At a campaign event in Iowa on Friday night, Vivek Ramaswamy was confronted by a voter who demanded to know his position on LGBTQ issues. If she thought she'd had a gotcha question, she was in for a real surprise.
“LGBTQ!” she shouted repeatedly.
Ramaswamy, who has never been one to shy away from a question, offered the woman the floor to ask her question.
"LGBTQ is a serious situation in this world today. There are children that get bullied because they are gay, they're lesbians, they are transgender [....] What is your stance on LGBTQ?”
Ramaswamy decided to "go into level of depth" that he doesn't usually go into on the campaign trail out of respect for the woman’s question.
“LGBTQIA... there's so many letters, they've just added a plus at the end," he said. "That's where we are now. What's going on? So, the same movement, because if we're gonna call that one thing was let's play it fair, the same movement that said that the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born—that was the premise of the gay rights movement for it to count as a civil right—that movement is now saying that your own biological sex is totally fluid over the course of your life. You can't believe those things.”
Ramaswamy continued: “And by the way, let's think about the feminist—the women's rights movement in this country, which said there's many ways to be a woman: You can have long hair, short hair, you can have wear a skirt, you can wear jeans—now says that ‘Oh if actually, you want to behave a certain way, that means you're a man.' So I think that the hypocrisies ]go all the way down. And I'll tell you what's going on. You can't believe both of those things at the same time, if you're operating according to principles of sheer logic. But you can if you're adopting a faith—a cult-like belief system.”
Ramaswamy went on to call transgenderism a mental health disorder, which the woman was clearly not thrilled with, even though there’s no reason to believe she didn’t expect such a response from him. She appeared to want to walk out of the event, but never quite made it. But he continued by citing the stories of well-known detransitioners who are now both in their 20s who were butchered as young teens. Their lives have forever been ruined because they were led down the path of transgenderism instead of receiving the mental health treatment they should have been given.
"This is what's wrong in this country. We will look back at this and say this was barbaric that we allowed this to happen in this country. That is not compassion. That is cruelty."
Related: WATCH: Vivek Ramaswamy Destroys CNN Host for Pathetic Gotcha Question About Trump
"So my view is this," Vivek continued. "If you're an adult, you're free to live your life however you want, as long as you're not hurting somebody else. If you're a man, you can dress how you want; if you're a woman, you can dress how you want, identify how you want. We're a free country, and I'm not going to stop you. But kids are not the same as adults, and we have to protect our children. And I want to go further than that. We can't change the way that women and men compete in sports. We can't do that. We can allow you to live your life the way you want to. But we can't change the way that we operate in our own life."
The sports issue was one where the woman and Ramaswamy had some agreement.
"That's different," she admitted -- and I kid you not, she and Vivek fist-bumped and high-fived each other.
You should really watch the entire exchange, because there's a lot more to it.
A protestor came to my event in Iowa last night. I gave her the mic. And then something surprising happened. pic.twitter.com/rKM1FPYPjS
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 23, 2023
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