In this episode Trent examines Matt Walsh’s arguments against transgender ideology on a recent episode of the Dr. Phil show and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of his case.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. In today’s episode, I want to talk about Matt Walsh’s recent appearance on the Dr. Phil show.
Trent Horn:
Matt Walsh is a commenter at The Daily Wire. He’s released a children’s book called Johnny the Walrus, which is about a little boy who identifies as a walrus and then doctors try to help him become a walrus, give him walrus hormones, put wooden spoons in his mouth for tusks. It’s a satire of transgender ideology, and a lot of LGBT advocates are furious that it’s like number one in LGBT on Amazon.
Trent Horn:
But I appreciate that Walsh has put this out there in his own unique style, because in our modern culture it’s not accepted to bluntly disagree, or really disagree at all, with transgender ideology. You can have your Twitter account suspended, your Facebook account suspended. You can have strikes against your YouTube channel. It’s important, though, to stand up for the truth and to make a stand against the dangerous effects that come from transgender ideology, especially what it does to children, to little children, three and four-year-old children who say “I’m a boy” or “I’m a girl,” even if that is not their correct biological sex, and then adults doing things to them that can cause lifelong, irreparable harm.
Trent Horn:
I want to talk about his appearance on the show because I think he did a good job. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in Walsh’s approach, and that’s okay. We just have different styles. I’ve been watching a show, Cobra Kai, recently. Well, I just wrapped up binge-watching it with my wife. I’ll talk about it on Free-for-all Friday soon.
Trent Horn:
This show, it’s a show about martial arts. It’s a continuation of The Karate Kid. Some of the martial arts styles are a bit more aggressive, like Cobra Kai. I’d say Matt Walsh is more Eagle Fang. He has honor. And others are a bit more defensive or reflexive, not as aggressive. That’d be Miyagi-Do. I’m more of a Miyagi-Do apologist. I’m more someone who uses reflexive Socratic questions, and Matt Walsh is more blunt and assertive. That doesn’t mean one is good or bad.
Trent Horn:
As I said in my interview with Nate from Wise Disciple, remember the Christian debate teacher that I spoke with, there are pluses and minuses to a blunt style versus a more Socratic style like mine. A Socratic style like mine, I can maybe not push a point as hard as I need to, and it could get lost, so that might be a minus there. But with a more assertive style, people might write you off, say you’re too aggressive, not want to listen to you. So there are pluses and minuses to both. But overall, I still think that Walsh did a good job.
Trent Horn:
There is one particular point that I think he could have improved on, and I bring it up not to rip on Matt Walsh or anything. I’ve been in these situations before where you’re in, obviously, a live debate or a live engagement or interview, and oftentimes you go back and say, “Oh, I wish I had said this. I wish I had said that.” I don’t like when people act like, “Well, I would’ve said this, and I would’ve said that.” Look, it’s a lot harder than it looks when you’re there, the studio lights on. You get one take, one shot to make your point.
Trent Horn:
That being said, I think he did a good job. I want to show where he did well, and then one particular point where I think he could have been a bit stronger. I’m emphasizing that for those of us who will be in these conversations. That way, we can have a ready reply. So let’s take a look at the engagement.
Dr. Phil:
Identify with the sex that they have been biologically created as and assigned at birth based on their genitalia. If they don’t feel that way, that there’s no construct that describes that experience as that.
Trent Horn:
Dr. Phil is setting up the modern common idea that you have your biological sex and then you have a psychological conception of yourself within a social construct or gender, so you could have your gender doesn’t match your sex. But what’s odd here is that for every other thing related to our biological categories, we don’t have a psychological counterpart that can outweigh it. It’s not like we have race and schmender. Your race is just biologically what you are based on your ancestry, based on the melanin in your skin, based on particular biological features. Then your schmender would just be whatever race you identify with, the social construct, what you think you are. We don’t even have that. Even if we did have something like that, we don’t allow it to override your biological race.
Trent Horn:
I’ll give a few other examples as we come up here later in the interview, but I think this is important to bring up, that people will bring up these two concepts, and I would ask, “Well, why is this concept of gender, why do we give it so much normative force to say that that is just what someone is, and I have to identify them by gender rather than by sex or risk the consequences?”
Matt Walsh:
Well, that’s got nothing to do with the reality. You can feel however you want. I could sit here and say that I feel like a tomato plant, but that doesn’t mean that I actually am those things. Your self-perception, you can have whatever self-perception you want, but you can’t expect me to take part in that self-perception or to take part in this kind of charade, this theatrical production.
Matt Walsh:
You don’t get your own pronouns, just like you don’t get your own prepositions or your own adjectives. It’s like if I were to tell you, “My adjectives are handsome and brilliant, and whenever you’re talking about me, you have to describe me as handsome and brilliant, because that’s how I identify.” Makes no sense. You don’t get your own pronouns. That’s grammar. That’s language.
Trent Horn:
I do like some people have also taken this example and said that, “Well, my preferred pronoun is ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘my lord.'” I think that this is helpful to say that.
Trent Horn:
Walsh is taking this… There’s two steps going down this road. First, I would say your sense of self, your sense of identity, as I said before, does not override objective facts about you. Your sense of self cannot override reality. That would be number one.
Trent Horn:
Then number two, what Walsh is bringing up, and this can be something that people are more sympathetic towards who are on the fence about this issue… Some people will say, “You know what, if somebody wants to say they’re a man, somebody wants to say they’re a woman, who cares? Let them be whoever they want. I don’t care.” I think a lot of people today who are not totally bought into transgender ideology still think, “You know what, people can just be whatever they want. Who cares? I don’t care. Do whatever you want.” So Walsh is pressing point two, which is not just that people should be able to override reality through their own sense of self-identification, but that you and I have to also go along with that.
Trent Horn:
Imagine if this was placed in another context. I just did a rebuttal video to a Muslim apologist. Muslims will refer to Muhammad as a prophet. In fact, to show him and other prophets deference, they will say “peace be upon him.” Sometimes when Muslims write out Muhammad, they’ll put the acronym PBUH after it, Peace Be Upon Him. I believe that they’re wrong, I don’t believe Muhammad is a prophet, but I should say they have the right to believe what they want to believe, even if it’s wrong.
Trent Horn:
But they cannot compel me to refer to Muhammad as a prophet. If I am going to refer to him as a prophet, I’m going to refer to him as a false prophet. He’s not a true prophet. But by this logic, if they sincerely believe that this is the way reality is, and it’s a hate crime or it’s… There are these blasphemy laws in other countries saying that you can’t blaspheme religions, that I have to refer to Muhammad as a prophet, or I can’t call him a false prophet. That’s ludicrous.
Trent Horn:
Or it’d be like if I said… I remember I got into a debate once with a transgender advocate online, and I talked about how incoherent transgender ideology is. This individual, this man who identifies as a woman, said, “Oh, that’s rich coming from a Catholic who identifies bread and wine as the body and blood of Jesus. So why do you want me to respect your identification?”
Trent Horn:
My reply would be twofold. One, because the God of the Universe is omnipotent, so He can transform elements of matter into His glorified body. You are not omnipotent. You cannot change whether you are male or female. That’s just something that cannot be done. That’s an essential part of your identity.
Trent Horn:
But more importantly, I said to this person, “Well, I’m not going to throw you in jail or get you fired from your job because you publicly say the Eucharist is not the body and blood of Christ. I totally affirm your right to say that, even if you want to say offensive things. I want you to have the right to be able to speak freely, so that I can speak freely to you about the Gospel, about the Church. I believe the more that we can speak freely, the more that the truth is able to be shared, that we should not clamp down on things to prevent this from happening.”
Trent Horn:
So Walsh makes a good point here about your sense of identity not overriding self, and he’s focusing more on the liberty aspect of forcing other people to go along with this, that even people on the fence would say, “I’m not comfortable with that. You can do what you want, but you can’t make me go along with this.”
Trent Horn:
Another example that I would bring up would be, consider the case of anorexia, anorexia nervosa, of somebody saying, even if they’re dangerously underweight, they identify as obese or morbidly obese, and they want to keep losing weight. That’d be another example where your sense of identity can be wrong, and it doesn’t override reality. It would be a disservice towards you, it would be unloving, to facilitate the delusion that an anorexic person is under.
Trent Horn:
I bring up that example because Dr. Phil has covered anorexia many times on his show. Both Dr. Phil and other health professionals, you don’t treat anorexia like transgender identity. You just don’t. They’re completely different.
Trent Horn:
Now, some people will say, “Well, anorexia is really dangerous for you because your heart weakens. You could die.” I would say, okay, transgender ideology, it may not be as fatal as anorexia, although there are very high suicide rates people who identify as transgender. Even in countries, in Scandinavia, in Denmark, where the culture is overwhelmingly pro-LGBT ideology, the suicide rates and mental health issues are still very high among those populations. So I could argue that there is a dangerous element to a person’s health in facilitating and encouraging this disordered sense of identity. I would say that it may not be as dangerous, but it’s still a dangerous thing.
Trent Horn:
Even if it’s not deadly, it can cause lifelong health consequences. There are people who de-transition, who were… This especially happens for women, people who… Biological women who then transition and try to identify as men undergo testosterone therapy, have their breasts surgically removed. Especially once you start doing surgery, even hormone therapy, there are irreversible results of this. This is being done to children.
Trent Horn:
Walsh makes this point, maybe not necessarily the surgery aspects, but hormone therapy is being done, cross-gender hormone therapy. Walsh brings this up later. I’m not going to cover that clip here, but another advocate asks him, “Why do you care so much about this?” He says, “Well, I care about truth, and I care about children and the harm this is causing to them.” I say amen, good for bringing that up.
Trent Horn:
But back to anorexia nervosa. I’m going to play now two clips from the Dr. Phil show where he engages two different women who are anorexic. Notice that he doesn’t say, “Oh, well, you identify this way.” It’s not an issue for debate about maybe they really are this overweight, and that’s how they identify. No, their self-identification is just wrong. Let me show you a few.
Dr. Phil:
Where do you see yourself right now, as you are right now? Which of these?
Speaker 5:
Oh, the far left one.
Dr. Phil:
If you could choose-
Trent Horn:
For those of you who are listening, she’s looking at different silhouettes of women from thin to overweight, and she actually picks the very far left one, the thinnest one.
Dr. Phil:
If you could just write your life script and you could choose to be any size you wanted to be, what would you choose?
Speaker 5:
The third one.
Dr. Phil:
So this would be ideal.
Trent Horn:
That’s a very short clip, but I think it’s interesting. Dr. Phil shows this woman, “Here are different body types, from thin to average to overweight. Which one ideally would you want to be?” This is a woman who has come to see her anorexia is a problem, and so she picks the third one. She picks one of the average ones.
Trent Horn:
But imagine if she had said, “Oh, I’m the one on the far right. That’s what I am. I am the overweight one.” We wouldn’t say, “Oh, well, that’s how she identifies, so she is overweight.” We would say, “No, your sense of identity is wrong. You are incorrect about that, and you’re harming yourself by living this mistaken sense of self-identity.”
Trent Horn:
Here’s another clip with another anorexic woman. You can see she is very, very underweight. It’s dangerous. The adult human body is not supposed to look like this or be at this particular weight. It is dangerous, and Dr. Phil doesn’t sugarcoat it.
Dr. Phil:
She’s telling you her currency is attention. Her currency is shock value, and she’s doing bad behavior to get it. You just don’t reward bad behavior.
Trent Horn:
Now, imagine if Dr. Phil had said to a transgender individual, “This is a cry for attention. This is bad behavior. You don’t reward it.” He would be canceled instantly. But what is the fundamental difference here?
Trent Horn:
Also, another point that I would bring up in these conversations is that if someone says, “Well, I am a woman” or “I feel like a woman,” even if they’re a biological man, how do you know you’re not mistaken? How do you know you’re a woman? How do you know that you’re a man? What does that feel like? How do you know that you are a transgender woman instead of just a gender-nonconforming man who wants to look, dress, and act like a woman? What does it feel like to be a woman? What does it feel like to be a man? These are questions that I would say transgender advocates cannot answer if this is supposed to be just some kind of social construct.
Trent Horn:
Then, also, and Walsh will bring up this point later, that this leads to a kind of cultural appropriation, where we say that, “Well, I feel like a woman because I want to do stereotypically woman things,” so a woman gets reduced to high heels, lipstick, hair. Ironically, transgender ideology reinforces a kind of sexism, that to be a man or a woman is to be someone who wants to look, dress, and act stereotypically like a man or a woman. It’s almost a regressive way of thinking about gender, even though it tries to be a very modern, cutting-edge way of thinking about gender.
Dr. Phil:
So you think it’s a delusion. Someone is self-delusional.
Matt Walsh:
Yeah. I think it’s delusion. It could be a mental illness. It’s a lot of different things. With children, there’s also just a basic confusion that all kids have. That’s why when you hear-
Trent Horn:
That takes a lot of guts to be in a public talk show format like that, with individuals who identify as transgender, to say this is deluded, this may be a sign of mental illness, but sometimes a hard truth needs to be said.
Trent Horn:
I would ask, what is the definition of a mental illness? If someone believes that a basic identifiable part of reality, they can’t recognize it or believe the opposite of it, then they’d be suffering from a delusion. People who hear voices that aren’t there, they have a mental illness. They’re schizophrenic. People who have body identity integrity disorder, these are people who believe… They self-identify as being paralyzed, and they want doctors to paralyze them, even though they’re ambulatory. They can walk. They say they’re trapped in the wrong body, and that they want to be… They are supposed to be in a wheelchair, even though they’re perfectly healthy.
Trent Horn:
What is the difference? Most people would call that a mental illness. What is the difference between someone who wants their spinal cord severed because they believe that they’re paralyzed when they’re not, and somebody who wants their genitalia removed because they think they are the opposite sex when they’re not? What is the difference? If one is a mental illness or deluded thinking, then the other needs to be. It has to be.
Matt Walsh:
When you hear a parent say, “Oh, my four-year-old son came to me and said that ‘I’m a girl now,’ and so that’s what I’m going to… I’m going to raise him as a girl.” No, your four-year-old… I have four kids. When a four-year-old boy comes to you and says, “Oh, I’m a girl,” here’s a good follow-up question. “What is a girl?” Ask him what he means by that. “What do you mean by a girl?”
Matt Walsh:
When you ask him that, here’s what he’ll tell you. He will tell you what he really means is that he wants to do some of the things that girls do, like play with a dollhouse, or he likes the color pink. That’s fine. Play with the dollhouse. But you’re still a boy. That’s a question I would like to throw out-
Trent Horn:
That was the point that I brought up earlier, that when you have children or others who say “I’m a boy” or “I’m a girl,” well, you can be a girl who likes boy things or a boy who likes things that are traditionally what girls like. Gender advocates, gender theory, there’s some merit to that… What is he saying?
Trent Horn:
Consider colors, for example. There was a time when pink or pastel were considered boys’ colors rather than girls’ colors. I could see how some things will change in society of what is considered what boys would prefer versus what girls would prefer. There’s room for that in social understanding of how men and women interact with each other, how they dress, things like that.
Trent Horn:
But to take from that… That’s where it’s interesting that Walsh comes off more egalitarian, if you will, more open-minded, to say, “Hey, boys can play with dolls. Girls can play with trucks. But you’re still a boy, and you’re still a girl.” It’s the advocates who say, as soon as they see a boy drawing himself in a princess costume or drawing himself even just wearing pink clothes, “Oh, it’s got to be a girl.” Why? Because only girls can like pink or something like that? I think that’s an important point to raise.
Matt Walsh:
To other members of the panel, actually, because just like the four-year-old can’t answer what is a girl, well, this is one of the problems with this left-wing gender ideology, is that no one who espouses it can even tell you what these words mean. What is a woman? Can you tell me what a woman is?
Speaker 6:
No, I can’t, because it’s not for me to say. Womanhood looks different for everybody.
Addison:
What do you define a woman as?
Trent Horn:
Okay, so it’s interesting that the first panelist just admits, “Yeah, I can’t define a woman.” Then I would say that if you cannot define basic terms in reality, like man or woman, then your position is ultimately incoherent. I think what transgender ideology ultimately boils down to, we’ll see it here in this clip, is that a woman is just anyone who says they’re a woman; a man is anyone who says that they’re a man. What’s really bad about this, too, is how are people supposed to become healthy men or healthy women if those words have absolutely no meaning whatsoever, that there is no sense of masculinity or femininity as being distinct things?
Trent Horn:
I think what is really interesting here in our modern culture… I saw another video where a guy was going on the street, and he was asking people, “Are there things that women do better than men?” and everyone was like, “Oh yeah, women are more sensitive. They’re more empathetic. They’re more verbal and responsive to people’s needs. They’re more compassionate.” They would say all these kind of things.
Trent Horn:
“Oh, okay, good. Okay, so women are better than men at those things. What are some things that men are better than women at?” No one wanted to say anything. Nobody wanted to say anything. I can’t think of anything, even basic things, like when they said, “Well, are men, on average, better at being taller than women or stronger than women?” “No, I don’t think so.”
Trent Horn:
It’s because of our modern culture that… Now, I agree there was a time when women were treated really, really poorly. They can’t vote. They don’t have the same equal basic rights with men. It’s important for men and women to be treated as equal. There’s a reflexive response, “You can’t say men are better than women because that’s like saying women are bad.” No, because people are willing to say women are better than men at all kinds of stuff.
Trent Horn:
My wife is way better than me when it comes to listening to the kids and seeing what they need. I always end up tuning them out. I have this magical invisible helmet I can put on when the kids are screaming, and I don’t hear what they’re doing. My wife is like, “How can you not hear what they’re doing?” “I don’t know. I’m a man. You’re better at hearing them. I’m better at ignoring them.”
Trent Horn:
But they’re not even willing to admit. Then the pendulum swings so far in the other direction, to say, “Oh, no, men are really the villains.” That’s the idea of the patriarchy, if you will. The inability to define what is a man or a woman with transgender ideology, it’s going to lead to very unhealthy development for men and women.
Trent Horn:
Now, this other transgender advocate takes a very shrewd response and throws the question back at Walsh. “Well, how do you define a woman?” This is the part where I think that Matt could have given a little bit better of a reply. He really should have been more prepared for that because it’s an obvious rejoinder. If you say, “Well, what is a woman?” “I don’t know. What do you think it is?” you should be able to answer your own question.
Matt Walsh:
An adult human female.
Addison:
What does a female mean?
Matt Walsh:
Well, that’s someone-
Addison:
How do you define a female?
Trent Horn:
Notice the problem here. If we say, well, a woman is adult human female, you’re basically saying a woman is a female. What Walsh will condemn, criticize, I should say, is when people say a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. Well, that’s a circular definition. You have the term in the definition. But if female is just a synonym for woman, then Walsh is kind of saying a woman is just anyone who is a woman.
Trent Horn:
Now, what he means is what determines femaleness or womanhood are biological factors, not psychological factors. That is, I believe, the point he is trying to get across, but I don’t think it works for a definition when he puts it that way, because the guest rightly asks a follow-up, “Okay, well, what is a female?” Then here is Walsh’s reply.
Matt Walsh:
With female reproductive organs, someone who is… Here’s the thing. When you’re a female, it goes right down to your bones, your DNA. That’s why, if someone dies, we could dig up their bones 100 years from now, we have no idea what they believed in their head, but we can tell what sex they were, because it’s ingrained in every fiber of their being.
Addison:
Interesting. I’m trying to understand. Your definition is that a woman is someone who is female, you said, right?
Matt Walsh:
Correct, is a biological female.
Addison:
So what happens if we have maybe someone who is female, identifies as a woman, cisgender woman, as you just explained, maybe doesn’t have the ability to reproduce, maybe doesn’t have those organs that you’re talking about that are reproductive organs?
Matt Walsh:
I have answered the question. You stood up here and said trans women are women.
Addison:
Yes.
Matt Walsh:
Tell me what you mean.
Trent Horn:
Walsh has sort of… He’s evaded the question. Notice that he didn’t give a reply to it. Instead, he’s pushing forward saying, “I made a definition. We’ve spent enough time on my definition. You define the question.”
Trent Horn:
I think this person’s name was… What was it, Addison? I can’t see it on here. Yeah, Addison, who I believe identifies as non-binary. He says, “Okay, you’re saying you’re a biological female. It’s in your bones, genetics, organs. What if you don’t have those things?” This is important, because some of us might say, “Oh, well it’s easy. A female is just any human being who has two X chromosomes.” If you have two X’s, you’re a woman. If you have an XY, you are a man.”
Trent Horn:
The problem here is that sex chromosomal abnormalities are not uncommon. I’ve covered this in previous episodes. You have biological females who do not have two X chromosomes. They have one X. They would have Turner syndrome. They tend to have more stunted development because of that, but they’re biological females. They don’t have two X’s. You have men who are XXY. That’s Klinefelter syndrome. They’re biological males, but they have two X’s.
Trent Horn:
So when you come up with a definition, you have to be careful because, yeah, if you say someone who has female reproductive organs, that’s a good point, what about someone who has a hysterectomy, or they do not have a uterus or ovaries? They’ve either been surgically removed or they had some kind of hormonal or developmental issue where they never developed those organs. They developed two sex organs. Now, this gets us into the intersex category, which is a very, very tiny minority of people compared to those who identify as transgender.
Trent Horn:
But Addison brings up a good reply. That’s why my preferred definition of what a woman is, is more teleological. I would say a woman is any human who is naturally ordered towards gestation, carrying a child, pregnancy, someone who is naturally ordered towards it.
Trent Horn:
Now, it doesn’t mean they’re capable of it, because you can have, obviously, a five-year-old girl cannot gestate, but she is a woman. She hasn’t developed that ability yet. Some women have lost that ability, if you’ve had a hysterectomy, you’ve gone past menopause. But you are naturally ordered towards it as a being compared to me.
Trent Horn:
You’ll have so-called same-sex marriages, two men, saying, “We can’t have a baby, so we’re infertile.” No, two men who engage in sexual behavior are not infertile. Odds are, both of those men are fertile. They are producing sperm. They are capable of impregnating someone.
Trent Horn:
It’d be like saying that I have… I don’t know what the word would be to describe a bird that cannot fly. Inflightal. Let’s call it inflightal. An inflightal bird is a bird that cannot fly. I am not inflightal because when I flap my arms, I don’t go anywhere. It is not within my nature to fly. It’d be the same thing for non-flying birds as well. It’d only apply to flying birds.
Trent Horn:
Now, a biological female who is in her reproductive years, like she’s 25 years old, who cannot become pregnant, we would say she suffers from infertility. You would not be able to diagnose who suffers from infertility and who does not unless you know what sex organs the person has and what they’re naturally ordered towards.
Trent Horn:
My definition isn’t necessarily perfect. People could try to poke holes in it. But I think if we say that a woman is anyone who is naturally ordered towards gestation, a man is anyone who is naturally ordered towards impregnation, then we will cover that. Then there are certain… We could say there are certain biological signs that, in almost every case, show us who these individuals are, bone structure, chromosomes, phenotype, other kinds of things that we can see to identify that individual.
Trent Horn:
I would’ve said, “Well, a woman is anyone who is naturally ordered towards gestation.” Now, you might say, “Well, what about someone who doesn’t have a uterus?” Well, if it’s like me, I’m a man. I’m not supposed to have a uterus. Is it a biological female, as Walsh would say? They’re supposed to. They’re naturally ordered towards that. That’s the language I would use.
Trent Horn:
That is my only real nitpick here on Walsh’s engagement, that if you’re going to demand that others have a non-circular definition of what is a man or what is a woman, you need to have your own non-circular definition. Notice, in mine, men are ordered to impregnation; women are ordered towards gestation. Even if it’s not the best definition, it’s not circular, because I don’t use the term woman or female, or man or male, in the definition itself.
Trent Horn:
Let’s continue.
Addison:
Womanhood is something that, just as Ethan explained, I cannot define because I am not myself-
Matt Walsh:
But you used the word, so what did you mean when you said trans women are women if you don’t-
Addison:
Love interrupting, right?
Matt Walsh:
… know what it means?
Addison:
Here’s the thing. I do not define what a woman is because I do not identify as a woman.
Trent Horn:
Well, I don’t identify as a dog, but I can define what a dog is. I don’t identify by a lot of things, but I can define what it is based on the shared characteristics of that class.
Addison:
Womanhood is something that is an umbrella term. It includes people who-
Matt Walsh:
That describes what?
Addison:
People who identify as a woman.
Matt Walsh:
Identify as what?
Addison:
As a woman.
Matt Walsh:
What is that?
Addison:
Well, it’s to each their own. Each woman, each man, each person is going to have a different relation with their own gender identity and define it differently. Trans women-
Matt Walsh:
I’m not asking you that.
Addison:
… are women too. Hold on.
Matt Walsh:
You just said it again. Trans women are women-
Addison:
You want to reduce… Listen, listen-
Matt Walsh:
You won’t even tell me-
Addison:
You want to reduce-
Matt Walsh:
… what the word means, though, so that’s the problem.
Addison:
You want to reduce women, you want to reduce men down to maybe just their genetics, our genitals-
Matt Walsh:
No.
Addison:
… our chromosomes, right? That’s what you’re saying-
Matt Walsh:
What you want to do-
Addison:
… is that that’s what we are at the end of the day.
Matt Walsh:
What you want to do is appropriate women. You want to appropriate womanhood and turn it into, basically, a costume that could be worn.
Trent Horn:
That is an excellent point. Think about this. What if we tried to say, what is a Native American? What is an Indigenous person? Imagine if we said, “Oh, well, a Native American is an umbrella term that refers to many, many different kinds of people who identify as Native American.” If you make the umbrella so wide, it includes anyone. But most people say that if you identify as Native American, and you’re not ethnically, you’re not genetically from a Native American tribe, you have engaged in illicit cultural appropriation.
Trent Horn:
In the acronym LGBTQIA2SP… 2S is an interesting one. That’s two-spirit. It’s not exactly Native American transgender, but it’s pretty close. Two-spirit is a kind of non-binary transgender identity exclusive for Native Americans, two-spirit.
Trent Horn:
I’ve read advice columns online from transgender advocates saying, “If you are not genetically Native American, you cannot trace your ancestry through a tribe, then you should not identify as two-spirit.” So here it comes, that to be Native American, it’s not just, oh, whoever says they’re Native American. A Native American is someone who has a genetic or biological link to peoples who settled in the Americas prior to the discovery of the continent by Europeans, or something like that, whatever that definition. But notice, it’ll have objective biological qualifiers, not just it’s whatever you say that you are, “If you say you’re Native American, you are. If you say you’re this race, you’re that.”
Trent Horn:
It doesn’t make sense. That’s what we need to bring up when people try to water down the definition of men and women. What they end up doing, as Walsh said, is they turn it into a stereotype. Caitlyn Jenner appears on a magazine in a dress and hair and makeup, in the most stereotypical womanly way possible to say, “I’m a woman,” when I know lots of women who are obviously more women than Caitlyn Jenner, because Caitlyn Jenner is not a woman, who can pull off femininity… They’ll wear boots and jeans, and they’re like the women at the rodeo that we’ll go to. They’ll go out there with their hat and their boots and jeans, and wrangle cattle. They don’t have to dress in a cocktail dress to prove they’re a woman, or have their long hair or anything like that.
Trent Horn:
That’s why it’s just so bizarre to me that the LGBT advocates are pushing a kind of stereotypical view of men and women. They need something. Otherwise, if it has no meaning whatsoever, it’s not anything that they can feel special about or celebrate, or wear with hair and makeup. The problem is, though, that masculinity, femininity, manhood and womanhood, it is not about these cultural artifacts. It’s about, as Walsh says, something deep down within, in your very being.
Trent Horn:
What is the most radical thing that could change about you? I had a friend who was a Catholic high school teacher once who said this to his students. He said, “After your species, what is the most radical thing I could change about you if I snap my fingers? It’s not your height. It’s not your weight. It’s not your color. It’s your sex.” That’s not just a radical change; it’s an essential part of who you are as an individual. To deny that and to live a false sense of identity in relation to that, it’s just not healthy for people, and it’s not healthy for society.
Trent Horn:
Hope this was helpful for you all. If you want more on engaging transgender ideology, my friend Leila Miller and I wrote a lot about that in a book called Made This Way. I would highly recommend that. It has a chapter on transgender ideology, homosexuality, a lot of different subjects. It was written for parents, to teach them how to talk to their kids, but I think anyone would benefit from the book, even high-schoolers who read it.
Trent Horn:
Thank you guys so much. Definitely keep supporting us here at the channel, like this video, subscribe to us, and definitely visit us at trenthornpodcast.com to support us and help us to make this great content. Thank you, guys, and hope you have a very blessed day.
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