Transgender activists who went topless during the Biden administration’s Pride Month celebration on the South Lawn are no longer welcome at the White House.
A now-viral video showed TikTok influencer Rose Montoya, a male-to-female transgender activist, jiggling her breasts as she covered them with her hands alongside at least two female-to-male transgender attendees who took off their shirts to display their mastectomy scars.
“This behavior is inappropriate and disrespectful for any event at the White House,” said a White House spokesperson in a Tuesday statement to media outlets. “It is not reflective of the event we hosted to celebrate LGBTQI+ families or the other hundreds of guests who were in attendance. Individuals in the video will not be invited to future events.”
The video posted Sunday on the TikTok account @RoseMontoya showed the activist taking a selfie with President Biden and dancing with a pink-and-blue transgender flag ahead of the topless footage. A voiceover says, “Are we topless at the White House?”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the “behavior was simply unacceptable” and that “individuals in the video certainly will not be invited to future events.”
“That type of behavior is as I said unacceptable, it’s not appropriate, disrespectful, and it really does not reflect the event that we hosted to celebrate the LGBTQ+ families, again, the hundreds of families who were here,” she said at Tuesday’s press briefing.
Rose Montoya took issue with the pushback, defending the decision to go half-naked and saying “conservatives are trying to use the video of me topless at the White House to call the community groomers.”
“My trans-masculine friends were showing off their top-surgery scars and living in joy, and I wanted to join them,” said Montoya on TikTok. “Because it is perfectly within the law in Washington, D.C., I decided to join them and cover my nipples just to play it safe because I wanted to be fully free and myself. I had zero intention of trying to be vulgar or be profane in any way.”
The activist and model also said that going topless wasn’t a problem before she transitioned to female and presumably received breast implants.
“All you’re doing is affirming that I’m a woman,” Montoya said. “All you’re doing is saying that trans women are women because for some reason, people like to sexualize women’s bodies and say that they’re inappropriate.”
Other footage posted online showed that there were children at Saturday’s Pride Celebration.
At the event, Mr. Biden told the crowd that they were “some of the bravest and most inspiring people I’ve ever known, and I’ve known a lot of good folks. You’ve set an example for the nation and quite frankly, for the world.”
Conservative columnist Jim Treacher responded by tweeting: “Tell that to Rose Montoya.”
Others accused the White House of hypocrisy for supporting LGBTQ books with sexually explicit illustrations in K-12 schools.
“Graphic illustrations of sexual interactions between minors in elementary school libraries? Sure,” tweeted conservative media critic Stephen L. Miller. “Topless covered breast implants at the White House? Too far.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.