Daily Wire Host Matt Walsh made waves at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Monday night while student activists protested outside after vandalizing a veteran’s memorial on campus.
Walsh’s 30 minute lecture was part of the ‘What is a Woman?’ tour sponsored by Young Americans for Freedom, a series expanding upon his widely acclaimed film of the same name, regarded by many as an unrivaled masterclass in the contentious field of Gender Studies.
“Thank you everyone for being here tonight,” Walsh began.” I want to thank also the leftist crybabies for the free advertising spray painted all over the campus.” Walsh dryly noted that while his campus lectures are often met with intensely emotional opposition, though he believed the behavior at UW-Madison represented a new zenith of censorious zeal.
Walsh noted that controversy ensued soon after the local YAF chapter posted flyers advertising the event in the Gender Studies department, which in his estimate most badly needed to be exposed to the film’s message. A teaching assistant tore the flyers down and filed a ‘bias incident report’. The LGBT center on campus offered a safe space to students on campus during the talk, and the university put out an official statement condemning the content of Walsh’s lecture.
“We are aware that a speaker is coming to campus on Monday whose viewpoints we believe are harmful towards the trans community.” The statement read.
“They’re aware because they approved the event.” Walsh responded. “They are aware of what they are doing, which is more than I can say for Joe Biden.”
Walsh challenged the university’s statement that they ‘affirm and celebrate a spectrum of perspectives’ and argued that by taking a vocal stance on the issue they made it apparent that they only affirmed viewpoints that conformed to a far left ideology out of step with most Americans.
Walsh then outlined his view, that male and female are fundamentally biological categories that conform to the production of male and female gametes, sperm and ova, and the suite of characteristics that complement them in reproduction.
“A female is that member of the human species who, by her nature, can become pregnant, while a male is the member of the human species who can impregnate the female.” Walsh explained, arguing that non-binary characterizations of sex could not provide any biological basis for additional sexes within the human species. “It’s not complicated, it’s not confusing which is why nobody ever was confused by it until 8 seconds ago.”
Walsh compared the idea that sex and gender were fluid to the idea that geometry is fluid, and argued that the claim that a man could be a woman was even more absurd and pernicious than claiming that a square could be a circle.
“The untruth at the core of gender ideology, of the transgender phenomenon, reaches down to the deepest conceivable level.Gender ideology wages its assault against our knoweldege of ourselves.” Walsh said, arguing that such a worldview ‘replaces light with darkness’ and by its very nature results in self-contradictory confusion in those who adhere to it.
Walsh took the time to respond to the four principal objections to his position, although he argued that the burden of proof should be on those arguing that ‘men can get pregnant.’
“If you’re coming along to deny what everyone in the world has always known to be the case, you are the one who has to prove that assertion.”
1.Sex and Gender are not identical
Walsh argued that he had “no use for the term ‘gender’” and that it was gender theorists who advocated for the sex/gender split in the first place, before the “collapsing the very sex/gender distinction that [they] invented.”
“If you did still affirm a definitional distinction between sex and gender then you would also have to affirm that there is in this world a binary category of male and female, and that those who belong to one group cannot cross the chasm between the two.”
Walsh noted that transgender activists would not affirm any binary distinction between ‘trans women’ and ‘women, and claimed that “the whole sex/gender thing was nothing but a sleight of hand trick.”
“I see only men and women, males and females. Each individual in either group has a different way of being and expressing themselves and understanding the world, that’s true, but we don’t need the word ‘gender’ to describe that. We have a word for that: it’s called ‘personality.’
2.You say that ‘women can get pregnant’ but what about women that can’t get pregnant.
Walsh compared this objection to arguing against describing human beings as ‘bipedal’ because some people don’t walk on two legs. “Does the existence of amputees and infants call into question the notion that humans have two legs?”
Walsh argued that human beings naturally have two legs “unless accident, or disease or deformity intervenes. The humans without two legs should have two legs, but they don’t.”
Walsh similarly noted that although age and various other factors could prevent her from becoming pregnant, a woman should be able to get pregnant and if a young woman went to a doctor to ask why she couldn’t that doctor would deduce that something was wrong with her body, and likely be able to diagnose what that problem was, whereas if a young man complained to his doctor that he couldn’t get pregnant that doctor should realize there is no problem with his body at all.
3. Trans people have existed throughout history across the world. The ‘binary’ is a Western construct.
Walsh called this “the dumbest damn thing I’ve ever heard” and observed that gender theory was in fact the modern western construct that was created in the middle of the 20th century by a “relatively small collection of degenerate creeps and whackos,” such as Alfred Kinsey and John Money.
Walsh recounted his expedition to Maasai territory in Kenya, where he discussed the intricacies of sex and gender with the incredulous natives, and pointed out that very few of the people criticizing the ‘Western’ gender binary had traveled outside their Western bubble and talked to people about the subject.
“There are places where, for one reason or another, a woman may dress as a woman or play the part of a woman. But none of these cultures believe that the man actually is a woman. Outside of the West, you will not hear of a ‘pregnant man’ anywhere.”
Walsh also noted that the ‘two-spirit’ identity, which was an alleged precursor of transgenderism among native american cultures, was invented by gay activists in 1990 in a “ret-con” of history.
“There has never been a culture, before ours, that believed that men could have babies.” Walsh stated. “Such madness is uniquely modern. Nobody before us was stupid enough to believe that. It took the most educated and technologically advanced civilization in history to come up with fantastic bulls*** like that.
Furthermore, Walsh noted that if trans people did exist in large numbers throughout history, but were not affirmed by any of these cultures, then by the logic of ‘gender affirmative care’, “that should mean that a great many of these unaffirmed trans people, historically, would have killed themselves.”
Instead, the historical record shows the precise opposite – childhood suicide was vanishingly rare until very recently, “in correlation with the rise in trans affirmation.” Walsh argued that this correlation was causal and that “trans affirmation causes suicide, and not the other way around.”
4. Why do you care so much?
Walsh called this line of argument an ‘intellectual surrender’ before arguing that it was trans activist themselves who were elevating the importance of the topic.
“You literally throw parades announcing your sexuality and gender identity to the world… You can’t put something on a flag and then ask me why I care about it.” Walsh said.
“You won’t allow me to not care,” he continued. “It’s just that you want me to care in the way that you have determined and arrive at the conclusions that you have pre-approved. You don’t have a problem with the fact that I care. You have a problem with the conclusions that I have drawn.”
Walsh concluded by stating that he was so invested in the topic because “the truth matters.”
“It matters more than your ideology, it matters more than your preferences, it matters more than your self identification, it matters more than your feelings. The truth matters more than anything: it matters more than your life. And more than mine.”
Walsh stressed that no claims of emotional harm or even threats to his life would deter him from speaking the truth as he saw it.
“Nothing can have meaning, apart from truth. There is nothing to fight for, except for truth. Nothing to live for, except for truth. There’s no love without truth, there’s no joy without truth, there’s no beauty without truth, there’s no freedom without truth. There’s nothing without truth, and that’s why I won’t give it up for your sake. Or anyone else’s.”
“The question we really ought to be asking, then, is not ‘why do I care about the truth?’, it’s ‘why don’t you?’”
