LGBTQ Americans and advocacy groups are sounding the alarm over Sen. J.D. Vance’s selection as former President Donald Trump’s running mate.
In addition to his history of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, the Ohio Republican is also the lead sponsor of at least two federal bills that threaten to significantly roll back transgender rights, including a proposal that seeks to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors nationwide.
The bill, a Senate version of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) Child Innocence Act, would make health care providers who violate the bill a Class C felony punishable by 10 years or more in prison, ban higher education institutions from offering instruction in gender-affirming care, and cut funding for health insurance plans that cover the costs of treatment.
And a bill Vance introduced in October would ban “X” gender designation on U.S. passports, which the State Department has offered as an option starting in 2022.
“There are only two genders. Passports issued by the United States government should recognize this simple fact,” Vance said in a statement at the time.
The first-term senator has also repeatedly made false and inflammatory claims about LGBTQ people “training” children to abuse, and after last year’s mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, suggested the shooter’s gender identity may have been a motive.
In a November letter, Vance criticized the possibility of adding a gender identity question to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey, which he called “highly polarizing and plain wrong.”
“The government’s official count should reflect objective reality,” Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote in a letter to Census Bureau Director Robert Santos. They wrote that gender identity is “a harmful ideology.”
“It’s heartbreaking to see someone who has openly expressed hatred and bigotry towards transgender people be selected as a senator, let alone a vice presidential candidate,” said Dara Adkinson, executive director of TransOhio, an Ohio transgender rights group.
“It is simply unfair to see someone who potentially represents us all hate us with such venom and contempt, denying our personhood and our right to exist,” they added.
Adkinson said she wasn’t necessarily surprised that Trump chose Vance as his running mate, given that Vance had promised on the campaign trail to ban gender-reassignment care for minors, cut federal funding to schools that accommodate transgender students and enact bi-gender legislation that would effectively end legal recognition of transgender people in the United States.
As president, Trump has rolled back Obama-era anti-discrimination measures against LGBTQ people, rejected a request from U.S. embassies to fly the rainbow flag during Pride Month and barred transgender people from serving openly in the military — policies he has said he would reinstate if re-elected in November.
“This is far from a unified candidate,” said Kelly Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy group that had endorsed Biden for reelection before he announced he was dropping out of the race on Sunday. “We’re not just choosing between two campaigns. We’re choosing between two fundamentally different visions of America.”
Gay conservative leaders at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week largely dismissed concerns that a Trump-Vance administration would threaten or undermine LGBTQ rights, citing, among other things, the removal of language explicitly opposing same-sex marriage from the GOP’s 2024 presidential platform.
Former first lady Melania Trump, who has largely stayed away from the campaign trail this election cycle, has hosted two fundraisers this year for the conservative LGBTQ rights group Log Cabin Republicans at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida.
“Our commitment to parental rights and traditional biological sex issues should not be confused with being homophobic,” Charles Moran, the group’s president, said in an interview with NBC News on Tuesday.
“Some things [Vance] “What I’ve been talking about is ensuring religious freedom…ensuring freedom and giving parents real control over their children’s education. These are not about LGBT rights, these are about freedom and rights,” he said.
Moran and Log Cabin Republicans this week celebrated Trump’s selection of Vance, who said during his 2022 Senate campaign that he would vote against bills that would enact same-sex and interracial marriage rights. Richard Grenell, Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, said Vance was a “living example of the American Dream,” an apparent reference to the upbringing he wrote about in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Ash Au, a transgender rights activist in West Virginia, said Vance’s inclusion on Trump’s list of nominees is worrying for LGBTQ Americans, but that they shouldn’t give up hope for a better future.
“Now is not the time to panic. Now is the time for us to come together, to get to know our neighbors and understand what the strengths of our communities are,” he said. “They want us to panic. They want us to feel isolated, because if you feel isolated, you’re more likely to be attacked.”
Arienne Childrey, a Democrat and transgender woman running for the Ohio House of Representatives, said Vance and other Republican politicians who advocate policies and rhetoric that target the community do so at the expense of solving family problems.
“No one has had cheaper prescription drugs because of a transgender bathroom ban. No one’s mother or father has had a higher-paying job because of a gender-affirming health care ban,” she said.
“He’s talking about Appalachian values, but I don’t get it,” Childree, who was born into a coal mining family in Grundy, Virginia, said of Vance. “I see him as a guy who wants to talk about ‘country blare,’ but he has no idea what it means to be country. Being country means fighting for your community, not against the people in your community.”
“I’m a transgender woman and a progressive,” she says, “but I’m also proudly country.”
