Across several pieces of online content and podcasts, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles attacked and misgendered two trans teenagers at the center of a lawsuit from extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) that seeks to prevent them from competing in girls’ sports. The lawsuit alleges that a Connecticut policy allowing trans athletes to compete in sports that align with their gender identity violates federal sex discrimination protections under Title IX.
Since May 11, the reliably anti-trans outlet and pundits have posted four podcast segments that received over 215,000 views on YouTube and two articles that earned a combined 158,000 interactions on Facebook. The pundits repeatedly misgendered the teen athletes and fearmongered about trans-inclusive sports, with Knowles claiming that recognizing transgender people is part of an agenda to end “objective reality.”
Their coverage was in reaction to a request by U.S. District Judge Robert N. Chatigny that lawyers from ADF maintain “respectful, humane, intelligent, civil discourse” by not misgendering the athletes, asking them to refer to the athletes as “transgender females” rather than “ male athletes.” In response, ADF’s lawyers demanded Chatigny disqualify himself from the case, claiming he had “destroyed the appearance of impartiality in this proceeding.”
Daily Wire pundits called the teenage athletes “penis wielding XYs” and claimed trans-inclusive sports are part of an agenda to destroy “objective reality”
After National Review first reported on the story on May 11, Daily Wire published two articles, one written by Walsh and the other by Amanda Prestigiacomo, that repeatedly misgendered the athletes, referring to them as “male” or “biologically male.”
During the May 11 episode of Walsh’s Daily Wire podcast The Matt Walsh Show, he called trans girls “boys with XY chromosomes and penises” and claimed that “people are like Mr. Potato Head dolls now. You just take off the different parts, swap them out. Doesn't matter. It makes no difference.” He also claimed that the athletes are not females, “not by the science, not by common sense, and not by human decency.” The following day, Walsh doubled down on his remarks and called trans athletes “penis wielding XYs” and claimed, “They’re not girls, and they are certainly not female.”