by zahlman | 2025-09-15 18:42:54+00:00
> what do you think he meant by that statement?

That's an interesting question.

Countless people had an opportunity to ask him to clarify. To the best of my knowledge, none ever did. If someone had asked, and he said anything that confirmed the narrative people are running with, I'm sure it would have been shouted from the rafters. So I can only assume that either nobody asked, or he meant something that simply doesn't support the narrative.

Alternately, you could write to TPUSA and ask them.

Many others have offered plausible interpretations that don't advocate for violence; I see no need to rehash that here. But the main point here is that Kirk's objection was very clearly not, in context, to transgender people simply existing. The objection in that instance was very specifically to trans women competing alongside cis women in competitive sports, on the grounds that this is unfair to the cis women for physiological reasons (the same ones that motivate separating women from men in most sports in the first place).

When I try to search for information on the quote, I find even more misrepresentations, so I can't really just quote you an analysis. One article lede claims:

> He went on to say he blamed "the decline of American men" on trans people.

This is blatantly incorrect; he blamed this putative decline for a willingness to accept such competition rules.

> How does his well-documented history of playing identity politics that explicitly attack trans people

He has no such history. There is a history of people representing his quotes in this manner. Considering them in context makes it very clear that he did not "attack" trans people and did not wish them harm, especially not physical harm. He simply disagreed about which/how many people are trans, what forms of care would be best for their well-being; and he furthermore had concerns about people (especially minors) being convinced of being transgender when that wasn't (in his view) actually the case.

> I'm getting rather tired of the expectation that far-right media personas saying sick shit requires us to bend over backwards to take the most charitable view of them and their attacks and dogwhistles, while random nobodies griping about them are held to a Caesar's Wife standard of civility that the targets of their ire don't even try to meet.

Civility is expected for everyone. But people making strongly worded political claims that you disagree with is not incivil. Calling someone else's opinion "sick shit" is not. A claim about a "dogwhistle" is inherently saying that you know someone meant something worse than what was actually said, while denying that you have any burden of proof. You do have a very strong burden of proof for such things.

There is no double standard. Holding views on these "culture war" issues is not what gets leftists censured; endorsing extrajudicial violence is. The rightists I know do not take clips of leftist speakers out of context, and are happy to give detailed arguments against those positions, rather than letting quotes stand on their own. They do not argue that it's immoral or disgusting to have certain beliefs — only that the consequences of the corresponding policy would be immoral or disgusting.

There are no clips of Charlie Kirk telling the students at these debates that they believed or espoused "sick shit" or anything of the sort. He didn't even call them stupid, or otherwise insult them. He just wasn't that kind of guy. When students at the mic complained that he was setting people up to look dumb, he would simply point out that they weren't bringing specifics that could be debated in any meaningful way, or didn't seem to know his actual position, etc. And in point of fact, they all had ample time to prepare, had they been in interested in talking about issues with Charlie Kirk, rather than in trying to make points about what he believed while addressing him.

It's not at all "bending over backwards" to apply the basic charity required. It's not a matter of searching for possible explanations of a phrase that aren't horrible — except for those who have not developed an understanding of the underlying mode of thought. Rather, it's a matter of listening to people who offer such explanations, learning how easy it is to make people sound bad out of context, and not immediately jumping to meanings that are horrible simply because they would be convenient for your argument.