Mary Margaret Olohan, who has been covering the trans issue for years, told American Family Radio the hot-button issue went mostly ignored by the Republican Party during the 2020 presidential election. There was a big fear four years ago, she said, of Republicans and conservatives being labeled “anti-gay” or “homophobic” for taking a stand.
“On the Left, we've always seen an understanding of where this issue is heading and a very heavy focus on pushing these types of topics,” Olohan told show host Jenna Ellis. “But on the right, for a while there was this fear.”
For her Daily Wire story, Olohan said she interviewed more than a dozen people associated with the Trump-Vance ticket, including Donald Trump, Jr. He told her he has two daughters, who are both athletes, so he understood what was at stake for female athletes.
“As a father of two daughters, who are also stellar athletes,” Trump told the Daily Wire reporter, “I immediately realized that biological men competing in women’s sports wasn’t about being inclusive, it was about being invasive.”
Trump, Jr. had even raised the men-vs-women issue back in 2019, in a CBS News interview, the Daily Wire story pointed out.
Trump Jr.'s influence inside a second Trump administration is important considering the Biden administration wants to reinvent Title IX, the 1970s non-discrimination law, to include male athletes, too.
Father’s arrest exposed sexual assault scandal
The fear of being labeled “homophobic” has gone away, Olohan was told, because of news-making incidents that have exposed the trans movement’s dangerous and twisted ideology.
One of the examples Olohan cited, which the Republican Party couldn’t ignore, was the sexual assault scandal in Loudoun County, Virginia. In that wealthy, liberal suburb of Washington, D.C., Loudoun County Schools hid a sexual assault investigation from parents because the school district was introducing a liberal gender identity policy at the time.
School officials were also ignoring the outcry from parents, who expressed concern about safety and privacy, even though a skirt-wearing teen boy had assaulted a female student in the restroom. Not only was the assault covered up, the boy was quietly moved to a second high school, where he assaulted a second girl.
In her AFR interview, Olohan pointed out a fellow Daily Wire reporter, Luke Rosiak, exposed the scandal after interviewing Scott Smith (pictured at left), the father of the first girl who was assaulted. Smith came to Rosiak’s attention after the father was arrested for disorderly conduct at a 2021 school board meeting.
“That absolutely contributed to the parental uprising in Loudon County, and all over the country, which led to Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia because he listened to parents,” Olohan recounted.
Gov. Youngkin later granted Smith, the father, a pardon from criminal charges of obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct.
Gaines got public’s attention
A second related issue that could not go ignored, Olohan said, was the controversy of male athletes competing against women.
The people interviewed by Olohan credited Riley Gaines, the University of Kentucky swimmer, for being one of the first female athletes to bring public attention to the issue. Gaines spoke out after competing against Will Thomas, a male swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania team.
Thomas, who dressed and undressed in front of female teammates, had competed on the men’s team until his senior year at UPenn when he became “Lia” on the women’s team.
Thomas went on to crush collegiate swimming records and won gold in the 500-year freestyle at the NCAA championship.
Back in her Daily Wire story, a political source told Olohan the transgender issue “snuck up on” politicians and their staff members, and it was activists who have brought attention to it.
Brent Buchanan, a pollster interviewed by Olohan, predicted the issue will now surprise Democrats who might be underestimating how voters feel about it.
Pushing back on transgender ideology is “very effective” at reaching female voters, he said, citing polling in a current congressional race.
“Overall, it’s really an issue of fairness, not necessarily of sexuality,” he told The Daily Wire.
Editor's Note: American Family Radio is a division of the American Family Association, the parent organization of the American Family News Network, which operates AFN.net.
