GOP lawmaker who claimed trans people “harm children” guilty of harming children

If protecting children were truly the goal, lawmakers would focus on evidence-based policies and real risks.

RNC, republican

For years, Republican lawmakers have insisted that trans people represent a danger to children, repeating the claim so often it has hardened into dogma on the right. Now one of those lawmakers is facing charges for allegedly harming children.

South Carolina state Rep. RJ May (R), the anti-LGBTQ+ “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty’s 2023 “Legislator of the Year,” pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 17 years for distributing child sex abuse material, including images of grown men raping children. A grim reminder that moral panics are often less about protection than projection.

After being arrested and indicted in June, May was suspended from his state congressional office and then resigned in disgrace. He originally planned to represent himself in court despite not having a law degree and asked the judge to throw out the warrant used to search his home, laptop, and mobile devices (which contained no CSAM, investigators said), as well as evidence that he had flown to Colombia to film himself having sex with three underage girls.

Then, his lawyer claimed that May had been framed by his political enemies. However, May eventually pleaded guilty in an agreement to drop five of the other charges against him. Though the federal government sought a 20-year prison sentence, May requested a shorter sentence followed by house arrest at his family’s Virginia farm.

LBGTQ Nation

This pattern has become uncomfortably familiar. Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric routinely collapses under scrutiny, revealing that its loudest proponents are often shielding themselves from accountability while manufacturing enemies. The result is real harm: trans people targeted, families torn apart, and children used as rhetorical props rather than protected as human beings.

What makes cases like this especially corrosive is not just the alleged abuse, but the way it exposes how hollow the rhetoric always was. If protecting children were truly the goal, lawmakers would focus on evidence-based policies and real risks. Instead, they choose scapegoats that provide them with political clout until the spotlight turns back on them.