Byron Donalds LGBTQ Rights Lies Florida

Byron Donalds Said the AMA 'Finally Realized This Is Insanity.' The AMA Told a Reporter That Isn't What It Said.

Campaigning before Florida's GOP primary, Donalds attacked his likely opponent over transgender kids and claimed America's largest doctors' group had come around to his position. The American Medical Association says it still believes families and doctors should decide together.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 18, 2026

Byron Donalds Said the AMA 'Finally Realized This Is Insanity.' The AMA Told a Reporter That Isn't What It Said.

Ahead of Tuesday's Republican primary, Byron Donalds stood at a rally and went after David Jolly, the Democrat he expects to face in Florida's governor race, over transgender kids.

His words:

"David Jolly is somebody who thinks it's still okay for boys to be in girl sports."

And:

"David Jolly still thinks it's okay to transgender kids. This is sick to me."

Then he reached for an authority to back himself up:

"Even the American Medical Association has finally realized that this is insanity. That you do not take the puberty from kids."

That last part is the one worth stopping on, because it's checkable — and somebody checked it.

The AMA Says That Isn't Its Position

Donalds was leaning on New York Times reporting that the AMA had changed its guidance to favor new restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors.

After that story ran, the AMA pushed back. It told The Advocate that it continues to believe parents, families, and medical professionals should decide together when such care is "medically necessary."

That is not "finally realized this is insanity." It is close to the opposite of it: the doctors' group is saying the decision belongs to a family and its physician, which is precisely the arrangement Donalds is campaigning against.

Donalds took a contested news story about a professional body's guidance, flattened it into a total reversal, and put words in the mouth of the largest association of doctors in the country — in front of a crowd, days before an election.

What Jolly Actually Says

The second thing worth checking is whether Donalds described his opponent's position accurately. He didn't.

Jolly's stated position, per The Advocate's reporting, has several parts:

He opposes athletes assigned male at birth competing in female sports.
He opposes sweeping government restrictions on youth sports participation.
He supports parental rights on gender-affirming medical decisions.

On the sports question he drew the line at kids' rec leagues: "if a 10- or 12-year-old soccer league … has a coed team, I don't think the governor should be throwing a flag."

So the man Donalds described as thinking "it's still okay for boys to be in girl sports" has said he doesn't think that. The disagreement between them is about whether the governor of Florida should be personally policing a 10-year-olds' soccer league.

That's a real policy difference. Donalds could have argued it honestly. He chose a version that wasn't true instead.

"This Is Sick to Me"

Set the factual problems aside for a second and look at what's being said about actual children.

Donalds is running to be governor of a state with a lot of transgender kids in it. He would be their governor too. He described the medical care some of them and their doctors and parents have decided on as "sick."

The care itself has already been stripped away from many of those families. In a separate move, Trump's Medicare and Medicaid agency cut off Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care for trans kids — meaning the lowest-income families lost the option regardless of what their doctor recommended.

So the practical situation for a poor family in Florida with a trans kid is this: the coverage is gone, and the man favored to become their governor calls what their doctor advised "sick."

The Habit

This is not the first time Donalds has said something in a campaign setting that didn't survive a fact-check. PolitiFact previously rated his claim about data centers and electric rates — another case of a confident, checkable assertion aimed at voters who had no easy way to verify it in the moment.

The pattern is not sloppiness. It's a bet: that the applause line travels farther than the correction. In a primary campaign, it usually does.

Which is why the correction is worth writing down. The American Medical Association has not decided that families and doctors making a medical decision together is insanity. It said the opposite, on the record, to a reporter who asked.