Rudy Giuliani wants New Yorkers to believe that a plan to enroll toddlers in free childcare is secretly a scheme to make them transgender and turn them against their parents. There is nothing in the actual policy to support that. He said it anyway, at length, on his web show.
What Giuliani Actually Said
On an episode of his show, America's Mayor Live, Giuliani went after Mamdani's plan to expand pre-K, misstating the program's starting age as six months (it actually begins at two years old) before spiraling into explicit, invented scenarios about what toddlers would supposedly be taught.
Did you ever think of being a girl, kid? Not bad being a girl. Come on, it doesn't hurt to chop your penis off.
Rudy Giuliani
He went on to say schools would bring in "transvestites" to lecture children and insisted kids would be encouraged to change their gender without telling their parents. None of this describes any actual New York City policy. Giuliani rounded out the rant with the usual grab bag of insults, calling Mamdani a communist who has "never had a job" and wants "free everything."
The Program He's Actually Attacking
What Giuliani is describing bears no resemblance to what Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul actually announced: an expansion of the city's free pre-K system to include two-year-olds, funded through the state, with just over 2,000 new spots created.
Mamdani campaigned on universal childcare for children from six weeks to five years old, a promise estimated to cost roughly $6 billion a year once fully built out. "The overwhelming demand for 2-K shows what families across the city have known for years: New Yorkers need free, universal childcare, and they need it now," Mamdani said when the expansion was announced, adding that the administration plans to keep growing it "until every family that wants a seat can get one." There is no gender curriculum attached to any of it.
Mamdani's Real LGBTQ+ Record
Giuliani's rant isn't happening in a vacuum. Mamdani has been a frequent right-wing target since well before he took office, partly for his left politics and partly for his open support of trans New Yorkers. As a state legislator, he backed repealing the "Walking While Trans" law, cosponsored the Gender Recognition Act, and voted for the state's shield law protecting providers of gender-affirming care. As mayor, he opened Pride Month with a "Trans Rights Are Human Rights" campaign and pledged tens of millions toward gender-affirming care and an Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.
That record has a real gap in it, too. Advocates and journalists covering the city budget have noted that promised gender-affirming care funding was missing from earlier budget drafts, and a new city-backed clinic that did open won't treat anyone under 19, in line with a federal executive order restricting such care for minors. It's a reminder that symbolic solidarity and delivered policy aren't always the same thing, even from an ostensibly friendly mayor.
MQ's Take
Giuliani's rant follows a script Republicans have leaned on for years: take a mundane, popular social program and recast it as a secret gender-identity pipeline. It has never held up to scrutiny, and it doesn't here either. Teachers can't make a kid transgender any more than they can make a kid gay. What this kind of rhetoric does accomplish is keeping trans kids and their families in the political crosshairs, whether or not any actual policy touches their lives at all.
Sources: them., LGBTQ Nation, The Advocate
Cover photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
