In 2022, Brundage was given a Spirit of the Community award by the Florida Commission on the Status of Women for bringing in tens of millions of dollars to the Tampa area with an international economic empowerment conference. Brundage received a letter of congratulations from DeSantis, who, it turns out, didn’t know Brundage was trans.

But news organizations did, and Brundage says DeSantis “dodged everybody’s request for comment on it. No comment. No comment. No comment. I announced my candidacy, of course, and talked about the letter. And then he finally responded — to the Daily Mail in the U.K. And he told them that he would have never given me the award if he had known that I was a transgender woman.”

[…]

“So none of that has changed, but because he knows my political affiliation, all of a sudden, he wants to say that he wouldn’t have given me that award. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with our political world right now. Partisan politics get in the way of actually accomplishing things that are good for our economy.”

Good for her and fuck him.