Megyn Kelly Calls Trans Boys a “Metastasis”
The extreme language from a former Fox News host in an interview with the Washington Examiner further stigmatizes transmasculinity.
by Evan Urquhart
Dehumanizing language is not new in the ongoing rollback of transgender people’s rights, and neither are comparisons between increases in transmasculine identification and disease, which is frequently called a “social contagion”). However it’s still shocking to read that former Fox News host Megyn Kelly has openly compared trans boys to a cancer. A story for the Washington Examiner, based on an interview with Kelly by reporter Julia Johnson, quotes the blonde SiriusXM talk show host as describing transmasculinity in the language of malignant tumors.
screenshot from the Washington Examiner
While the implications of using cancer as a metaphor for a group of people is pretty spine-tingling in its implications, the full quote also betrays a deeper animosity towards trans boys. While Kelly claims opposing youth transition is necessary in order to protect young girls, this pose of concern is belied by her denigrating attitude towards trans youth as people who “just want a social cause to make themselves feel special or unique.” Instead, Kelly is using exaggerations about the risks of medical transition, including the false claim that transition causes sterility, as a cover for her irritation and anger towards transmasculine young people.
Think about it for a moment. When a young person is actually suffering from cancer, is it normal to mock them for wanting “a social cause to make themselves feel special or unique?” Of course not, to do so would be monstrous. But Kelly, and the Washington Examiner, see no tension between this pose of concern and the belittling tone Kelly uses to describe the very people she claims to be so concerned about.
Kelly seems to be reacting to a stereotype inside her head of an obnoxious, attention-seeking teenage girl. Through her comments she is seeking to punish that imaginary young person and put “her” back in “her” place. Kelly doesn’t really care about the wellbeing of trans boys, she just wants them to stop trying to be special and unique. Put differently, Kelly wants trans boys to stop seeking their best lives in ways Kelly doesn’t agree with, to stop trying to be special and conform to mainstream societal expectations.
In this Kelly is not alone. The mainstream recently discovered trans boys exist and is now making every effort to push them back into constrained, stereotypical womanhood. This is not because the group of trans boys is very large, or because cisgender girls are erroneously identifying as boys due to peer influence, but because transmasculinity represents a threat to traditional hierarchies.
Despite all the progress towards equality, it remains a bedrock principle of our civilization that women are born to be inferior and subordinate. Whenever a person who was assigned female says “I am a man” it represents a threat to that idea of birth-ordained inferiority for women. This is just as true even though trans boys aren’t transitioning in order to gain a higher status; they’re just being true to themselves and seeking their best life. That’s irrelevant because this isn’t about trans boys at all, it’s about the poorly suppressed fear that if women were allowed to change sex they would, because of the raw deal society gives to women. If someone society has decided is an inferior can declare themselves a member of the superior group it represents a threat to the categorization of people as inferior and superior regardless of the individual’s motivations.
Of course, trans women also represent a threat to this traditional hierarchy, because rejecting membership in a group that has been claimed to be superior also destabilizes those claims of superiority. Society has long dealt with the threat trans women represent by pushing them to the margins and justifying violence against them. While that process hasn’t slowed one bit, the discovery of trans boys by the mainstream has caused a new panic, not over young women’s bodies being mutilated (not really) but over people who are supposed to be inferior not staying in the place society has put them.
In other words, trans boys are acting as equal human beings who have agency and a right to self-determination. That is what Kelly and conservatives cannot allow, and why transmasculine transitions have become a cultural flashpoint and a moral panic.