From Pronoun “Jokes” to Weird Animal Metaphors, the RNC Was Full of Harmful and Cringey Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric

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The 2024 Republican National Convention has come and gone, leaving in its wake reports of a Grindr outage, a blown kiss from Hulk Hogan to Donald Trump, and a truly staggering, beyond embarrassing amount of transphobia.

Over the course of the past week, Republicans from across the country gathered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to confirm their ticket for the 2024 election: former president Trump and newly-selected VP pick J.D. Vance. But no modern GOP gathering would be complete without a heaping helping of anti-trans virtue signaling from a diverse array of besuited white cishet people, each of them vying for the biggest crowd reaction as they trotted out their not-so-tight five like it was Open Mic Night at the anti-LGBTQ+ comedy club.

Given that the Republican party has staked its entire future on criminalizing the existence of trans people, the speakers’ steady stream of transphobia was a grim but unsurprising reminder of what a second Trump would mean for LGBTQ+ rights. But those speeches were also — as I believe The Kids say — hecking cringe. If the RNC is a bellwether for the state of modern conservatism, Republicans will truly never beat the “one joke” allegations.

We know our readers, like us, are gluttons for punishment (and not always in the fun way), so we’ve rounded up five contenders for the most eye-rolling, teeth-gritting instances of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric at the RNC below.

“We were richer, inflation was low, and there were two genders.” – Matt Gaetz

The Florida congressman barely made the cut for this list, and only because most of his competition was even less inspired than this lazy “joke.” Referring to “better” times during Trump’s first (and so far only) term in elected office, Gaetz carefully elided the question of who exactly got richer under Trump — though given the setting, “we” was, in fact, the appropriate pronoun. How’s that for grammatical irony?

“Donald Trump doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight, Black or white, or what gender you are.” –Richard Grenell

The ex-ambassador to Germany and Trump’s former Acting Director of National Intelligence gets extra points for this little bit of wishful thinking, solely because of its awe-inducing quisling factor. Though he was once a “Never Trumper” prior to Trump’s election in 2016, the openly gay Grenell has since fallen in line with MAGA world, using his own identity to run cover for Trump — who, in his first term, enacted more anti-LGBTQ+ policies than any previous U.S. administration, according to the Fenway Institute. There’s a special kind of secondhand embarrassment one feels watching a gay man cozy up to far-right actors around the world, while openly lying about how his political meal ticket isn’t homophobic in the slightest. Sorry Grenell, but Trump and Vance seem to actually care quite a bit! It’s almost like they’re running on an entire platform designed to strip people of rights based on their gender and sexual orientation!

“Back in Montana, we know the difference between a bull and a cow.” –Steve Daines

Whoever told Montana Sen. Steve Daines that he could get cheap applause by simply referencing (and misgendering) trans women accidentally gave us one of the most unintentionally amusing moments of the entire RNC. In the middle of his speech, Daines took a detour to indignantly invoke the specter of “boys in girls’ sports,” but received only a smattering of boos from the crowd instead of the thunderous horror he clearly hoped for. He also had to face down a complete lack of reaction to his accusation that Democrats “don’t even know what a woman is.”

After a deer-in-headlights moment of waiting for a chorus of boos that never came, Daines did rally for a classic, folksy farming metaphor to affirm his anti-trans bona fides. Naturally, Daines himself was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Montana’s fourth-largest city, and spent 15 years as a white-collar executive before running for Congress; his good old-fashioned fake appeal to a farm life he has never experienced arguably makes Daines the only real Republican on this list.

“They promised normalcy and gave us transgender visibility day on Easter Sunday.” — Marjorie Taylor Greene

It simply wouldn’t be a GOP roundup here at Them if we didn’t check in on Greene, the cartoon villain who made me unable to abbreviate Magic: the Gathering in chats to my friends without clarification. Surprising nobody, the Georgia representative is still mad about a four-month-old fake controversy, accusing Joe Biden himself of conspiring to make Trans Day of Visibility coincide with Easter Sunday 2024. Nobody can ever say Marjorie doesn’t care about U.S. industry: She wants every factory in the country manufacturing outrage as efficiently as possible.

“My name is Tim Sheehy. Those are also my pronouns.” –Tim Sheehy

Sitting atop this list is a late contender for “most baffling attempt at standup comedy by a political candidate.” In fairness, Sheehy’s opening line did earn him some extended “woos” from the audience, but we have to wonder what they thought the joke was. Sheehy, who is currently running for one of Montana’s Senate seats, clearly thought that this was a real banger line — but honey, babygirl, we’re already halfway to convincing John McEntee to get on estradiol already. This bit is not going to get you the kind of online attention you’re hoping for. Or will it?

“I’ve been a he/she for 38 years,” Sheehy went on, mispronouncing his own name, “and I can promise you going to elementary school in the ’80s with that name was not fun.” Way to learn the wrong lesson from gendered bullying, Tim! Is it too late to go back in time and pick on this guy a little harder?

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