The Progressive Double Standard: Ben Carson, Idiot?

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I agree that Ben Carson doesn't come across as the sharpest tool in the shed when he's speaking publicly. But:
(a) Dude is a neurosurgeon.
(b) Progressives would never allow conservatives to get away with something like this.
   The progressive rule is something like: conservatives aren't permitted to say anything critical of anyone who belongs to a group high in the progressives stack; if Jones is a member of progressive-favored group, G, and you criticize Jones, then you are a G-ist (or G-"phobe," or whatevs). OTOH, progressives are free to be as derisive toward Jones as they like...if Jones doesn't toe the progressive line, that is. Look at the stuff they say about Kanye. (Who is, though, a bit of a nut, so...)
   Also, of course, trangenderism is controversial to say the absolute very, very least. It isn't in any way clear that segregating people by sex under relevant circumstances is discriminatory. If Jones is a man (which is to say: an adult male), and a homeless shelter is segregated by sex, then standard practice would, it seems, be to house Jones with the other men. "Gender identity" isn't a real property/characteristic. It's a term that was made up to make false beliefs seem like facts. What matters for real purposes is people's real characteristics, not their beliefs or feelings or other subjective representations of those characteristics. Of course one can disagree, and I'm willing to pretend that the question is still open. But it's preposterous to simply declare it discriminatory to treat men like men and women like women--as if radical theories of transgenderism had been proven while no one was looking. Perhaps some as-yet unforeseen evidence and arguments will be discovered in the future. But, until such a time, it's not Carson who's being weird here. Progressives simply declared a radical, implausible theory true, and declared it bigotry to disagree. But that doesn't mean that the rest of us are obligated to play along.