LGBTQ Americans and advocacy groups are raising alarm over the selection of Senator JD Vance as former President Trump’s vice presidential running mate.
In addition to a history of anti-LGBTQ statements, the Republican from Ohio is the lead sponsor of at least two federal bills that threaten to drastically restrict transgender rights, including a proposal that seeks to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors nationwide.
This bill, the Senate version of the bill by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Law to protect the innocence of childrenwould charge health care providers who violate it with a Class C felony punishable by more than 10 years in prison. It would also prohibit colleges from offering classes on gender-affirming care and cut funding for health insurance plans that cover the treatment.
And a bill introduced by Vance in October would ban the “X” gender marker in U.S. passports, an option the State Department has offered since 2022.
“There are only two genders – passports issued by the U.S. government should reflect this simple fact,” Vance said. said in a statement by the time.
The first-term senator also repeated the false and inflammatory claim that LGBTQ people “groom” children for abuse, and after a fatal shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, last year, recommended The shooter’s gender identity may have been a motive.
In a November letter, Vance criticized the possible 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 should reflect objective reality,” said Vance and Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). wrote in the letter to Census Bureau Director Robert Santos. Gender identity, they wrote, “is a harmful ideology.”
“It is hurtful to see someone who has so openly displayed his hatred and bigotry toward transgender people appointed to the Senate, let alone a possible vice presidential post,” said Dara Adkinson, executive director of TransOhio, a statewide trans rights organization.
“To see someone who is supposed to represent us all hate us with so much venom and contempt, and to devalue our personhood and right to exist, is simply not fair,” they added.
Adkinson said they were not necessarily surprised that Trump chose Vance as his running mate, given that the former president Election promises banning gender-affirming care for minors, cutting federal funding for schools that accept transgender students, and passing a law recognizing only two genders, a move that would effectively end legal recognition of transgender people in the United States.
As president, Trump rolled back Obama-era anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, rejected requests from U.S. embassies to fly rainbow flags during Pride Month and banned transgender people from serving openly in the military — a policy he said he would reinstate if re-elected in November.
“This is anything but a one-size-fits-all ticket,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy group the advocated President Biden’s re-election before his announcement to 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 dismissed concerns that a Trump-Vance administration could threaten or undermine the rights of the LGBTQ community, pointing to changes such as the removal of language explicitly opposing same-sex marriage from the Republican platform for 2024.
Twice this year, former first lady Melania Trump, who has made little appearance on the campaign trail this cycle, hosted fundraisers for the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBTQ rights group, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s South Florida resort.
“Don’t confuse advocacy for parental rights and traditional, biological sex issues with something homophobic,” said Charles Moran, the group’s president. in an interview on Tuesday with NBC News.
“Some of the things [Vance] has talked about ensuring religious freedom … ensuring freedom and making sure that parents really have control over their children’s education. These are not LGBT rights issues, these are just issues around freedom and independence,” he said.
Moran and Log Cabin Republicans this week celebrated Trump’s choice of Vance, who said during his 2022 Senate campaign that he would have voted against legislation codifying same-sex and interracial marriage rights. Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence under Trump, said Vance “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 activist in West Virginia, said that while Vance’s inclusion on Trump’s ballot should worry LGBTQ Americans, it should not stop them from hoping for a better future.
“Now is not the time to panic. Now is the time to get organized, get to know our neighbors and find out what the strengths of our community are,” he said. “They want us to panic. They want us to feel isolated, because when we feel isolated, we’re easier to get caught.”
Arienne Childrey, a Democrat and transgender woman running for a seat in the Ohio House of Representatives, said Vance and other Republican politicians who advocate for community-focused policies and rhetoric do so at the expense of solving problems at the kitchen table.
“No one has ever gotten cheaper prescription drugs because there is a ban on trans bathrooms. No mother or father has ever gotten a better-paying job because there is a ban on gender-affirming care,” she said.
“He invokes our Appalachian values, but I don’t see that,” Childrey, who was born into a mining family in Grandy, Virginia, said of Vance. “I see a guy who likes to invoke the ‘hillbilly elegy,’ and he sure as hell doesn’t know what it means to be a hillbilly – it means being out there fighting for your community, not against the people in your community.”
“I’m a trans woman and I’m progressive,” she said, “but I’m also, and I’m proud of it, a hillbilly.”
