Bias Watch

Tucker Carlson says transgender people threaten “the perpetuation of the species”

Tucker Carlson with his trademark "confused" face
Photo: Screenshot

Fox New host Tucker Carlson said that transgender people are “a challenge to the perpetuation of the species” yesterday when discussing what his guest claimed was the “20,000 percent increase” in the transgender population.

“It’s hard to think of anything more profound than that,” Carlson said on Fox Nation’s Tucker Carlson Today.

Related: Texas dad talks about his transgender son in this amazing video

Carlson had Kentucky State University political science professor Wilfred Reilly, who wrote a book called Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War where he claimed that many hate crimes are hoaxes.

On Carlson’s show, Reilly tortured LGBTQ statistics to claim that there was a “20,000 percent increase” in the transgender population in recent years.

“The percentage of people that identified as transgender, traditionally, was about 0.01%, which would be one in 10,000,” he said, not citing a source.

“It’s now two percent or a little more, which is one person in fifty,” he said. He was referring to a 2019 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of high school students where 1.8 percent of respondents said they were transgender.

“You’ve seen it go from this to, again, not too far under five percent of all kids,” Reilly said, the number inexplicably increasing again.

“Is society self-sustaining?” he asked. “If 30 percent of men simply aren’t willing or able to sleep with women, if another two or three percent 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. And you might ask, ‘Why is that going on?'”

“It’s a challenge to the perpetuation of the species is what you’re saying,” Carlson said.

“If both trends increase, yes,” Reilly responded.

“That’s right, and so it’s hard to think of anything more profound than that,” Carlson said.

Reilly’s use of statistics on this subject exaggerates the point he’s trying to make in order to scare the audience, implying that soon everyone will be transgender and all reproduction will stop.

First he said that “traditionally” 0.01 percent of the population of the U.S. is transgender. He didn’t cite a source or even say what time period “traditionally” refers to.

He doesn’t even say how “transgender” is defined in that statistic, which is a big deal. For example, Ira B. Pauly in 1968 estimated that there were 2500 trans people in the U.S., but he was only referring to trans women who had undergone gender affirming surgery at a time when it was even more inaccessible than today.

The 2019 CDC survey that found that 1.8 percent of high school students were transgender just asked students if they’re trans, and it probably included many groups of people that Pauly wouldn’t have counted like non-binary people, gender-fluid people, trans men, and trans women who have not or will not have surgery.

In 2016, the Williams Institute estimated that 0.6% of Americans identify as transgender.

Last, Reilly’s main point is about reproduction, and transgender people have children. He should know this because even one of the most prominent transgender people in America, Caitlyn Jenner, has six children.

His point is similar to the old trope about gay people articulated last week by Albany County Legislator George E. Langdon IV (R), that if everyone were gay, no one would have children.

“When you have homosexual relationships, it’s not perpetual. Give them an island, they’ll be gone after 40 years, OK? Because they can’t — God created us to be this way,” he said. “There’s so much common sense that needs to be applied to our policies, our procedures, the things that we do in our government.”

Langdon resigned this week.

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