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(from left) Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, October 2025
Mark Carney sat silently as the U.S. president went on an anti-trans diatribe.
President Donald Trump mocked transgender people in front of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose child identifies as nonbinary, during an Oval Office meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that was intended to focus on trade relations but instead became a showcase of Trump’s familiar culture war politics.
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The meeting, held in the presence of reporters, aimed to emphasize renewed cooperation between the two countries, which remain deeply economically intertwined. But as The Independent reported, it “devolved into a political rally disguised as a routine press availability.” Trump repeatedly veered off topic to attack Democrats, the media, and transgender people, boasting that under his leadership, “We have strong borders. We have no men in women’s sports. We’re not going to take your child away and change the sex of your child.”
Related: Donald Trump bizarrely blames transgender rights for looming government shutdown
He went on to claim that Democrats had left America “a dead country” plagued by “men playing in women’s sports and transgender for everybody and windmills all over the place.”
Carney, sitting beside him, did not respond publicly. The contrast was striking: Trump dominated the moment with bluster and provocation, while Carney, having been elected on the promise that he could handle Trump better than his predecessors, remained silent.
Carney’s caution reflected the stakes. More than 77 percent of Canada’s exports go to the United States, and the countries’ trade pact with Mexico comes up for review next year.
Carney and his wife, British-Canadian economist Diana Fox Carney, have four children, one of whom identifies as nonbinary. In 2019, The New Haven Register profiled then-Yale student Sasha Carney, who used they/them pronouns and spoke about the relief of being recognized outside the gender binary when the university introduced a nonbinary gender marker.
Related: Trump and El Salvador's president attack transgender people during White House meeting
Trump’s targeting of transgender and nonbinary people has become a defining feature of his political brand. When he took office in January, he declared through an executive order that transgender people don’t exist as far as the federal government is concerned. He has blamed “transgender operations for everybody” for the ongoing government shutdown, declared before Ireland’s prime minister in March that “everything is transgender,” and mocked trans athletes in a meeting with El Salvador’s president in April, asking if the country allowed “men to box your women.”
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