Byron Donalds Lies LGBTQ Rights Florida

A Byron Donalds Ad Cut a Sentence in Half to Claim His Opponent Backs 'Gender Changing Surgeries on Kids.' Jolly Was Quoting Someone Else's Grandfather.

PolitiFact rated the Friends of Byron Donalds PAC ad False. The clip was edited to make David Jolly appear to endorse surgery for children, when he was retelling a grandfather's story about a suicidal trans teenager. Donalds' spokesperson stood by it.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 21, 2026

On August 8, a PAC supporting Byron Donalds put out an attack ad about David Jolly, the Democrat running against him for governor of Florida.

The text on screen said Jolly supports "gender changing surgeries on kids." Then it played a clip of Jolly saying:

"We embraced it, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care."

PolitiFact rated it False, and the reason is worth reading slowly.

The Sentence the Ad Cut in Half

The clip comes from a September 2025 podcast interview. Jolly was telling a story about a phone call he got a few years earlier from a grandfather in Florida.

The man's grandchild was in high school, was transgender, was having suicidal thoughts, and was wondering whether to leave home.

Here is the full sentence Jolly said, quoting that grandfather:

"As a family we embraced it, we sought the right pathways, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care, for this grandchild."

Those are the grandfather's words about his own family. Jolly was repeating them.

The ad cut out the beginning, cut out the end, and ran the middle as if it were Jolly announcing his own policy.

The man wasn't calling to talk about surgery, either. He was calling because Florida lawmakers were considering SB 254 — the bill that made it a felony for a doctor to provide gender-affirming care to a minor. He told Jolly his family's doctor could be arrested, and that the parents could lose custody. That bill became law in May 2023.

A grandfather afraid of losing his grandchild became, in the ad, proof that a candidate wants to operate on children.

What Jolly Actually Says

PolitiFact looked for any instance of Jolly talking about gender-affirming surgeries for kids. It found none in the public record. It asked the Donalds campaign for one. The campaign didn't provide any.

PolitiFact also asked Jolly's campaign directly about the ad and about his position on gender-affirming surgeries for minors, and got no response — so on that narrow question his campaign has not said either way. What he has said, when Politico asked him in July about medical care for minors:

"I simply subscribe to the old-school Republican position that government should stay out of your life, out of your doctor's office, and out of your bedroom. The last person you need sitting on the foot of your bed during hard family conversations is Byron Donalds."

What "Gender-Affirming Care" Actually Means

The ad depends on people hearing that phrase and picturing an operating room.

Gender-affirming care covers a wide range of things, starting with using a person's chosen name or pronouns. For adolescents, medical treatment can include puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Surgery is rare, limited to older teens, and requires a parent's consent.

Surgeries are not performed on young children. That is the thing the ad's on-screen text says Jolly wants.

Donalds Said It Himself, Too

This wasn't only the PAC. In July, at a restaurant in Doral, Donalds told patrons that Jolly believes "it's okay to change the gender of young kids."

And when PolitiFact asked his campaign to back the ad up, spokesperson Skylar Swanson didn't walk anything back:

"I do not know what further statement you need when he says it pretty plainly himself."

He doesn't say it plainly. He doesn't say it at all. He was quoting a grandfather.

The Second One This Month

This is the second time in a week that a claim Donalds made about Jolly and transgender kids has fallen apart when someone checked it.

Days earlier, at a rally before the primary, Donalds said the American Medical Association had "finally realized that this is insanity" and come around to his position. The AMA told a reporter that is not what it said, and that it still believes families and doctors should decide together.

It is also not the first ad of this cycle to pin "surgeries on kids" on an opponent who never said it. In Iowa's Senate race, PolitiFact rated False an Ashley Hinson attack ad claiming Josh Turek supports "sex changes for kids" — an ad her campaign put out within an hour of Turek winning his primary. That one was built differently: it ran video of surgeons operating while citing Turek's vote against a school law about names and pronouns, which PolitiFact found "did not authorize or regulate medical gender-affirming care."

The move underneath is the same: put an operating room in front of the voter, and attach it to something that was never about surgery.

Why This Matters to Floridians

Donalds is asking to run a state of 23 million people. His campaign's response to being shown, in detail, that its ad reversed the meaning of a sentence was to say the sentence speaks for itself.

Meanwhile, the actual policy question in Florida is not hypothetical. SB 254 is law. Doctors face felony charges. Families like the one that grandfather described have to decide whether to leave the state.

Donalds' contribution to that conversation was an ad built out of half a sentence.