Tucker Carlson claims trans people threaten “perpetuation of the species”
Carlson also attacked gender-affirming treatments for transgender youth
Anti-LGBTQ Fox News host Tucker Carlson spent his week engaging in anti-transgender rhetoric, including calling transgender people a threat to the “perpetuation of the species.”
Carlson also claimed that providing transgender youth with access to gender-affirming health care increases their risk of suicidal ideation, and called hormone therapy “chemical castration.”
It continues a pattern of anti-transgender rhetoric by Carlson, after he last year called trans youth “grotesque” and a “nationwide epidemic.”
Carlson started by attacking Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson for vetoing a bill that would have criminalized health care for transgender youth. (Republican lawmakers ended up overriding the governor’s veto a day later.)
In a ten-minute segment on Tuesday, April 6, documented by media watchdog Media Matters, Carlson claimed that transgender youth experience mental health issues after accessing hormone therapy.
“The depression and the urge to self-harm and suicide is a component, is a side effect of taking these hormones,” he falsely claimed, later adding, “there is not a single study that I’m aware of that shows an improvement in the mental health of children who take puberty blockers who are chemically castrated.”
In reality, accessing hormone therapy has been proven to improve a transgender person’s quality of life and decrease rates of depression and anxiety.
One 2018 study noted that gender-affirming hormone therapy “overwhelmingly seems to have positive psychological effects in both adolescents and adults.”
But that didn’t deter Carlson from attacking Gov. Hutchinson, a guest on his show on, saying the governor had “come out publicly as pro-choice on the question of chemical castration of children.”
Gov. Hutchinson said that Carlson’s description of the bill that passed in Arkansas “did not accurately represent the bill.”
“This is chemical castration, of course; if you stop puberty and suppress the sex hormones, you are chemically castrating someone,” Carlson retorted. “So, our description was correct.”
Carlson continued his attacks on Wednesday, April 7, on his Fox Nation show Tucker Carlson Today.
Kentucky State University political science professor Wilfred Reilly, who authored the book Hate Crime Hoax: How The Left Is Selling a Fake Race War, told Carlson that there had been a “20,000% increase” in trans-identifying people in the U.S., Media Matters reports.
“The percentage of people that identified as transgender, traditionally, was about 0.01%, which would be one in 10,000,” Reilly said. “It’s now two percent or a little more, which is one person in fifty.”
Reilly threw out a number of statements, before seeming to suggest that an increase in people openly identifying as transgender could threaten humanity.
“Is society self-sustaining to some extent? If 30% of men simply aren’t willing or able to sleep with women, if another 2 or 3% of in particular, young women want to modify their bodies so they cannot in many or most cases have children, I mean that’s something that’s an issue almost at the structural level,” Reilly said. “And you might ask why? Why is that going on? It’s something that at the very least needs research.”
Carlson jumped on that, responding, “It’s a challenge to the perpetuation of the species is what you’re saying.”
“If both trends increase yes,” Reilly said.
Carlson replied by saying it was “hard to think of anything more profound than that.”
In 2016, the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimated that 1.4 million Americans identified as transgender — around 0.43% of the population in 2016.
In a 2019 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, almost 2% of high school students in the U.S. identified as transgender.
However, the Washington Post noted that estimates of the youth transgender population have varied greatly in recent surveys — a 2018 study found almost 3% of high school students in Minnesota identified as trans or gender-nonconforming, while a 2017 study estimated that 0.7% of U.S. youth aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender.
Last year, Carlson branded transgender children “grotesque” and a “nationwide epidemic” during a rant on his show last week.
The outraged host took aim at a documentary about transgender children, calling the content of the film “so disturbing it would have qualified as a crime not so long ago.”
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