By Joe Marusak, The Charlotte Observer
The founder of Gays for Trump is drawing fire for anti-transgender comments he’s made in his bid for a seat in the North Carolina House.
Boykin has entered the fray as the lone Republican candidate for the House seat in the strongly Democratic 58th District in the Greensboro area. Current U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, D-Charlotte, once held the seat, and it’s now occupied by Democrat Amos Quick, who ran unopposed.
Boykin told The Daily Beast in an article published Sunday that he believed transgender soldiers are “mentally challenged,” too expensive for the military and “would be our weakest link.”
Peter Boykin is running for North Carolina's House of Representatives. He also believes that transgender soldiers are "mentally challenged" and too expensive for the military https://t.co/u0o8y9th8T
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 12, 2018
President Donald Trump’s proposed ban on transgender soldiers was not discriminatory but supportive of the military, Boykin told The Daily Beast.
“It’s a business move, not a transphobic move,” he said. “This is a president that is probably still friends with Caitlyn Jenner.”
Boykin previously told the Triad City Beat newspaper that he supported Trump’s push to ban transgender people from the military because “it was more of an economic thing to make sure the military didn’t pay for the transgender surgeries, which are elective.”
Posted one reader: “After reading this article, it’s clear that Boykin has a lot of screwball ideas about a lot topics. Being a traitor to ‘his own people’ is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Wrote GayRVA.com, an LGBTQ publication in Richmond, Va.: Boykin “is a ‘drop the T’ advocate who founded the sketchiest right-wing organization ever to come out of the gay community. So let’s be real – regardless of our support for his civil rights as a gay man, his being elected to North Carolina’s state House of Representatives would be an extraordinarily bad thing.”
However, given the heavily Democratic district that Boykin is running in, “it’s an open question as to whether he has any real chance of getting elected to state legislature,” the publication said.
This article was originally published by The Charlotte Observer.