Last Updated on October 26, 2020
Presidential hopeful and former U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden cast his support behind LGBT children after answering a query from a mother of an eight-year-old transgender girl.
In the town hall event on Thursday, October 8, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Biden stated that he would “flat-out just change the law. Eliminate those executive orders, number one,” and expressed that transgender children should face “zero discrimination.”
The former Vice-President began by retelling a story about his first exposure to an LGBT couple and how his father guided him through the experience, per Newsweek:
“You may recall, I’m the guy who said I was raised by a man who, I remember, I was being dropped off, my dad was a high school educated, well-read man who was a really decent guy and I was being dropped off to get an application in the center of our city, Wilmington, Delaware, the corporate capital of the world at the time.
“These two men—I’m getting out to get an application to be a lifeguard in the African-American community because there was a big swimming pool complex—and these two men, well-dressed, leaned up and hugged one another and kissed one another. I turned to my dad, my dad looked at me, he said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.'”
After introducing his first experience, he went onto add: “The idea that an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old, decides, you know, I decide I want to be transgender. That’s what I think I’d like to be, it would make my life a lot easier—there should be zero discrimination.”
This awesome mom Mieke Haeck asked Joe Biden about how he'd protect her trans daughter, cited the Trump-Pence administration's rollback of trans rights pic.twitter.com/k23GTQkAKA
— Brennan Suen (@brennansuen) October 16, 2020
The topic of child drag queens has been highly controversial and oftentimes inflammatory as groups on both sides of the political aisle struggle to find any common ground on the issue.
The meteoric rise of preteen drag kid Desmond is Amazing — who has been identifying as the opposite gender since the age of two and whose parents financially depend on his being a drag kid — has alarmed Christian conservatives as various other children have enjoyed clout for self-identifying as “drag kids.”
Another subject of controversy has been so-called “Drag Queen Story Hours” that occupied public libraries across the Western World.
Later on in the town hall, Biden clumsily addressed a common far-left talking point concerning the disproportionate rate at which transgender people of color are murdered.
“And what’s happening, too many transgender women of color are being murdered. They’re being murdered. I think it’s up to now 17, don’t hold me to that number. It’s higher now?” Biden said.