Nikki Haley, former Governor of South Carolina and current U.S. presidential hopeful, has made a link between transgender students and teenage suicide – despite there being no evidence of correlation between the two.
Her remarks came during a CNN Town Hall on Sunday night, during which Haley discussed abortion rights – she is “unapologetically pro-life” – as well as gun laws, China as a security threat, and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot: “I think it was a terrible day.”
Her remarks on transgender teens came when she was asked by moderator Jake Tapper to define the term “woke.”
“There’s a lot of things,” she began. “I mean, you want to start with biological boys playing in girls’ sports. That’s one thing.”
After listing gender pronoun classes in the military, she circled back to her first point, called it “the women’s issue of our time … how are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year?”
While the percentage she gave was accurate – a recent report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said 30 per cent of female students in 2021 reported that that has seriously considered suicide in the past 12 months – there is no evidence that transgender students contribute to that figure in any way.
The report did note that LGBQ+ students had a higher rate of considering suicide. It also said that creating safe and supportive school and home environments for such students has been shown to lower those numbers.
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