Embattled far-right wing Daily Wire host Michael Knowles insists when he called for a complete ban on America’s 1.6 million transgender people he was not calling for genocide – and says it would be impossible to do so because transgender people aren’t “real.”
“I got in trouble for this issue yesterday. I, your beloved host, whom everybody loves so, I got in trouble for this issue,” Knowles said Tuesday, while attacking the nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America which highlighted his remarks.
“The big issue that they had yesterday, which was then picked up in other media outlets as well, is that I called to ban transgenderism entirely,” he admitted, which Media Matters also reported.
“It has to be the whole thing because if men have the right to behave as women and identify as women for the purposes of public life, then women can’t have their own spaces and we as a society cannot have our own standards and norms and we’re not allowed to live according to reality,” he claimed, falsely suggesting that transgender people don’t exist in reality. Later in the segment he calls being transgender “fraud.”
“We have to live according to the delusions of these troubled people. And I think we, the people, have a right to reality. And I think women have a right to their own spaces. And so, that means you’ve got to ban the thing entirely.”
After inaccurately claiming that “genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology,” Knowles said, “transgender people is not a real ontological category. It’s not a legitimate category of being. There are people who think that they’re the wrong sex, but they’re mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.”
(The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention has a very different definition of genocide than what Knowles is claiming it means.)
After falsely declaring “transgenderism, ultimately, is a lie. It’s a deception. It’s a fraud,” Knowles insisted what he meant when he called for a complete ban on transgender people was “that we return to the way that American society operated until approximately five minutes ago when we said that men do not have a right to present themselves as women in public life, and women don’t have a right to present themselves as men in public life. You have some limits on that. We have all sorts of limits on our speech and behavior.”
That too is false. Transgender people have existed since the dawn of time, and for centuries men have been presenting as women and vice versa.
Watch a portion of Knowles’ comments below or at this link.