Pitman Councilman-Elect Shares Transphobic Photos on Social Media
Below is an official press release from Pride Alliance of Pitman (PAP), following further troubling posts found shared by Councilman-elect Vince Kelly.
PITMAN, NJ-The Pride Alliance of Pitman (PAP) joins forces with Pitman Anti-Racist Collective in calling out problematic content on Vince Kelly’s Facebook posts. PAP has uncovered transphobic content shared by Councilperson-elect Vince Kelly in several posts.
These posts include a picture of an individual with an invitation to mock and ridicule them for their appearance and a post degrading people who are “confused” about gender. PAP finds Vince Kelly’s sharing of this content to be violent, dehumanizing, morally repugnant, and a direct threat to transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
Transgender and gender-nonconforming people face extraordinary levels of violence and discrimination every day. According to the Trevor Project: in the last year 35% of transgender youth have attempted suicide, 31% have been the victims of violence, and 27% have felt unsafe in school in the past 30 days. Vincent Kelly, and people who share and encourage similar beliefs, play a large part in exacerbating those problems.
We are a town that holds moral fortitude as an important part of the foundation that Pitman was built upon 116 years ago. That must include protecting the human rights of transgender and gender-nonconforming people within our community by ensuring their right to safety, prosperity, joy, and inclusion everywhere.
The Pride Alliance of Pitman will not allow this attack on the transgender community to go unchallenged.
“Our town motto is that Everybody Likes Pitman. That will only be true when Pitman likes everybody,” stated Michael Grillo, PAP member. “Vince Kelly’s posts represent the struggle for acceptance that the transgender community in our town faces. His posts are a relic of a time that society is leaving behind. I have no confidence that Kelly will fairly represent our transgender community or help continue the amazing progress Pitman has made to become a town that likes ‘everybody’. I wish for a Pitman where LGBTQIA+ youth, including my own daughter, can blossom instead of anxiously waiting until they can move away to a safer place.“
In Vince Kelly’s recent address regarding his past appearance in blackface, he explained that “we live in a very different time.” Blackface was well-known to be offensive decades before Vince Kelly’s 2015 post. His transphobic posts were made as recently as August of this year. This pattern of behavior shows an alarming lack of empathy for marginalized and underrepresented people.
In solidarity with The Pitman Anti-Racist collective, we urge Vince Kelly to apologize to the transgender and gender-nonconforming community and to complete Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training. If this minimal request is not met, he must step down, and we strongly encourage the Pitman Republican Committee to do a significantly better job of vetting the candidates chosen to replace him currently and with all future candidates.
