A transgender emergency medical technician (EMT) who attempted to use his medical training to rationalize that sex is not binary was confounded when author and journalist Matt Walsh asked him how he would deal with a patient with a penis who claimed to be having a miscarriage.

The biological male who identifies as a woman asked Walsh, “How would you define a woman?”

“An adult human female,” Walsh responded to cheers from an audience.

“How doesn’t a transgender women fit that definition?” the EMT asked.

“Because they’re not female,” Walsh said. “You said that you are a biological male, correct?”

“I said I’m transgender,” the EMT replied. “I might be intersex for all we know. About almost as many people in the world are transgender as intersex and well, a lot of people don’t know.”

“All right, but that’s a different conversation; intersex – that’s a genetic anomaly; that’s a medical condition,” Walsh said. “So, that’s a completely different conversation. It’s also not a third gender. That’s a genetic anomaly that occurs within the sex binary of male and female.”

Walsh then asked the EMT how he would define “female.”

He responded:

Through my training in healthcare, there are several different categories for how we define sex. People bring up chromosomes. People also bring up hormone levels, people bring up all sorts of other categories. Lots of people don’t fit neatly into a gender binary, even people we don’t consider to be intersex. It’s a complicated spectrum.

When Walsh observed the EMT did not actually define “female,” he still insisted sex is “a spectrum”:

It’s complicated. And I know you’re not gonna like that answer, but that’s because there are no simple answers in human biology … You guys like to bring up high school level biology classes a lot. I get that a lot, but people who go on to more complicated biology classes will talk about sex as a spectrum.

“Biological researchers would disagree with you,” the transgender individual said.

“Well, they’re full of s**t, the ones that would say that,” Walsh shot back and then turned to another question:

You said you’re an EMT. Okay, if you’re responding, you’re responding to a health emergency. Biological male, somebody with a penis, is having a medical emergency. And they say to you, “I think I’m having a miscarriage.” Would you, would you check them to see if they’re having a miscarriage? Would you consider that a possibility for them?

The EMT stood silent for a time, then finally responded, “No, but that’s because some people don’t have body parts. It doesn’t mean they’re not a woman.”

“Sounds like we’ve established there are some people who, in principle, can get pregnant, and there are some people who can’t,” Walsh observed. “So, there’s two categories, otherwise known as binary.”

The transgender EMT then attempted to challenge Walsh with the argument that “lots of women can’t get pregnant either,” appearing to claim that women with infertility issues are not biological women.

“So, how are they still women?” he asked Walsh.

“But they’re still of the nature to get pregnant,” Walsh countered, giving another example of a human being with one leg:

For the same reason that I can rightly say that human beings have two legs. And if a person is born with only one leg, that doesn’t call into question the statement that human beings have two legs, okay? A person being born with one leg doesn’t mean that now legs are on a spectrum. And we can’t say, we can’t say anything at all about how many legs a person has. Who knows, they could be a centipede, you know, they could have, they could have 100 legs. No, we know human beings have two legs. If a human is born without two legs, something went wrong. They were supposed to have that second leg. Something went wrong. If you meet a person on the street only has one leg, maybe they had an accident. Maybe they were in war, maybe something, you know, maybe they were in a car accident. Maybe they had cancer, a leg was cut off. But, you know that something went wrong because of that, by their nature, they’re supposed to have two legs. Same thing for a woman. A woman by her nature can get pregnant, a man by his nature never can, so if you meet a woman of childbearing age, say she’s 28 years old, and she can’t get pregnant, you know, automatically that something has gone wrong. And she can go to the doctor and find out what that thing is even if they can’t fix it.

“So, that proves that women by their nature can get pregnant because the simple fact that she can’t shows you that there is something wrong,” Walsh said. “This is what is known as the exception that proves the rule.”

“Whereas if a male with a penis can’t get pregnant, no doctor on earth is going to run a test to see what’s wrong with it,” he added. “Because they already know it’s … a male, and there’s only male and female, those who get pregnant those who can’t.”

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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “Matt Walsh” by Matt Walsh.