Nikki Haley Appears to Blame Teen Suicide on Trans Kids in Girls Locker Rooms

CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed Nikki Haley when the Republican 2024 presidential candidate appeared to blame high suicide rates among teenage girls on the presence of transgender girls in locker rooms.

The former South Carolina governor was in Iowa on Sunday night for a town hall moderated by Tapper, who asked Haley to weigh in on the ongoing debate over the definition of the term “woke.” Haley replied with an exasperated tangent about transgenderism in American society, especially among young people.

There’s a lot of things. You want to start with biological boys playing in girl sports. That’s one thing. The fact we have gender pronoun classes in the military now. All these things that are pushing what a small minority want on the majority of Americans, it’s too much.

The idea that we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports, it is the women’s issue of our time. My daughter ran track in high school. I don’t even know how I would have that conversation with her. How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker room? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.

We should be growing strong girls, confident girls. Then you go and you talk about building a strong military. How are you going to build a morale and strong military when you’re doing gender pronoun classes?

The comments by Haley come amid the ongoing uproar by conservatives over businesses and institutions trying to work with transgender figures and be more LGBTQ inclusive.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently noted an increasing trend of suicidal thoughts among young women in recent years, but they did not produce evidence backing Haley’s claim that trans kids are the root cause. Furthermore, Tapper pushed back on Haley by invoking the Trevor Project , which finds that 41 percent of LGBTQ young people seriously considered suicide in the past year, and that anti-LGBTQ movements have been detrimental to their mental health.

Tapper confronted Haley on her claim by asking if there is  “room for the humanity of these young people in this debate?” Haley countered by arguing that transgenderism has “overtaken the entire conversation, and that’s not fair to the rest of our kids.”

I think there’s a humane way to do it. Let’s get them the help, the therapy, whatever they need so that they can feel better and not be suicidal. But don’t go and cause all these other kids to feel like the pressures on them. They don’t deserve that and they don’t need that either…I want everybody to live the way they want to live. But stop pushing your views on everybody else.

Watch above via CNN.