Opinion

WALSH: Media Matters Accuses Us Of ‘Demeaning’ Males By Calling Them Male

   DailyWire.com
The word MALE, with the letters FE added to spell FEMALE - stock photo
Melinda Podor via Getty Images

Our great fans over at Media Matters ran another lengthy article last week exposing our terrible alleged bigotry and launching various accusations at us that end in -ist or -phobia. The article, written by “LGBTQ researcher” Alex Paterson, says that Michael Knowles, Ben Shapiro, and yours truly are guilty of “demeaning trans high school athletes.” The athletes we have supposedly demeaned are biological males who have been competing against — and often beating, despite being mediocre runners by male standards — girls in track and field. Three of those girls are filing a lawsuit to keep boys off of their sports teams, and that was the occasion for the allegedly demeaning comments made by Knowles, Shapiro, and myself.

In reading through their report, I was not able to find an example of anything that could be reasonably considered demeaning or insulting. When posting his article on Twitter, Paterson called us “disgusting” because we “comment[ed] about teenagers’ genitals.” But we of course made no specific comments about anyone’s genitals, except to point out that the teenagers in question are male. We “commented about their genitals” in the same way that a doctor in the delivery room comments about a baby’s genitals when he looks down and says, “It’s a boy.” Paterson may want to stop and consider why and how doctors make these determinations based, most of the time, on a brief glance at the genitals. Is it because doctors are involved in a transphobic conspiracy? Or is it perhaps because there is a crucial link between a person’s genitals and their sex? I would encourage our friends at Media Matters to use their brains and think carefully about this question. Though I don’t mean to comment about their internal organs. Especially one that, evidence suggests, they may not possess.

The article goes on to provide even more objectionable details:

After National Review first reported on the story on May 11, Daily Wire published two articles, one written by Walsh and the other by Amanda Prestigiacomo, that repeatedly misgendered the athletes, referring to them as “male” or “biologically male.”

During the May 11 episode of Walsh’s Daily Wire podcast The Matt Walsh Show, he called trans girls “boys with XY chromosomes and penises” and claimed that “people are like Mr. Potato Head dolls now. You just take off the different parts, swap them out. Doesn’t matter. It makes no difference.” He also claimed that the athletes are not females, “not by the science, not by common sense, and not by human decency.” The following day, Walsh doubled down on his remarks and called trans athletes “penis wielding XYs” and claimed, “They’re not girls, and they are certainly not female.”

Admittedly, the Mr. Potato Head line was a bit insensitive. I should have stipulated Mr. or Mrs. Potato Heads. Aside from that momentary lapse, I fail to see the problem with my analysis of the situation. What I see instead is more evidence of a classic leftist bait-and-switch.

Notice how we are accused of “misgendering the athletes” by referring to them as male. But wait a minute. I thought male is a sex, not a gender. Have we not been told, time and again, that sex and gender are two different things? In fact, here’s Planned Parenthood — I’m sure Media Matters would consider them a trusted source — explaining that sex and gender are “different things.” This is what the organization has to say about sex: it “is a label — male or female — that you’re assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with and the chromosomes you have.”

Is Planned Parenthood transphobic now, too? Indeed, if sex is “based on the genitals you’re born with” (commenting on genitals, how perverted) then we are back to the reality that those trans athletes are males racing against females. But Media Matters says we “misgender” by calling them male, which is to claim that male is a gender, not a sex. This is where the bait-and-switch comes in. The Left normalized the idea of gender fluidity by breathlessly insisting that gender is an entirely different sort of thing from sex. Yes, a man is male, they said, but he may still be a woman. Now they say, never mind, if he’s a woman then he can’t be male, silly. Transwomen aren’t just women, they’re female. And just like that we went from fluid gender to fluid sex. First gender was subjective, and now biology itself is subjective. For all of the talk of people “attacking” and “denying” science, this is an actual example of both.

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