LGBTQ community sounds alarm bells over Vance

LGBTQ Americans and advocacy groups are sounding alarm bells over the selection of Sen. JD Vance as former President Trump’s running mate. 

In addition to a history of anti-LGBTQ statements, the Ohio Republican is the primary sponsor of at least two pieces of federal legislation threatening to sharply roll back transgender rights, including one proposal that aims to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors nationwide. 

That bill, the Senate version of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) Protect Children’s Innocence 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 institutions of higher education from providing instruction about gender-affirming care and cut funding for health plans that cover treatment.

And an October bill introduced by Vance 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 should recognize that simple fact,” Vance said in a statement at the time. 

The first-term senator has also repeated the false and inflammatory claim that LGBTQ people are “grooming” children to abuse them, and after a deadly shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., 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 surveys should reflect objective reality,” Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote in the letter to Census Bureau Director Robert Santos. Gender identity, they wrote, “is a harmful ideology.” 

“It’s hurtful to see someone who has been so overt in their hatred and bigotry for trans people selected for Senate, let alone for potential vice president,” said Dara Adkison, executive director of TransOhio, a state transgender rights organization. 

“Seeing someone who’s supposed to potentially represent all of us hate us with so much venom and disdain and invalidation of our personhood and right to exist just isn’t fair,” they added. 

Adkison said they are not necessarily surprised by Trump’s selection 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 trans people in the U.S. 

Trump as president rolled back Obama-era antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people, rejected requests from U.S. embassies to fly rainbow flags during Pride Month and barred transgender individuals from serving openly in the military — a policy he has said he will reinstate if he is reelected in November. 

“This is anything but a unity ticket,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy group that endorsed President Biden’s reelection prior to his announcement that he was dropping out of the race 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 brushed off concerns that a Trump-Vance administration would threaten or undermine LGBTQ rights, citing shifts including the removal of language explicitly opposing same-sex marriage from the GOP’s 2024 platform. 

Twice this year, former first lady Melania Trump, who has rarely appeared on the campaign trail this election cycle, hosted fundraisers for Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBTQ rights group, at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s South Florida resort. 

“Don’t confuse the commitment to parental rights and traditional, biological gender issues as being something that’s homophobic,” said Charles Moran, the group’s president, in a Tuesday interview with NBC News. 

“Some of the things [Vance] has talked about is ensuring religious freedom. … Ensuring liberty and ensuring the ability for parents to really have control of their kids’ education. These aren’t LGBT rights issues, these are just issues surrounding freedom and liberty,” he said. 

Moran and Log Cabin Republicans this week celebrated Trump’s pick of Vance, who during his 2022 Senate campaign said 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 organizer in West Virginia, said Vance’s addition to Trump’s ticket should worry LGBTQ Americans, but it shouldn’t stop them from hoping for a better future. 

“Right now is not the time to panic — this is the time for us to be organizing, getting to know our neighbors and figuring out 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’re easier to pick off.” 

Arienne Childrey, a Democrat and transgender woman running for an Ohio House seat, said Vance and other Republican politicians who champion policies and rhetoric targeting the community do so at the expense of solving kitchen table issues. 

“Nobody ever got more affordable prescription drugs because of a trans bathroom ban. No mom or dad ever got a better-paying job because of a gender-affirming care ban,” she said. 

“He claims our Appalachian values, but I don’t see it,” Childrey, born to a family of coal miners in Richlands, Va., said of Vance. “I see a guy who likes to claim the ‘hillbilly elegy,’ and he don’t know one damn thing about what it means to be a hillbilly — it means to be out there fighting for your community, not fighting against people in your community.” 

“I am a trans woman, and I am a progressive,” she said, “but I am also, proudly, a hillbilly.”