Daily Wire host claims “around 2015, we did not have any acceptance of transgenderism in public life”

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From the March 6, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show

MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): So, the question then becomes -- the more honest liberals have said, okay, well, what does it mean, then, to eradicate transgenderism from public life? And it's a good question. I'm glad people are talking about that. That was the point of my speech. What would it mean to eradicate the preposterous ideology of transgenderism from public life at every level? I'll tell you.

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Put simply, eradicating transgenderism from public life would mean behaving as American society did before, say, 2015. Before, around 2015, we did not have any acceptance of transgenderism in public life. And it started to be introduced into public life around 2015 when Barack Obama instituted transgender military policies and some liberals in North Carolina decided to invite men into the women's bathroom and passed all sorts of weird ordinances about bathrooms. Then, later on, we got the Bostock decision. The Bostock decision rewrote civil rights law to say that there was a protection for gender identity and there -- obviously there is not one, but that came years later. So we're only talking about the last seven, eight years or so we've had transgenderism in public life.

And my point is you can't deal with transgenderism only by saying we're not going to trans the kids. I think there are a lot of conservatives who say, okay, look, if transgender adults -- if a man wants to identify as a woman, he's an adult, that's fine. Just don't do it to the kids. That's missing the point. I actually think this is what motivated these news outlets to lie about what I said. They obviously couldn't deal with the argument I was making. If they could, they would have done that. But they couldn't do that. So they had to lie. They had to re-write what I said until I scared them at the prospect of libel laws and then they had to change their headlines. Even though there's still libelous content in the articles. Why? Because the left believed that it had already won the transgender issue, just like it wins every other social issue.

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And the reason that the libs, I think, had to libel me and lie about what I said is because I said no. I'm not rolling over on transgenderism. And you can't. Because it's not five year-olds who are going into women's bathrooms and taking women's private spaces. If a five year old is going into a women's bathroom, it's because his mother is bringing him in there. Okay? The issue with women being able to have their own bathrooms or have their own sports teams or have their own locker rooms or have their own public spaces is not that little kids are identifying as the opposite sex. It's that 50 year-olds are identifying as the opposite sex. So, if you want to deal with the transgender issue, it's kind of all-or-nothing.