Trump campaign, GOP allies criticize Walz for pro-trans record
Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, earning praise from Democrats and LGBTQ advocacy groups close to the party, Republicans seemed to coalesce around an attack message.
First came efforts to characterize Walz as a liberal extremist. Then, in short order, conservative critics lashed out at the governor’s stridently pro-LGBTQ record. “As a woman, I think there is no greater threat to our health than leaders who support gender transition surgeries for young minors, who support putting tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for former President Donald Trump’s campaign, said during an interview with Fox News.
Walz last year issued an executive order protecting access to medically necessary gender- affirming healthcare treatments, which include surgical interventions for minors only in extremely rare circumstances.
He also signed a bill in 2023 to provide menstrual products in schools for all students “in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 through 12.” A Democratic Minnesota legislator who authored the bill told the New York Times she received emails from trans students, “parents, teachers, librarians, custodians from across the country, talking about how they were — or that they knew — trans students who faced these barriers and needed these products, and how much it meant to them that they would have that access, and also that we were standing up for them.” Walz’s pro-trans record nevertheless became fodder for conservative activists and pundits, such as Chaya Raichik, creator of Libs of TikTok, who the Southern Poverty Law Center considers an anti-LGBTQ extremist.
