterizations” of his statements, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post and Politico . In the memo sent to his staff amid backlash over the comments, Carson said he felt compelled “to set the record straight,” claiming the press had reported the story irresponsibly. “During a recent meeting with local staff in San Francisco, I made reference to the fact that I had heard from many women’s groups about the difficulty they were having with women’s shelters because sometimes men would claim to be women,” he said. “This made many of the women feel unsafe, and one of the groups described a situation to me in which ‘big hairy men’ would come in and have to be accepted into the women’s shelter even though it made the women in the facility very uncomfortable.” Carson argued his “point was that we have to permit policies that take into consideration the rights of everybody, including those women.” His remarks in […]

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