On Wednesday’s edition of Outkick’s “Tomi Lahren is Fearless” podcast, 2024 presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) defended an ad criticizing 2024 GOP rival former President Donald Trump over his positions on LGBTQ issues by stating that Trump was “a pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream,” and “it’s an attack on women’s rights more broadly to say that gender is fluid. And I also think it’s an attack on the truth itself.”
DeSantis said, “I think identifying Donald Trump as really being a pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream, where he was having men compete against women in his beauty pageants, I think that’s totally fair game, because he’s now campaigning saying the opposite, that he doesn’t think that you should have men competing in women’s things like athletics. And so, we’ve been very clear on it, that we believe in protecting the rights of our girls and the rights of women athletes to be able to participate with fairness and with integrity. And ultimately, when you talk about some of the gender ideology that’s being unleashed in this country, in the State of Florida, we are fighting back against that, clearly in schools.”
He added, “But I think even beyond that, it’s just a fundamental issue of, what role — I think it’s an attack on women’s rights more broadly to say that gender is fluid. And I also think it’s an attack on the truth itself. When they take a swimmer who swam on the men’s team for three years and then switches to the women’s team and they say that’s the women’s swim[ming] national champion, we know, not only does that violate the opportunities for the other women’s swimmers, but we also know that that’s a lie, that’s not true. And I think there’s value in making sure that our society is rooted in truth and not in social fads.”
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