J.D. Vance had plenty of bizarre takes to spew about transgender people as part of his dizzying three-hour interview with Joe Rogan, went live Thursday afternoon.
The VP hopeful and Rogan, who share similar views regarding transgender women in sports and in opposing gender-affirming care for minors, riffed for long stints against transgender folks.
Faking being trans for college admission
Vance, a 40-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, claimed that people are becoming transgender and nonbinary simply to up their chances of getting into elite universities like his alma mater and Harvard.
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“People are very good at rationalizing things 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,” Vance said. “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.”
Transgenderism is a ‘cult and religion’
Things only got more head-scratching as Vance’s interview continued, with him asserting that transgenderism is a “cult and a religion, but with one big difference.”
That difference, as explained by Vance, is that the “woke stuff” doesn’t have “forgiveness and redemption.”
“Most people recognize that even if you violate some fundamental moral value that I have, if you apologize and try to be a good person, we’re gonna be forgiving,” Vance said, explaining his thinking.
He added on the matter, “I think that’s the, what’s most destructive about this is you can’t be friends with people if you think they’re only, you know, they’re only ever wrong. They can only ever wrong you. And if they apologize, your response is not to say, ‘oh, okay, I accept your apology.’ If your response is to say, no, I want you to apologize even more and even harder, that destroys human civilization.”
Big pharma is behind it all
Vance also argued—without evidence—that big pharma is pushing kids to become transgender so they can profit off confused adolescents and their left-wing parents.
“It’s a confusing phase for most Americans,” Vance said of puberty. “We take that normal adolescent curiosity and that normal adolescent confusion and then we try to medicalize it. And nobody’s saying, oh, when we do medicalize it, by the way, a lot of pharmaceutical companies get very rich off of it.”
Vance also argued that transgender children should not receive treatment because they are left with “changes that won’t go away” when they’re older and supposedly change their mind.
“We are experimenting on tens of thousands of American children,” he said. “We’re making them miserable. It’s not having any long-term health benefit. It’s making a lot of pharmaceutical companies rich and its conservative Republicans as the only ones saying, ‘eh, maybe this is a little crazy. Maybe we should stop.’”
‘Radical trans ideology’ drives people to violence
Vance claimed to Rogan that there’s such a thing as “radical trans ideology.” He said it was that so-called ideology that drove a trans person to massacre children at the Covenant School in Nashville last year, despite authorities in Tennessee not confirming the shooter’s motivation to kill.
“The Nashville shooter—I mean just while we’re on the topic—went in and murdered a bunch of children at a Christian school because he or she, like whatever, was motivated by some very radical trans ideology and that is something we should talk more about as a country,” Vance said.
We’re winning the ‘normal gay guy’ vote
Vance speculated to Rogan that he and Donald Trump are destined to win the “normal gay guy vote.” He described those men as wanting to be “left the hell alone” and not be associated with the transgender youth, which Vance called victims of “pharmaceutical conversion therapy.”
Rogan, 57, leaned into Vance’s bizarre speculation, adding that “a lot of gay guys feel like the whole [transgender] movement is homophobic.”
Sports aren’t safe for my daughter
Trump’s running mate also spoke at length about transgender women in sports, claiming they’ve led to an increase in biological girls being injured and that his daughter may one day have to fear for her life while competing.
“Most Americans, they don’t really care who you sleep with,” Vance said. “They’re pretty open-minded about most lifestyle choices. But when you talk about having a biological male compete with their teenage girl, right, in competitive sports, Americans are saying, no, no, no, no. Yeah. This is crazy. You’re causing injury to my kids. We have to stop this.”
Rogan, as he did for nearly every point Vance made in the interview, concurred with Vance and added on.
“Not only that, it like ruins chances of getting scholarships if you were the number one player and then all of a sudden some guy comes along who wears lipstick,” Rogan said. “Now he’s the number one girl on the team. Like, what are you talking about?”
Vance added that he’s worried his two-year-old daughter will grow up and not being able to play sports without risking being “bludgeoned to death.”
“I don’t want her going into athletic competitions where I’m terrified she’s gonna get bludgeoned to death because we’re allowing a six-foot-one male to compete with her in sports,” Vance said.
So there was this guy in a miniskirt...
The Ohio senator also shared a story about a visit he made to Paris, which he claimed is more conservative than some major U.S. cities. He explained to Rogan that he spoke to a woman there who complained about an incident she had in New York City involving a transgender woman.
Vance quoted the Parisian as saying: “‘Senator Vance, I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but when I was in New York City recently, I saw a grown man who was walking around in a miniskirt... Senator Vance, I could see his balls.‘”
Rogan reacted by saying, “He probably wanted you to see his balls.”
Vance cracked up before adding on the matter, “You realize, 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 miniskirt in broad daylight. Like, what are you talking about?”
