There is a revealing second in a latest episode of The Joe Rogan Experience when the dialog briefly brushes towards empathy earlier than veering again into acquainted anti-trans rhetoric. Cisgender males, not transgender ladies, are the true hazard to all women, the conservative podcaster stated.
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On Wednesday’s episode, Steve-O, the comedian and stunt performer whose public persona has lengthy trusted doing issues different individuals would by no means dare, was recounting an interplay that had shaken him out of a joke. He had been contemplating getting breast implants as a part of a bit for his act, he stated, when an opportunity dialog with a transgender cashier in Los Angeles precipitated him to cease and suppose. He requested whether or not the stunt is perhaps offensive. The reply, as he advised it, was not an summary lecture however an outline of atypical indignities and exclusions.
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It was a narrative about what occurs when somebody hears one other individual’s ache and lets it complicate their very own assumptions. On a special present, or in a special media tradition, that may have been the purpose.
“They described to me a level of oppression that genuinely f***ing broke my heart,” Steve-O stated.
Trying to recall the dialog, Steve-O stated the employee advised him how some trans individuals had been not even allowed to make use of the toilet at their office due to politics. Rogan instantly pushed again, insisting that the declare was inaccurate and arguing the problem was merely that transgender individuals had been not allowed to make use of restrooms that did not “align with their biological sex.”
But Rogan, whose podcast is among the many most influential platforms within the nation, which has grow to be a central platform within the on-line ecosystem of male grievance politics, rapidly redirected the alternate into one thing extra acquainted: a round argument by which he intermittently sounded compassionate, even affordable, solely to negate that posture virtually instantly with bigotry, falsehoods, and anti-trans misinformation.
He started with what can sound, to an inattentive listener, like a concession. “I genuinely think there’s people that feel like they are in the wrong biological sex,” Rogan stated.
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But Rogan did not go away the thought there. Almost directly, he pivoted to the outdated insinuation that some trans ladies are merely “perverts” searching for entry to ladies’s areas. It is among the oldest and most sturdy myths in anti-trans politics that insurance policies defending transgender individuals in bogs, locker rooms, or different sex-segregated areas perform as a canopy for predatory males.
According to a 2025 Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law review of the analysis, there’s ”no proof that privateness and safety in restrooms modified because of transgender individuals having, by legislation, entry to restrooms and different services in accordance with their gender identification.”
Instead, the information suggests the other dynamic, that transgender individuals themselves face heightened danger of harassment and violence in restrooms.
The report discovered that transgender people who find themselves compelled to make use of bogs akin to the intercourse assigned to them at delivery expertise larger ranges of harassment and denial of entry. For instance, about 10 % of transgender males who used ladies’s restrooms reported being denied entry, and almost 11 % skilled verbal harassment, charges larger than after they used restrooms according to their gender identification.
In different phrases, the individuals Rogan described as potential threats are way more prone to be the targets of hostility themselves.
The circularity of Rogan’s argument turned even clearer because the dialogue continued. After warning about risks to ladies’s safety, he supplied a blunt rationalization for why gender-segregated areas exist within the first place.
“It’s because some men are f***ing creeps,” Rogan stated. Moments later, he put a finer level on his argument. “It’s men that are the problem,” he stated.
Research reveals that violence towards ladies is overwhelmingly dedicated by cisgender males. Rogan even admitted to the hypocrisy over anxieties in regards to the existence of transgender individuals. Rogan highlighted how issues on the suitable are principally about transgender ladies and not trans males.
“No one gives a f**k about trans men going into the men’s bathroom,” he stated. “Come on in. Who cares?”
Rogan insisted that whereas some transgender individuals legitimately undergo from gender dysphoria, in his opinion, many had been pretending to be ladies with a view to get sexual gratification out of being in ladies’s areas.
Related: Joe Rogan Continues to Spew Anti-Trans Rhetoric on His Spotify Podcast
“It doesn’t mean you can’t be kind. I try to be kind to everyone,” he stated.
He additionally described gender dysphoria as “a mental illness,” presenting trans identification as pathology reasonably than human variation. But in accordance with the American Psychiatric Association, gender nonconformity is not itself a psychological dysfunction. The APA says gender dysphoria refers particularly to clinically important misery that may come up from incongruence between an individual’s gender identification and intercourse assigned at delivery, and it notes that not all transgender or gender-diverse individuals expertise gender dysphoria.
Rogan, in one of many extra reckless moments of the episode, claimed that transgender mass shooters had killed extra individuals than ICE this yr and steered that “the majority” of highschool shootings had been dedicated by transgender individuals.
“I did not know that,” Steve-O responded. Rogan’s declare is fake. Most mass shooters are cisgender males.
According to a Reuters fact check revealed in 2024, transgender people accounted for lower than 1 % of all mass shootings within the Gun Violence Archive over the earlier decade and solely about 2 % of faculty mass shootings in that interval. Reuters additionally reported {that a} 2023 U.S. Secret Service examine of 180 public mass attackers from 2016 to 2020 recognized solely three transgender people. FactCheck.org, reviewing later claims of a supposed “trans shooter” sample, equally discovered that transgender or nonbinary suspects accounted for a really small share of mass shootings within the Gun Violence Archive database since 2013, lower than 0.1 %.
And if one is genuinely involved with who faces violence, the obtainable proof factors in the other way from Rogan’s insinuations. According to the Williams Institute, transgender persons are greater than 4 instances as probably as cisgender individuals to undergo violent victimization.
Rogan continued to assert that trans ladies are not ladies, to boost alarms about prisons and bogs, and to indicate that social recognition of transgender individuals creates a loophole for abuse.
“My experience was that I didn’t get any of this sense that this was a creepy pervert, anything like that,” Steve-O advised Rogan.
The Jackass alum, for his half, saved making an attempt to return to what had really moved him. “My only takeaway from my experience,” Steve-O stated, “is that it made me feel compassionate.”
Watch Joe Rogan understand the hazard posed by the boys beneath.
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