Daily Wire host Matt Walsh broke down how leftist gender theory had gone from a fringe idea decades ago to mainstream in the United States today.
Walsh explained the spread of leftist gender theory in a speech at the University of Wisconsin-Superior on Wednesday evening. The first tactic leftists have used to spread gender theory, Walsh said, is through the manipulation of language.
“The trans agenda has infiltrated our society largely through language, and I don’t mean that the gender ideologues use language to make a compelling argument,” Walsh said. “Rather, they manipulate language itself. They make it into their pet.”
The prime example of language manipulation is in the rise of subjective pronoun use, Walsh says. Pronouns, unlike names, are based in biology and are the result of thousands of years language development. They cannot be changed based on one’s feelings, and nobody has the right to demand of others that he or she be addressed by pronouns other than those that align with his or her sex.
“A pronoun is a grammatical construct. It has to be deployed according to the laws of grammar, not the fickle whims of the individual to whom it refers,” Walsh said. He later compared someone choosing pronouns to him picking his own adjectives, “I might perceive myself as handsome and brilliant … but I can’t require that everybody who speaks about me also have that same perception.”
The second way the Left has injected gender ideology into the mainstream is by sowing “confusion,” Walsh said. “It’s to make the issue of sex and gender seem complicated, complex. It’s the sort of thing you have to rely on the experts to explain to you. And, conveniently, the experts are all leftists.”
The movement to complicate gender and confuse the ignorant is driven, at least partly, by pharmaceutical companies that make significant sums of money selling drugs used in sex change surgeries and hormonal therapy. Walsh said his oft-asked and rarely-answered question “What is a woman?” is a way to cut through the faux complexity and a good example of how leftist gender theory can fall apart under relatively little pressure.
“If, as a woman, you go to the doctor and tell him you are unable to conceive children in your womb, he’s not going to say to you, ‘Oh, that means you’re non-binary.’ … No, he’s going to run some tests and figure out just what is wrong with your body,” Walsh said. “If, as a man, you go to the doctor and tell him you are unable to conceive children in your womb, he’ll run some tests to see what’s wrong with your mind.”
“At least that’s how he would have responded up until recently because, now that society has lost its mind, he might give the man hormone pills to help him transition into a woman. But you’ll note that even after transitioning, still the man will not be able to ovulate or conceive children or perform any other exclusively female function because he is not a female,” Walsh said.
Walsh said the third way leftists have spread progressive gender theory is through the indoctrination of young children. He brought up the example of leftist parents taking seriously their children’s fantasies of being another gender, and then making life-altering decisions for their children’s health.
To show how pervasive leftist gender theory had become, Walsh sited a Gallup poll showing the increasing number of people choosing to identify as LGBT.
According to a Gallup poll from February, “The percentage of U.S. adults who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual has increased to a new high of 7.1%, which is double the percentage from 2012, when Gallup first measured it.”
The percentage of people who identify as LGBT has roughly doubled in each successive generation from Traditionalists, born before 1946, through Generation Z, born from 1997 to 2003, according to the survey.