GENDER CONFUSION: Herschel Walker is the world’s worst biology teacher
In a recent interview, Herschel Walker tried to explain his views on gender (you won’t be surprised to learn he rejects the notion that transgender people exist) but did a terrible job of it. One thing he did prove: if he’s not elected to the Senate, he shouldn’t consider teaching biology as an alternative.
Walker recycled a conservative trope: the notion that if he rejects a person’s identity, it’s the other person who is wrong, or “confused,” about their gender.
A video surfaced on Twitter of Walker speaking to Pastor Benny Tate of Rock Springs Church in Milner, Georgia. In the clip, the pair start to discuss gender and reproduction, agreeing that the two are intrinsically linked, and that the word “woman” is etymologically connected to the word “womb,” and thus possessing one is inherently necessary to be a woman.
In fact, they went further to insist that a woman isn’t only someone with a specific set of reproductive organs, but someone who can use those organs to produce a child — and anyone outside that limited subset, Walker declared, is a man.
Check out the clip below:
Herschel Walker: “If you can’t produce a child you’re a man.” pic.twitter.com/OmDMGna6aU
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) October 21, 2022
“You’ve got a man,” Pastor Tate asserts, “And you’ve got a whoa-man. A womb-man.”
Side note: “womb” and “woman” have separate etymological backgrounds, and “woman” does not come from roots that indicate possession of a uterus.
“If you have a womb, you’re a woman,” he claims.
Walker agrees and adds his own misunderstandings.
“And if you can’t have, you can’t produce, a child, you’re a man.”
Of course, Herschel himself has arguably done plenty of producing children, although he seems to have meant the word as a synonym for “birth.”
Even giving him all that benefit of the doubt, his rhetoric isn’t any better. Aside from transgender women, his notions also erase — or, redefine as men — every woman who is infertile, and every woman who has had a hysterectomy. Yet, at the same time, they (surely unintentionally) affirm the gender of trans men who have undergone procedures, whether hormonal or surgical, that render them unable to carry a pregnancy.
Hopefully Walker can find employment that doesn’t involve trying to either legislate or explain gender and reproduction.
Steph Bazzle covers politics and theocracy, always aiming for a world free from extremism and authoritarianism. Follow Steph on Twitter @imjustasteph.
