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(NewsNation) — Candidates were at odds over appropriate policy or lack thereof surrounding transgender issues during the fourth Republican presidential debate Wednesday.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley butted heads over laws regulating transgender students’ bathroom use, while businessman Vivek Ramaswamy equated being transgender to having a mental illness and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said decisions about gender-affirming care for children should be left to parents.
Former President Donald Trump, who has maintained a wide lead in the race so far, did not attend this or prior debates.
Chris Christie
The former New Jersey governor said parents should be the ones making decisions about a child’s health, regardless of his personal opinion about different kinds of gender-affirming care.
“I get to make the decisions about my children, not anybody else, and every parent that’s out there who’s watching tonight, you start to turn over just a little bit of this authority? The authority they take from you next, you’re not going to like.”
Christie’s statements and actions toward LGBTQ Americans are a mixed bag. He has both instituted protections for trans students in schools and vetoed a bill that would have made it easier for transgender people to obtain birth certificates that align with their gender.
In 2012, he vetoed legislation that would have legalized same-sex marriage in New Jersey at the time. He gave up that fight the following year when he chose not to appeal a judge’s ruling that allowed the marriages.
Christie went on to make New Jersey the second state to ban licensed therapists from trying to turn gay teens straight through so-called conversion therapy.
On Wednesday, he told moderators that as a Republican, he believes “in less government.”
“We should empower parents to be teaching values that they believe in in their homes without the government telling them what those values should be,” Christie said.
Vivek Ramaswamy
Ramaswamy on Wednesday repeated the inaccurate claim that “transgenderism is a mental health disorder.”
The American Psychiatric Association revised its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2012 and it no longer lists being transgender as a mental disorder.
He suggested banning “genital mutilation and chemical castration,” comparing gender-affirming care for children to smoking a cigarette or drinking before the legal age.
Nikki Haley
Haley and DeSantis went toe-to-toe over so-called bathroom bills — laws addressing which bathrooms transgender and gender non-conforming students are allowed to use.
DeSantis criticized Haley for shooting down one such bill in South Carolina several years ago.
Haley responded that when the issue was first brought to her attention a decade ago, “We had maybe a handful of kids that were dealing with an issue, and I said, ‘We don’t need to bring government into this.’”’ Now, the issue has “exploded,” she added.
“What I have always said is boys go into boys bathroom girls go into girls bathroom,” Haley said.
She additionally rejected the idea of students playing on sports teams designated for a gender other than what they were assigned at birth.
Ron DeSantis
During the same exchange between Haley and DeSantis, the former South Carolina governor called DeSantis a hypocrite and referenced a comment DeSantis made during a 2018 candidate forum.
The Republican governor had said “bathroom wars” weren’t “a good use of our time,” according to a report by The Tampa Bay Times
Now, Florida prohibits trans men and women from using bathrooms and locker rooms intended for the gender opposite the one they were assigned at birth.
“I don’t think men should be going into little girls’ bathrooms,” DeSantis said. “I think it’s wrong and I think we have every right to protect them from that.”