Republican presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis and other conservative critics hit out at former president Donald Trump after he hedged this week on the explosive debate surrounding transgenderism,
Trump refused to give a clear answer on whether he believes it’s possible to change one’s sex.
Trump responded with a long-drawn-out “Ummm” and an uncomfortable laugh when host Megyn Kelly, in a Thursday interview on her “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM, asked: “Can a man become a woman?”
“In my opinion,” he finally said, shaking his head slightly, “you have a man, you have a woman.”
“I, I, I think part of it is birth,” he continued. “Can the man give birth? No.” However, Trump seemed to leave the door open on that criterion.
“They’ll come up with some answer to that also someday,” Trump went on. “I heard just the other day they have a way that now the man can give birth. No, I would say I’ll continue my stance on that.”
The answer drew derision from conservatives, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Don’t tell me a man can become a woman because it’s not true,” DeSantis said Friday in a speech to the Concerned Women for America in Washington, DC. “Don’t tell me a man can get pregnant because it’s not true.”
“There is value in standing up for what is true,” the Florida governor said, declining to refer to Trump by name. “And what woke agenda is, is it represents a war on the truth itself.”
Another conservative, and longtime Trump opponent Erick Erickson, joined into the discussions, saying on X, formerly Twitter, “When a former president cannot and does not immediately say ‘no’ when asked if a man can become a woman, he does not need to be president again.”
Some other responses:
Trump’s exchange with Kelly came just moments after he expressed a strong stance against puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors.
“I’m so against it,” Trump said of what he called the “mutilation of children.”
“Many of them, I’ve heard like 62%, when they grow up, when they’re older, they say, Who did this to me? Why did you do this to me?” Trump stated that his stance on the issue has never wavered, even though he allowed biological men to compete in the Miss Universe pageant while he owned it.
“I don’t think I’ve changed,” he said. “I think I just, you know, at the beginning it was such a small subject.”
The interview was Kelly’s first sit-down with the former president since their clash during a republican debate in 2016. It sparked uproar after Trump claimed that he had no idea who gave Dr. Anthony Fauci a Trump-signed presidential commendation for spearheading the White House response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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