Daily Wire host says “there can't be a genocide” of trans people: “Transgender people is not a real ontological category.”
Michael Knowles: “Transgenderism, ultimately, is a lie. It's a deception. It's a fraud. Fraud is not protected by the First Amendment. Fraud is not a category protected by the principles of free speech. You have no right to fraud.”
Published
Citation From the February 28, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): This transgender issue, it's all anybody wants to talk about. In fact, I got in trouble for this issue yesterday. I, your beloved host, whom everybody loves so, I got in trouble for this issue. It was my publicists over at Media Matters, they were working overtime yesterday, publishing multiple articles about the allegedly egregious things I was saying on this show -- which I always encourage. I just retweet them when they put those articles out because those articles and videos tend to be the highlights from my show. So I thank them for going through, clipping it out, making it look really nice, and then they put it out into the world.
The big issue that they had yesterday, which was then picked up in other media outlets as well, is that I called to ban transgenderism entirely. I made the point that if you want if women to have their own bathrooms, if you think women ought to be able to have their own locker rooms and not have to look at gigantic gross men while little girls are getting changed, if you want any of those things, you have to ban transgenderism entirely. It's not enough to say, well, you have to wait until you're 12 or whatever people are saying now. It has to be the whole thing because if men have the right to behave as women and identify as women for the purposes of public life, then women can't have their own spaces and we as a society cannot have our own standards and norms and we're not allowed to live according to reality. We have to live according to the delusions of these troubled people. And I think we, the people, have a right to reality. And I think women have a right to their own spaces. And so, that means you've got to ban the thing entirely.
And, oh, my goodness, what these people say. They said that I was calling for the extermination of transgender people. They said I was calling for a genocide against – I said, what? I must have missed that part of my show. When did I -– did I say that? I don't – one, I don't know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology. And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology. That's what the transgender activists say. They say, forget about biological sex. My gender expression doesn't have to have anything to do with my biological sex. Okay, well, then there can't be a genocide. It refers to genetics.
But furthermore, nobody's calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category. It's not a legitimate category of being. There are people who think that they're the wrong sex, but they're mistaken. They're laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.
People said, well, what does it mean to ban transgenderism entirely? Well, it means that we return to the way that American society operated until approximately five minutes ago when we said that men do not have a right to present themselves as women in public life, and women don't have a right to present themselves as men in public life. You have some limits on that. We have all sorts of limits on our speech and behavior.
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And transgenderism, ultimately, is a lie. It's a deception. It's a fraud. Fraud is not protected by the First Amendment. Fraud is not a category protected by the principles of free speech. You have no right to fraud. So if you're a man and you dress up like a woman and you rename yourself Sally, you have no right to go to the gym and go into the women's locker room and say, no, I'm really a woman. That's a fraud. And you have no right to that.
So, banning transgenderism, what that would mean is telling people who are a little confused that they need to get psychological help, that they probably need to get a little bit of spiritual help and they need to be normal. Be normal. That's my -- I think that's my main political message these days.