J.D. Vance Accused of Hypocrisy for Changing Own Name but Opposing Trans

Donald Trump’s newly-announced running mate J.D. Vance is facing allegations of hypocrisy for having changed his own name—but opposing rights for transgender people.

The Ohio senator and Hillbilly Elegy author has been consistently conservative on transgender issues, including introducing a bill which would remove “X” as an option on passports’ gender identity section and an attempt to criminalize providing hormones or gender-affirming surgery to minors.

But critics highlighted a little-known part of his biography: that Vance chose to change his surname while at Yale University, which they said made his opposition to allowing minors to transition a double standard.

Vance has been open about his troubled childhood, making it the core of his narrative in the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy. But less noticed is how he made his own decision about how to be addressed, changing his name from James Hamel while at Yale Law School to J.D. Vance.

He chose Vance because it was the name of his maternal grandmother, Bonnie Blanton Vance, who played the key role in his upbringing while his mother battled addiction. Vance was born James Donald Bowman; his father Donald Bowman was his mother’s first husband. But he walked out and they divorced when Vance was six.

She remarried twice and her third husband, Bob Hamel, adopted her son James, making him James Hamel. At the same time, his mother changed his middle name to David, erasing the connection to his biological father. But her third marriage ended and Vance was completely estranged from both his biological and legal father by the time he was a teenager, leading to his decision to take the name Vance at Yale. It was he wrote, “finally, the same name as the family to which I belonged.”

J.D. Vance smiles in his senior portrait. — J.D. Vance, known as James Hamel at the time, was vice president of his senior class at Middletown High School in 2003. Here he’s photographed in his senior portrait for the yearbook.

Classmates.com

Among those calling that choice to not identify by his birth or legal names hypocrisy were parents of transgender people, including Threads user juhneenhow who posted, “Dear red hats: If you won’t call my daughter by her chosen name you don’t get to call him JD Vance, it’s James Bowman.”

Another Threads user, sydney_meditates posted, “‘Good for me, Not for thee’ seems to be his MO.”

And user arasmussss also posted, “Celebrities and politicians using stage names are fine, but how dare trans people have chosen names.”

The charge was also made by Brad Walsh, who posted, “James Bowman, better known after a string of name changes as JD Vance, doesn’t believe identity is fluid… unless it’s his identity, of course.The identifying information on the birth certificate assigned to him when his brain was not yet fully formed turned out to be inadequate to describe him as his life and mind progressed, so he changed it several times.But you shouldn’t be able to do that. According to ‘JD Vance.””

Vance’s voting record is likely to form a central part of Democratic attacks on him, particularly his pursuit of ultra-conservative positions on culture war issues including transgender rights and access to abortion, which polls suggest are unpopular with the key voting block of suburban women.

As well as seeking a national ban on gender-affirming care procedures for minors, in October 2023, he decried a third option on passports of “X.” “The last thing the State Department should be doing is wasting its time and your tax dollars pushing far-left gender ideology,” Vance said in a statement while pushing a bill he called the “Passport Sanity Act.” “There are only two genders — passports issued by the United States government should recognize that simple fact. I am proud to introduce this bill to restore some sanity in our federal bureaucracy.”

In 2022, he commented that an increase in people changing their pronouns was merely a “fad” that was “so weird.”

“Why not just say ‘Mr.’ and ‘Ms.’? That’s what we did when America was still a real country,” he posted to X.