Joe Rogan and guest discuss whether trans people are a sign of “the end of America”
Rogan and his guest Douglas Murray likened the acceptance trans people to a “late-empire sign of things falling apart” and called trans athletes participating in sport “repulsive”
Written by Brianna January
Research contributions from Alex Paterson
Published
Podcast host Joe Rogan and his guest Douglas Murray discussed whether acceptance of trans people signals “the end of America,” and Rogan said he finds it “repulsive” that trans women participate in sports during his show, which is hosted by platforms including Spotify and Youtube. Rogan has a history of spreading anti-trans rhetoric on his influential podcast, but Spotify has defended its decision to keep anti-trans episodes online.
On the September 17 edition of The Joe Rogan Experience, Murray, associate editor of The Spectator, claimed that acceptance of trans people is “an end-of-empire discussion. At the end of every empire they get interested in sexual fluidity, hermaphrodite, and so on.” Murray continued that trans issues “will be seen to be a late-empire, a bad sign of things falling apart.” Rogan responded, “That is fascinating that at the end of empires they get really concerned with gender, and hermaphrodites, and those things.”
Murray also demeaned nonbinary people, saying that identity “is a brilliant one if you wanted to pull apart society because, again, get people to pretend that men and women don't exist. Get people to pretend that one of the things that we’ve all known from the beginning doesn't exist, and you can do all of the other stuff, too. It’s a brilliant one to demoralize people on.” He said this will make people “just doubt everything.”
Rogan responded, “I don't think people are doing that on purpose with the specific goal of eroding society.” Murray said that some people are doing so, including politicians, particularly to criticize capitalism. Rogan agreed that “those people are using it,” also saying, “It’s another thing that demands compliance.”
Rogan said that he “didn't have a lot of experience with trans people” nor concerns about them until he heard about a trans woman competing in mixed martial arts. “We’ve crossed over to the other side, where you can just say anything,” he added. “You can say a man who sticks his penis in a woman, ejaculates inside of her, gets her pregnant, has a baby, was never a man.”
He also compared trans athletes to a child whose parents decided to inject them “with testosterone from the time she was a baby and just making her the perfect killing machine.” He concluded that allowing trans women to participate in sports is “repulsive.”
Citation From the September 17, 2020, edition of The Joe Rogan Experience
DOUGLAS MURRAY (THE SPECTATOR): I worry about the dominance that trans has taken precisely where we started off, because it's an end-of-empire discussion. You know this? [Camille] Paglia says at the end of every empire, they get interested in sexual fluidity, hermaphroditism, and so on. And I do think that if this is the end of American dominance in the world, and it could be — if America falls into civil war, then this is the end of American dominance. It’s the end of the West as we saw it, and the rise, obviously, and the overtaking by China — well, China first of all. And, if that happens and historians look back on this, one of the things that they will say is, wasn't it strange that in the last decades, this American society got completely hung up on the issue of trans? It will be seen to be a late-empire, a bad sign, a bad sign of things falling apart. On top of the multitude of other bad signs that you, particularly in America, have all around you at the moment.
JOE ROGAN (HOST): That is fascinating that at the end of empires they get really concerned with gender, and hermaphrodites, and those things. Like, that's universal?
MURRAY: Well, it certainly happens at the end of the Greek and Roman empires.
ROGAN: I wonder what that is.
MURRAY: I think it must be something to do with those boundaries and all other boundaries starting to erode. I mean, the nature of society is that we have certain fixed ideas that we agree on. I mean, by the way, trans is a brilliant one. The whole nonbinary thing is a brilliant one if you wanted to pull apart society because, again, get people to pretend that men and women don't exist. Get people to pretend that one of the things that we’ve all known from the beginning doesn't exist, and you can do all of the other stuff too. It’s a brilliant one to demoralize people on. Say there’s no difference between men and women, the penis is a social construct. … If you do that stuff, then of course people end up, they just doubt everything, everything. And that's why these things worry some of us, because if everybody is persuaded to doubt what they see with their eyes, then they can be persuaded to fall for absolutely anything next.
ROGAN: Agreed. But I don't think people are doing that on purpose with the specific goal of eroding society, right? So what is the foundation --
MURRAY: Well, some are. Some are.
ROGAN: Some are, you believe? In what way?
MURRAY: Yes. Definitely. You can predict with 100% certainty the people who will use the latest, craziest trans claim and run with it. There are definitely politicians in all of our countries who -- pardon the image -- but use trans people as a battering ram for something else. They use trans as a battering ram against capitalism. Horrible image, but I mean, like, they’re just running at the door of capitalism using the latest thing that they think will be useful, because they think that it demonstrates our horribleness as a society, and obviously, communist regimes were much better with trans. But it’s something like that. So, yeah, some people are pushing it, but I agree, it's not knowingly done among everybody.
ROGAN: Right. I think those people are using it, but it already exists. The question is why does it exist in such prevalence, and the people that are supporting it in such -- And it's another thing that demands compliance.
…
ROGAN: This is how I got brought into the whole trans thing in the first place. I pride myself on being open-minded. I literally don't care what your gender is. I don’t care what your sexual orientation is. I don't care where your ancestors are from. I just, I like people. I like all kinds of people. And I didn't have a lot of experience with trans people, but I didn’t have any problem with them, zero. Until I found out that there was a woman who was a man for 30 years and then started entering into mixed martial arts competitions, as a woman, without telling the women that she was a man for 30 years. And I was furious. And I’m like, this is fucking crazy, this, you just entered into my realm.
MURRAY: Yes.
ROGAN: OK? This is my world. I’m a martial arts expert, and I’m telling you right now, that’s fucking insane. And the blowback I got, I didn’t expect, I didn’t see coming, and some of it was so preposterous. One of them was this woman who I interacted with who said she has always been a woman. And I said, “Even when she had sex with a woman, and got her pregnant, and had a baby?” And she said, “Yes, even then.” I remember seeing that, seeing the “yes, even then” and going, oh, we’re in a fucking, we’re in Narnia. We’re in nonsense land. We’ve crossed over to the other side where you can just say anything. You can say a man who sticks his penis in a woman, ejaculates inside of her, gets her pregnant, has a baby, was never a man. What the fuck is going on then?
MURRAY: Absolutely.
ROGAN: What are we doing? And then you can also say that she is not just a woman, but she’s equal to women in terms of physical strength, all the different, all the different physical attributes that we know: reaction time, one tenth of a second faster. There’s all these different things that make -- the shape of the hips, the shape of the shoulders, the size of the hands, the mind that is grown with testosterone for 30 years.
If you had a woman that was competing in any sport, forget about combat sports but any sport, and it was found out that her parents were injecting her with testosterone from the time she was a baby and just making her the perfect killing machine so that when she entered into the octagon, she would have this spectacular advantage over women and all they were going to do is just cut off her testosterone about two years before she entered into competition. You would go, that's fucking crazy. That's cheating. Oh my God, how can you do that? That’s so, that’s so unethical. But yet, when it’s a trans person, we say, oh she was always a woman. And we’re supposed to step back and just let it all happen, and I found it repulsive.
During the same episode, Rogan pushed a debunked conspiracy theory that “left-wing people” are “lighting forest fires” on the West Coast.
Rogan is one of the most influential podcast hosts in the world, and he has frequently used his platform to demean and spread misinformation about trans people. Spotify has faced internal pressure to remove Rogan’s anti-trans episodes from its platform, with Vice reporting that LGBTQ employees and allies at Spotify felt “unwelcome and alienated because of leadership’s response.”
In May, Rogan signed an exclusive licensing agreement worth more than $100 million with Spotify, where 11 years of his show as well as new episodes began streaming on September 1. Notably, numerous past episodes featuring right-wing guests were not uploaded to Spotify’s library, including interviews with far-right bigot Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Both Spotify and YouTube, which also hosts Rogan’s interviews alongside other streaming platforms, have bans on hateful content on the basis of gender identity. According to Vice, a Spotify spokesperson determined that flagged episodes of Rogan’s show “did not meet the criteria for removal from our platform." YouTube has previously taken action against videos for anti-trans attacks.