For everyone taking in the publicity surrounding Charlie Kirk's gaslit murder.
Charlie Kirk, the conservative podcaster who co-founded Turning Point USA, passed away on Wednesday after being shot while hosting one of his "Prove Me Wrong" debates at Utah Valley University. Tyler Robinson, 22, was identified and taken into custody by authorities Friday in connection with the shooting. Kirk, 31, became famous when Donald Trump was first running for president in 2016. He often went on TV to campaign for him. His online content, particularly his debates, has been attributed with swaying young voters to support Trump in the 2024 election. Kirk has been lauded for his participation in political discourse since his passing; however, his legacy is not one of candid discourse. By disparaging LGBTQ+ individuals and other minorities and regularly disseminating false information about transgender people and gender-affirming care, Kirk developed his brand.
Turning Point USA "Culture War"
Stephen King, the author, was met with online criticism and subsequently issued an apology for stating in a post to X, which was formerly Twitter, that Kirk "advocated stoning gays to death." However, Kirk did say that and a lot of other terrible things about the LGBT community, so King's claim wasn't entirely false. These are some of Kirk's most offensive remarks regarding members of the LGBTQ+ community. In addition to being hateful, they are simply inaccurate. Kirk invoked a Bible verse about stoning gay people "to death" on a June 2024 episode of his podcast with Jack Posobiec, calling it "God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.". Kirk stated on an episode of his podcast from April 2022 that transgender individuals are accountable for inflation. He did not offer any evidence, and there is no indication that the two problems are even remotely connected.
"There's a direct connection to inflation and the trans issue. You say, Charlie, come on. They couldn't be further apart. No, they're exactly the same. They're the same in this aspect—when you believe that men can become women, why wouldn't you also believe that you could print wealth? If you believe that someone can change their gender, why wouldn't you also believe that money is wealth?"
Kirk stated on Twitter that "it should be legal to burn a rainbow or [Black Lives Matter] flag in public.". He said:
“We should work to overturn every conviction for those arrested, fined, or otherwise harassed for the ‘hate crime’ of doing donuts over Pride flags painted on public streets"
During an interview with failed college swimmer Riley Gaines, Kirk blamed trans equality for the alleged "decline of American men," stating that people should have "just taken care of" trans people "the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s"—which, as independent journalist Erin Reed points out, included lobotomies, shock therapy, and involuntary institutionalisation.
Charlie Kirk and Riley Gaines Talking About Lynching
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WhMtFZtmcg
Others saw it as supporting lynchings or other violent acts against trans people. In a speech in September 2023, Kirk claimed that transgender people are "throbbing middle finger to God." He then spoke directly to transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, calling her names and telling her, "You're an abomination to God.". In a Media Matters clip from an April 2024 episode of his podcast, Kirk stated that physicians who offer gender-affirming treatment ought to face the same level of prosecution as the Nazis did following World War II.
"Her daughter all of a sudden came home and said, 'I'm a boy.' She said, 'what?' And the whole assembly line, the conveyor belt was started to grind," Kirk said. "They wanted to give her cross-sex hormones. They wanted to give her testosterone therapy. They wanted to cut off her breasts. They wanted to do all these sorts of things, and these doctors do this without any thought whatsoever. Yeah. Sure. Here's the script. Here's the clinic. Go here. Go for surgery. These doctors need to be put in prison quickly. We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately."
There is evidence that gender-affirming care is medically necessary for both adults and children. This is agreed upon by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the World Medical Association, and the World Health Organisation. A number of studies have shown that teens and young adults experience less depression and anxiety when they socially transition and get help for gender dysphoria. Several additional longitudinal studies have demonstrated that the quality of life of individuals who identify as transgender is significantly enhanced by gender-affirming care. None of the 55 peer-reviewed studies concluded that gender transition had detrimental effects.
Kirk said he would not support his children if they came out as gay or trans. He said that trans identities are a "social contagion" that can be explained by "the autism spectrum" and "puberty anxiety.".
"I don't affirm delusions. You do not affirm what is harmful or what is not true," Kirk said. "And you must find the underlying issue as to why this is happening. ... Young women have always been more prone to social contagions, and transgenderism is a social contagion. A 5,000 percent increase in transgenderism is not normal. Everybody is an external force upon our nation's youth."
The "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" hypothesis, which asserts that being trans is a "trend," has been long refuted as junk science. The theory is based on Lisa Littman's 2017 poster abstract, which she herself says is not a formal diagnosis. When the work isn't good enough for a journal article or even an oral presentation at a conference, it's often published as a poster abstract. According to a 2022 study published in Pediatrics, the overall percentage of adolescents who identified as trans fell from 2.4 percent in 2017 to 1.6 percent in 2019, out of 91,937 in 2017 and 105,437 in 2019, which would not support the "social contagion" theory. During a speech at UC Boulder in April 2022, Kirk claimed that society is catering to the LGBTQ+ community, calling them the "alphabet mafia" and a "hypervocal minority."
"What is with this all gender bathroom stuff? You go in there and it’s like boys and girls both in the same restroom," he said. "I got thinking to myself, ‘How did this happen?’ It happened for a couple reasons. One of the reasons is that we tried to reconfigure society to accommodate and pander to a hypervocal minority that itself will never actually be happy regardless of how many changes we make for the alphabet mafia, it’s never going to be enough, right? Bathrooms, pronouns, whatever, but then it’s like we have to teach your four year old about whether or not they need to transition or not."
"I do not believe transitioning your gender is right for people," he added. "I think it’s a lie and we should tell people that suicide rates are extremely high for people that transition. ... You look at the transition regret and it will take your breath away at how many people wish they did not transition."
When it comes to major surgeries, gender-affirming surgeries have one of the lowest rates of regret. In 2023, the National Library of Medicine found that only 0.3% of transgender men and 0.6% of transgender women said they regretted having surgery to change their gender. The primary reason for the majority of individuals who detransitioned was a lack of financial or social support. Significantly more people regret major life events than gender-affirming surgery: 16.2 percent regret getting tattoos, and 7 percent regret having children. Kirk stated in February 2022 that the "transgender movement's" purpose is to change people into machines. He wasn't joking. "The transgender movement actually matters even more than biomedical fascism and they actually are together because the transgender movement is an introductory phase to get you to strip yourself of your humanity to mesh with machines," Kirk said. "It's called transhumanism. They want you to say 'Okay, well, I can choose any gender, why can't I just have like an exoskeleton of some sort of machine around me?'"
"This is what meta is about, the metaverse, kids staring at screens all day long," he continued. "This is where Silicon Valley is going. This is why they're so insistent on this transgender thing, because if you stop being a man then maybe you could stop being a human being."
In a June 2023 tweet, Kirk once again mislabeled care that is gender affirming as "mutilation."
"Cis is a slur. 'Sex assigned at birth' is a logical fallacy," Kirk wrote. "Gender Affirming Care is child mutilation. Minor Attracted Persons are pedophiles. Trans is a mental delusion. Reclaim the language they stole from us."
It is extremely uncommon for minors to have gender-affirming surgeries. A recent study published in JAMA found no evidence of surgeries being performed on trans youth under the age of 12. Additionally, only 2.1 out of every 100,000 trans youth aged 15 to 17 underwent surgery, with the majority of these procedures being chest surgeries. In 2019, 146 (97 percent) of the 151 breast reductions performed on American minors were performed on cisgender males, and a much greater number of teenage girls receive breast implants than transgender teens undergo chest surgeries. During an episode of his podcast in February 2024, Kirk, whose organization Turning Point USA provided bus transportation for rioters attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, suggested that the insurrectionists would have received a more lenient sentence if they had filmed themselves having gay sex in the buildings. He was referring to a leaked sex tape from a Senate staffer.
“There are hundreds of peaceful people that went into the Capitol on January 6. They did not touch a police officer," Kirk lied. "They didn’t smash a window, but they have been charged federally for trespassing and called insurrectionists for the rest of their life. ... They should have stripped naked and filmed themselves having gay sex."
It was said that the person who shot up a Catholic school in Minneapolis was transgender, so Kirk said that all trans people were responsible for the attack.
"The evil perpetrated on young people by the trans medical industry is something future generations will look upon with horror," he wrote.
According to a study conducted by the U.S. Secret Service Threat Assessment Center, 96 percent of the perpetrators of 172 mass attacks between 2016 and 2020 were cisgender men. According to earlier reports by The Advocate, transgender suspects were involved in no more than six of the 4,600 mass shootings that occurred between 2014 and 2024, or 0.128 percent of all mass shootings. Transgender individuals are significantly less likely to be mass shooters than the general population, as they constitute only one percent of the U.S. population. Also, trans people are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.
