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May 30, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:37:53
20230530_destruction-of-womens-sports-over-trans-ideology-a
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Redefining Baby Onesies 00:14:24
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
What an extraordinary man who's served our country so honorably and paid such a high price, he and his family.
But the story is totally inspirational.
He's the guy, he's the Navy SEAL who, after getting shot in the face, when they told him his face was shot off, posted the sign outside of his hospital room saying, Don't come in here feeling sorry for me.
This is a place of optimism.
The sign went completely viral.
He's legendary.
His message of positivity is legendary.
He's got a lot of thoughts about where our U.S. military is today.
And it's well worth your time to meet and get to know Jason Redmond.
Oh, it just makes you feel proud of America and to be an American.
But today, I want to tell you that in our second hour, we have an exclusive interview with two very well-known female cyclists appearing together for the first time.
One is absolutely a legend in the sport who has recently begun speaking out about transgender ideology hurting actual women in the sport of cycling.
This is a woman who was third, I think, a couple of times in the Tour de France, U.S. Olympian, national champion.
I mean, everybody knows this woman.
And then another, an up-and-comer who we have reported on on this show, who just retired at age 24 from cycling because she keeps facing biological men in her sport.
Men who are crushing the sport of cycling because, oh, they're men.
Yeah, that's what it is.
But we begin today with the news and our friend Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show on the Daily Wire.
Michael, welcome back.
How are you doing?
How was your holiday?
The holiday was wonderful, Megan.
I did basically nothing at all other than lie on a couch and have my little children crawl all over me.
So it was wonderful and wonderful to be back with you as always.
Oh, it's great to see you.
Same.
I didn't do much of anything.
My husband took our daughter to a soccer tournament.
My mom came for a visit, Michael.
My mom is hilarious.
Hurricane Linda is always fun.
Just listen, I tweeted this out yesterday, but just listening to my mother play Sorry and Trouble with my two boys was just a gift from God.
She's so funny.
She's so snarky.
She was holding back on the swearing because that's not her thing, but she was threatening them.
She was accusing them.
She said they cheated.
It was really a thing of beauty.
That there's music to my ears, to be honest.
That's wonderful.
It's truly in the midst of this absolute chaos.
You mentioned the transgender cycling.
We've got the edifices of our society falling down all around us.
We no longer know what a man is.
We've got this brutal presidential primary.
It is just lovely to take one last breath, say, ah, things can be normal within the confines of my home.
And then you open the door and you see absolute madness.
Yes.
My mom, the best line I ever heard was from my mother to my nine-year-old and 13-year-old.
I'm not going to give you the finger, but I want to.
Great lessons in restraint and prudence.
Yeah.
Exactly.
All right.
So this is where I want to start today.
Target.
Target is still in the mix of it because of its pride.
We're going to go through this all next month.
June is Pride Month.
And while this was never really a problematic thing, now that they folded in the T on the LGBTQ, whatever, it's getting problematic because now you're talking about a very harmful, weird, different kind of messaging on baby onesies than we've ever seen before.
I mean, it's one thing, you know, I have two friends who are lesbians and they're married.
And Dave Rubin was just on the show on Friday.
He's a gay man in a gay marriage.
I can understand why they might want to put their child in a, you know, a shirt with a rainbow.
I can.
You go to the tea place and you start saying, ask me my pronouns on the little onesie of a baby.
We have a problem.
Yeah, I would also object to that in a Target store.
And I realize there are people who are to the right of me on this issue and wouldn't want the rainbow either.
So it's causing massive problems for Target.
They've lost billions in their market share and people are going in target after Target and complaining about these displays being front and center right when you first walk in.
That leads me to Canadian actress Rochelle Lefeuvre.
She's, I think it's French.
L-E-F-E-V-R-E Le Feuvre.
Le Fevo.
Thank you.
It's like Brett Ferve.
She's very, very angry, very angry.
If you don't know who this is, I take you back to the Twilight series of movies.
She was in the big first one and she was in the second one and she ran around trying to kill Kristen Stewart's character most of the time.
Here's just a little refresher on who this actress is.
The humans were tracking us, but we led them east.
You should be safe.
I'm the one with the wicked curveball.
I think it best if you leave.
That was her in better days.
Now she's very angry that Target in just a few of its stores in the South has responded to the outcry by moving the displays to the back of the store.
They didn't pull the displays.
The displays are not gone.
It didn't happen nationwide like some of us would like.
Just a couple of stores in the more conservative parts of the country.
And she freaked out.
So she posted on Twitter this long thing about how she has a seven-year-old non-binary child, Michael.
And she says the following.
Actually, I think we have a, well, we have a clip of what she said.
Look at this.
Sat seven.
So I just walked into Target and the right behind me here where you see all these lovely swimsuits.
That's where the pride display used to be.
And I came in here two days ago and my seven-year-old, who's non-binary, saw it and said, look, mom, it's pride.
Look, they're going to celebrate me.
And because some people complained and threw some stuff to the ground or I don't know what happened, they have moved the pride section to the back of the store.
So the next time my seven-year-old comes to Target, or rather, I can't bring them here anymore, at least for the entire month of June, because if they walk in and all the other people who walk in and go, where'd it go?
Are going to realize that they are being successful in trying to erase them.
We could do so much better than this.
We're not supposed to negotiate with terrorists.
OMG.
Thoughts on that?
I think most seven-year-olds who walk into Target are more concerned with getting a cookie at the Starbucks kiosk than they are as to how radical the LGBT pride setup is.
That would be my guess.
But you point out, Megan, a really important point, which is that the pride display is going to be a totalizing phenomenon.
It's going to include stuff for adults.
It's going to include baby onesies.
It's going to be in every single store around the country.
It's going to go on for a month.
It's really going to go on for more than a month because we're technically not in Pride Month yet, right?
Pride Month is June.
We're in May, so there's Pride Month, there's Pre-Pride Month, there's going to be Post-Pride Month.
And then, by the way, October is LGBTQ history month.
So it's not Pride Month.
There's another one, though.
And so it's going to be, right now it's about a quarter of the year.
It's going to be a third of the year.
It's going to be half the year by the time we're all through.
And you're also really insightful and beautiful and smart and charming, Megan.
Oh, yeah.
I love this part.
Thank you.
You're really insightful on this point about the onesies, that the onesies are not for the babies.
The onesies, like all onesies, are for the parents.
You want to dress your kid up in something that reflects some aspect of your identity and your desires and who you are.
And so now that we've redefined marriage, now that you've got same-sex male couples and same-sex female couples defined as marriage, adopting children, creating children through in vitro fertilization, you're going to want to see baby clothing that reflects that ideology as well.
I say this as someone who grew up in New York.
I lived in LA.
I'm a graduate of the gayest university on the face of the earth.
Okay, a disproportionate number of my loved ones identify as gay and all sorts of different sexual identities.
But this is inevitably going to be the consequence of redefining sexuality and human nature.
I know a lot of people want to try to chop the tea off of the LGB, but ultimately you're probably going to end up with the T regardless because the premise of LGB is that men and women are pretty much interchangeable and two men is the same thing as two women is the same thing as a man and a woman.
And so if you accept that premise.
When it comes to parenting and family, you mean.
Yes, exactly.
When it comes to the definition of marriage, let's say.
So if you accept that premise in society, then it's not a huge leap to say that a man can basically be a woman or a woman can basically be a man.
And it doesn't mean you're hateful if you point this out.
It doesn't mean you don't like people or anything like that.
But you cannot in society simultaneously have mutually contradictory ideas.
So you can't establish them as a fact of our law.
You see this especially with the bathrooms.
Either women get their own bathroom or they don't get their own bathroom and you kind of got to pick one.
This is why I think that the Pride Month celebrations have become so mandatory is either our society is going to accept all of the ideology that goes along with the modern rainbow or it's not.
But if we do accept it, then we're going to have it for everybody.
It's going to be in every store.
It's not just Target.
It's going to be in Kohl's.
It's going to be on your Bud Light Can.
It's going to be everywhere for a month and maybe two months and maybe three months.
And it's not just going to be for the adults.
It's going to be for the onesies.
And so the common people, the vast majority of Americans, don't like this stuff, including plenty of people who would identify as gay.
And they say, okay, the onesies, we're taking it a little bit far here.
Get it out of my Target store.
But the problem is that the elites, the people who control the corporations, the people who control the political order and the universities and the media and all the rest of this, they're totally bought in on this liberalizing ideology.
And so that's where the tension is going to come.
And right now, the elites still have most of the political power.
See, I don't agree that the tea was the inevitable outcome of the LGB.
I think a lot of the LGB folks are with you and me on this issue.
Like, enough, stop.
Like they're trying, they're speaking of erasure.
She's saying, oh, she's being, you know, they, her child, they, has been erased by Target moving the display to the back of the store.
Okay.
One of the people on Instagram responding to this was like, if your child feels erased as a human because they moved a display, you're doing things wrong.
You've got to reevaluate your parenthood, sister.
Good point.
Right.
But I think we had, I mean, look, I was born in the 70s and I remember my sister dated a guy who came out as gay, unfortunately for my sister, in, let's say, it must have been 1986 around there.
And it was shocking back then.
This is 86 was still absolutely shocking for somebody to come out as gay.
It still had a big stigma to it.
Maybe the society wasn't totally shocked, but it still had a big stigma.
But anyway, then we got past that.
We had the 90s.
We had the aughts.
And we kind of got to a place where we managed to remove much of the stigma of being gay or lesbian.
Trans didn't pop up.
Trans wasn't immediately accepted.
I think it happened because of it happened in smaller pockets.
People were tolerant.
And then people with an agenda stepped in and exploited, you know, like the medical community who had dollars in their eyeballs and was like, oh my God, you know, we see some of these tapes thanks to your colleague Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire, you know, who realized they could make tons of money off of this and then woke school teachers who decided to shove it into curriculum, which is the battle Ron DeSantis is fighting down in Florida to get it out of curriculum.
I really think it's not a natural outcome of those other two things.
And that's why for me, I can easily draw a line between the LGB and everything that comes after it, which is very different, which is very political, and which I think is in its own league when it comes to perniciousness and children.
Sure, I agree with almost all of that, Megan.
And I think you're totally right.
I mean, you mentioned our pal, Dave Rubin, who identifies as gay, he's in a gay marriage and all the rest of it.
But he says, look, all this crazy trans stuff, this has gone way too far.
A lot of this problem movement stuff is.
So he's obviously much more reasonable on these issues.
And there are plenty of people just like Dave who say, yeah, we don't want to trans the kids or anything like that.
The problem is not the people.
The problem is that ideas have consequences.
And so I totally grant that there are people who want to say, all right, we can go this far in redefining sexuality and human nature, but we're going to stop right here.
Just seems to me that the problem is going to be that if you accept certain premises about the malleability of sex, that's going to open the floodgates to other options.
And then those floodgates are going to be exploited by those cynical actors that you're talking about, many of whom just want to make a buck, many of whom want to upend the political order for all sorts of other reasons.
And so they're going to do that.
And the problem is if you redefine something like marriage, for example, then you've taken away the limiting principle.
And so I remember in the Obergefell decision, when the conservatives dissented in redefining marriage, they asked, well, what's the limiting principle here?
Why is it that we're going to just cut it off at two people of any sex?
Pushback Against Trans Propaganda 00:10:45
What about?
Oh, there was all sorts of crazy pushback on that at the time.
Like, what do you say?
Oh, now they're saying that gay marriage is going to lead to bestiality.
I remember these debates when it happened.
Keep going.
Yeah.
So the issue is what is that limiting principle?
And if we're now in a position where, yes, right away you didn't see the transing of the children and the pride flags in every single corner of society.
Well, eventually that did happen.
And so there's got to be some pushback.
And the pushback is going to have to answer this question of what is a man, what is a woman?
And what are we going to exalt in our society?
Because the other aspect here is religious.
You know, Pride Month is really just a kind of liturgical month in the religion of liberalism.
And we have Woman Month, we have Black History Month.
And of course, those are not really about black people or women, but they're about a very left-wing ideological view of them.
And now you have gay month in June, but everybody's got to assent to that.
Everybody's got to get down and accept it on their knees prayerfully, or you can be ostracized from society.
This is why the corporations are doing it as well, by the way, because they know that if a corporation does not have its pride display, it's going to be targeted by.
Garm.
It's going to be targeted by the ESG movement.
It's going to have its access to capital cut off.
It's going to have its access to social media platforms cut off.
And so they just have to go along to get along.
And so I'm sure there are a lot of people who want to say, okay, this is the line and we go no further.
But it reminds me in a way of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's now running a presidential campaign as a 1960s liberal Democrat.
From today's perspective, he seems rather conservative.
And he says, well, why did liberalism have to go any further than it did in the 60s?
But the answer, I think, is that ideas have consequences and you can't just tell history to stop.
You know, I hear you.
I do.
For me, I am able to draw the line after LG and B.
I really am.
Like, we've lived harmoniously with LGB for a long, long time.
And I am happy to live harmoniously with T as well and let them do their thing as adults, as long as they don't hurt others and as long as they stay out of my spaces.
Like, get out.
I agree with you.
Get out of the women's bathroom.
Get out of the women's locker room.
Get out of the gynecologist's office.
There was a piece today.
No, it was over the weekend by USA Today columnist Nancy Armour.
Nancy Armour is up in arms over ESBN Sam Ponder, who spoke out for fairness in sport, saying we shouldn't allow, I mean, she didn't say this explicitly, but basically said she's come around on the issue of girl sports and not allowing trans kids to come in and take over and win all the titles in the girls' sports.
It's always the male who comes into the girls' sport and wins.
And Nancy's very upset with Sam Ponder because Sam Ponder wasn't tweeting and writing notes about other Title IX fights that apparently Nancy has written about.
So Sam Ponder, you see, is a hypocrite because she's taken up this fight, but didn't take up all the others.
But Nancy Armour, she's not a hypocrite for taking up the others, but ignoring this one.
See, it only works one way.
And in Nancy's little article in USA Today, she brings yours truly into it saying, dig a little deeper into Ponder's timeline.
And it's clear her hostility toward transgender women.
By the way, there's no hostility by Sam Ponder.
None at all.
It's about sports.
Goes far beyond their participation in sports.
In January, she replied, yes, thank you, to Megan Kelly's screed about a transgender woman going to the gynecologist, quoting me, you can't just become a woman and take all of our things, Kelly ranted.
Nancy goes on, I'm at a loss to see how a transgender woman going to a gynecologist takes anything away from anyone or how it's any of Kelly's or Ponder's business.
Well, Nancy, I'm an actual woman who goes to a gynecologist, so it is my business.
As far as I can tell, Nancy has no children of her own, no daughter to protect.
And I'll tell you something, Nancy, has a way of firing you up about this issue.
And Sam Ponder lives her life in the area of sports and coverage of them and sees firsthand every day.
And I think she's a mother too.
But as far as a gynecologist's office, Michael, this is the thing that bothers me.
So it's fine.
You can, you, the left will cancel you for culturally appropriating a taco, but it's totally fine for a man to social, to culturally appropriate everything there is to appropriate about a woman, from building a fake vagina to then going to a gynecologist's office, which no man needs, and making the rest of us sit there and wait.
If I go into my gynecologist's office and I see some dude with a beard and I've got to wait to go in, I'm never going back there again.
It's bullshit.
Those visits in particular, the breast doctor, the mammogram, the gynecologist, those are already tense visits for most women.
They're already tense.
You know, there's like 50% of the things you could die of are waiting for you in these two exam rooms.
And we don't need it complicated by a man sitting there in yet another woman's space, Nancy.
So this is what happens, right?
It's like you get people like this trying to call everybody a transphobe, Sam Ponder, old Nancy in her judgmental corner for people like you, for people like me who actually find the nerve to say no, to draw that, even for me, right?
I'm to the left of you on this, but to finally find my own line and say, no.
I love, Megan, how it's always the leftists who tell us it takes a village.
That's the title of Hillary Clinton's memoir.
Who, when it comes to our private property and many of our private decisions, they say, no, we're all part of society.
You can't have your gun.
We're all part of society.
No, you can't educate your child.
No, you can't keep your money.
No, you can't live in your zoning area of your neighborhood.
No, you can't build this part of your ass.
No, you can't do this, that, or the other thing.
But then when it comes to transgenderism or whatever the social fad du jour is, they say, well, how does it affect you?
How does it affect you, Megan, if there's a burly fellow with a beard waiting in the gynecologist's office who's going to make you wait?
And the answer to this, of course, is because we live in society, because man is the social creature.
We don't live as floating atoms somewhere in the middle of the sea.
We interact with one another and we're in political community.
And I don't think it's too much to ask if you're a woman to be able to go to the gynecologist's office without having to pretend that some big husky guy is a woman.
And I don't think it's too much to ask to say that in a public school where parents are footing the bill and we're sending our kids that the child not be exposed to gay porn in the form of Gender Queer by Maya Kababi decide just one book.
And I don't think it's too much to ask even to say that when we're walking around our town square or our shops or our whole culture, we're not just constantly inundated by this absurd transgender propaganda all the way down to three-month-old onesies.
We live in society.
We're supposed to have a self-government here.
Why can't we set standards and norms that are standard and normal?
Have we lost that right?
The only right that we have now is to set standards and norms that are abnormal that involve a big fella in your gynecologist's office?
No, it only moves in that one direction.
Oh, it's crazy.
And Michael, let me tell you something.
When you go in for a mammogram, you know, you had to start getting him, I think, at 45.
I can't remember when I started getting him, but you go in there and that's always a scary one, right?
Because you're there to look for cancer.
I mean, that's the only reason.
You go to the GYN for a lot of reasons, but you go there to catch.
So you go and you put on your little robe and then they have you sit in a little like waiting area.
This is where I go in New York.
You have to sit in this little waiting area.
It's a small little room and there's maybe four or five other women also wearing a little robe.
We're all there for the same reason.
And there's a tension.
There's a bonding.
There's something kind of lovely about it, to be honest with you, because it's like we're all there for the same thing.
We're all hoping for the same result.
We're all a little scared we're going to get something else.
And then they call you out one by one.
You go get the test and then you got to go back into the waiting room until you get called in by the radiologist who will tell you what the results were.
So the whole thing is a little tense.
And I do not want to see a fucking sorry man sitting in there with me and my fellow women who actually do have things to worry about, who don't, it's hard enough to get in for these visits to the best doctors and go through all this stuff and deal with the insurance, all that.
It's absurd to pretend like, what is, how does it affect your life?
It affects my life in very vulnerable situations in which I already feel unsteady, Nancy.
And so if people like Sam Ponder and you and me don't speak out because of these nasty USA Today pieces or what have you, we lose.
We've been losing too long because those of us who didn't draw the line at the LGB, the B, whatever, and the T, sorry, LGB, the QI, LMOP.
We finally found our line.
And now they're basically like, well, camel's nose, you're done.
You know, like you, now you're a bigot.
You know, you don't get any credit for your priors.
I want to say to you.
Think about it.
The big case, one of the big cases that established this right to transgenderism as a matter of civil rights law, it was the Harris Funeral Homes case.
Everyone talks about the Bostock decision, which changed the interpretation of Title VII to now say that the protections on the basis of sex now don't protect sex.
They protect sexual orientation and gender identity, which obviously undermines that.
And the word racism.
There was the Harris Funeral Homes case, and that case centered around whether a man who works at a funeral home can be made to dress in respectful, somber garb as a man, because a man who worked at a funeral home decided he wanted to put on a skirt one day because he wanted to pretend to be a woman.
And the owner of that funeral home said, hey, man, I don't know what you're going through.
And, you know, I'm not judging or anything like that.
But this is a funeral home.
People are mourning.
People are really vulnerable and upset when they come in here.
And we're not going to make it about us.
And we're not going to make it about our fantasies and delusions or anything else.
We're going to be respectful and behave in a way that is normal and reverent and somber for this occasion.
And the Supreme Court got to pick who gets to decide.
The community, the people mourning, tradition, standards, or a man who wants to put on a mini skirt while families are trying to grieve their loved ones.
And unfortunately, the Supreme Court chose the latter.
And now we've got a regime of tyrannical self-expression that has corroded anything even resembling a coherent society.
Princess Fantasies at Disneyland 00:07:00
My God, can you imagine?
I mean, look, this hit the news today.
We cut us out of it.
Sound on tape.
This is a little girl.
This is off of a woman's TikTok who posts a lot about the trans issues.
And we traced it back to the original TikTok, which was by a patron down at Disney who did not seem offended by it, but hey, to each their own.
I am.
Look at what this woman found when she went into, if you've ever been to Disney, you can go into like the Cinderella castle and you can give your daughter like the princess experience where she can pay $450.
Didn't do it for some Cinderella or princess-esque dress.
And normally you meet with Cinderella or one of her helpers who welcomes you and your daughter as you walk into the shop.
Look what's happening here.
This is at the one out in Florida, Disneyland.
Watch.
In California.
I'm here to shop you around and make a story.
This guy's got a ticket.
Yeah.
Can we re-rack it?
Start it again.
What was his name?
Nick?
His name is Nick.
And he's a man.
He's literally in the princess gear.
Watch it again.
So my name's Nick.
I want to pray on Milla's apprenticeship.
I'm here to shop you around and make all your selections for the day.
And I'm your fairy godmother.
Okay.
He's got a mustache.
He's a clear man.
And his name is Nick.
Michael.
Can you imagine?
Reason number 42073 to not take your children to Disneyland would be encountering big, burly, mustachioed, pretty little princess.
It's a really telling episode, and it's a great way to view the whole culture at this point, which is that this guy woke up in the morning and said, you know what?
My appearance as princess whatever at Disneyland, it's about me.
It's not about the kids.
It's not about the parents who shout out a gazillion dollars to take their kids on this once-in-a-lifetime memorable.
It's just about me.
And that's how so many people are viewing society today.
It's the way that people view systems of government.
It's the way people view even the law.
Is the law?
Is human nature?
Is biology?
Is education?
Is it about something outside of ourselves?
The truth, the moral order, science, you name it.
Or is it just about me, me, me, and whatever I want to do?
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed.
I guess that fellow made a relatively burly package, but as a matter of society, it's very, very small.
And it will diminish anything even resembling a kind of a society.
And then we're all just living sort of selfishly for ourselves rather than what you're supposed to do at the very least at Disneyland, which is give people a magical sort of experience that is about somebody else.
I mean, like, I've been there.
I've been to the Disney World with my kids a couple of times.
I can't imagine walking.
I mean, I would turn around and walk out.
And I resent being put in that position because I have no wish to be rude to a trans person's face or to make him feel bad about his dysphoria.
I really don't.
I just, but I don't buy into their ideology.
I don't believe a man can be a woman.
And I believe a princess is a female who doesn't have a beard and a mustache.
And most are not named Nick.
And like, I wouldn't want my child exposed to it.
Same as I don't want them exposed to the Target thing.
Same as I don't want them exposed.
Now, Kohl's is K-O-H-L-S is involved in a controversy of its own, Michael, where they've got the pride display, including for infants and young children, including, like I was saying earlier, an infant shirt that reads, ask me my pronouns, ask me my pronouns in Kohl's.
Like everyone's submitting to this nonsense.
We're not going to stop it with just Bud Light.
That helped.
And what we're doing at Target helps too.
But it's got to be all of them.
They all have to feel some pain so that there's a counterbalance to that enormous weight you were talking about from the DEI community and the corporate equity index.
We certainly do.
You'll remember that when Transhyzer-Busch first made this with the Dylan Mulbane beer can, you'll remember that part of the crisis communications effort was to say, oh, it was this random VP of marketing, Alyssa Hirschenfeld or something like that.
And it was, she went rogue and we had nothing to do with this.
And of course, that isn't true.
These decisions to embrace LGBTism and transgender ideology and all the rest of it were made at much, much higher levels of AB and Bev.
And they were made across platforms.
They were made in collusion with GARM and the World Economic Forum and all sorts of industry standard setting groups.
And so they allowed this VP of marketing to take the fall.
But this is a much deeper problem.
And so yes, obviously you've got to replace these executives.
You've got to recognize that personnel is policy.
And so we have to put the right people in these positions.
But we also just need to reorient the way that we view truth and law and government and society.
Because right now we're just locked in this battle of the wills, which is you've got the normal people on one hand saying men shouldn't dress up as pretty little princesses at Disneyland and men shouldn't go into the girls' bathroom and they shouldn't dress up in skirts at funeral homes.
And then on the other side, you've got the leftists who say, yes, they should, and we damn well will do it because that's what we want to do.
And in a battle of wills, you're just going to see ever-escalating tensions that are one day going to explode.
I guess they already have exploded a few times, and it's going to get worse.
That's not the only way that we have to run society, though.
In fact, that's not the way that any flourishing society has ever been run.
It's not just a battle of wills, it's also about reason.
That's the other thing that makes us human beings.
And so, when you've got two people who disagree, the one guy says a man can't be a woman, the one guy says a man can be a woman, then you can use your reason to point to objective truth and say, Oh, no, actually, hey, brother, no, you're just wrong about that.
You're actually not a woman, and it's actually not right for you to dress up like a pretty little princess, and it's not right for you to take the girls' trophies and go into their locker rooms and all the rest of it.
And here's why: here are my arguments from philosophy and from theology, and here's my examples from history, and here's my argument from the civil law.
And you just go and make a reasonable argument.
You don't need to be filled with hatred.
You don't need to yell.
You don't need to scream.
You don't need to smash any windows to do that.
As our society neglects reason and discards truth and says that there's really nothing beyond what I want to do, and I'm damn well going to get it.
As we do that, then our society is going to become less and less reasonable.
We're going to descend into cacophony.
The Beauty Pageant Debate 00:06:25
We're not even going to be able to understand one another and the words that we're using.
And frankly, we're already pretty far down that path.
I mean, it's amazing as if Disney hasn't taken a big enough beating on its stock price.
And Disney Plus is in serious danger.
The Wall Street Journal recently had a report on that thanks to its wokeness.
And that's, you know, separate and apart from its legal fights with Ron DeSantis.
This is not the answer, Disney.
I got a little pro tip for you.
This is not the way forward.
I'm going to hold on to Transhyzer-Busch in many conversations.
I really appreciated that one.
Stand by much more with Michael Knowles right after this quick break.
Okay, so I'm going to go to the bathroom.
HBO Max, Prime Video, Sky Showtime, you name it.
Oh, you can't do it.
Michael, I want to talk to you now about the madness of crowds.
A couple of rando examples of people losing their ever-loving minds that I want your take on.
This one, we've got to start with.
I got it from TMZ, and it's spectacular.
We have friends, they're amazing.
And the male, well, one of the guys is an expert on beauty pageants.
Like, he can game it the way somebody at a racehorse can game the racehorse.
You know, like this guy, these are the odds.
It's a tough mutter, but they can't do blah, blah.
That's how he approaches the beauty pageant circuit.
And I cannot wait to get his take on what happened in Brazil as two contestants were down to the wire.
I'm not sure if they were, if it was for Miss Brazil or for a local.
Hold on, I've got it.
The tantrum took place on Saturday at the Miss Guaymato Grosso 2023 pageant.
All right, so they're at the lower level still, where the contest came down to two finalists, Emmanuel Bellini from the municipality of Varzeja, Grande, and Nathali Becker of Quiuba.
This is, I'm a hot mess.
I don't speak Portuguese.
In any event, here they are in the crowning moment.
I will describe what happens for the listening audience.
It's all, I think, in Portuguese.
And wait for the big finish.
The one on the left wins.
She bends over.
She's so excited.
She won.
She's about to get the big crowd, which is on stage.
Oh, up comes a man, grabs it, smashes it into pieces.
Now grabs the loser by the wrist.
Shepherds her off the stage.
Picks up the crown again.
Smashes it a second time.
Getting shepherded off by security.
Yells at security.
Very animated.
Brad's the loser again.
Runner-up, I guess I should say, and shepherds her off the screen.
So it turns out they say that he is her husband.
I got questions about whether that man actually has a wife, but okay, they say that they're married.
And he's very, very upset.
Michael, what did you make of that?
Well, I have an alternate theory, which is that that man is Kanye West.
And he was going to let her finish, but he wanted to point out that Beyoncé did have one of the greatest albums of all time.
I really like this.
I feel bad for the winner.
I'm sure she got her tiara eventually.
But we are living Megan.
We're in this age where everyone is just so sad and lame and clinical about love.
There are people, boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, who will refer to their beloved as their partner.
And they'll say, not even, not just two men or two women.
I mean, this is a boyfriend will say, oh, this girl over here, she's my partner, as though they have an accounting firm or something together.
They won't refer to love affairs.
They'll talk about the relationship that they're in.
Like Cole Porter was singing, you know, let's do it.
Let's enter into a relationship together.
It's so sad and clinical.
And I want some fiery, hot-blooded Brazilian to get up there and say, no, I love this woman.
Even though, as you point out, that remains perhaps a little bit dubious.
We'll get to that.
Well, listen, listen, guess what?
Breaking news.
My team just informed me.
This is broke.
This is a gay pageant.
It's an LGBT thing.
So, first of all, my Gator worked, okay?
It did.
That's number one.
Spot on.
Second of all, are those even women?
I don't know what we just saw.
Oh, you're right.
Because, well, if it's a man and he goes up there and it is a woman, then you think, okay, this homosexual man is setting an example for the heterosexual men, especially up in the Anglo world who've gone so lame about all of this.
Or is it a gay man and a man dressed as a woman, a drag queen beauty pageant?
And if so, then those drag queens are setting an example for gender roles that, frankly, we haven't seen in the West in a long time.
That's either way.
Fascinating.
All around sore losers.
And, you know, congratulations to whoever it was that actually won that pageant.
Not for nothing, but as we, as I circulated the story amongst our team, I found out that Canadian Debbie, Debbie Murphy, who's been with me forever as my editorial producer, guess what?
Debbie's from Ohio.
She had a very checkered past.
Law School and White Supremacy 00:10:28
Some pipe bombs in her past.
That's why she'd be going into news producing.
She loves when I tell that story.
Actually, she had some highs and lows, though, Michael, because it turns out Debbie revealed to me something I never knew in all the 15, 16 years we've been together.
She was little Miss Hubbard.
Little Miss Hubbard, here she is.
She's the brunette getting the crown in this picture.
And check out the side eye from the loser on screen left.
Yeah.
But there were no little boys storming the stage to snatch her tiara.
No.
One is happening.
I asked her what happened.
Like, did you go to Little Miss Ohio after that?
She said she did not participate.
Her parents didn't want to make the drive.
You got the taste, though, at least.
Yeah.
She needed a partner, like the runner-up had in that Brazilian thing.
All right, here's another example.
We go off to Sweden for the next one where there's a big finale in one of those reality shows.
It's basically they're dancing with the stars.
It's some dance show.
And what happened was there, as in many places, some crazy climate activists stormed the dancers.
You know, they've been like defiling art everywhere.
In Sweden, they decided to storm the finale of the dancing, interrupting the pair that was out there dancing.
And the jib operator, and for those of you not familiar with television, the jib is like the big camera on a crane that's operated remotely usually.
And it's large and you stay the hell away from it if you're in a studio.
The jib operator decided to take out the protesters.
Look at this.
Yeah, they're releasing some sort of toxic something.
There, the jib operator, get somebody down and we'll see it from another angle.
Look at this.
Check it out.
Wow.
This is how it's done, Michael Knowles.
That is how it's done.
I hope that that jib operator gets some sort of a prize because, you know, when we're talking about game shows, you got to remember a rule of life in politics.
If you play stupid games, you will win stupid prizes.
And I think those protesters learned that firsthand.
Yes, you will get hurt.
You mess with the wrong people.
And that leads me to the madness of crowds right here in New York City.
Well, I'm in Connecticut, but the background's New York.
Where this lunatic law grad from CUNY, City University of New York, who apparently was at John Jay College of Law and then transferred to CUNY.
I mean, none of these is going to get this person very far in the legal profession based on what we just heard.
She decided, she spoke at the graduation.
Mayor Adams was there.
It was a nice occasion.
He got booed because he mentioned that he's a former cop.
Okay.
And now we understand exactly just how left that crowd was.
Who on earth is going to hire this woman?
This is how she sees our country and others in SOT3.
One of very few legal institutions created to recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world.
We joined this institution to be equipped with the necessary legal skills to protect our communities, to protect the organizers fighting endlessly day in and out, working to lift the facade of legal neutrality and confront the systems of oppression that wreck violence on them.
Systems of oppression created to feed an empire with a ravenous appetite for destruction and violence.
May the rage that fills this auditorium, may it be the fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world.
She wants to abolish ICE.
She has some very unfortunate things to say about Israel to the point now where there are protests over her and calls to defund this publicly funded university where we're helping this person get ahead in the law.
And this is just a window into how people on law school campuses today feel, right, about how they see the world.
It's absolutely offensive.
The headlines are about how this pro-Palestine student made all sorts of nasty comments about Jews, which is an expected story.
It's not newsworthy.
It's not exactly man bites dog.
But what I think is still newsworthy is what this woman is saying about the law.
She's saying that CUNY uniquely recognizes that the law is just this facade to uphold white supremacy and justice is all a big sham.
And so she graduates from this law school.
She's never even learned the basic meaning of law and of justice.
Law is an ordinance of reason for the common good by the one who has care of the community and promulgate it.
That's the most basic definition you could get of law.
Justice is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to each and all what they deserve.
Again, this is pretty basic stuff.
You don't need a law school education to have that.
And so we focus today on how so many things in our society are not what they seem.
We've been talking for a long time about how a lot of men are not the women that they present themselves to be and vice versa.
But this is the case with the law, too.
If this is what this girl learned from law school, then she doesn't know a damn thing about the law.
And a nation that doesn't know anything about the law and doesn't know anything about justice is not going to be able to render justice to anybody.
Her name is Fatima Musa Mohammed.
She's from Yemen by way of Queens.
And she views, yeah, this law school is one of the very few legal institutions created, as you heard in the soundbite, to recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation.
She's working to help people fight against systems that were created to feed an empire with a ravenous appetite for destruction and violence.
And on she goes, calling the NYPD and the U.S. military fascists.
That's lovely over Memorial Day weekend, though it happened May 12th.
Yeah, NYPD is a fat, those are fascists, U.S. military fascists, called on her peers to continue to the revolution against capitalism and racism across the country.
I mean, this is terrifying that this person's actually gotten a law degree.
It doesn't mean she passed the bar.
We'll see if she can do that.
But this is why we have the crazy cases that we have.
And thank God for the bar as it exists now and some of the justices sitting there and judges who fight back against this nonsense.
The vast majority of the federal bench is not woke.
Maybe some of the state bench, they're not woke and they're not going to tolerate this nonsense.
But think about this, Megan.
Think about what she's saying just about the law.
And she says the law just exists to uphold white supremacy.
That's what the law is about.
Okay, ladies, so what's the alternative?
What are you proposing?
The only alternative to law is lawlessness.
And that is what she and her fellow radicals and frankly a lot of mainstream Democrat politicians have been advocating in recent years.
So it's not a bug of the liberal system when you hear calls to defund the police or abolish the police or empty out the prisons or any of the rest of it.
That's a feature of the program.
The program is explicitly advocating for injustice now because they don't believe in any such thing as justice.
Meanwhile, you've got, you know, what is it, 11 people shot in Chicago over the weekend, you know, violence breaking out in a terrible melee in California, people hurt down in Florida.
Like the numbers are bad.
So, I mean, to be so tone-deaf now to be attacking the police still as a bunch of fascists and the military still as a bunch of fascists.
Like she probably never going to have to deal with it, but others have.
You had DeSantis on Fox over the weekend making an interesting comment, I thought, about the military.
In addition to going to Yale undergrad and Harvard law school, I think that's the order.
He served.
He served in the U.S. military, in the Navy.
And he had some thoughts on why we're having such recruiting difficulties and some of the problems that we're seeing in our military.
Here's a bit of that in SOT1.
I think the military that I see is different from the military I served in.
I see a lot of emphasis now on political ideologies, things like gender pronouns.
I see a lot about things like DEI.
And I think that that's caused recruiting to plummet.
I think it's driven off a lot of warriors.
And I think morale is low.
I remember being in Iraq and we were in Fallujah and it was not going well.
And yet people were still willing to sign up knowing they'd get sent to Iraq because they believed that this was something special.
And I think we've lost that a little bit.
And I think we really need to rejuvenate the morale in the military.
So we will do that on day one and you will see very big changes in the services.
Michael, it's a good point.
And it's from a vet, right?
You forget that about DeSantis because you hear so much about his current battles as governor, but he served the country honorably and good on him for reminding people.
You know, Megan, people are despairing of this primary.
You've got those who are on the DeSantis side who are just furious that Trump won't drop out and anoint the next generation.
Then you got people on the Trump side who are just furious that DeSantis won't wait his turn and allow Trump to get a second term.
And here I am.
I feel as though I'm alone.
I'm very pro-primary.
I like these guys.
They've got thick skin.
They're pretty tough.
DeSantis, he's a military vet.
Donald Trump was born with the hide of a rhinoceros on him.
Okay, these are big, tough guys.
They can battle it out.
They're going to push each other in a more conservative direction.
We've got great options ahead.
Bring it on, baby.
I love it.
Let's watch these two tough guys hash it out.
You are not alone.
I am 100% with you.
I think, I mean, either one of these obviously would be a better choice than what we have right now, who's pushing the country to the far left.
And, you know, it's good for DeSantis to remind us of some of his firsthand insider knowledge on how things used to be inside the military and the armed forces.
As we know, Trump has a very different history.
He dodged many attempts to loop him in because of his bone spurs.
So why not draw some distinctions there, right?
Between like, I did serve.
I did so honorably, and I've learned a thing or two.
Michael, thank you so much.
Looking forward, I'll sit next to you with the open-minded primary and enjoying the whole show, as I always do when you are on.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you, Megan.
Wonderful to be with you as always.
Cycling Union Representation Crisis 00:15:02
Coming up, two female cyclists speak out on gender ideology.
Transgender cyclists continue to take center stage in the debate for women's rights.
This past week, British Cycling decided to ban all transgender, quote, women from competing in the female category.
That's great.
British cycling is getting it right, saying, sorry, it's about fairness, and we are not going to let biological men compete against women in cycling.
Great.
That is a step in the right direction.
Joining us today to discuss how many others are making the opposite decision, leaving women cyclists hanging on a thread, are two female cyclists and champions of their sport who have witnessed what trans athletes competing against biological women do to female sports.
Inga Thompson is a retired American road cyclist and a badass one too.
A 10-time national champion, three-time Olympian, two-time podium finisher at the Women's Tour de France.
Also with us today, Hannah Ahrensman.
She's a 35-time national cyclocross champion who announced recently she was retiring from the sport at just 24 years old over this issue.
Ladies, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
Thank you for having us.
Yes, thank you.
And I know you've never met officially, but we're chatting in the pregame.
And, you know, it's been interesting to me because I know, Inga, you've been out there talking about Hannah saying, this is such a shame.
Like we lost yet another young, promising female cyclist because people are too afraid to speak out about this issue because they understand very well there will be penalties.
So let's just start there.
You had, I mean, your career has just been absolutely stunning, amazing.
Lance Armstrong was singing your praises to me recently.
I told the audience that.
So what made you finally speak out about this issue, understanding there could be blowback?
Well, when I first started this, I had ultimate compassion for the transgender athletes, and I still do.
And when this first started, it was for transgender women who had gone through sexual reassignment surgery.
And I had believed the science that they put forth where they said, oh, this is fair.
And I was a believer.
And then we started kind of seeing the abuse of it with people self-IDing.
And then realizing the science that they put forth for this to get passed was eight athletes who are transgender women who self-reported.
And so you have this study, which has since shown to be flawed.
This eight self-reported people said, hey, yeah, we're a lot weaker.
And boom, in slides, the IOC slides in this new policy that transgender women can compete.
And from there, then it turned into, you know, a few more years goes by and they're realizing that these women or transgender women who have had gonadectomies have serious health issues.
So then it got changed to you can take up to 10 nanomoles per liter of testosterone, which is like, you know, 10 times the amount that women have, and you can compete with the women.
They could get a therapeutic use exemption.
And then we had self-ID came in.
And so you saw this slow domino effect of the women's sports being destroyed.
And here we have put forth 22 peer-reviewed studies that show that this is not fair.
And like, well, we're not quite sure.
You know, first five, 10 study come out.
Well, we're not sure.
Oh, now there's 22 studies.
Well, we're really not sure.
And yet the IOC accepted one flawed study and just threw it right in.
And you don't, and the reality is you don't need studies.
All you need is your eyes.
Yeah, in elementary school, we all figured out what has taken them 22 years or 22 peer-reviewed studies to go, yeah, I don't know.
And so here we have Xavier Picard, who is the medical commissioner at the International Cycling Union, basically stating, I've read all the studies, but inclusion is more important than fairness.
Right.
And this is the person.
And then there's the medical director, Dr. Richard Budget of the IOC, who says, everyone agrees that trans women are women.
So that's at the Olympic level.
Trans women are women.
And then you point out that at the cycling level, you've got a similar attitude by the person in charge there.
They're totally on the side of, quote, inclusivity without acknowledging the reality that that means unfairness.
And in some cases, lack of safety for actual women who are participating.
Right.
And yet they allowed a flawed study and shoehorned it right through really easily.
And we can give them 22 studies and they're not sure.
I mean, you can see right here that they have zero intention of doing anything for the women.
So like for the last five years, I have written letters to the IOC and the International Olympic Committee.
And it's all the tactic is silence, ignore, gaslight.
Yeah, we'll get to that.
And they don't allow any women at the table to have a discussion about this.
They will have in their medical directors who believe that transgender women are women.
And they'll allow the transgender women to come and state their case, but they will not allow the women to come in and state their case.
And when they do, if they're bringing in women athletes, if they were to speak up, they get canceled.
So, how are we going to have fair representation when you have a woman athlete who all they want to do is to compete and to step in front of all these people?
So far, we haven't seen it happen, but supposedly there's going to be four women athletes at the International Cycling Union to speak up.
But let's talk about this.
And I want to tell the audience, you too just got canceled and we'll talk about what happened to you.
Let's talk about the International Cycling Union, the ICU, because they've been terrible, terrible on this issue.
And, you know, you were pointing out maybe, you know, it used to be maybe they'd allow the 10 nanomules, whatever, of testosterone.
Then it was lowered to five.
In many places like California, we just saw those runners at the high school level.
You can have as much testosterone as you want.
They absolutely require nothing for those trans girls, it's biological boys to run against natural born girls.
You don't have to do a thing.
You can be in the midst of full male puberty and crush these girls, which is exactly what happened in that California race we just covered, foot race that is running.
And nobody will say boo to you.
So at the professional level, they've started to realize they have to have some standards, but being past male puberty doesn't count against you.
No problem whatsoever.
All that, you know, the strong legs, the femurs, the musculature, no, that's no problem, no problem.
So they only focus on the testosterone.
So the UCI originally said, okay, it's at five, this five nanomules on the testosterone.
Then there was pushback and they lowered it to 2.5 and it has to have been at 2.5 for two years.
And you and others have been saying, Newsflash, that doesn't solve it.
That's not a fix.
And now there's been more buzz amongst women cyclists about possibly boycotting the events where some of these trans cyclists are going to show up.
And then the UCI realized it was going to have to do something because some of its biggest stars were saying, we're not going to show up at your biggest races.
And that's a problem.
So you tell me, because it looked to me like you were not satisfied and go with the UCI's fig leaf because they were like, we're going to have a meeting.
We'll have a meeting in August and we're going to invite a female cyclist, someone named Katarina, and she's going to represent you ladies and fear not.
Well, the last cycle cost championships about a year and a half ago, Katarina, who is our representative, was wearing a trans flag wristband, which goes against policy.
You're not supposed to be promoting one side or the other.
And she's got the trans wristband on.
And then I've had private Zoom meetings with her where transgender women are women and they should be included.
So now we have the woman's representative at the International Cycling Union stating also trans women are women and this is who is representing us.
And the Cycling Professional Association for the women haven't even been contacted for this meeting.
And these are the women representing the pro-cyclists.
And so they had to reach out.
Do we know how a majority of the female cyclists feel about this issue?
I think that the survey that they did was taken with only professional women cyclists and 93% said they do not want to have women or transgender women in the women's field.
And so the International Cycling Union came back and they said, well, you know, we're really not going to do this on the feelings of the women because that's not really right.
We have to follow the science.
But it's like, hold on.
So you're not going to let the women put their feelings out there, but transgender women can get into the women's race based on their feelings.
I mean, does anybody not see the hypocrisy here?
And then we have the medical director saying transgender women are women.
I mean, we don't even stand a chance.
And this is why I'm advocating for protesting because every effort that we've had to do with trying to work with the policy, trying to get a seat at the table has all been stonewalled, gaslit.
We can't get anywhere.
So it's like, all right, let's protest.
And we are getting somewhere because two days after Austin Killops won Gila, two days afterwards, the International Cycling Union said, we stand by our transgender policy.
And then we started calling for protest.
Two days after that, it's like, well, maybe we will revisit this.
And no women yet have been consulted.
And so I want to go ahead with the protests.
And we have at the national championships coming up here, pro-nationals, June 22nd to the 25th.
And there's some women in Scotland that are putting together a protest there.
And I think we will be protesting until this gets changed.
And I know it'll probably start very small, but it'll grow.
And somewhere there, there are many forms of the women.
There are many forms of protest, including what Hannah's been doing.
And I know, you know, as I said, you've been praising it.
So, Hannah, you, she mentioned, Inga mentioned Austin Killops, who is a biological man who is winning in women's spaces in cycling.
And I know there was, we recently covered Austin Killops because Austin was involved in a race that I don't think you participated in.
Inga mentioned Tour of the Gila.
It's in New Mexico.
It happened on April 30th.
And it's an elite race.
It's sanctioned by the UCI that we've been talking about.
And Killops won the race and won the $35,000 prize money for first place, the first time in the race's history that the women's prize money equaled that of the men.
And yet it went to a biological man.
Killops only took up cycling like yesterday, 2019, 2019, and now has been crushing it in the women's racing.
And my understanding is not only is Killops now a candidate to make the U.S. Olympic team, our Olympic team, our female Olympic team in Paris next summer, but that you raced against Killops previously.
And Killops beat you.
Is that right?
Killops beat you.
And then there was a trans person right behind you as well.
You were sandwiched in between two biological men in a race that happened last December.
Tell us about that.
Yeah.
He's been racing in the elite women's cycle cross field for about two years that I've been aware of.
And it was interesting the first year he came out, he didn't do well at all.
Like his handling skills weren't the elite level.
And he's a new rider kind of jumping in, right?
And then within a year, he was keeping up on strength along.
His handling skills have improved a little bit, but still running a lot of sections that us pro-women ride.
And that showed forth a lot at the Hartford Cycle Cross Nationals this last December, where he and another guy raced in our field and they were third and fifth in our elite women's field.
And yeah, it was just demoralizing when you have two guys who have been deluding themselves beat you like that when you've been working at it since you were a kid.
My understanding is I don't know that much about cycling, but you point out the distinction between the tricky handling of the bike in the tougher parts of the race versus just sheer power, you know, just using your legs and getting ahead.
And my understanding is that he, so his...
This was no problem to him in being new to cycling because he could beat the women in the power phases of the race.
That's what you're saying, that his ineptitude as a new professional cycler in the trickier parts of the race was no problem for him because he had such an advantage over you when it came to the power pieces of the course.
Yes.
Yes.
And it's just, it's, you know, it's biology.
If you look at a male body versus a female body, you just look at their bone structure.
Their levers are longer and generally stronger, bigger.
And the muscles that they can build are a lot bigger too.
And especially if they've gone through puberty already, those effects never go away.
Their heart is bigger.
Their lungs are bigger, which means they can get blood to their muscles quicker and oxygen to their muscles quicker and then get the waste away quicker so that they can recover faster.
So it's there's no way to undo that.
And you shouldn't undo that.
That would be just though, destroy human.
Like that would be terrible.
Well, now at that race, because we talked about this on the show, not even knowing that you were coming on, Hannah, that race in December, he was racing against you in the women's category.
Suspension Rules for Women Riders 00:03:23
And you're the biker he pushed off course, right?
We showed the audience video of this.
Are you that biker?
I am.
Cyclist?
All right.
So let's show the video.
What's happening here?
Can you explain it?
So that is a very tricky off-camber.
You can't really see it from the camera angle, but it's like a wall.
And you're riding across the side of it and it's all muddy.
It's very hard to ride, but if certain lines were grassy enough and grippy enough that you could actually ride it.
And Austin in the white is on a line there at the bottom of the hill.
And instead of cutting straight down the course, it seems that he stumbled and runs right into me.
I'm the rider in the red and the yellow.
I didn't really pay attention to it because when you're in that situation, you just kind of focus.
If you pay attention to the rider, you're going to go down.
So you got to pay attention to your line, stick your line and try to ride it out, which thankfully I was able to, but it slowed me down a good bit.
And, you know, that always just knocks your focus a little bit.
So it was a little frustrating because, you know, like you're professional field and you have like, that really wasn't a place where somebody should have run into you.
But I don't, I can't vouch for intentions.
I just, you know, it was, it just seemed like a kind of a clumsy.
But is it the case that a new female cyclist probably never would have been in this race and therefore wouldn't have placed you in that kind of danger?
Because this is a guy who's there only because the power stretches and is inept on the more difficult technical stretches, endangering other cyclists like you.
Somebody who has that much power in the women's field should also have this handling to go along with it.
You wouldn't see a woman with that much strength doing that, especially in cyclocross.
So you just wouldn't be able to keep up.
What is cyclocross?
Can you explain that for those of us who don't?
Okay.
So if you think about road racing, that's just pavement, that's big field.
You see like the Tour de France is a classic version of a road race.
And then you have mountain biking, fat tire, suspension.
Cyclocross was where those two meet in the middle.
So you have a skinnier, knobby tire, no suspension, kind of looks like a road bike.
And you do these circuit courses, generally in parks, about eight to 12 minutes long.
You can have mud, sand.
You could be running up staircases.
You could be running, riding down those steep off Canberra hills.
It could be snowing.
It could be frozen ruts.
So you're on and off the bike constantly.
It's a great big fun party.
It's about an hour-long race, just all out.
It's a good time.
That's awesome.
No wonder he wants in.
So I presume there's a male division for people like Austin.
Absolutely.
I understand that there is something called the cyclocross worlds.
And that's, do you believe that, you know, you could have made that?
I'm understanding is you were not considered for that.
Do you think you could have made that had you not been competing against these two males?
I kind of wonder.
Forced Apology for Female Athlete 00:14:46
I can't say for sure, but they definitely have taken up slots from women.
They have taken opportunity from women.
It's so disheartening.
So your concern, Inga, is that people like Hannah.
So Hannah decides she's going to retire.
She's like, I'm at it.
I'm done.
I'm not going to, what's the point?
And that was her way of protesting, but your concern is too few women are willing to do that.
And they don't want to sacrifice their careers, understandably.
And even more so, too few women will explain why they're really leaving.
In fact, in race after race, and Inga, what we're seeing when these trans women, these biological men win, is you see the next in line, the actual woman say, oh, I'm fine with it.
Oh, it's okay.
I'm fine.
You know, I'm supportive.
And your belief is that's BS.
Yeah, they have to, because otherwise they lose sponsorship.
They get canceled by their teams.
I mean, we've watched a lot of these team sponsors actively go after any of the women who might even try to speak up.
They are told to be quiet.
And I mean, you saw what they did to me.
This is what happens to any women that do speak up.
We watched what happened to Chloe Dygert when she liked the tweet of a black woman that was about protecting women's rape shelters and they labeled her as racist.
And I'm like, hold on, do you guys not see the, that she liked a black woman's tweet, but you labeled her as racist?
And this is what they're willing to do, anything and everything to silence.
And so they'll take anything that an athlete does and blow it out of proportion into something that it wasn't even.
But as soon as you start saying racist, Nazi, fascist, hoping that it will silence any woman, and it has worked.
I think up until now, where we have so many people speaking up now, like specifically, like right now, it's a lot of the more right-leaning media.
Left-leaning still won't touch it.
Any bicycling media will not touch it, but they will in order to attack you.
And I mean, so you can just look.
The advertisers are all over you.
What they pull their sponsorships from you as a cyclist?
They will pull sponsorship.
I mean, I'm going to go back to Chloe Dygert.
I hate picking on her here, but did you see what Rotha did when Chloe Deigert liked Candace Owens' tweet about protecting rape shelters?
Chloe was forced to put out an apology.
And then she's saying, keep, keep, keep rape shelters for women only.
Don't allow for women only and she liked and she liked a tweet by Candace Owens.
Okay.
And she was forced to put out an apology by her team.
And then Rotha came out and said that was not enough of an apology and basically sent her to a Rotha is a clothing company.
Oh, and Rotha, high-end clothing company.
And they came back and they said that apology was not good enough.
It was not enough.
We need you to apologize more.
Oh my god.
Think about what happens to a young woman athlete when they go through this.
Like let's look at our woman, a tennis player, just not too recently, long ago, maybe a year ago.
Osana Osaka, sorry, I can't remember her name right now.
Naomi Osaka talked right that talked about her mental health and taking care of it.
And yet here we have Rotha that says it's not enough.
We need another apology.
And we want everybody to know that we're sending her to re-education camp.
And I mean, they drug this poor woman through the gutter.
Thankfully, Chloe is as strong as she is.
But where would we be if she had not been that strong and she had committed suicide from the incredible onslaught and defamation that got levied against this poor athlete?
I mean, where are all the people screaming bloody murder about what you just did to a woman's mental health?
Where are the teammates to say, we don't need you, Rotha?
We got a lot of sponsors.
We stand with our teammate in solidarity with her.
You can't do it or they all lose their sponsorship.
Oh my gosh, this is terrible.
Yeah, no, it's it is beyond repulsive what is happening to women in sports.
And I'm hoping that in about 10 years, we will see this as one of the biggest tragedies and scandals against women and against children is this ideology movement and all of the people that just didn't stand behind it and said nothing, but have actively attacked anybody who speaks up.
What has your experience been, Hannah?
First of all, talk to us about the decision to peace out of the sport that you loved, and then whether you had any blowback because you deigned to explain why.
So there were multiple reasons why I loved the sport.
It is definitely part of it.
The biggest thing that I want to focus on now that I'm out, though, is that it is wrong.
It is unfair to have guys racing in women's sports.
I don't want to watch any more of the young athletes I helped mentor have to go through that or have to look forward, but not even look forward, dread that if they get in the elite women's field one day, which would be a dream come true for them, that they don't get to race women, they have to race guys.
And it's sad to think that something we fought so hard for, we have a great men's field, we have a great women's field.
Why are we trying to blend the two?
Like, there's no, there's no point to it.
They're not following science.
So, yeah, it's just a hope that people will wake up and realize that this can't go on.
Have you received any blowback or have people been respectful?
The day I went and did the first signing of that Supreme Court brief, I put had to put all my social medias on private and just kind of just be like, you know what?
There are just people who are going to be saying some not life-giving things.
They're just going to say some really vulgar things that I don't need to hear.
No one needs to hear that and just walk away from that part, which it's.
It's as much as most people can do to anyone who is outside the sport, but it's a big reason why nobody in the sport will say anything, because if your social media platform gets blasted like that, that's your biggest um platform to speak about your sponsors.
Sponsors see that, no one wants to touch you.
If no one wants to touch you, guess what?
It's an expensive sport and you can't race.
And I've also known some ladies who would have loved to say something about it and they're afraid to lose their job.
Pretty sure they would lose their job because even their workplace would have been down on them for it.
Like there's no freedom of speech for it.
Right.
I mean, you're in a similar situation to Riley Gaines, who was forced to swim against Leah Thomas and tied for third.
And then they gave Leah the trophy.
They wanted the picture with Leah, not with Riley.
And Riley, you know, people have accused her of, Katie Porter, I think, accused her of, oh, it's all about you.
And Riley's saying, I'm supposed to be, I think it was in dentistry school right now or dental, to be a dental hygienist.
I'm not, I didn't mean to become an activist.
I just wanted to help the women coming after me who aren't in a position to speak out now that I am.
But still, you saw what happened to her at that San Francisco State University.
I mean, that's probably what would happen to you, Hannah, if you went on a college tour and just in the kind, respectful manner that you speak, told your story, that they would do the same to you because you're not even allowed to, when you have standing to object, lodge that objection.
Even those words, your feelings are too offensive to be spoken, to be expressed.
And that leads me back to you, Inga.
So you went on Fox and raised some of these issues and said, despite the 22 studies, they don't listen.
They don't listen to testimonials.
It's, you know, this UCI review where we're going to have a new result in August is a farce.
And you said, I'm calling for female cyclists to protest, you know, maybe take a knee, do what you can for fans to come and make their voices heard, for coaches to try to protect their players.
And very soon thereafter, the Sinisca Cycling Board, which is a France-based American pro-women cycling team.
So it's an American team, but it's based in France.
I mean, you were on their board.
They parted ways with you and how.
What they wrote was so disgusting.
I mean, I'm glad you can laugh about it now because I'm sure it was very jarring when you saw this organization.
How long had you been working with them, first of all, just to set the scene?
Well, the reason why I'm laughing about it is back in November when I joined Sinisca, I told them my stance and that I'm very, very outspoken.
And Jeff Jones, who bankrolls the team and the other co-owner, Chris Kokoski, agreed with my position.
And I have the email chain to back this up.
And in one of the emails, it said they would be breaking windows and rioting in the streets if they were women.
And they were very supportive of me.
And so when the Riley Gaines incident happened, I was asked to advocate more and to advocate louder.
And I said, I don't think that would be good for me to be on the board of Sinisca if I did that.
And so we had an agreement.
And once again, these are in emails, had an agreement that I would step down from Sinisca and advocate more loudly.
And that's what I did.
of really nice email letter about wanting to advocate more.
And then within about two weeks, here comes Chris Katosky putting out this hateful that I was dehumanizing and demagoguery and bullying that I was bullying.
And I'm like, hold on a second.
So you mean that it's dehumanizing for me to speak out to protect women?
I think it's actually dehumanizing for men to be competing against women.
Demagoguery, that's on the political side.
I'm going to argue that one and say this is a human rights issue.
This is a sports issue.
It's about fairness.
And I said, so, and bullying when I'm speaking up for women's sports is this is just dawning on me now because I am an outsider.
They spun it like they had fired you.
What you're saying is you voluntarily left with their with a handshake to go work on your advocacy without them saying, get out.
You're terrible.
You no longer represent.
Because the way they spun it in the media is Inga sucks.
She's a transphobe.
I.
This is, I'm, I'm learning this for the first time.
Yeah.
No, I mean, if, if anything, I mean, I really like Jeff Jones.
Um, he paid me to step aside and go speak up more because he was so upset about what happened to Riley Gaines.
And when Chris Katoski wrote this letter, even Jeff Jones came back and said, what the explicative did you write this for?
We had an agreement.
She honored her agreement to quietly walk away.
And now you're going to do this to her.
I mean, there was a smear you.
Let me tell the audience what they said, just and then you continue so they know what they did.
There's a couple of choice pull quotes.
The statement said, if shared in the absence of politics, Inga's knowledge and experience would benefit many and advance cycling for everyone.
However, she's decided to dedicate her time to excluding people that are otherwise and currently eligible to compete in UCI events.
She has also attempted to use our team as a platform for her political activity.
Development teams state, the team states, that due to associations with Inga, some lost media exposure.
Some respected cycling journalists refused to cover the team, while qualified and competent people have declined job offers out of fear of crossing or appearing to align themselves with her, meaning you.
Ms. Thompson's departure resolves a troubling conflict of interest.
Sinesca is an apolitical organization, and her campaign and methods are not and will never be Sinesca's mission.
Here's the final.
To be clear, she's entitled to her opinions and advocacy, but her methods and personal attacks are inconsistent with our mission to advance opportunities for women.
Those methods well documented on Ms. Thompson's social media presence include dehumanization of transgender people, spreading misinformation, demagoguery, and personal attacks on anyone who opposes her views.
Our mission has been and always will be that of advancing women at all levels of cycling and doing so in a framework of equality, fairness, and intolerance.
Despite the negativity fostered by Ms. Thompson, we are succeeding and we will push forward faster without her.
I just start laughing.
My standing up for women and fairness for women's sports, women's rights issues, putting forth scientific studies.
I'm just going to sit there and laugh.
I mean, what a great spin job.
But it is.
Those must be the methods that are inconsistent with Siniska's mission.
Well, if they're there for women, then what I find interesting with Sinesca is they had two women on there, two highly decorated women Olympians, me and Marion Clinier, and Marion, multiple world championships, multiple Olympics.
Inclusion vs Biological Reality 00:09:25
And then you have me with my credentials.
We're the only two women Olympian there.
We are the only one with international pro experience.
And we both were removed from the team for standing up for women's rights.
While Sinesca talks about being there for women, and the two men who own the team are there for women, and yet they turn around and they pull this stunt.
What I think happened was that if that they became cowards and they folded to the transgender advocacy crowd, if you do not go out there and flog yourself a hundred times and put out a statement against Inga Thompson, we will forever cancel you.
We will go after you.
We will make sure you, I mean, I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but I see that Sinisca had to flog themselves publicly and denounce me in order to, I don't know, throw up their world credentials.
This is, but this is a message because if they can do this to you, people need to understand what a goddess you are in this sport.
If they can do this to you, they can certainly do it to women who have less power, less name recognition in your sport.
And that's the point.
My understanding is that when you got this letter, you first thought it was a private correspondence, which was bad enough.
But is it true that you did not realize they had publicly released this?
Yeah, the first hour, I kind of had my jaw on the ground.
I'm like, all right, it's public within the group.
And then the next thing I know that it was a public statement.
I'm like, oh, this isn't going to go well for them.
Anybody who puts out a statement like that, right out of the gate, also, no sponsor is going to touch them because you do not do that to a board member.
And if you have private correspondence that shows differently, knowing that I can expose that and show that they are in fact lying, what sponsor is going to touch them?
And I mean, they, yeah, when they did that one, they're banking on being so inclusive, quote unquote, of everybody who's not a biological woman that they'll just get a pass for treating you like this.
But it's even worse than we're outlining because, forgive me for raising this, but you had just been through a terrible health scare and real issue, and they knew about it.
They couldn't have cared less what this was going to do to you, to your mental health, to your reputation.
It was all about them and their virtue signaling.
Yeah, I mean, I had just come off of a double mastectomy from cancer, and I wasn't five weeks out and went to a sponsorship fundraising dinner and had Adam Giles, who's also on the board of director,
try to threaten to chest bump me and said that they couldn't get sponsors because of me and they couldn't get interviews or press to sponsor them because of me.
And, you know, and we have Jeff Jones standing there just going, Adam, stop, Adam, stop.
And physically getting into my space, knowing that I have just gone through a double masectomy.
I mean, the extent that Sinesca will go to silence anybody who speaks up is beyond the pale.
And I will leave Jeff Jones out of this one and focus in on Chris Katowski and Adam Giles as to an active, active intimidation and silencing campaign.
And sorry, didn't work.
Didn't work at all.
All the reasons for me is give me more resolve.
And I really truly think that they thought that this last stunt would silence me.
Like that will get her out of here.
And I'm like, nope, nope, sorry, not going to happen.
The other thing, Inga, I can't help but wonder, in our first hour, we were talking about how I do have an objection to trans people coming into my gynecologist's office or my mammogram office.
You have to wait long enough to get in for these appointments.
They're stressful enough.
I don't want to walk in there and have to wait behind a biological man who has no business going to a gynecologist or getting a mammogram, right?
It's just not something I want to deal with at these precarious moments.
And I hear about your story where you were diagnosed with cancer.
You had a double mastectomy, extremely traumatic and unique for the most part to women, to women.
It is very possible.
It's very remotely possible for men to have breast cancer, but it's extremely rare.
And I just wonder whether how there couldn't be more compassion and open-mindedness to a woman going through a uniquely woman's issue that cuts right to one's mortality as a result of being a woman, trying to advocate for other women who are feeling helpless, who are not empowered in the other ways that you were, and responding in this way.
Yeah.
And well, when you looked at during COVID, I saw again and again and again, transgender women who wanted breast augmentation felt like their not committing suicide if they didn't have breast augmentation was more important than women going through cancer.
And I remember being upset at that point during COVID, not even comprehending the fact that I would actually be living that.
And it was pretty interesting being in the plastic or in the office and having transgender women in there that were coming in for breast augmentation.
And I'm going in there to have a double mastectomy.
And it felt very surreal to be in that same space with it was really tough to stomach because this is a female issue.
And when you think about them also as, you know, transgender women asking for gynecological exams and asking for gynecologists just to have more understanding of their issues, it's like, no, you need to go to your reconstructive surgeon for that or the person who did your sexual reassignment surgery.
But to be demanding to go into gynecologist offices for validation is as ludicrous as being in a women's sports for validation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know I wrote down one of your lines, which I loved.
And it was from one of the articles in which you spoke, but I have it here someplace, but it was, we do not need to participate in your dysphoria.
We do not need to participate in your dysphoria.
And it's just so reductionist to even suggest that when we go into the gynecologist, it's all about some hole.
They have absolutely no clue what happens when you go into a gynecologist, what gets examined, what they're testing for, from ovarian cancer to other GYN issues that a lot of women suffer from that can be very painful to pregnancies.
I mean, we could go down the list, right?
None of which any one of these people will ever suffer, but we have to pretend because Inga, they do want us to participate in their dysphoria.
Yeah.
And they want us to validate them.
So here's how you, I have a distinction here.
I believe that there are a very, very, very few true transgender women.
And they are, and I know quite a few, and they are quietly living their lives, but this opens up this loophole to autogynothelia, which we call AGP, which is the sexual fetishization of wanting to be a woman.
And part of this is they need everybody around them to validate their dysphoria.
And there was a time that I was willing to go along with this and anymore.
It's like, no.
If you were asking me to validate your dysphoria, then I really don't think you have dysphoria.
You have autogynophilia.
And it's not on my shoulders.
What's that?
All the more reason why you shouldn't be here.
Yeah.
And it shouldn't fall on women's shoulders to try for men to try to figure out their gender dysphoria.
They have it.
Great.
Go to your support group.
Go to your therapist.
Go elsewhere.
But it is not on women to have to carry the issues of men.
And think about it.
I mean, sorry to take it to the worst place, but it's happening.
So you're there and you are worried about your breast cancer.
And now you have to sit in a small room with someone who is getting off on being in that space.
That is a new development in American life.
That is never something we had to worry about.
To sit in the office with in the same office that I'm in going in for breast cancer.
And people don't understand.
It's really hard to get an appointment to get in there.
I mean, I did everything possible to rush it through as soon as possible so that it wouldn't metastasize.
And thankfully I did, but I mean, I had to squeak.
And then the other funny thing was, you know, issues about, well, we'll only give you one.
Is American Cycling Changing 00:05:33
And I'm like, no, I want a double.
Well, you know, we don't really want to do that.
And it was like, no, I really think I'll go for double.
It's like, yeah, but that seems a little bit extreme.
I'm like, hold on.
But if I had, if I identified as a transgender man, you'd take them off like that.
So if we have any issues, then I'm just going to self-declare here.
The doctor's like, okay.
You know what?
You could resume your racing career over in the man's lane.
Of course, that's never the way it goes.
Never goes the other.
All right, let's take a quick break and come right back.
Thank you so much for this open, honest discussion.
It's an honor to have you both here.
So it's not easy to speak out, but speak out.
We must, no matter where we are, to protect our women and support and support them, or if you're in the sport, to try.
What happened over in Great Britain is inspirational.
The British Cycling Association changed the rules to say, no, no men, no biological men, period, you're out.
And this caused quite the kerfuffle.
Someone named Emily Bridges, who about two minutes ago was Zach Bridges, setting national junior men's records over there, came out as trans only in 2020, but it raced in men's events while transitioning.
So was a man, a successful man in biking, and then transitioned over and it has been a woman for two minutes.
And the Brits said, we are not racing against Bridges.
And the British Cycling Association agreed and changed the rule.
And now Bridges' reaction is this is a violent act.
When the government expresses admiration towards Ron DeSantis' fascist state, which kidnaps children and is itching to pass legislation to ban us from public life, it is a violent act and goes on to say the British cycling group is furthering a genocide against us, a genocide.
So far, they're standing by their position, British cycling.
U.S. cycling, totally different.
They're allowing it 2.5 nanomoles of testosterone in 24 months as that.
Even if you've gone through male puberty, that's where the UCI, the cycling group is.
The IOC is terrible.
Is it going to change?
What do you think, Hannah, as somebody who's connected to a lot of these racers still?
Is American cycling going to have to change?
I hope so.
The USAC will probably change after a lot of the bigger organizations have changed.
Very concerned about their monetary gain.
And so they will do whatever is the popular opinion.
The Olympic committee you're talking about.
And do you think this Killops is going to get on it?
This person who transitioned in 2019 and is now racing as a female in your race?
On the Olympics?
Yeah.
It depends if rules are made to make women's sports for women only, then no.
But if this continues, if it continues that men who have been taking hormones can indeed join the women's field, then yes, I think it is very possible for Austin to get on the Olympic team.
I mean, that's in a way, Inga, it could help your cause.
You know, I think if Americans see that same as they saw Leah Thomas, it could help.
What we're looking at right now is when after Austin Killops won a tour of the Gila and they were riding just a simple road bike, we did the numbers on this one with quite a few people.
I won't bring up their names.
And if they ride the same way and they go to the pro-nationals coming up here in the end of June, there's a very good chance that Austin Killops will win the individual time trial.
If that happens, they become an automatic onto the world championships and they also become on the long team for next year's Olympics.
So we're looking at potentially in cycling or at least on the road, Austin Killops displacing some very highly decorated women from the World Championships and from potentially from the Olympics.
So in the time we have left, what can we do?
How can we help you?
How can we help support you?
We are looking at protesting at Pro Nationals June 22nd to the 25th in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Go to my website.
I'm going to start posting more on their coming right up and wear a t-shirt that says 100% woman at the events at any women's races.
And for the cyclists, what should they do?
I'm asking them to take a knee.
I'm asking for all of the support staff around to wear a t-shirt that says 100% woman.
The athletes really can't speak up, so we need the support staff anywhere and around to wear this t-shirt to talk to the sponsors and because it's only going to get louder.
And you know what?
The athletes can speak out.
They can speak out anonymously, at least, if they don't want to do it, you know, with their name.
They can do it anonymously.
Go to inga thompsonfoundation.org, ingathompsonfoundation.org.
All the best, Anna and Inga.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Megan.
And I'll speak to all of you more tomorrow.
What a story.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
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