CPAC 2023 Was a Hatefest Against Transgender People

Trudy Ring
Wed, March 8, 2023 

From left: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, and Michael Knowles

The annual Conservative Political Action Conference is always a hatefest, but this year it was particularly so, and the hate was directed mostly at transgender people.

At this past weekend’s event, right-wing commentator Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire said that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” and that it would be “for the good of society.” The reliably outrageous Marjorie Taylor Greene falsely claimed that puberty blockers cause permanent damage and promised to once again introduce legislation to criminalize the provision of gender-affirming care to minors. And none other than Donald Trump boasted of banning “transgender insanity” from the U.S. military.

“It is a sign of their disconnection from reality that these extremist politicians and activists spent their weekend at CPAC spreading hateful and discriminatory transphobic rhetoric rather than tackling any real issues facing our country,” Geoff Wetrosky, national campaign director for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a press release. “Their vile, anti-trans rhetoric does not resonate with the majority of Americans who are interested in solutions, not slander. But that doesn’t mean their transphobic hate and propaganda won’t cause harm. Their words rile up far-right extremists resulting in more stigma, discrimination and violence against LGBTQ+ people. The rights and very existence of trans people are not up for debate. We will keep fighting back until we are all treated equally, with dignity and respect.”

HRC has assembled a list of anti-trans comments from CPAC, culled from media coverage of the event. Here’s a selection of them, supplemented by The Advocate’s research.

Knowles wasn’t the only one to lambaste “transgenderism,” which many trans people consider an offensive term, as it is used to “reduce their humanity to a ‘condition,’” as the LGBTQ+ Twitter account Queer Insider explained. Right-wing activist Candace Owens used the term as well, saying, “There is no middle ground on transgenderism” and that “if you don’t have the courage to say what needs to be said, we truly don’t need you,” as reported by The Independent.

Knowles objected to coverage of his talk and claimed eliminating “transgenderism” doesn’t mean eliminating trans people — he simply denies they exist. “Saturday does not mark the first time Knowles has used this anti-transgender rhetoric,” The Daily Beast noted. “Just last week, Knowles responded to backlash he faced for a similar transphobic comment calling for a ban on ‘transgenderism.’ ‘I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology,’ Knowles said on The Michael Knowles Show. ‘And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology.’ ‘Nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category,’ he added. ‘It’s not a legitimate category of being.’”

He groused on Twitter about a Rolling Stone headline that read, “CPAC Speaker Calls for Transgender People to Be ‘Eradicated,’” so the publication changed it to “CPAC Speaker Calls for Transgenderism to Be ‘Eradicated.’” Rolling Stone drew some criticism, then changed the head again, to “CPAC Speaker Calls for Eradication of ‘Transgenderism’ — and Somehow Claims He’s Not Calling for Elimination of Transgender People.”

There was lots more hateful rhetoric being tossed around. Former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka used the same terminology as his old boss in discussing trans people. He “ranted about ‘mutilating boys and girls’ and ‘sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity,’” according to The Independent.

Anti-trans forces often call gender-affirming care “mutilation.” Greene, a Republican member of the U.S. House, invoked this in claiming that social media influences young people to be transgender. “These are kids who are confused about who they are and they are confused about who they are because of what they are seeing on the internet, what they see on social media, and they are also confused, many of them, because these victims of this billion-dollar industry that mutilates the genitals of children, many of these victims have diagnoses of autism, mental illness, they have depression, anxiety, psychosis,” she said in a speech broadcast on C-SPAN. In truth, genital surgery is not recommended for minors, and when adults have it, they see it as a life-enhancing improvement, not mutilation.

She also said, “These boys think they can become girls and the girls think they can become boys, but what’s happening to them is they are given puberty blockers that actually chemically castrates them, makes them sterile.” But scientists that that’s not so. “Puberty blockers are falsely claimed to cause infertility and to be irreversible, despite no substantiated evidence,” The Lancet, a well-regarded medical journal, noted in 2021.

Greene further vowed to introduce “a bill called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act that would criminalise doing ‘anything to do with gender-affirming care’ for minors,” according to The Independent. She introduced a bill with the same title last year, and it went nowhere before the congressional session ended. The House had a Democratic majority then; it now has a Republican majority, but the Senate is still in Democratic hands, so the bill has little chance of going to President Joe Biden, who would undoubtedly veto it anyway.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who’s challenging Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — Trump remained the favorite of CPAC attendees in the conference’s straw poll — claimed awareness of trans identity is undermining the military. “We need our military to be stronger than ever,” she said in a talk carried on C-SPAN. “But what does Joe Biden have our troops doing? Taking gender pronoun classes. I am the wife of a combat veteran and that disgusts me. Our troops already know the difference between men and women. They also know that we need a different commander in chief. It’s not just our military. On Biden and Harris’s watch, this woke self-loathing has swept our country. It’s in the classroom, the boardroom, and the bathrooms of government.”

Other speakers pushed the narrative that support for trans people is bad for women, and they took time to denounce trans women athletes. “There's this systemic eradication of women that is being attempted by the left, and it’s more than sports,” Riley Gaines, who tied trans woman Lia Thomas in the NCAA swimming championships last year, told the Washington Examiner during an interview at CPAC. Gaines, who now works for the Independent Women’s Forum, also said, “These large organizations and large companies, these woke companies, continually make the claims that men make the best women.”

In addition to doing the interview, she spoke on a CPAC panel, where she said, “Man and woman is the sheer essence of humanity, and these people are trying to blur that line. I don’t know if I was just naive before or if this is something that has just been totally sprung on us, but it’s an attack on women.”

Republican U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a former college football coach, got in digs at trans athletes and education about race and gender. “All this woke, transgender athletes, CRT, 1619, they don’t teach reading, writing, or arithmetic,” he said on a panel called “Sacking the Woke Playbook,” as reported by The Independent, referring to critical race theory and The 1619 Project. He called trans girls “biological boys” and said they shouldn’t be permitted in school sports. “Sports have built this country,” he said.

“The senator also falsely claimed,” The Independent noted, “that ‘half the kids when they graduate they can’t read their diploma’ as he condemned ‘the progressives, the crazies’ who are ‘trying to change family, change things that are our moral values.’”

Opinion: What the CPAC speaker meant when he said 'transgenderism must be eradicated'

Diana Goetsch
Wed, March 8, 2023 

Michael Knowles on a TV set in 2022. At CPAC last weekend, Knowles said that in "dealing with transgenderism" it was "all or nothing." (Jason Davis / Getty Images)

When far-right commentator Michael Knowles announced from the Conservative Political Action Conference stage this past weekend that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” Rolling Stone ran the headline “CPAC Speaker Calls for Transgender People to Be Eradicated,” under the banner GENOCIDAL MANIA. But hours later, after Knowles threatened multiple news outlets with libel suits, Rolling Stone editors changed that headline to “CPAC Speaker Calls for Transgenderism to Be Eradicated,” and put “GENOCIDAL” in scare quotes — which is fitting because editors are scared of lawsuits.

Knowles pretends to claim transgenderism and transgender people are two different things, and he was careful to use the “ism.” He said, “There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing.”

Let’s not overthink this. Had he said, “Judaism must be eradicated,” or had he proclaimed an “all or nothing” solution for homosexuality, nobody would mistake the murderous intent of such a message. The story would have earned a front page headline in every major newspaper in the U.S. and beyond. (Which I hope will someday be the case when it comes to threats of trans genocide from a major political party.)

For the record, trans people have existed throughout history in every culture, which has been exhaustively documented. By turning trans existence into an ism, conservatives are attempting to misrepresent a struggle for equality as a culture war.

The campaign against Black history is another attempt to turn one group’s existence into an ism. Critical race theory is taught as an upper-level elective in some law schools, not to children in public schools. In reality, when Florida’s Ron DeSantis and other Republican governors ban “CRT” they are banning the teaching of basic historical facts — such as the details of slavery, the events leading to the Civil War, what happened during Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. (You know, the kinds of things on posters during Black History Month.)

The state of Florida has also banned discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity through the third grade, and “inappropriate” instruction beyond that — lest queer and trans children feel safe enough to come out. When DeSantis says Florida is where “woke goes to die,” he’s going after people. Again, the propaganda strategy is to turn some humans into a problematic idea — “wokeism” — and then eradicate the ism.

It’s also the legal strategy. While the gaslit GOP base is attacking drag queens, trans people and LGBTQ nightclubs, its leaders are introducing anti-trans bills in state legislatures at a dizzying pace — more than 410 in the first three months of 2023, according to the Human Rights Campaign — targeting trans people, particularly trans kids.

It’s worth remembering that during the first six years of Hitler’s dictatorship more than 400 anti-Jewish decrees and regulations were issued, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia. Many were national laws, “but state, regional, and municipal officials, acting on their own initiatives, also promulgated a barrage of exclusionary decrees in their own communities.” Was the legislation “anti-Jewish” or “anti-Jew”? Does it matter, given what happened next?

Here’s a piece of good news: That Rolling Stone headline now reads, “CPAC Speaker Calls for Eradication of ‘Transgenderism’ — and Somehow Claims He’s Not Calling for Elimination of Transgender People.” The updated story features Erin Reed, a trans writer and legislative researcher — and needless to say the scare quotes are where they belong, around the “ism.”

Here’s one ism we ought to be citing: fascism. We should have been using it for years to describe what’s transpiring, yet few people in the national media choose it, opting instead for blunted substitutes like “anti-democratic” or “extremism” or “ultra-MAGA.” I’m wondering how the majority of Americans can see clearly where things stand when news sources employ mealy-mouthed euphemisms instead of the right word: fascism.

Maybe national media outlets are cautious about deploying this ism, lest they be branded extreme, or lose audience. Or maybe they are saving it for the right moment, lest they become the boy who cried wolf. If so, now is the time. When a political party calls for the eradication of a group of people, that’s fascism.

Diana Goetsch is the author of the memoir “This Body I Wore,” a 2022 best nonfiction selection of the Washington Post.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Ted Cruz keeps dodging on whether he agrees with his former podcast co-host's call to eradicate 'transgenderism'


Bryan Metzger
Tue, March 7, 2023 

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and conservative personality Michael Knowles.

Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images; Jason Davis/Getty Images

Conservative personality Michael Knowles called for the eradication of "transgenderism" in a CPAC speech.

Knowles previously co-hosted a podcast with Ted Cruz for nearly two years.

Cruz repeatedly refused to say whether he agrees with that idea, calling it "silly politics."

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas repeatedly refused to say whether he agrees with his former podcast co-host that "transgenderism" must be "eradicated."

"I think the extreme left's ideology has been very harmful," Cruz initially told Insider on Tuesday before boarding an elevator in the Capitol building.

Minutes later, Insider posed the same question to Cruz again, prompting him to dismiss the question as "silly politics."

"I get that you have a story you want to write," Cruz told Insider. "But let me tell you this: when you write a story about the young children who have their genitals mutilated, and they're rendered permanently sterile from radicals who removed their reproductive organs in the interest of radical ideology, then I'm happy to answer your other questions."

"But until you write that story, it's just silly politics that you're playing," he added.

In a Saturday speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, conservative media personality Michael Knowles — who previously co-hosted a podcast with Cruz for nearly two years — called for the eradication of what he describes as "transgenderism," arguing that it "isn't true."

"There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism — it's all or nothing," said Knowles, who co-hosted "Verdict with Ted Cruz" from the show's inception in January 2020 until it was purchased by iHeartMedia in October 2022. "For the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely."

"Transgenderism" is itself a largely derogatory term mostly used by opponents of transgender rights to dehumanize transgender people.

An influential figure on the right and a competitive presidential candidate in 2016, Cruz is typically willing to directly answer questions from reporters and offer his positions on all manner of issues.

But the senator has repeatedly declined to answer reporters' questions about Knowles' comments, opting instead to criticize the media for the way the comments were portrayed. Following Knowles' CPAC speech, critics accused him of making genocidal comments, arguing that he had essentially called for the elimination of transgender people.

Knowles has since argued that he was instead referring simply to the phenomenon of people undergoing gender transitions.

"Quite clearly, I'm saying I don't want to kill these people, I want to help them," said Knowles, who went to argue that transgender people must be required to identify by their sex on official government documents and be prohibited from using the bathroom of their preferred gender.

Knowles has since accused several media outlets of libelous behavior for saying he had called for the eradication of transgender people, prompting Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah to publicly back him up.

"The press is being silly and deliberately taking him out of context," Cruz told Insider when first asked about the issue on Tuesday.

But even so, Knowles' comments go well beyond what most Republican lawmakers have articulated.

While the GOP has put forward legislation at both the federal and state level to ban transgender people from participating in sports, prevent them from using the bathroom of their choice, or block minors from receiving gender-affirming care, there's been relatively little sign of a broader effort to prevent people from transitioning altogether.

However, former President Donald Trump has pledged to sign an executive order instructing federal agencies to "cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age."