In April 2025, Rep. Diana Harshbarger sat for a half-hour interview with FAME Ministries, a local Christian group in her East Tennessee district. Near the end, the interviewer brought up Democrats holding signs during President Trump's address to Congress the month before — the night Rep. Al Green of Texas was escorted out of the chamber for heckling.

Harshbarger said she'd wanted to go grab a few of the signs, "but Al Green was over here with his cane."

"And I'm like gosh dangit boy, put that — he does not need that cane. That cane is a prop. I swear it's not real. And I'm wondering, one my colleagues said take the, screw the gold part off of it and see if there's a gun in there, and I'm like, I don't know about that, man. He's just weird Al."

Three things in one breath: a 77-year-old Black man called "boy," his mobility aid dismissed as a prop, and a colleague's suggestion that he might be smuggling a gun inside it — repeated approvingly enough to be worth repeating.

What Green said

Green held a press conference the following Tuesday. He did not spend it defending his cane.

"It wasn't said to indicate that you are youthful," he said of the word "boy." "It was said to demean, to degrade, to denigrate."

He said he had heard people call his father that when he was a child.

"Friends, it's not about Al Green. It's about whether Black people in this society are going to allow slurs such as this to be normalized. We cannot allow the normalization of these kinds of slurs."

On the cane, he said simply that it gives him stability when he walks — and that no, there is no weapon in it, though he'd use it to defend himself if he had to.

He also made a point of not asking for an apology. "I never ask people to apologize," Green said. "I ask people to tell the truth. If you just tell the truth, no apology is necessary."

What Harshbarger said next

Her office didn't respond to WJHL's request for comment. She answered on X instead:

"The weather is warming up, so naturally, the snowflakes are starting to melt!

I was discussing one of my colleague's erratic behavior during President Trump's Joint Address, and now he—along with the rest of the Radical Left—is blowing it out of proportion in a desperate attempt to get attention.

BOY oh boy, you just can't catch a break between the FAKE NEWS and young men wielding canes!"

A colleague had just explained, on the record, that the word was used to demean his father. Her response used it twice more and called the 77-year-old a "young man."

That is not a slip of the tongue anymore. A slip is what happens before someone tells you. This came after.

"So many fairies in the White House"

The same interview included another passage. Asked about the Biden administration and transgender people, Harshbarger said:

"Listen, I never saw so many fairies in the White House, dancing around. I'm like, I don't know where they got them. But look, my job is to love them into the love of Christ, and I've got to watch what I say."

A few minutes earlier, on the same subject:

"But if you look at what some of these other countries are going back, they're pushing off on these stupid things like transgender — you can pretend to be a man if you're a woman or a woman if you're a man — and all this junk. They're getting back to what made them great. And we do want to make America great again. And it starts with God and with the family."

"I've got to watch what I say" is the part worth sitting with. She knew. She said it anyway, and then didn't take it back.

Why it still matters a year later

This could be filed away as a bad interview if she had no power over the people in it. She does.

In April 2026, Harshbarger introduced the STOP Act, federal legislation banning gender transition procedures for anyone under 18 — puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries — with civil penalties of at least $100,000 per violation, a private right to sue in federal court, and a compensation fund in the U.S. Treasury funded by the penalties.

People can and do disagree in good faith about minors and medical transition. Many parents, doctors and voters have real concerns, and Tennessee's own law on the subject was upheld by the Supreme Court.

But the person writing the federal version of it is the person who, a year earlier, described the people it governs as "fairies… dancing around" and their identity as "all this junk." She is also a member of the committee that oversees federal health policy. When she says "as a parent and pharmacist, protecting patients has been my priority," the interview is the context in which that sentence has to be read.

And on Al Green: he sits with her in the same chamber. She will vote alongside him for as long as they both hold their seats. The measure of a member of Congress is not whether she can be provoked into saying something ugly on a podcast. It's what she does when the person she said it about explains, calmly and publicly, why it hurt.

What she did was say it twice more.

We deserve better.

Source

Slater Teague, "Harshbarger criticized for comments about Black congressman, trans people" — WJHL News Channel 11, April 23, 2025. Photo: Getty Images, via WJHL — Rep. Al Green during the March 4, 2025 joint address, with Harshbarger seated behind him.