Donald Trump has spent this election cycle lying about the state of transgender rights, saying repeatedly that schools are forcibly transitioning students behind their parents’ backs.
But he just told his biggest lie yet about transgender rights during a roundtable discussion that was supposed to be about Social Security and Medicare, hosted by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R).
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“Who would want men playing in women’s sports?” Trump asked at the Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, event, bringing up a topic that has been a mainstay of his campaign this year even though the only people who want to require men to play in women’s sports are generally in his own party. “They want it.”
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“Who would want transgender operations for almost everybody in the world? They want that,” he said. This is not true. Democrats and trans rights advocates want to keep gender-affirming care accessible for those who want and need it. There are no instances of people being forced by Democrats to transition against their will.
“This is a sick group of people,” he continued. “I’m telling you, there’s a great evil in this. You know, we want to come together as a country, but there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of evil there.”
Trump has told numerous lies about transgender people and their allies this past year. He claimed that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) allowed the state to “kidnap children to change their gender,” which is not true. He claimed that a college volleyball player was “hurt badly” when playing against a team with a transgender player, which the university said wasn’t the case and that the player didn’t even miss a play. He accused Kamala Harris of supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” when that’s a constitutional protection that was in place during the Trump administration.
But perhaps the lie about trans people that he has been telling the most this year is that schools are transitioning children behind their parents’ backs, which his campaign even said they could not name one instance where that happened.
“Can you imagine, you’re a parent, and your son leaves the house, and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’” Trump said at a Wisconsin rally in September. “And your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”
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