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By Andrew Stanton
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Senator JD Vance's former friend Sofia Nelson revealed why the pair's friendship ended.
Vance, an Ohio Republican, was announced earlier this week as Donald Trump's running mate in the 2024 presidential election, as the GOP formally nominated the former president as their party's presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a crucial battleground state.
In the days following his announcement, Vance's positions on key political and cultural issues have garnered national attention and intense scrutiny from Democrats. Vance has positioned himself as a staunchly conservative senator and close ally to Trump since he was elected to the Senate in 2022.
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But years before launching his political career, Vance was a staunch Trump critic, frequently condemning the former president during his first term in office and voting for independent candidate Evan McMullin in the 2016 election.
A college friend of Vance, Sofia Nelson, who is transgender and uses they/them pronouns, weighed in on Vance's stance on LGBTQ+ rights in comments made to The New York Times.
Nelson said they were once friends with Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, and that the senator brought them home-baked treats when they received top surgery.
However, the friendship ended after Vance after he voiced support for an Arkansas bill that would ban gender-affirming healthcare for minors in 2021, Nelson told the Times.
"It hurt my feelings when he started saying hateful things about trans people," Nelson told the Times.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign and Nelson, through the Neighborhood Defender Service, for comment via email.
Nelson's remarks drew attention on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Activist Alejandra Caraballo shared the except from the Times, adding, "JD Vance and his wife were previously close friends with a trans classmate at Yale Law. That all changed in 2021 as he eyed running for senate in Ohio. Vance will throw his friends, family, and loved ones under the bus for political power."
The post has been viewed more than 800,000 times.
As a senator, Vance introduced legislation that would ban gender-affirming care for minors in July 2023, known as the Protect Children's Innocence Act.
"Under no circumstances should doctors be allowed to perform these gruesome, irreversible operations on underage children. With this legislation, we have an opportunity to save countless young Americans from a lifetime of suffering and regret," he wrote in a statement announcing the legislation.
He also introduced a bill that would prevent U.S. passports from having an unspecified "X" designation for a person's gender, rather than a "M" or "F" for male or female. He described efforts from the State Department to include the designation as the agency "wasting its time and your tax dollars pushing far-left gender ideology."
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a leading LGBTQ+ rights organization, criticized Vance's alleged "history of spewing anti-LGBTQ+ vitriol" in a statement issued after the announcement he would be Trump's running mate.
"He defended the dangerous 'groomer' smear campaign against Democratic politicians for their support of LGBTQ+ people, said he 'strongly disagreed' that LGBTQ+ people should be protected from discrimination, railed against the Equality Act, calling its landmark nondiscrimination provisions 'an assault,' and argued that victims of rape and incest should be barred from accessing abortion care," the statement reads.
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