Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has apologized for widely condemned comments he made about transgender people.
Bloomberg, 77, who’s running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, issued the apology during a phone call with transgender leaders on Thursday, NewNowNext reported.
“It was a poor attempt to describe how some who oppose transgender equality think about this issue — and those words do not reflect my unwavering support for equality for transgender Americans,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “I want to offer my sincerest apologies to the members of the transgender community.”
The former mayor also noted that he signed a bill in 2002 that gave transgender and gender nonconforming New Yorkers nondiscrimination protections. His apology came after backlash over resurfaced remarks in which he referred to transgender people as men in dresses and mocked their preferred pronouns.
“If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people,” he said at a forum hosted by the Bermuda Business Development Agency on March 21, 2019, in Manhattan.
Bloomberg made a similar remark about a “man wearing a dress” in 2016.
