JD Vance suggests White children are incentivized to identify as transgender for college admissions

(CNN) — Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance suggested in an interview that aired Thursday that White upper- and middle-class children are incentivized to identify as transgender to gain admission to elite colleges.

“Think about the incentives,” Vance told prominent podcast host Joe 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’s the social signifier. The only one that’s available in the hyper-woke mindset is if you become gender nonbinary,” the Ohio senator added.

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, 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.

Vance sat for the wide-ranging interview days after former President Donald Trump did the same – a nearly three-hour appearance that came after years of Rogan saying he would not have the former president on. In the closing days of the presidential election, Trump and Vance have used platforms from podcasts to rallies to make their closing argument to voters.

Vice President Kamala Harris has not appeared on the popular podcast, though Rogan wrote on X that he “really hope(s) we can make it happen” and that the Democrat’s campaign “has not passed on doing the podcast.”

Vance, describing a friend as a “gay Reagan Democrat” who rejects the ideology of progressive politicians, said he believes that the Trump-Vance ticket may earn what he described as the “normal gay guy vote.”

“Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote, because, again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone,” Vance said.

Vance also described a conversation he had with a “very conservative” woman from Mississippi while at the Paris Air Show on a congressional delegation trip about how she believed Paris was more conservative than some United States cities and her experience seeing a man’s genitalia in a miniskirt.

“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 mini skirt in broad daylight,” Vance said. “If that’s what you’re doing, you’re a pervert. And I want, I want all of us to say, whatever your political persuasion, just say, ‘No, that’s weird, right?’ You’re not allowed to walk down the street and flash children in the middle of the world’s or the America’s biggest city.”

Vance also said he believes most Americans are open-minded about what he described as “lifestyle choices,” but transgender athletes who compete in women’s sports cross a line.

He later suggested that Democrats want Americans to be in “poor health and overweight” because they would become more liberal.

“Have you seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics?” Vance said. “Maybe that’s what’s going on. Maybe that’s why the Democrats want us all to be, you know, poor health and overweight is because that means we’re going to be – no, it means we’re going to be more liberal.”

The campaign did not elaborate on which studies Vance was referring to.

Here are other key moments from the interview:

Chinese hackers targeted Vance’s phone data

Vance on Thursday confirmed that Chinese government-linked hackers had targeted his and Trump’s phone communications by accessing major US telecommunications networks.

“Maybe they got some stuff. We’ll find out eventually. I try not to worry too much about sh*t I can’t control,” Vance told Rogan.

“Luckily, I’m a pretty boring guy, so I don’t think that they got really anything,” the Ohio senator said. “Apparently, they couldn’t get the encrypted messages that weren’t sent. So, I’m pretty careful about making sure I use Signal and iMessage and all that stuff.”

CNN previously reported that Chinese hackers had targeted people affiliated with the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns as part of a much broader cyber-espionage effort aimed at high-level US targets. Phone communications of current and former senior US officials are coveted by foreign spies.

Vance, who said Trump’s phone was also apparently hacked, told Rogan that “the way that they hacked our phones is they used the backdoor telecom infrastructure that had been developed in the wake of the Patriot Act.”

He continued: “What I’ve been told is that that infrastructure was used by this Chinese hacker organization … and that’s how they got into the Verizon network and that’s how they got into the AT&T network.”

US law enforcement’s ability to conduct court-authorized surveillance of telecom infrastructure predates the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 national laws. But those laws strengthened those capabilities and the relationship between US law enforcement agencies and telecom firms.

The Chinese government has denied allegations that it hacked into US telecom infrastructure.

The cybersecurity industry dubs the Chinese hacking group in question “Salt Typhoon” and considers it a top-tier threat that is very difficult to detect. Investigation of the hacks is ongoing.

“It’s a pretty badass name,” Vance said. “If they have anything on me, I can’t be too pissed off at them. At least they named themselves Salt Typhoon.”

Vance doesn’t like idea of prosecutions for out-of-state abortions

Vance also said that he doesn’t like the idea of women potentially being prosecuted for getting an out-of-state abortion if the procedure is not legal in their home state.

“I don’t like the idea, to be clear, of people getting arrested for freely moving around the country,” he told Rogan.

The Ohio senator said he’s heard about the idea as a “threat” but has not seen it in practice.

As CNN previously reported, in 2022, Vance was “sympathetic” to the view that a national ban was necessary to stop women from traveling across state lines to obtain an abortion.

Rogan told vance that “the concept in the zeitgeist is that abortion had always been, you know, Roe v. Wade always been the law of the land, and then all of a sudden that was taken away and you have these religious men who are trying to dictate what women can and can’t do with their bodies.”

“Yeah. No, look, I mean, again, I, I understand that,” Vance responded. “I understand the, the, the pushback against that, but I, I think you can go, like, with so many other issues, you can go way too far about it, and it becomes trying to celebrate something that at, at the very best, if you grant, I think every argument of the pro-choice side, it is a neutral thing, not something to be celebrated.”

“I think there’s very few people that are celebrating, though,” Rogan said.

Vance told Rogan he understands the “autonomy value” of the pro-abortion rights argument that men shouldn’t be telling women what they should do with their body, but he emphasized that life also matters.

“That’s the balance that people are trying to strike,” Vance said.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Sean Lyngaas contributed to this report.

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