What Does Twitter Think ‘Destroy Transgenderism’ Means?

When Matt Walsh said it, what did his Twitter followers hear?

After Michael Knowles told CPAC that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” Matt Walsh tweeted his agreement on March 5.

“Transgenderism as a concept and an ideology,” Walsh declared, “needs to be destroyed entirely.” He was tiptoeing around a distinction between someone’s concept of themselves or others and the purported ideology by which they live, as contrasted with something real about that person (since, in his view, using trans-related words doesn’t prove that anyone can really be transgender), a thought/reality distinction he imagines the media will swallow so that he will win ongoing license to say terrible things. Children are “but one phase in the overall war,” he said. He means he does not accept transgender adults either. And he is waging war on everyone.

A prominent voice for trans rights on Twitter (who nevertheless only has 4% of the followers that Walsh has) asked him publicly for clarification: “What would it mean” to destroy transgenderism entirely for people of all ages? What policies are being proposed here? She tossed in an insult, asking him to use simple vocabulary for his followers’ benefit.

Lots of people had ideas about what it would mean to destroy transgenderism. Responses included:

• “Hey stupid. Nobody is trying to destroy Transgender,” one person said, even though both Knowles and Walsh had just said literally that. The right-wing’s concern is limited to the “sexual exploit[ation]” of “children,” they went on, even though both Knowles and Walsh had explicitly said they would apply their ban equally to adults and in fact it was the whole point of their statements.
• Another tossed in an insult toward the trans woman (“You must be great at parties”), acknowledging that, by insulting her, they were merely “throwing insults, not acting like I’m a morally superior ass.” The trans person, they claimed, had behaved worse by claiming a “moral high ground and treat[ing] others like lesser beings and talk[ing] down to them.”
• Another said that the trans woman, even though “unprovoked,” had indeed insulted Walsh’s fans and that unprovoked insults are “a sign of a weakness in a debater.” (Recall that Walsh had declared “war,” which is indeed a provocation and not an academic debate tactic. Recall, also, that the trans person had asked for clarification on a particular point and had not asked to debate him.)
• Another similarly said: “Debate Walsh in a venue…Adhere to the onus and embrace the remedy.” (Because Walsh, a professional transphobe with 1.4 million Twitter followers, used Twitter to declare “war” on “transgenderism,” the burden falls on a trans person to book an official media venue to publicly argue with this celebrity. That’s the only “remedy” allowed to the trans person. For some reason, she’s not allowed to use Twitter to tweet back at him.)
• “Are you going to kill yourself if people don’t affirm your mental illness?” Not waiting for a response, this person continued: “Can you see how incredibly abusive threatening suicide is? Do other groups get to use this abuse as freely as you and other trans people do?” (The trans person had said nothing whatsoever about suicide, nor had she asked for affirmation or help.)

Some people on Twitter, rather than answer the question of what it would mean to destroy transgenderism, cis-plained what it means to be transgender:

• Did you know! “Modern gender theory” originated with “two horrific doctors whose experimentation ended horribly for those they experimented on,” and the outcome was “buried.” (No names, locations, or dates were provided, of course.)
• Doctors today are in it for profit. (As if doctors in general do not earn a living from the healthcare they provide.)
• “Transgenderism” is not “widespread” but is instead “a rarely occurring mental health issue.” (This person seems to use the -ism to refer to a feeling, identity, or experience, not an ideology.)
• “God created them male and female. Period.”
• One person shared a post-surgery photo, allegedly of a donor skin graft site on a minor’s arm. (What is the point?)
• Another demanded that this particular trans person who had asked Walsh for clarification on his beliefs must first answer for a violent slogan once used by another trans person somewhere else. (The term for this is “whataboutism.”)

Walsh himself replied: “The destruction of gender ideology” means that people who believe they’re another gender or want to be another gender would get psychological “counseling” rather than “experimental drugs and surgeries.” (Hormones and surgeries are not actually “experimental.” He’s just scaremongering and insulting.) Twenty minutes later, he added: “We were minding our own business when suddenly the trans movement came along and demanded that we totally abandon biology, common sense, and truth itself for its sake. Our war against this scourge is a defensive struggle. They started it. They wanted this fight. Now they have it.” The next day, he tweeted that transgenderism is “a self-destructive cult,” not an actual thing someone can be, and therefore “there is no such thing as a trans child.”

A lot of other Twitter users replied, making various attempts to answer the question of what it would mean to ban transgenderism entirely from public life for all ages. Some of their proposals contradict. See if you can make sense of transphobia:

• “Be gay. No one cares”
• Keep it in “ur bedroom” and in the “red-light district” and out of “my restrooms locker rooms changing rooms n sports.” This is “simple & easy.”
• People may “carry on as you are,” “cross dress all you want,” “act as you wish,” and “call yourself whatever you’d like” among “your friends,” but “it does not change gender” and you can’t be “demanding that I play along.” (One person insists that “I see/hear you” as a member of the sex you were assigned at birth, even though this conversation is happening on Twitter and they do not actually see/hear the trans person at all. You have “a dick,” another asserts, though they have no way of knowing if this is true.)
• No one will be “encouraged to continue living a lie.”
• Keep it out of “public life,” one person emphasized. (Knowles had included this. Walsh had left it out.)
• Trans women will be seen, treated, and classified as men. “Males…will not be able to forcibly self-identify” themselves into women’s spaces. “No males” in women’s bathrooms, “ever.”
• “Transgenderism is just stereotyping gender into roles. This can only lead to bigotry.” (Matt Walsh doesn’t believe in gender roles? This is news to me — )
• “You are still free to identify/practice your ideology, in private, but you cannot demand acceptance or protection of your ideology by others… same as the other commonly rejected ‘isms’ like racism, communism, nazism, etc.”
• Trans people or concepts (it wasn’t made clear) will be “banned from classrooms” or maybe the Walshites will “remove trans ideology from gov funded schools” or introduce “prison for Activist teachers peddling pedophilia.”
• Children will not receive puberty blockers because they “cannot consent.”
• “Leave our children alone.” Trans people will stop “grooming children.” With more words, but with no more clarity: “activists will no longer have the power to confuse, mutilate, and ideologically groom children.”
• “You couldn’t strip for children anymore” and couldn’t try to “normalize adults having sex with kids.”
• “It” will be treated as a “sex crime” with possible jail time, similar to bestiality. Trans people wouldn’t be “given unfettered access to children.” They should be put on a “registry” with “signs in the yard, not allowed within 1000 feet of a school, etc.”
• It will be treated as “fraud,” similar to those who “lie about [their] age.”
• It will be treated like sex crime and fraud put together: as if an adult were pretending to be a minor to gain access to a minor.
• Actually, one person said, destroying transgenderism would have “nothing to do with jailing people with a gender identity disorder.” Instead, their doctors would be punished, or people could sue doctors.
• Transgender feelings will be treated as a mental illness or “delusion.” Trans people are “mental cases and sex freaks.” They should “be correctly diagnosed,” get psychological “help” and not “force” the delusion on others. “Intense psychotherapy. For life. Required by law.” More specifically, they “should be instituted to a mental hospital till they know they are the sex they are born with.”
• Gender-affirming surgery won’t be taxpayer-funded.
• “Big pharma” won’t use trans people as “test subjects” for profit, and all gender-affirming care will be banned.
• Except that “sterilization” should be required. (When another person commended this answer for “being honest about the genocidal intent,” the person who had proposed sterilization did not dispute this characterization, and replied simply by intentionally misgendering a trans person.)
• “male=man=penis and female=woman=vagina” (Hmm, but a man is not a penis and a woman is not a vagina. This statement does indeed reduce humans to body parts.)
• Every person has equal recognition by law “as a Citizen of USA.” No one has “a Right to extra protection” based on the group they belong to.
• A “man in a dress” should be “treated with respect. But I should be treated with respect also & not be threatened” for calling that person a man.
• “Government/employment vocabulary” will be banned. (I suppose that means nondiscrimination laws will not exist.)
• Seek “individual rights,” fine, but no “attempting to influence society.”
• “No [anti-transgender] law needed.” What is needed? Simply recognize: “You either have a prostate or you don’t.” (Ah, yes. Classify new acquaintances by the presence or absence of a prostate gland, which you locate by — )
• “You would all have to live in reality”
• “Everybody would be normal again”
• “No one cared up until around 2015” when trans people popped into existence and began living as members of their genders and began imposing “ideological indoctrination.”
• “We’d simply [go] back to how things were in 2015”
• “Remember 2005? That’s what it will look like”
• “Zero spaces in public media, for the propaganda of the ideology.”
• “Just leave the women and children alone.”
• Trans people would not be recognized as a “race of humans.”
• “Being transgender would no longer be glorified in the media”
• Trans people will “go back to feeling ashamed of yourselves.” Specifically: “You should be shamed into social invisibility.”
• “SHARIA LAWS for LGBTQ”
• “Transgenderism is pure imagination” and thus there is no need to destroy it. (Even though Knowles and Walsh had said it needs to be destroyed. Well, if it doesn’t need to be destroyed after all, could they stop talking?)
• “You and your friends need to be destroyed”

That’s what Twitter thinks destroy transgenderism means. That is roughly what it’s intended to mean. It might also mean worse things that no one, not even a trollbot, is willing to admit.