The Smithsonian Institution is massing donors to fund a “Museum of American Women,” which the director of the project says will include biological men who claim to be transgender women.
With high-dollar donors including Melinda Gates, Tory Burch, and a member of the Walmart Walton family, the museum’s new director promises to “represent women on the National Mall” in Washington, DC, according to the New York Times.
The museum is only in the planning stages and has not picked a site, according to the museum’s interim director Lisa Sasaki, but it already has pledges of more than $55 million to help get the idea off the ground.
The Times noted that the immediate future of the project is still in flux as it races to prepare ahead of the Smithsonian’s other effort to pander to a minority group, the National Museum of the American Latino. But the nascent museum already has 14 employees and an annual budget of $2 million.
Sasaki is excited about the plans for the museum, and told the paper, “It’s a rare opportunity to start a museum from scratch.”
The director added that their initial idea is to organize around themes including women in politics, entertainment, and science. Thus far they are set to include civil rights activist Mary Burnett Talbert, actress Anna May Wong, and breast cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan, who just happens to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s mother.
But Sasaki is also planning to satisfy the radical transgender lobby by including biological men who claim to be women among the history of the women they hope to highlight.
