Middle class students becoming trans to get into Ivy League, JD Vance tells Joe Rogan

Donald Trump’s running mate tells podcast there is a battle against ‘radical trans ideology’

White, middle class parents are allowing their children to undergo sex changes because it makes it easier to get into an Ivy League university, JD Vance has claimed.
Speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the Republican vice-presidential candidate said gender transition could provide routes into schools like Harvard and Yale through what he claimed was the “DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] bureaucracy in this country”.
Mr Vance said: “If you are a middle class or upper middle class, white parent and the only thing you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper middle class kids.
“But the one way those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”
He added: “Is there a dynamic that’s going on where if you become trans that’s the way to reject your white privilege? That’s the only social signifier, the only one that is available in the hyper-woke mindset, if you become gender non-binary.”
Affirmative Action policies have become particularly controversial at universities across the United States, with a Supreme Court judgment last year ruling that colleges will be banned from using race and ethnicity in admissions.
But there have been no court-tested cases that stop universities from recruiting students based on gender or sexuality.
The Telegraph understands that being gender non-binary or trans is not currently included as part of DEI admissions targets.
In a three-hour long interview, Mr Vance also accused pharmaceutical companies of pushing children to transition in order to profit from the sale of conversation therapy drugs, railed against transgender women competing in sports and said he and Donald Trump were going to win the “normal gay guy vote”.
The Republican party has made trans rights a key issue in the final stretch of the election campaign, pouring millions of dollars into adverts attacking their Democratic rival Kamala Harris’s policies.
Mr Vance told Rogan that there is a battle against “radical trans ideology” in communities, which he claimed was behind a mass shooting by a transgender man at a school in Nashville last year.
The police are yet to reveal a motive for the shooting, describing writing left behind by the shooter, who was killed at the scene, as “rambling” and not pertaining to any specific issue.
He also argued against children receiving drugs like puberty blockers because they can cause “changes that won’t go away” if the child changes their mind in the future.
On transgender participation in sport, Mr Vance said he was worried about allowing his young daughter to play in sport for fear she could be “bludgeoned to death” by a trans player.
He said: “Most Americans, they don’t really care who you sleep with.
“They’re pretty open-minded about most lifestyle choices. But when you talk about having a biological male compete with their teenage girl, right, in competitive sports, Americans are saying, no, no, no, no. Yeah. This is crazy. You’re causing injury to my kids. We have to stop this.”