Will Trump Win Over the 'Normal Gay Guy' Voters? Vance Thinks So

Trump's running mate JD Vance told conservative podcaster Joe Rogan that "normal gay guy[s]" might show up for them at the ballot box next week.

His words seemed surprising, especially since, as People Magazine noted, Vance "has opposed same-sex marriage" and publicly opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, which won approval from Congress and was signed into law by President Joe Biden in the wake of the Supreme Court's rollback of reproductive freedoms.

"Vance, 40, has a history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights during his short political career and received a score of 0 on the Human Rights Campaign's congressional scorecard," People added.

But Vance also showed his more familiar colors during his appearance on Rogan's podcast, claiming that transgender youth are only claiming to be trans in order to gain access to top-flight colleges like Harvard and Yale. (Vance himself attended Yale law school.)

"Think about the incentives," CNN quoted the Ohio senator telling Rogan. "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 claim ignores the fact that transgender children, who often know from very early ages that their perceived gender does not align with their innate gender, are typically the ones who have to communicate the fact that they are transgender to their parents, rather than parents somehow coaxing their children to identify as trans.

Vance went on to illustrate how comprehensively unfamiliar he is with transgender people with the claim that "the only" free pass to elite universities "that's available in the hyper-woke mindset is if you become gender nonbinary" – an identity that is distinct from being transgender.

Unsurprisingly, Vance's claims bore little resemblance to actual fact.

"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," CNN noted, "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."

But Vance's flights of fancy didn't end there. Talking about an exchange he said he had with a woman who claimed she saw a man's genitals on public display in Paris thanks to him wearing a "miniskirt," the senator exclaimed, "This is not respecting lifestyle choices. We're letting a grown man walk around in a mini skirt in broad daylight."

"If that's what you're doing, you're a pervert," Vance went on dismissively. "And I want, I want all of us to say, whatever your political persuasion, just say, 'No, that's weird, right?'"

"Weird" is the word that the Harris campaign has repeatedly used to describe Vance. That word cropped up once more in comments when the "Kamala HQ" account on X tweeted a video of Vance's comments to Rogan.

Vance also hammered on the trope of transgender athletes posing a threat to women's sports, an issue that GOP politicians and the Trump campaign have magnified despite the fact that there are so few transgender female athletes that most schools don't have any trans girls playing on (or even trying to get into) their sports teams.

But demonizing trans Americans was a central point at the recent Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, the Associate Press reported.

"We will get ... transgender insanity the hell out of our schools," the AP quoted Trump declaring, "and we will keep men out of women's sports."

The possibility that a Trump/Vance administration would leave LGBTQ+ Americans in peace seems slim, not only given their campaign's focus on demonizing trans Americans but also because "Project 2025," the 900+-page playbook for a second Trump term, lays out a strategy for curtailing the rights and liberties of queer people, including the abolition of non-discrimination policies and a rollback of marriage equality.