Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has continued to face criticism from within and beyond his party after his presidential campaign began touting his record of opposing pro-transgender legislation as part of a somewhat puzzling political attack on leading GOP candidate Donald Trump.
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who's vying to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024, defended a video his campaign released
The video featured clips of then-candidate Trump in 2016 promising to support LGBT rights, allowing trans-identified men to compete against women in the Miss USA pageant and telling NBC's ‘Today’ show he would allow Caitlyn Jenner to use any bathroom he wanted at Trump Tower.
These clips were contrasted with headlines about DeSantis signing ‘the most extreme slate of anti-trans laws in modern history’ and a ‘draconian anti-trans bathroom bill’.
When Trump was president, however, his administration was criticized for rescinding former President Barack Obama's trans bathroom mandate on public schools.
DeSantis discussed the video with conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, who described it as ‘attacking Donald Trump for, I guess, his advocacy for the LGBTQ community’.
‘I think identifying Donald Trump as really being a pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream where he was having men complete 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’, DeSantis said.
The 2024 presidential hopeful explained that he believes referring to gender as ‘fluid’ is an attack on women’s rights, and he condemned the practice of allowing men to compete in women’s sports as an attack on ‘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 National Champion, we know not only does that violate the opportunities for the other women swimmers, but we also know that that’s a lie. It’s not true’, DeSantis maintained.
The Florida governor asserted that there is value in making sure that society is ‘rooted’ in truth and not what he described as ‘social fads’”. -Samantha Kamman, Christian Post
One can’t help but notice how the origins of the transgender ideology are rooted in the very concepts consistent with Ron DeSantis’ civic nationalist ideals.
As a vocal proponent of “legal” immigration, DeSantis believes that foreigners who file for citizenship can transform their identity into red-blooded “Americans” so long as they receive sufficient legal documentation. While at the same time, the governor insists that a male with legal papers that recognize him as a female never truly becomes one.
“I’ve always opposed amnesty and stood up for the rule of law in our country. Cheap foreign labor is not an excuse to let lawlessness prevail in the sunshine state. We want people who come legally”. -Ron DeSantis
As it happens, some things cannot be defined on the basis of their legal status.
And, as even Governor DeSantis probably understands full well, naturalized citizenship does less in reality to alter the nature of a person’s national identity than sex reassignment surgery does to change the status of one’s perceived gender.