August 17, 2022 10:02 AM UTC

Ganahl Repeats Questionable Story to Impress Hate Group

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

It’s not a new revelation to report that Republican Hiedi Heidi Ganahl will literally say anything if she thinks it might earn her some support in her doomed campaign for Governor.

Ganahl long ago made it clear that her core principles are mostly about convincing Colorado voters that she has some. Back in Nov. 2021, Ganahl was explaining to an audience of Republicans in Durango that they shouldn’t worry about any comments she made that sounded too un-Republican. Included in those remarks was this infamous line, in which Ganahl affirms that she’ll stand wherever you want her to stand: “Y’all, I care about everything that you care about.”

Ganahl has since made plenty of statements that are patently absurd, particularly when it comes to education issues. She has claimed, for example, that sex education is being taught in kindergarten classrooms (it is not), and that “60% of our kids here in this state cannot read, write, or do math” (um, no). But with Election Day drawing ever near and her campaign appearing no closer to defeating incumbent Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, Ganahl seems to have advanced to the stage where hopeless candidates invent often disgusting stories of “leadership” out of whole cloth.

As Heidi Beedle reports in a must-read story from the Colorado Times Recorder, Ganahl recently attended a “Red Wave” party in Colorado Springs hosted by failed Senate candidate Eli Bremer that served as the kickoff for a new organization called “Nine PAC” seeking to ensure that college students and athletes don’t have to interact with scary transgender people. Ganahl took this opportunity to tell the audience about a recent interaction at the University of Colorado — where she still serves as an elected Regent — in which she claims to have saved the day for a family worried about a transgender roommate:

“Today I got a call from a parent at CU who said, ‘Oh my gosh, my daughter got a dorm assignment, and it’s with a biological male who considers himself a female, and Heidi, they won’t let her back out,” Ganahl said. “They said she has to live there for two weeks before they’ll give her another option.’ So I made some phone calls and got it reversed, but that’s the policy. This is happening everywhere.”

There are a number of horrible things about this anecdote, including the completely-ridiculous line that forcing students to live with transgender roommates is “happening everywhere.” But as Beedle reports, the biggest issue with Ganahl’s story is that it is almost certainly NOT TRUE.

A spokesperson for CU explained to Beedle that “University Housing assigns students a space based on the student’s self-identified gender that they select on their housing application, rather than birth gender.” If errors are still made in roommate assignments, “Students have the opportunity to request room changes both before and after move-in.”

A statement from the board of oSTEM (“Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math”) at CU Boulder echoed the University Housing response:

“Every student must mark which genders they are willing to room with (with transgender woman and transgender man being separate options). The housing department at CU does an incredible amount of work to ensure that these preferences are met, meaning that students should not be forcibly rooming with transgender students unless they indicate their willingness to do so. Especially before move-in, housing is often more accommodating with room change requests in these situations than [Ganahl’s] statement is portraying them to be.”

Perhaps CU Boulder and oSTEM are wrong and Ganahl is correct, but it is telling that a separate spokesperson for the University of Colorado felt compelled to note that “Ms. Ganahl was speaking in her capacity as a candidate for elected office, not as a CU regent.”

Ganahl often talks about “free speech” on the campaign trail, though usually in a way that is related to her belief that journalists and social media outlets are somehow conspiring against her. When it comes to free speech on campus, Ganahl apparently believes this includes lying about your own university and attacking its students in order to curry favor with idiots like Bremer and his new hate group PAC.