An alleged picture of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) in drag at a Halloween party while in law school has gone viral.

Vance, who has referred to LGBTQ+ people as “groomers” in the past, is wearing a blonde wig, a skirt, and a large necklace in the picture shared by progressive queer influencer Matt Bernstein, which has over 88,000 likes at the moment.

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Yale pediatrics professor Travis Whitfill claimed responsibility for sharing the picture with people who passed it along to Bernstein. Whitfill said that it was taken in 2012, when Vance would have been at Yale Law School and that it was taken by a classmate and shared.

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“It’s from a group chat of Vance’s fellow classmates and is from a friend of a friend,” Whitfill told the Daily Beast. “I believe it was grabbed from Facebook and was taken at a Halloween party.”

Vance’s campaign, the Daily Beast reports, has not denied the authenticity of the picture and didn’t offer any comment on it.

Last year, along with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in the House, Vance introduced legislation in the Senate to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth at the federal level and to make such care more difficult for transgender adults to obtain.

A year prior, Vance expressed his support for so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws prohibiting discussions of sexual orientation and gender identities in schools, writing, “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.” 

Vance spoke out against laws protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination following the 2020 Supreme Court Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which found that anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination is a form of sex-based discrimination. Vance criticized the legal reasoning behind the decision, stating it had resulted in a “betrayal of social conservatives and traditionalists.”

He also opposes the Equality Act, legislation to include sexual orientation and gender identity in federal anti-discrimination laws.

He proposed the “Passport Sanity Act,” which would prohibit the use of “X” gender markers on passports and limit gender options to only male or female.

Update