‘It’s Never Okay To Castrate A Child’: Walsh Talks ‘What is A Woman?’ At Berkeley

Daily Wire Host and best selling author Matt Walsh addressed a crowd of about 400 people at the University of California, Berkeley after airing his acclaimed documentary “What is a Woman?”

UC Berkeley is well known for the left-wing tilt of its campus culture and its history as the birthplace of the free speech movement — although in more recent years, it has become a well known battleground in the culture war, as students and local agitators have repeatedly attempted to prevent conservative speakers, with protests that have sometimes escalated to violence. Roughly 100 protesters gathered outside the event, but no serious incidents occurred.

Before the event began, Young America’s Foundation, a conservative student organization that sponsored Walsh’s speaking tour, interviewed several students about their thoughts on Walsh’s appearance.

“There’s a difference between free speech and hate speech,” one young woman said. “If it is free and it is, like, what you believe, then that’s great. But if it’s against, like, the safety and health of other people, then it’s not right.” Hate speech does not exist in the United States as a legal concept, and what is often considered “hate speech” in other countries is protected in America by the First Amendment.

We toured around UC Berkeley to ask students how they felt about @mattwalshblog speaking tonight. It did not disappoint. Here’s what they said: pic.twitter.com/cXYl006tGs

— YAF (@yaf) November 18, 2022

At the start of Walsh’s lecture, he quipped about the city’s issues with drug abuse and sanitation. “The thing I really loved about this area is that you can always find your way downtown, even if you don’t have a map or GPS, because you can just follow the stench of weed and fecal matter … this is public speaking 101, to start by insulting the host city.”

Walsh also noted that it was “providential” that he came to San Francisco to discuss the subject of gender ideology, as earlier this week, the city announced its “Guaranteed Income For Trans People” or GIFT, program, which will offer a select group of transgender individuals $1,200 a month because members of the trans community are “disproportionately impacted by poverty.”

“We already know that trans people are disproportionately affected by everything, really. … If there was an apocalyptic asteroid strike, the very last news report filed for CNN would have the headline, ‘Asteroid Apocalypse At Hand: Trans & BIPOC Most Affected.’”

Walsh also noted that gender confused individuals tend to have higher rates of mental illness and substance abuse, which he argues is a better explanation for their higher levels of poverty than alleged discrimination, given that the disparity exists in a place like San Francisco where the social attitudes toward such people are exceptionally welcoming.

Walsh also noted that the official government application form for the GIFT program includes 15 sets of gender pronouns such as ve/ver/vis and a sexual orientation of “f*****” (a slur for homosexuals who would seemingly be covered under the also listed “gay” orientation). Walsh noted other seeming redundancies in the list of 97 gender identities, such as “trans woman” and “woman of transgender experience.”

“What are these pronouns, what do they signify, what does it mean to be a ve/ver/vis? No one can really explain that.” Walsh said.

Walsh structured the bulk of his lecture around four common rebuttals to his perspective fielded by advocates of gender theory.

1. Sex and Gender are not the same

Walsh holds that the conceptual difference between the two categories has been deliberately obfuscated by such phrases as “trans women are women,” and that gender was first extracted from sex and then elevated above it in a rhetorical sleight of hand, and that “gender” was, in his mind, a useless concept outside of the study of language and the “gender” of certain words. Walsh also argued that the natural variation in human behavior in personality and self perception is better encapsulated by personality.

2. You say that “women” can get pregnant; what about women who can’t get pregnant?

Walsh noted that while some biological females, due to age or illness, cannot become pregnant, “women” are still “of the nature to get pregnant,” in the same way that it is “in the nature” of human beings to walk on two legs. Counterexamples also exist as the result of age or infirmity, but “does the existence of amputees and infants call into question the notion that human beings have two legs?”

3. The gender binary is a western construct and other cultures have more diverse beliefs about gender

Walsh spoke about his own experience outside the western bubble during his visit with the Maasai people in Kenya, noting that the idea of men getting pregnant was utterly foreign to them. Walsh also argued that while some cultures do have situations where a member of one sex “acts out” the role of the other sex in various ways, no other society

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