By Kit Maher | CNN
(CNN) — Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance suggested in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan that aired Thursday that White upper- and middle-class children are incentivized to identify as transgender to gain admission to elite colleges.
“Think about the incentives,” Vance said. “If you are a, you know, middle-class or upper middle-class white parent and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper middle-class kids, but the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans, and is there a dynamic that’s going on where, if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege.”
“That’s the social signifier. The only one that’s available in the hyper-woke mindset is if you become gender nonbinary,” the Ohio senator added.
Studies have found that because of the discrimination, harassment and lack of support they generally experience in earlier grades, students who identify as transgender would be a lot less likely to have access to higher education in general, let alone an Ivy League school that is difficult to get into, compared with those people who identify with the gender that matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
Describing a friend as a “gay Reagan Democrat” who rejects the ideology of progressive politicians, Vance said he believes that the Trump-Vance ticket may earn what he described as the “normal gay guy vote.”
“Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote, because, again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone,” Vance said.
Vance also described a conversation he had with a “very conservative” woman from Mississippi while at the Paris Air Show on a congressional delegation trip about how she believed Paris was more conservative than some United States cities and her experience seeing a man’s genitalia in a miniskirt.
“Oh my God, this is not, this is not empowerment. This is not respecting lifestyle choices. We’re letting a grown man walk around in a mini skirt in broad daylight,” Vance said. “If that’s what you’re doing, you’re a pervert. And I want, I want all of us to say, whatever your political persuasion, just say, ‘No, that’s weird, right?’ You’re not allowed to walk down the street and flash children in the middle of the world’s or the America’s biggest city,” Vance said.
Vance also said he believes most Americans are open-minded about what he described as “lifestyle choices,” but transgender athletes who compete in women’s sports cross a line.
