Matt Walsh returned to his spring college speaking tour on Wednesday after cancelling a March 30 appearance due to threats against his family.
“Sadly I have to postpone my speech at Washington and Lee University,” he wrote on Twitter the day before the scheduled event. “Due to threats against my family and other serious security concerns in Nashville this week, I cannot leave my family and fly to another state. I hate to push the event off but my wife and kids come first.”
He went on to say the threats only made him “more determined to fight this,” and reaffirmed that he would “not let these psychopaths scare me into silence.” Sadly I have to postpone my speech at Washington and Lee University. Due to threats against my family and other serious security concerns in Nashville this week, I cannot leave my family and fly to another state. I hate to push the event off but my wife and kids come first.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 29, 2023
On April 4, Walsh took the stage at a Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) event at New Mexico State University (NMSU) to deliver a speech titled “Genocide: How The Trans Agenda Destroys Human Life And Common Sense.”
“Trans ideology is the most toxic evil our nation faces today, and it must be burned to the ground, destroyed completely,” he said. “Now, if you are a trans-identified person, and you hear that, you should be the most on-board with this campaign. Because trans ideology has taken more from you than it’s taken from me or any of the rest of us. You are a victim — you are — just not in the way that you think. You are a victim of transgenderism. You have fallen pray to this ideology, and the ideology is wrong.”
He added: “You are on a path that can only lead to despair, I promise you. It cannot have any other outcome. Most people will not tell you this. They will lie to you because they don’t care about you. Your life means nothing to them. The people who are pushing this on you … they don’t give a s--- about you.”
Walsh’s appearance was preceded last week by chalk-drawn messages denouncing the Daily Wire host on the sidewalk in front of NMSU’s Student Union.
While some drawings referred to Walsh as “a f------ knob” and “a jerk,” others promoted abortion as healthcare and touted sex work as “valid,” YAF reported on March 27.
Another message from a student named Gauge stated: “I’d rather kill myself than carry a pregnancy to term.” Controversial commentator/author stirs up protests at NMSUhttps://t.co/nZxjIzdvtr
— KTSM 9 News (@KTSMtv) April 5, 2023
Prior to the April 5 speech, KTSM 9 News reported that a group of students protested with signs supporting trans rights outside the Corbett Center, where the speech took place.
Michel Wing, a peer facilitator with the Las Cruces Trans and Non-Binary Support Group, disagreed with the central message of Walsh’s speech.
“[The claim that] trans people specifically are a threat to the very existence of life … is so ironic because it’s trans lives that are on the line here, not the other way around,” Wing said, per KTSM 9 News.
They added that the motive of the protest was “to create community; it’s not to bring up hate even against someone like Matt Walsh.”
An NMSU spokesperson released the following statement to the NBC affiliate:NMSU encourages free expression and peaceful assembly. The university also realizes that certain speech may have a negative impact on some members of our community. It’s written into NMSU policy that the free exchange of ideas is a reflection of the university’s public land-grant heritage, interest in diverse points of view, and commitment to excellence in education and research.
Walsh’s speech, which ran just over 45 minutes, was followed by a Q&A discussion wherein Walsh engaged with several attendees who pushed back against his views.
One transgender-identifying audience member seemed to take offense to the notion that such an individual could not be perceived as the gender with which one identifies.
“I have my co-workers, I have my boss, my VP, my CEO, all respecting me as a woman, my family, my long term friends, who are actually here with me,” the audience member said. “All of these people assure me … I'm a woman. They'll tell me, ‘Girl, like there is no way you are a man.’ They see me as a woman. So the question: how can you assert that nobody would ever see me as a woman when my material experience tells me you're wrong?”
Though Walsh contended that he didn’t make that assertion in his speech, he granted that “it's possible, I suppose, that you could fool someone” into thinking that the person was a woman.
“Now, you brought this up. … you've put your identity on the table for conversation, and so I'm going to say you wouldn't fool me at all,” he continued. “I mean, I see a man 100 percent and I think that most people would.”
Walsh added: “No one in my life has ever once said to me, ‘You're totally a man, Matt.’ If a friend of mine called me on the phone and said: ‘Listen, Matt, I want you to know you're really a man,’ I would think that there is something wrong with him.”
He went on to say that this anecdote proves his point: “Your identity, even in your own mind ... is something you need to be assured of.” I asked a “trans woman” to explain how he knows that he’s a woman. The answer was about as coherent as you’d expect
pic.twitter.com/sBEOnn5VFq
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 5, 2023
Walsh then asked the audience member, “How do you know that you’re a woman?”
“It was first when I heard transgender persons describe their experience in their own words, and this was only about two years ago,” the person responded. “It blew my mind to hear somebody so eloquently and precisely describe things that I had experienced.”
When Walsh asked for more details about the descriptions to which the audience member was referring, the audience member paused before saying, “I am honestly hesitant. I know that you touched earlier about the difficulty that transgender women might have in describing their identity, but ... I honestly don't feel that you would engage in this conversation in good faith.”
After a brief back-and-forth, the audience member listed examples like “looking at yourself in the mirror and not recognizing yourself,” hearing compliments about being “a positive masculine role model,” or “feeling alone, even when you’re surrounded by guys, even when you have a lot of friends.”
“How does that make you a woman as opposed to just a man who doesn’t get along with some other men, or a man who’s depressed, or a man who doesn’t feel at home totally in his body, which, by the way, is a pretty universal human experience?” Walsh asked.
The exchange concluded when the audience member, after being asked to define a woman, said, “So, gender is a social thing.” When Walsh pressed for a more specific definition, the audience member replied: “A woman is somebody who is included and respected and seen and participates in society, recognized by other women.”
Later on, another audience member, who identifies as transgender, or “I might be intersex for all we know,” asked Walsh to define what a woman is.
“An adult human female,” he said — a reply met with applause.
“And how don’t trans people, how doesn’t a transgender woman fit that definition?” asked the audience member.
“Because they’re not female,” Walsh replied, before briefly digressing into a discussion of what he called the “genetic anomaly” of intersex people. “So what you’re saying is that a ‘trans woman’ is a female?”
“By the definitions I’m familiar with, yes,” replied the person, who claimed to be an EMT trained in healthcare. A trans EMT tried to use his medical training to prove that sex is not binary. He ran into trouble when I asked him how he’d respond to a patient with a penis who claims he’s having a miscarriage.
pic.twitter.com/COtz0m0sS6
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 5, 2023
When Walsh insisted that sex does not exist on a spectrum, the audience member claimed “biological researchers would disagree with you.”
“Well, then they’re full of s---, the ones that would say that,” Walsh said. “There are male gametes and there are female gametes.”
The audience member walked away from the microphone at the point, but Walsh said he wanted to ask the EMT one more question.
“If you’re responding to a health emergency, [and a] biological male — somebody with a penis — is having a medical emergency and they say to you, ‘I think I’m having a miscarriage,’” he said. “Would you check them to see if they’re having a [miscarriage]? Would you consider that a possibility for them?”
After an eight-second pause, the audience member rolled their eyes and said, “No, but that’s because some people don’t have body parts. It doesn’t mean they’re not a woman.”
Walsh then made the case that this establishes a binary in sex between people who can get pregnant and people who cannot.
When the audience member suggested some women cannot give birth, Walsh formulated the following analogy: I can rightly say that human beings have two legs, and if a person is born with only one leg, that doesn’t call into question the statement that human beings have two legs, OK? A person being born with one leg doesn’t mean that now legs are on a spectrum and we can’t say anything at all about how many legs a person has. ‘Who knows? They could be a centipede, they could have a hundred legs.’ … If a human is born with two legs, something went wrong … maybe they had an accident … but you know that something went wrong. … Same thing for a woman: a woman, by her nature, can get pregnant. A man, by his nature, never can. So if you meet a woman of childbearing age … and she can’t get pregnant, you know automatically that something has gone wrong, and she can go to the doctor and find out what that thing is — even if they can’t fix it.
He concluded: “If a male with a penis can’t get pregnant, no doctor on earth is going to run tests to see what’s wrong with him. Because they already know, it’s that he’s a male.”
The five-and-a-half-minute clip of this exchange has over 3 million views on Twitter as of Wednesday afternoon.
Though Walsh has yet to reschedule his lecture at Lee and Washington University, his next campus appearance is scheduled for April 19 at the University of Iowa.
