LGBTQ Americans and advocacy groups are sounding the alarm over the selection of Senator JD Vance as former President Trump’s running mate.
In addition to a history of anti-LGBTQ statements, the Ohio Republican is the lead sponsor of at least two pieces of federal legislation that threaten to drastically roll back transgender rights, including a proposal that seeks to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors in All country.
That bill, the Senate version of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) Children’s Innocence Protection Act, would charge health care providers who violate it with a Class C felony, punishable by more than a decade in prison. It would also prevent higher education institutions from providing instruction on gender-affirming care and cut funding for health plans that cover the treatment.
And a bill introduced by Vance in October would ban “X” gender markers on U.S. passports, an option the State Department has offered since 2022.
“There are only two genders – passports issued by the United States government must recognize that simple fact,” Vance said in a statement at the time.
The first-term senator also repeated the false and inflammatory claim that LGBTQ people are “grooming” children to abuse them, and after a deadly shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, last year, suggested the shooter’s gender identity may have been a motivating factor.
In a November letter, Vance criticized the potential addition of questions about gender identity — a concept he called “highly polarizing and patently false” — to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
“Official government polls must reflect objective reality,” Vance and Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) wrote in the letter to the Director of the Census Bureau, Robert Santos. Gender identity, they wrote, “is a harmful ideology.”
“It’s heartbreaking to see someone who has been so open in her hatred and intolerance for transgender people being selected for the Senate, let alone a potential vice president,” said Dara Adkinson, executive director of TransOhio, a statewide rights organization. transgender.
“Seeing someone who should potentially represent all of us hate us with such venom, disdain and invalidation of our personhood and right to exist is simply not fair,” they added.
Adkinson said they are not necessarily surprised by Trump’s choice of Vance as his running mate, given the former president’s campaign promises to ban gender-affirming care for minors, cut federal funding for schools that accommodate transgender students and enact a law that recognizes only two genders, a move that would effectively end legal recognition of transgender people in the U.S.
Trump, as president, repealed Obama-era anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, rejected requests from U.S. embassies to fly rainbow flags during Pride Month, and banned transgender individuals from serving openly in the military — a policy he said which he will reinstate if he is re-elected in November.
“This is anything but a ticket of unity,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy group that supported President Biden’s re-election before his announcement that he would drop out of the race on Sunday. “We are not simply choosing between two campaigns. We are choosing between two fundamentally different visions of America.”
Leading gay conservatives at this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee largely ignored concerns that a Trump-Vance administration could threaten or undermine LGBTQ rights, citing changes including the removal of language explicitly opposing same-sex marriage of the Republican Party’s 2024 platform.
Twice this year, former first lady Melania Trump, who has rarely appeared on the campaign trail this cycle, hosted fundraisers for the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBTQ rights group, at Mar-a-Lago, the resort of Trump in South Florida.
“Do not confuse the commitment to parental rights and traditional and biological gender issues as being homophobic,” said Charles Moran, the group’s president, in an interview Tuesday with NBC News.
“Some of the things [Vance] talked about is guaranteeing religious freedom… guaranteeing freedom and guaranteeing the ability of parents to truly have control over their children’s education. These are not LGBT rights issues, they are just issues relating to freedom and liberty,” he said.
Moran and Log Cabin Republicans this week celebrated Trump’s selection of Vance, who during his 2022 Senate campaign said he would have voted against legislation codifying same-sex and interracial marriage rights. Richard Grenell, Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, Vance said. “is the living example of the American dream,” in an apparent reference to Vance’s upbringing, which he documented in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Ash Orr, a transgender rights organizer in West Virginia, said Vance’s addition to Trump’s ticket should worry LGBTQ Americans but shouldn’t stop them from hoping for a better future.
“Now is not the time to panic. This is the time to organize, get to know our neighbors and discover what our community’s strengths are,” he said. “They want us to panic. They want us to feel isolated because if we feel isolated, we are easier to eliminate.”
Arienne Childrey, a Democratic and transgender woman running for an Ohio House seat, said Vance and other Republican politicians who advocate community-oriented policies and rhetoric do so at the expense of kitchen-table problem-solving.
“No one has ever gotten more affordable prescription medications because of the bathroom ban for trans people. No mother or father has gotten a better-paying job because of a gender-affirming care ban,” she said.
“He claims our Appalachian values, but I don’t see that,” Childrey, born into a coal mining family in Grandy, Virginia, said of Vance. “I see a guy who likes to claim ‘redneck elegy’ and he doesn’t know anything about what it means to be a redneck — it means to be out there, fighting for your community, not fighting the people in your community. .”
“I’m a progressive trans woman,” she said, “but I’m also, proudly, a redneck.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
