Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, criticised Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley after Ms Haley claimed that the presence of trans girls in female locker rooms is connected to a rise in suicidal thought among teenage girls in the US.
Ms Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations, has been making simliar claims in campaign trail appearances for weeks. But the assertion, offered without any evidence, gained national attention when she made it during a CNN town hall in Iowa on Sunday night.
After moderator Jake Tapper asked Ms Haley how she would define the term “woke” partway through the event, the candidate launched an attack on trans children.
“My daughter ran track in high school,” Ms Haley said. “I don’t even know how I would have that conversation with her. How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year. We should be growing strong girls, confident girls.”
Ms Haley called trans girls competing in girls’ sports “the women’s issue of our time” less than a year after Roe v Wade was overturned. After the event, Ms Haley doubled down on her claim in a statement provided to NBC News.
“We have to grow strong girls, and that is being threatened right now,” Ms Haley said. “Whether it’s biological boys going into girls’ locker rooms or playing in girls’ sports, women are being told their voices don’t matter. If you think this kind of aggressive bullying isn’t part of the problem, you’re not paying attention.”
Mr Buttigieg rejected Ms Haley’s remarks as “unserious” and criticised her for robbing trans children of their humanity.
“Nikki Haley suggesting that 1/3 of American teenage girls are contemplating suicide because of the existence of trans people is an unserious, untrue, and hateful thing to say,” he tweeted. “But hate is the point, isn’t it?”
In a subsequent tweet, Mr Buttigieg complimented Tapper for reminding Ms Haley that “trans youth are deserving of their humanity.”
Ms Haley has not, either at the town hall or since, provided any sort of evidence to back her claim about a link between trans girls being allowed to play sports and teenage girls in general experiencing what is increasingly considered a mental health crisis.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report in February on the challenges teenage girls are facing, but did not draw any link between trans rights and suicidal thought.
What the CDC’s report did highlight was that LGBT+ teenagers themselves face extremely high levels of violence and mental health challenges and that one in five LGBT+ teens attempted to die by suicide in the last year.
Experts in psychological and sociological fields have offered a number of possible, partial explanations for why girls’ mental health in the US has suffered so dramatically in recent years, including the social effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and social media, the threat of climate change, the rise of the far right and its political implications, and more.
LGBT+ youth, meanwhile, continue to face disproportionate levels of discrimination and harrassment in their homes, in their communities, and in the country at large. State legislators this year have already introduced more than 400 bills targeting the LGBT+ community, with various states passing bans on gender-affirming care for minors, public drag performances, and more.
This was not lost on a number of observers.
“Nikki Haley’s claim last night that transgender people are the reason why teen girls contemplate suicide is beyond specious, it’s actively contradicted by the actual statistics,” author Brynn Tannehill tweeted. “It’s also dangerous pro-extermination propaganda.”
Ms Tannehill subsequently pointed out that five of the six states with the lowest rates of teen suicide have legal protections for trans people codified into state law, while Idaho, the state with the highest rate of teen suicide, has already bans trans women athletes from competing in sports on female teams.
Ms Haley’s targeting of the trans community comes even as she has staked out a position as a relative moderate in the GOP presidential field and even as polling suggests that a majority of Americans support trans rights and not the bans the Republican Party has pushed over the last several years.
Ms Haley herself is currently polling in the single digits and is considered a longshot to win the Republican nomination.
