President Trump jokingly impersonated a transgender athlete while discussing the hot-button topic — while joking about it would get him “in trouble” with his wife, first lady Melania Trump.
Trump addressed the controversy surrounding transgender athletes competing in women’s sports during his commencement ceremony speech at the University of Alabama on Thursday night.
“The greatest is like weightlifting, you ever see the weightlifting? Where they have a record that wasn’t broken in 18 years,” he said before asking if he should break out his impersonation of the athletes despite his wife’s warning.
“Should I imitate him? My wife gets very upset when I do this. She says ‘Darling, it’s not presidential,’ I say yeah, but people like it,” Trump added
The commander in chief again asked the crowd inside the Coleman Coliseum if he should “do it.”
“All right, I’m in trouble when I get home, but that’s OK, what the hell. I’ve been in lots of trouble before,” he joked.
The 78-year-old president created a scenario about a cisgender female weightlifter at a competition having trouble lifting an “eighth of an ounce” of weight before a “transitioned person” follows up.
“Mom, I’m gonna do it,” Trump said while making high-pitched noises and showing off a unique form to lift the barbell.
In the made-up scenario, the cisgender female failed to clear the lift.
“Then a guy comes along or a gal or whatever,” Trump said. “A transitioned person and he was a failed weightlifter as a male, but he comes along 206 pounds, they put the little thing on and just ‘boom, boom, boom.’”
Trump showed off the simplicity of the transgender competitor, adding the athlete would break the record by “119 pounds.”
“That’s not right,” he said.
On Monday, the Trump administration determined the University of Pennsylvania violated federal civil rights laws by allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.
The Ivy League school broke Title IX rules by “denying women equal opportunities by permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.”
UPenn was given 10 days to “voluntarily resolve these violations or risk a referral to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) for enforcement proceedings.”
“Little girls who look up to Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan can find hope in today’s action – the Trump Administration will not allow male athletes to invade female private spaces or compete in female categories,” Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement.
“UPenn has a choice to make: do the right thing for its female students and come into full compliance with Title IX immediately or continue to advance an extremist political project that violates federal antidiscrimination law and puts UPenn’s federal funding at risk,” he added.
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