Former President Donald Trump just announced his running mate, JD Vance, a first-term senator from Ohio who has espoused anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ policies while in office.
The 39-year-old former venture capitalist, first made famous by his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” is known for his hard stance on abortion. He campaigned against Ohio’s constitutional amendment to protect the right to abortion last year, though voters ultimately approved it.
But last year Vance also introduced a bill in the Senate that would criminalize gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Vance’s bill cobbles together numerous restrictions on gender-affirming care, mirroring the language of state-level bills that Republican-led legislatures have passed in the last three years.
Even the name of the bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, echoes similar Republican-introduced legislation to “save” or “protect” kids and women from the threat of “transgenderism,” evoking rhetoric that dates back to anti-gay activist Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in the 1970s and beyond.
Vance has criticized the role that gender-affirming medical care plays and cast doubt on whether it helps transgender kids’ mental health, despite widespread mainstream medical consensus that it does. His bill would not only imprison health care providers who prescribe puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, but also calls for barring federal Medicaid programs and government-employed medical providers from providing gender-affirming care
In addition, the bill would expand anti-trans policies in novel ways: It would prohibit colleges, universities, and other higher education institutions from offering “instruction in gender-affirming care” for people of any age and would call for deporting immigrants who provide transition care to minors.
The legislation hasn’t moved since it was introduced last year. But if Trump were elected this fall, with Vance as his vice president, these policies would be more likely to become a reality.
Trump has already promised to enact a number of policies as early as day one that would significantly curtail LGBTQ+ rights.
Already, two dozen states have passed bans on gender-affirming care for minors, as well as numerous other restrictions on transgender students’ participation in sports and their ability to use restroom and school facilities that correspond with their gender identity.
Trump vowed in May that he would immediately roll back Biden’s recently implemented Title IX rules, which include protections against discrimination for transgender students. At least 22 states have already sued the Department of Education over these Title IX rules — and numerous federal judges, appointed by Republican former President George W. Bush, have leveraged a recent Supreme Court decision to block these protections from going into place.
Last year the Trump campaign released a video on Truth Social where the former president promised to “protect children from left-wing gender insanity” and said that he would punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors.