While speaking at a CNN town hall event in Iowa over the weekend, Republican 2024 presidential contender Nikki Haley suggested that there was a connection between teen suicide and transgender girls in sports.
The comment arose when answering host Jake Tapper’s question about how the Republican nominee hopeful would define the term “woke.”
“There’s a lot of things. I mean, you want to start with biological boys playing in girl sports. That’s one thing,” Haley said. “The fact that we have gender pronoun classes in the military now, I mean, all of these things that are pushing what a small minority want on the majority of Americans, it’s too much. It’s too much.”
Haley went on to say that she couldn’t imagine how she would discuss “biological boys playing in girls sports” with her daughter while her child was playing sports in high school.
“How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms?” Haley asked. “And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year. We should be growing strong girls, confident girls.”
Haley sent a statement to NBC News following her comments, in which she seemed to double down on the remarks.
“We have to grow strong girls, and that is being threatened right now,” she said. “Whether it’s biological boys going into girls’ locker rooms or playing in girls’ sports, women are being told their voices don’t matter. If you think this kind of aggressive bullying isn’t part of the problem, you’re not paying attention.”
Online not everyone seemed to agree with the sentiment Haley was pushing, including Chasten Buttigieg, husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“Nikki Haley suggesting that 1/3 of American teenage girls are contemplating suicide because of the existence of trans people is an unserious, untrue, and hateful thing to say. But hate is the point, isn’t it?” Buttigieg tweeted.
Several studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have looked into the recent rise in suicidal ideation in teenage girls and LGBTQ students.
However, the CDC has not named a connection between the presence of transgender youth and those thoughts in teenage girls.
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