Former President Donald Trump has had a fickle relationship with transgender competitors. He’s gone from allowing biological men who identify as transgender to compete in Miss Universe a decade ago to supporting bans on biologically male athletes competing in women’s sports in 2022.
Trump, who owned the Miss Universe pageant at the time, praised Miss Universe 2012 Olivia Culpo’s answer to transgender participants competing in the pageant. Culpo, who competed as Miss USA, said she thinks allowing contestants who were born men but identify as female into the pageant would be fair.
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“I do think that that would be fair, but I can understand that people would be a little apprehensive to take that road because there is a tradition of natural-born women,” Culpo said at the time. “But today, where there are so many surgeries and so many people out there who have a need to change for a happier life, I do accept that because I believe it’s a free country.”
Trump said Culpo’s response was a “good answer” to a difficult and controversial question. The answer came the same year Trump allowed a contestant who was born male to compete in the pageant as Miss Canada.
“She gave a great answer, a very tough question on transgender — just the question everybody wants to hear, and she gave a great answer, and she really did a great job,” Trump told Fox and Friends in June 2012. “It was a very cool answer. Great, [she] gave a great answer.”
Trump also celebrated Miss Canada Jenna Talackova’s entrance to the pageant and the buzz it created by allowing a transgender person to compete.
“It has become a hot subject. It is being talked about all over the world right now,” Trump told The Laura Ingraham Show in April 2012.
“This is a young woman who, according to the laws of Canada and according to the laws of the United States, is allowed to enter the pageant system. … We didn’t have a rule. This is sort of new territory. We have 58 contestants in Canada. I said let her run and maybe she will win, and if she wins, she will go to Miss Universe. And I think I made the right decision. I feel fine with the decision,” he added.
But a decade later, Trump, who is hoping for a return to the White House by running for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, changed his tune on transgender competitors by promising a “ban on men participating in women’s sports.”
The former president has also referred to gender transition surgeries for minors as “child sexual mutilation,” according to CNN, and he promised to sign executive orders that banned federal agencies from promoting gender transition surgeries at any age if elected president next year.
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Trump also said he would ask Congress to pass a bill that requires the government to only legally recognize genders assigned at birth.
Trump’s main challenger for the GOP nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), is also perceived as strongly against the LGBT community, passing multiple laws that negatively affect LGBT youth. Such impacts include restricting gender identity, prohibiting sexual orientation discussion in school classrooms, and barring transgender youth from accessing gender transition surgery.
