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‘There is the harm’: Megyn Kelly explains why she’s done with ‘preferred pronouns’

June 4, 2023 | | Print Article

As Pride Month kicks into full swing, podcaster Megyn Kelly has come to a decision: She won’t be playing the “preferred pronouns” game anymore.

She’s done with them, and her reasons for refusing to use them going forward echoed the sentiments of many on social media.

“It is June 2nd, and that means it is officially Pride Month, where we will be subjected to non-stop celebrations of a group — gays and lesbians — that has had equal rights and political power in the United States for quite some time now,” Kelly began on her Friday podcast.

(Video: YouTube)

She quoted Bruce Bauer, who wondered in Thursday’s New York Post, “for what are we being celebrated, anyway?”

“I don’t expect to be applauded for being left-handed,” Bauer stated. “Being gay is an attribute, not an accomplishment.”

Kelly noted, “Nonetheless, American corporations must show the citizenry how Progressive they are, and so, ‘Taste the rainbow.”

She pointed to the recent cover of Glamour UK magazine,  which features a “pregnant woman who purports to call herself a man, complete with facial hair.”

“She says giving birth made her very dysphoric,” Kelly said. “That will happen when you’re calling yourself a man by giving birth to a baby, to the point where she demanded a C-section.”

“I for one will not be celebrating this dishonesty,” she stated. “In fact, I’m in a very different place when it comes to this entire issue.”

The former Fox News anchor recalled how she was an “early proponent of using preferred pronouns” going back to the early 2000s.

“It seemed harmless,” she said, “and I had no wish to cause offense. Trans people were tortured enough, it seemed to me, by the nature of their dysphoria and society’s disdain for them in general.”

“I didn’t see the harm,” she confessed.

She supported trans people as they insisted on using bathrooms that affirmed their self-described identities, she cheered on “trans kids,” she “used approved terms like ‘gender-affirming care,” “CIS” to refer to “natural born women,” and other “evolved language.”

“I didn’t see the harm,” she repeated.

But by 2020, when her popular podcast began, Kelly says, “the warning signs were everywhere.”

More adolescent girls were suddenly identifying as trans, and teenage girls “were losing on the track to males.”

Runners “simply declared themselves female and dominated their new competitors,” she said.

After being called “offensive” when she “slipped” and said that “trans girls were biological males” in an interview with a trans medical physicist, she said she “began to rethink the language policing.”

“Why did I have to deny reality in order to be polite?” she wondered. “What I said was true and not offered to offend.”

She shared that her son “and his third-grade classmates were regularly asked if they were sure they were still boys,” and kids who told teachers “they were uncomfortable in their bodies were immediately affirmed as trans, despite the fact that upwards of 90 percent of kids will grow out of these feelings if only they are allowed to do so.”

Meanwhile, schools began “implementing policies to keep it secret from their parents.”

“We pulled our children out,” she said, “fleeing to woke ideology on gender and race that seemed closer to abuse than academics.”

In 2021, she stated, “the floodgates really opened.”

“Hardly a day went by over the next two years without another story in the news of the trans madness sweeping the nation.”

Female inmates were being raped by “male sex offenders who had conveniently declared themselves trans right before heading to prison.”

“Grown men” were taking titles away from “female cyclists.”

“Professional psychiatric associations” were pushing gender-affirming care “as the only acceptable option for children suffering any hint of gender confusion.”

A girl in a Virginia school bathroom was sexually assaulted by “a boy in a dress” and the school administrators “covered it up.”

And hospitals began “bragging about how much cash they were making on cross-gender procedures.”

Kelly discussed the horrific truths of surgically building “a grotesque phony phallus,” “top surgery,” and “a system that seemed more about a political agenda than about addressing the patient’s mental health.”

Those who spoke out against the trans movement, such as Riley Gaines and women’s rights advocate Kellie-Jay Keen, were threatened with physical violence.

“There is the harm,” Kelly said. “There is the harm. There is the harm.”

“It is beyond time to stand up to the trans lobby that means to deprive women of their space and rights; to the men who pose as trans women to gain access to places like sorority houses only to exploit the women who’d been strong-armed into welcoming them; to the men who grow their hair long, throw on a dress, pop on their TikTok filter, and then threaten to kill us if we object to them coming into our private spaces; to the mutilation of our children by money-driven doctors; and the rape of our imprisoned sisters and the theft of our medals and opportunities to win,” she boldly stated.

“How can we stand up to any of this if we are complicit?” she asked.

“To pretend” that a man can become a woman and vice versa “is to foster a lie that is hurting too many people, almost all of them girls, women and girls,” Kelly said.

“They say pronouns are a gateway drug,” she continued. “They open the door to these lies that lead to real harm to real females.”

“For these reasons,” she concluded, “I have resolved to base my conversations around gender on the same tenets that already govern my live: truth and reality. I will not use preferred pronouns, a decision motivated by a growing alarm over women’s rights and the safety of children.”

Kelly said she has “no wish to intentionally provoke or upset anyone” but “I will not take this gateway drug anymore, because I have a daughter; because I am a woman, an adult human female; because for far too long I failed to see the harm and therefore helped cause it.”

It was a heartfelt, beautifully articulated monologue that resonated with many on Twitter.

“This monologue from @megynkelly is so powerful,” tweeted Riley Gaines. “Wow. I think it so perfectly explains why people have reached this level of being fed up. Megyn certainly spoke for me in everything she said.”

“It’s been a tough & sometimes lonely road for those of us who saw through this early,” said Lara Logan, “but what matters now is that enough people see the truth before our ability to discern & stand up for it is taken from us.”

“When I lost my job over this in 2015, I remember feeling so betrayed to watch Megyn play along with this crap,” said Kaeley Triller. “Seven years later, this is so healing to watch. Thank you, @megynkelly, for the humility and the courage it took to speak this.”

Melissa Fine
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