Matt Walsh, the far-right Daily Wire host and author who has been attacking the LGBTQ community for years calls having a transgender child “like a fate worse than death,” and “like a death of a child while they’re still alive.” He says he has been told that when one of your children tells you they are trans it is like they have died.
“The thing that makes it really personal for me is the way that kids are affected by it,” Walsh said in a podcast last week, as Media Matters reports. He does not explain how children are affected by people coming out as transgender, but Walsh says he homeschools his children to “shield” them from the world.
“I have six kids and, you know, they are — we homeschool them and we do — my oldest kids are nine, so it’s still relatively easy to shield them from a lot of this craziness. But eventually they’re going to end up in the world and they’re going to be subjected to this.”
“I hear from parents all the time, just these horror stories of, you know, I raised my kid, I did everything right. I even homeschooled. I did, whatever. And then one day my daughter at 16 comes home and declares that she’s a boy,” Walsh says, not explaining how many parents of transgender children he talks to.
“And from that moment, it’s just she is devoured by this cult almost overnight and becomes unrecognizable. She wants nothing to do with us anymore. I’ve heard the story so many times and it’s terrifying. It’s horrific. You know, it’s — I think as a parent, it’s like a fate worse than death in a lot of ways. You’re losing your child. It’s like a death of a child while they’re still alive and — so that’s what makes it, I suppose, personal for me.”
There are also countless stories of parents who support their transgender children, and more recently, even of parents taking steps or choosing to move out of anti-LGBTQ states to protect their children.
“More than half of queer Florida parents have considered fleeing the state in the wake of ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ study finds,” reads a headline at The 19th. It adds that 17 percent of respondents “have already taken steps to leave Florida, and 11 percent have considered transferring their children to other schools.”
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports “a review of 27 studies involving almost 8,000 teens and adults who had transgender surgeries, mostly in Europe, the U.S and Canada, 1% on average expressed regret. For some, regret was temporary, but a small number went on to have detransitioning or reversal surgeries, the 2021 review said.”
Watch Walsh’s remarks below or at this link.