Vance Tells Rogan: Teens Become Trans to Get Into Ivy League

Senator JD Vance of Ohio criticized what he called “gender transition craziness,” spoke dismissively of women he claimed were “celebrating” their abortions and said that studies “connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics” during a three-hour episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that was released on Thursday.

Mr. Vance criticized transgender and nonbinary people at length during the conversation, saying that he would not be surprised if he and his running mate, former President Donald J. Trump, won what he called “the normal gay guy vote.” And he suggested that children in upper-middle-class white families saw becoming trans as a way to improve their odds of getting into Ivy League colleges.

“If you are a, you know, 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,” Mr. Vance told Mr. Rogan. “But the one way that those people can participate in the D.E.I. bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”

Mr. Vance hit on a number of culture-war flashpoints and conservative cultural grievances as he spoke for more than three hours on Mr. Rogan’s immensely popular podcast, the latest in a series of interviews that he and Mr. Trump have done on podcasts aimed at young men. Mr. Rogan’s show is likely to be one of Mr. Vance’s most-watched campaign appearances: Mr. Rogan has 14.5 million followers on Spotify and 17.6 million on YouTube, many of them young men.

At one point, Mr. Vance suggested that liberal women were publicly celebrating their abortions — “baking birthday cakes and posting about it” on social media — a notion Mr. Rogan pushed back on.

“I think there’s very few people that are celebrating,” Mr. Rogan said.

Mr. Rogan challenged Mr. Vance on abortion rights.