Trans Kids Playing Sports ‘Women’s Issue Of Our Time,’ Nikki Haley Says

Republican 2024 statesmanlike hopeful Nikki Haley said Sunday that keeping transgender kids from playing connected schoolhouse sports teams was the “women’s contented of our time” during a CNN municipality hallway event.

Haley, a erstwhile politician of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has made the remark before, but her rhetoric Sunday plays into the Republican Party’s ongoing battle against transgender Americans. GOP lawmakers person made anti-LGBTQ authorities a cardinal absorption of the 2024 race, including the sports squad plans and efforts to bounds entree to medically indispensable wellness attraction for trans youth.

“How are we expected to get girls utilized to the information that biologic boys are successful their locker rooms?” Haley asked during the event, attempting to nexus the thought with the prevalence of teen termination among young girls. “We should beryllium increasing beardown girls, assured girls.”

A caller Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report recovered an accrued level of termination hazard among teen girls, but determination is nary grounds to suggest the inclusion of trans athletes connected sports teams contributes.

In fact, much than 40% of transgender and nonbinary young people successful the U.S. person earnestly considered suicide, according to caller findings from the Trevor Project. The radical besides recovered that two-thirds of that radical accidental ongoing efforts to restrict freedoms for LGBTQ radical person had a antagonistic interaction connected their intelligence health.

Moderator Jake Tapper pressed Haley connected her comments, and she said the state needed “to instrumentality attraction of these kids” and beryllium “humane” successful discussions astir trans issues. But she said the treatment astir inclusion connected sports teams — an contented driven by Republicans — had “overtaken the full conversation, and that’s not just to the remainder of our kids.”

“I privation everybody to unrecorded the mode they privation to live,” she said. “But halt pushing your views connected everybody else.”

There are presently nearly 500 bills targeting queer Americans earlier lawmakers during the 2023 legislative session, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Those see efforts to bounds however teachers tin discuss sexuality and sex identity, and attempts to ban resistance shows.