Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg was recorded as recently as last year referring to transgender people as “he, she, or it” and “some guy in a dress” as he chided 2020 Democrats for focusing on transgender issues.
“If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people,” Bloomberg said on March 21, 2019 at a Bermuda Business Development Agency forum in Manhattan.
Bloomberg went on to argue that the Democratic Party has rapidly become more progressive and is now “so far left” that “we are focusing on a lot of things that have little relevance to people.”
“And so you can understand where somebody like Trump comes from,” Bloomberg said at the forum last year, which took place before he announced his presidential run. “You can understand when you look at the Democratic Party, they are so far left that two years ago there was nobody on their side who would take these positions, and today virtually all the candidates for president of the Democratic Party are so progressive. I don’t know what progressive means.”
A spokesperson for Bloomberg said Tuesday that the former New York City mayor “understands that the transgender community has been under attack for decades and the advance of rights has not been equal.”
“Mike is running to defeat Donald Trump and reverse the many policies he has implemented that attack the rights of the transgender community,” the campaign representative said.
Three years before last year’s comments, Bloomberg made the point that voters in the Midwest are skeptical of transgender rights, such as being able to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify.
“If you want to know if somebody is a good salesman, give him the job of going to the Midwest and picking a town and selling to that town the concept that some man wearing a dress should be in a locker room with their daughter,” Bloomberg said in December, 2016 at an event at the University of Oxford in England.
Bloomberg last month released his LGBT policy platform, which includes passing the Equality Act, ensuring health care for transgender individuals, and fighting violence against transgender women.
Two gay leaders in the fashion world, former “Project Runway” judge Tim Gunn and designer and television presenter Isaac Mizrahi, have endorsed Bloomberg and serve on the candidate’s National LGBTQ+ Leadership Council.