According to Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz, he was. At an Iowa campaign stop on Sunday, Cruz told a reporter that Dear was a “transgendered leftist activist”
Dear, 57, with guns blazing, held a Planned Parenthood clinic hostage for nearly six hours. When his shooting rampage concluded, three were dead, and six had been injured.
Though he is said to have made comments about “baby parts” to arresting officers in a reference to the leaked hidden camera videos that showed top Planned Parenthood executives brokering the sale of organs from aborted fetuses, the extent of his motivations remain a mystery. Law enforcement says it’s too soon, since they’re still investigating and processing evidence.
But if Cruz is right, that Dear was transgender, it could give an interesting new angle to Dear’s motivations.
Cruz’s claims come from a story initially reported by center-right news source, The Gateway Pundit, that said Dear “identifies as [a] woman.” The source of that information came in the form of publicly-accessible Colorado voter information, which has Dear listed as a female.
It’s unclear whether Dear actually, in fact, identifies as a woman, or whether it was merely a clerical error. His appearance—namely his long, grizzled beard—doesn’t seem to suggest that he’s becoming a woman.
But if Dear is, in fact, a leftist activist protesting so-called “cisgender” (non-transgender) women at a Planned Parenthood, it could dramatically shift the national conversation on a number of key issues.
