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Another day in this election, another weird claim about trans people.
On Wednesday, J.D. Vance sat down for a long interview with Joe Rogan, doing his usual schtick of making a litany of absurd claims, among them that high school students are “becoming trans” to secure an advantage in the notoriously competitive Ivy League admission process, explaining it this way:
“If you are a middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like, obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids.”
Sigh… okay, so, let’s all take a breath and put on our thinking caps.
For any trans person or someone who has a trans loved one, the first question that comes to mind is: how on earth would this be worth it?
Because even in the most progressive areas of the country, trans youth and their families still face intense cultural obstacles. Even where non-discrimination laws exist for trans people, anti-trans sentiment doesn’t simply disappear.
Any trans person can tell you that even in places where 99% of folks have no issues with trans people, all it takes is one transphobic person to cause trouble.
And they do! Let’s be clear about that: anti-trans harassment and discrimination happen everywhere in the United States. Simply residing in a progressive place doesn’t insulate trans people from bigotry.
Last month, Jo Yurcaba of NBC News reported on the CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, data gathered last year but published about three weeks ago.
In regards to trans high school students, the data is predictably horrifying. About a quarter of trans and questioning students surveyed had attempted suicide in the past year, 40 percent reported being bullied, and about 70 percent reported persistent sadness or hopelessness.
Bottom line: it really ain’t great to be a trans youth in the current climate.
So, even if a non-trans high school student were presenting as “trans” to obtain a mythological advantage (more on that in a sec), they would quickly find out that transphobia still very much exists.
I just can’t see how it would be worth it. It doesn’t make sense.
Okay, so, what if a non-trans student didn’t publicly come out as "trans” but lied on their college application about being trans in order to gain that mythological advantage?
That’s a hell of a roll of the dice, isn’t it?
A family would basically be betting that their college applicant could keep their false representation a secret, limited only to the admissions committee, risking all the consequences that would come with any future revelation that they lied on their application.
That doesn’t make sense, either.
But here’s the kicker to all this: trans youth are woefully underrepresented at Ivy League universities and clearly don’t have an admissions advantage when applying.
That CDC national survey also reported that about 3.3 percent of high school students identify as transgender.
Harvard’s entering freshmen class this year has 0.7 percent trans students, a fifth of the national average.
UPenn’s entering class is 1.0 percent.
Princeton’s entering class is 1.4 percent.
Dartmouth’s entering class is 1.6 percent.
Brown and Cornell have neither publicly-available, official statistics nor student surveys on trans students matriculating this year.
The entering classes of Yale and Columbia are tied for the highest rate of trans students among the Ivies: two percent, nearly half the national average of high school trans students.
Most of these college stats were gathered from student surveys conducted by campus newspapers. I was unable to find any evidence that these institutions factor in an aspiring matriculant’s gender identity when considering their application.
Maybe a top university outside the Ivies does?
Stanford has no publicly available data on this, so I called their admissions office, and after explaining my inquiry, a polite but understandably incredulous staffer told me:
“We don’t collect that information during the admissions process.”
They directly confirmed that trans applicants have no advantage.
Not wanting to waste anyone else’s time on this—or mine—I left it there. It’s abundantly clear that being transgender offers no clear advantage when applying to our nation’s top universities.
But I also have to ask: why shouldn’t being transgender make an aspiring applicant stand out a bit?
Being trans is a rare life experience which has constantly been at the center of American public life over the past several years and certainly shows no signs of going away in the national discourse.
If a college education is meant to include developing social skills for their future place in the workforce and learning from other students of widely different backgrounds, doesn’t it seem reasonable that all college students, regardless of gender identity, benefit from having trans classmates?
I feel the same way about conservative students. Having young people of varying political backgrounds and viewpoints in good faith conversation with each other is a necessary thing for civic engagement and professional development, and it should be encouraged.
It reminds me of a heartwarming conversation I read recently between two friends who met each other as law school students, one of them a trans progressive and the other a non-trans conservative.
The conservative had a written a memoir in which he described his trans friend in a manner that he realized might not accurately reflect their identity. He wrote the friend an email apologizing for the error.
The trans friend wrote him back with a kind reply, offering grace and understanding and good faith.
The two signed off their respective emails with love, reflective of a long friendship that was built on trust, despite their divergent political views.
The conservative in this story is J.D. Vance, and his trans friend—whom he would later betray by selling out to to horrific anti-trans views—is Sofia Nelson.
So, maybe this expectation of sociocultural exchange doesn’t guarantee good outcomes, especially when one of the parties throws away their value system for fame and power.
It’s almost as though J.D. Vance knows what he’s saying about trans people is flat-out wrong and hateful and counterproductive, and he’s decided that betraying people he claims to love—let alone an entire vulnerable community—is worth it.
And that does beg the conclusion: if this is how he’s used his Ivy League degree, it probably makes sense he imagines anyone else would lie to get one.
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