“The queer people have turned their backs on me, and I’m queer, so it’s very painful,” LA resident Tanya Tsikanovsky told LA Fox affiliate KMSP over the weekend as she complained about how being a supporter of Donald Trump has meant losing friends in the LGBTQ+ community.

Tsikanovsky said that she wasn’t always a Republican. In fact, she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. She worked in Iowa with Clinton’s campaign, and she said that she really didn’t like Trump supporters at the time.

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The former Olympian dismissed her critics with the incendiary comment in a new interview.

“I was absolutely that person who would say if you’re a Trump supporter, I don’t want you in my life,” she said.

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But now she regrets her old attitude. She said that she changed her partisanship after campus protests against the Israeli government’s war on Gaza, which she called “appalling.”

“They should have sent in the National Guard as soon as Jewish students were being blocked on campuses,” she said.

That was enough to get her to become a vocal Trump supporter, something that cost her friends right away.

“I had like 50 unfollows right away,” she said about the first time she discussed her support for Trump on Instagram.

Tsikanovsky said that she lost friends on her queer basketball team and longtime friends have turned their backs on her for supporting the extremely anti-LGBTQ+ presidential candidate.

“Ever since I publicly said I was voting for Trump, I am no longer welcome in the [LGBTQ+] social spheres they provide,” she complained. “If there was a birthday party I was invited to, I’m no longer able to attend.”

“I think it’s disgusting someone can push me out of something [like this]. They liked me two weeks ago, and now they don’t, just because I voted for someone.”

“I definitely feel like I’m on an island alone.”

Tsikanovsky accused LGBTQ+ people of being too worried about Trump’s second term. After all, Trump was already president once and it didn’t affect her personally.

“I was a lesbian under the Trump presidency before and my rights haven’t changed,” she said.

“I’m not all of a sudden anti-gay now because I voted for Trump,” she said. “I want to bring humanity to this. The only way we can come together is if we sit together and have hard talks.”

Exit polls – which are a far-from-perfect tool for analyzing voter behavior – showed overwhelming support for Kamala Harris among LGBTQ+ people in this election. They found that 86% of LGBTQ+ people voted Harris and just 13% voted for Trump.

In 2020, post-election polling showed even greater support for Biden than exit polling did among LGBTQ+ people, but such polls have not been released yet in 2024.

The same early exit poll results show that 79% of Jewish Americans voted for Harris. The poll didn’t release any numbers for Jewish American voters in 2020 due to a small sample size.

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