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March 30, 2024 - The Michael Knowles Show
23:37
Non-Binary: Knowles Vs Protestors | Cross The Picket Line

PreBorn! - Help save babies from abortion: https://preborn.com/Knowles At a campus YAF speech, Michael Knowles sits down with some of the students arguing against his stances at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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When a conservative speaks on a college campus, anything can happen.
I've come to expect the histrionics of the excitable leftist students with purple hair.
That's just how college kids are.
It's frankly kind of charming.
What still gives me some surprise, though, is that the most ardent disruption these days often comes from the supposed adults who should know better.
The University Administrators.
Just days before I was scheduled to speak at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, left-wing administrators tried to shake down the students for a last-minute, unprecedented security fee totaling well over $4,000.
For me!
Little old me!
At first, I was honored.
UW-Madison didn't charge any last-minute security fees when my friends Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh spoke there.
Perhaps they were just more intimidated by my Sicilian physique.
But then I learned that the fee was not to protect the students from me.
Rather, it was to protect me from the liberal students, who ideologically are on the same side as the administrators who were trying to shake me down.
Fortunately, the group that had invited me held its ground and even threatened to sue the school, which was legally bound by the First Amendment to abide by free speech.
What was the result?
Chaos?
Mayhem?
Did my producer survive the violent hordes?
It all turned out great.
Hundreds of people came in, they filled all the seats, and they were polite for almost the whole time.
I'm standing here now, a biological male, wearing a dress with a pair of leggings.
Do you sincerely believe that I should be subject to punitive justice on the basis of what I'm wearing?
And if so, are you willing to turn yourself in for wearing women's panties in your gay college film?
I say almost the whole time because a couple students, one who called himself transgender and another who called herself non-binary, became a bit more pointed during the Q&A.
I was happy to answer their questions.
So happy, in fact, that we all decided to sit down and have a conversation after the event.
Demi.
Demi.
Ferris.
First of all, thank you for coming to the lecture, and then thank you for your questions, and then for sitting down.
I take it you did not agree with me coming in.
Did I persuade either of you?
No.
No.
Okay.
Not particularly, no.
The topic of the conversation was abortion.
Mm-hmm.
You asked about transgenderism.
I did.
I didn't persuade you on that?
No, not really.
When did you start to identify as a woman?
What makes you say that I identify as a woman?
Because I actually didn't assert that.
I don't know.
Is it just pattern recognition?
Do I just look like one of the transes?
You're wearing a dress.
First hint.
Have you heard of a femboy?
Do you know what that means?
Now I have, but I don't know what it means.
It's feminine men.
They wear a lot of dresses.
It's cool.
I'm not a femboy.
I identify as a trans woman.
Okay, so I was right.
Yeah, you were correct.
But a femboy is different than a trans.
Yes, they are.
They're quite different.
What's the difference?
So, a femboy still retains their male identity and pursues femininity, whereas a trans woman actually identifies as a woman.
What does that mean, though?
If I pursue Sicilian identity, then I would identify as Sicilian?
Yeah.
I would agree with that.
But then, if a femme boy pursues feminine identity, he would identify as female.
He would identify as feminine, not necessarily female.
I think you and everyone at The Daily Wire would agree that feminine and female are not synonymous.
Well, men can be effeminate, actually.
Yeah, effeminate.
But that's different than feminine.
Feminine.
How would you define feminine versus effeminate?
Feminine is good, and it's what women are when they act like women.
And effeminate is bad, and it's what men are when they act like women.
So yeah, we could say a femme boy is a boy who is effeminate.
Well, a trans woman actually doesn't retain the male identity and chooses to identify as a female.
Okay, but then to loop back around to my first question, when did you start to identify as transgender?
Started to identify as transgender.
Internally, I've noticed the sort of mismatch between my identity and the body that I was given and the roles that society has placed upon me.
That mismatch was pretty clear from a very young age.
I'm not gonna pretend that.
I was a woman all along, you know, I was born with a female brain.
But I'd say probably since around 4K, you know, like school.
4K?
Like four-year-old kindergarten, like preschool.
Okay.
What do you think caused it?
If you say you weren't, you know, it's not like you were born in the wrong body or something, then what do you think caused it?
I think it's quite simple, really.
I think some people like ketchup and some people don't.
You know, I wanted to live my life this way.
I wanted to pursue these characteristics, these traits.
No, I'm not denying that you want or want to do that, but I'm just kind of asking why.
I think the same reason why anybody identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth.
It just feels kind of natural.
When did you publicly start doing it?
I'd say I came out as trans to everyone except for my family members, because it wasn't safe in my household.
What do you mean it wasn't safe?
Why wasn't it safe?
I don't want to get into the grotesque details, but I was in a pretty abusive household.
My father was not very accepting, but my mother... Do you think maybe that might have had anything to do with...
No, the abuse and whatnot didn't really, I don't see any correlation with that in my gender identity.
I could see the look on your face.
Because I've just heard.
I see the talking point.
I've heard, it's not just, I mean, I've just heard it from people who have detransitioned or, you know, that sometimes that correlates.
Yeah, I don't like, you know, trust me, I'm not proud to say that I grew up in an abusive household and I also happen to be trans.
I don't want to fuel that statistic, but I'm also not going to be dishonest about my upbringing.
Yeah.
Now, you are not trans.
I am.
You're trans, too?
Mm-hmm.
No, you're not.
I am.
So what are you?
I'm non-binary.
Oh, all right.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but you're not saying you're a man?
I'm not saying I'm a man, no.
And you would have at some point in your life said you're a woman?
I don't think I ever said I was a woman.
A little girl?
I don't know.
Sure, yeah.
You did, okay.
But then when did you decide you're non-binary?
I didn't know what transgender or non-binary was until I was 14, 15.
Most people had not heard of it until recently.
I mean, it existed, but I hadn't heard of it.
I suppose we'll perhaps agree to disagree on that.
You don't think it existed until recently?
No, I think people have been confused about their sex, and I think they've had all sorts of aberrant desires for all of history.
But I don't think it's a real category, basically.
So I don't mean it in any disrespectful way.
I just don't think it's possible to have a male body but be a female, because I don't think that's how body and soul or how identity actually works.
So, I think what we're saying is that transgenderism, let's just say as an ideology, has existed for a very, very long time.
The first books that were burned in the Holocaust were about transgender people, about sexual studies.
Well, yeah, there was all sorts of sort of sexual, and it goes back obviously much further than the 1940s.
I suppose the difference would be transvestitism has existed for all of history, always been sort of, you know, cabarets and red light districts and things like that.
But the ideology, meaning the view that a man could say he really is a woman, or a woman could say she really is multiple, you know, they or them, or not an either man or a woman, that's a relatively new ideology.
Um, no.
Not the behavior.
We have, looking back, I mean, obviously historical records going back thousands of years get kind of shaky just because, you know, we aren't able to preserve text that long and maybe text even didn't exist.
They did exist.
Not for all of human history.
Well, thousands of years, yeah, but not like... Oh, we're not going back to Adam in the garden.
That's probably true.
But we have, there's evidence of people with assigned male skeletons in female, traditionally female clothing and attire in burial.
And we have the same vice-versa people.
This is, one of the specific examples I'm thinking of was Norse.
There was a female skeleton that was buried with traditionally male burial rites and clothing.
How do they know the skeleton's female?
Well, I said female because obviously I believe that gender is something social rather than just biological.
But the scientists were able to identify it by the skeleton.
We know that sex is unambiguous.
I don't think we're denying that.
There's this odd idea among conservatives that transgender people don't understand that biological sex exists.
Some don't.
Some do.
You obviously do.
But some don't.
No.
I mean, I have yet to meet anybody.
I've seen people clipped out of context to look like that, but I haven't.
Those people are clipped talking to me.
These are people, I promise you, I've spoken to these people on camera in some cases.
But in any case, you don't feel that way.
I have never felt that way.
You're non-binary.
You said that you came to this realization at 14.
What do you think kind of pushed you over that edge at 14?
Um, I think intense emotional distress at the prospect of needing to navigate through life being someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's girlfriend, someone's wife, someone's mother.
That's just something that wasn't really a role that I wanted to fill and a role that I felt intensely distressed at the prospect of needing to fulfill.
Why is that?
It's difficult to explain, and it would be difficult to explain in a very short period of time.
It's just one of those things that you feel deep down in your soul.
You mean it would be difficult to explain even to yourself, or you're just saying it would be difficult to articulate this thing that I understand?
It's difficult to articulate.
It's kind of an abstract thing.
Yeah, the cause of gender dysphoria and this discomfort with your sex assigned at birth in these roles is still pretty widely debated, even in the woke scientific community.
And there would seem to be, even among the pro-trans kind of woke, a presumed plurality, or multiplicity rather, of causes.
Like some people can fall into this as a bit of a sexual fetish.
That isn't transgender, though.
Some guys who dress up like women will openly state that they're—the Wachowski brothers, who are now the Wachowski sisters, said they fell into their transgender identity largely through pornography.
And others will say that as well.
Now, you might say, well, it wasn't pornography.
It was because of, you know, I wanted to wear a dress when I was four years old or something.
But I'm just saying, in some cases, it would appear to be more of a sexual fetish.
For some people, it might be caused by some emotional distress.
For some people, it might be caused by any number of other factors.
Again, I'm just repeating what I've heard from the left.
I'm not even stating that.
I don't think that the left says that.
The Wachowski brothers certainly do.
That's two people.
The most famous transgender identifying people in the world.
That is wildly false.
The material presence of a man in a woman's dress perhaps could come about as a sexual fetish.
I think we agree on that, but I don't think that... I think what we're trying to say is that that's a very different thing than we're describing.
No, I guess that's what I'm saying too, that there are these, so we all agree, there are these different causes for this kind of identity.
There's so much more to say.
First though, go to preborn.com slash Knowles.
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You came not to talk about transgenderism, you asked me about abortion.
So you support abortion.
Absolutely.
And you support it.
Do you support abortion?
We didn't even talk about it.
Yeah.
You do?
Yeah.
You won't need one though.
No, I won't need an abortion.
And you might not either because you're transgender or non-binary.
Do you believe that transgender people are all celibate?
I'm just a little confused as to what non-binary means.
Non-binary means, um, I am not a man or a woman, regardless of what parts I was bestowed.
Okay.
What you're saying is your body has nothing to do with whether you're a man or a woman.
Um, correct.
Okay.
I think, yeah, oftentimes the gender identity does describe a relationship to one's body.
For example, you know, if I were to say, I am a transgender woman, I'm directly asserting that I am a woman and that I have, you know, male genitalia.
Or you could have gone under the knife and lost your male genitalia.
I could have, yeah.
So you could be asserting that too.
So I guess that's what I'm saying.
It seems like you could just, all of these terms just mean kind of whatever you want them to mean.
No, not really.
It's a pretty concrete definition.
So you just said, to be a transgender woman, I have to be wearing a dress or look like this, but... I didn't say I have to.
I said that's just how I like it.
What's the concrete definition of a transgender woman?
Somebody who is assigned male at birth who identifies and pursues womanhood.
Okay, and what is womanhood?
Not to sound like Walsh, but what is womanhood then?
What does that mean in that statement?
I would describe womanhood as a very subjective concept.
But you just also said we're talking about things that are concrete, and that's all I'm just trying to grab onto something.
What is the actual definition of the thing that you are using to define transgenderism?
I would describe womanhood as a set of characteristics associated with females, usually removed from sex.
But that's a circular definition, and even the way you said it, I would describe, but I'm not asking you to describe anything.
I'm asking if you can offer a definition.
Because it gets to the heart of your identity, which is that you're four years old, you say, I don't really feel like a man.
How would you even know what that would mean at the age of four?
And how would you know what that would mean now to feel like a woman?
Because there are a variety of traditions associated with the male and female sex, and I've decided that I'd rather subscribe to the ones associated with the female sex.
But how would you even know what that is?
How would I even know what the traditions associated with the female sex are?
Yeah, I mean, they could be just a caricature.
I know that mom stays at home and that dad goes to work.
But you would disagree with that.
No, that's... You said you reject those roles.
I understand what a traditional gender role is.
I don't reject that it, as a concept, exists.
I'm not comfortable with these social expectations, therefore I am going to adhere to different social expectations that are generally... But that's not what you're saying.
I'm saying it right now!
Well now you are, but that's not previously what you said.
Previously what you said was, there are these different social expectations associated with being a woman, and I so wanted to avoid them that I no longer call myself a woman.
Not that a woman can avoid those social expectations, but rather that the social expectations are so Intrinsic to womanhood, that I will no longer be a woman, I will be a non-binary they-them.
That's what you said earlier.
You see the conflict, the contradiction there?
Yes, I understand where your confusion came from.
I don't want to adhere to the social norms generally pushed onto women, and I also feel intense discomfort when being called with feminine pronouns, when being called a woman, when being perceived as a woman.
Yeah.
And I understand those things aren't necessarily under my control, so, you know, water off a duck's back, but I feel discomfort with that, therefore I choose to reject it.
Okay.
Just to tie it up, I don't want to spend the whole time talking about the issue that you wanted to talk about.
Would you ever get an abortion?
I could come up with a circumstance in which I would.
I highly doubt that such a circumstance would arise.
Why wouldn't you?
Mostly just because those circumstances... I've never been pregnant.
I do not foresee being pregnant in my future.
Okay, but why wouldn't you in principle, I guess?
In principle, in principle I have no issues with it.
Past certain points of development, I do believe you can start ascribing personhood to a fetus.
What would the point be then?
What would the point be?
Because you said, look, there's a point at which I would start to ascribe personhood and then presumably you wouldn't have the abortion.
So what is that point?
I'm not a doctor.
And, you know, this isn't something that I consider very much because, again, I don't foresee myself being pregnant.
Sure, sure.
But you intuit.
I mean, you're obviously concerned about the issue of abortion.
You showed up to this lecture and I had to ask me this long question about it.
So you intuit that there is some point, at least in gestation, where the baby would be a person and then it would be kind of wrong to abort the baby.
That's me personally.
Yeah, so I'm asking about your personal opinion.
That anyone should be forced to give up their bodily autonomy to save the life of another person.
Even if you're considering a fetus to be a baby.
Even if you're considering a fetus to be a baby from the beginning.
So then why did you bring up the personhood thing?
That's how I feel.
But I don't believe that the way that I feel should necessarily decide what other people do with their bodies and their lives.
You don't think that your conclusions are sound?
You don't think that you perceive the truth?
I'm just not... You don't think your logic is too good?
I think that believing that my perspective is universally correct, I think that that's hubris.
I'm a human being.
But you came here to tell me that my views are wrong and your views are right.
I do believe that people have the right to self-determination very firmly.
But you would force me to live in a society that tolerates abortion.
I don't think that you're being personally affected by that.
It's not affecting your right to self-determination.
It's not affecting the way that you live your life.
Right, so you're forcing me to base my political judgments on your conception of self-determination.
Don't you think that's a little coercive?
Isn't that a little bit of hubris that you're showing here?
Well, this is odd.
Wait, I'm not even following... I'm not sure you're saying much at all.
Could you repeat what you were saying?
Try and be more specific?
Yes.
You previously said that it's a demonstration of pride and hubris for you to take your own personal judgments and impose them and universalize them to everyone else.
And then, in the very next breath, you said that your views of bodily autonomy and self-determination ought to apply to everyone and we all ought to abide by them.
That's why you came here to tell me that I'm wrong and you're right.
That's a contradiction.
I also believe in democracy, and the majority of Americans side with me.
They believe in the right to— Do they?
Yes.
I'm not so sure.
I mean, after Roe v. Wade was overruled, half of the states imposed limitations on abortion or banned it outright.
That's democracy for you, isn't it?
Um, are you under the impression that we live in an absolute democracy?
No, we live in a representative democracy.
Yeah, we do live in a representative democracy and those representatives do not necessarily, their actions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the people that they represent.
So you support democracy in principle, just not ours?
I support democracy.
I support our democracy.
You're putting a whole lot of words in my mouth.
Well, we have a representative democracy and you just said that the representative- You're putting a whole lot of words in my mouth.
I think I'm just repeating what you said and I'm trying to- You're not.
You just said that you support democracy and I said, okay, well, in our democracy, half the states decided to severely limit or outright ban abortion.
And you said, well, you're assuming that we're a direct democracy.
I said, no, we're a representative democracy.
I didn't say that we were a direct- I was explaining to you that we do not live in the That's what I'm saying, right.
But then I said, right, we live in a representative democracy.
And you said, well, that's not representative of the people.
But then what that would mean is you support some kind of democracy in theory, but you don't support the actual one we have here, which outlaws abortion in half the states after Roe v. Wade is overruled.
I prefer democracy to actually genuinely represent the feelings and best interests of the people living in that democracy.
Every once in a while?
I mean, do you believe the government, do you 100% agree with the government of the United States on everything all the time?
And would that mean that you hate democracy in America?
No, I think sometimes most people disagree with me.
But that doesn't mean that I would sacrifice my view and the rightness or wrongness of my view to the mob or something like 50% plus one.
If 50% plus one of the electorate came out and said that abortion is murder and we're going to ban it in all circumstances, would you still support democracy?
Of course!
You would?
Democracy, what is that Winston Churchill quote?
That's the worst form of government other than all the other ones that have been tried.
So you would support that?
Absolutely.
We just gotta convince 50% plus one of the people and you would be the biggest pro-lifer in the country, ban abortion everywhere.
I mean, I wouldn't agree with it, but I would live with it.
You would live with it?
That's good.
Again, I don't believe in imposing my beliefs on others.
If the majority believes that abortion is murder, then obviously I'd be forced to go along with that.
I don't believe in political violence.
What would I do?
That would be horrifying.
Great.
Alright, so maybe I convinced you a little bit in my talk then.
No.
That's what it sounds like I did, but... I just think that I'm not against political violence doesn't mean... You said you would support the outlawing of abortion if most people wanted it.
I don't think they're saying that they would totally comply with the, you know, social acceptability of being pro-life.
I think they would still try to convince people within the marketplace of ideas, what they believe in.
Okay, so you wouldn't accept what the majority... I think when they say it... You just try to convince them otherwise.
Yes.
I think they're trying to say they wouldn't override democracy with political violence.
They're not saying that.
No one had suggested that.
That would have been terrible.
Demi, thank you very much.
It's great to talk to you.
Ferris.
I don't know whether or not I ultimately convinced Demi and Ferris.
I'm not sure they know yet either.
But what I am sure of is that their willingness to sit down to discuss a disagreement was much more impressive than the university administrators' desperate attempts to keep me off campus.
As my YAF campus tour continues,
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