Why I Went To Speak In Front Of The California Assembly Yesterday

You won’t find many instances in modern life where there’s near-unanimous agreement on something. It doesn’t really matter what the issue is. You’re probably not going to find a consensus. There was a recent poll that supposedly showed that around a third of millennials believe the Earth is flat, for example. Whatever explains this phenomenon — whether it’s the Internet, drug use, a large-scale mental health crisis, or some combination of the three — it’s hard to deny that it exists. As a country, we simply can’t agree on much. We weren’t always like this. Not so long ago, presidential candidates like Nixon and Reagan could win 49 states. Try picturing that happening again in your lifetime. Very hard to imagine.

But despite this sea change in American politics, there are still some issues that remain uncontroversial. There aren’t many, but they do exist. And maybe the most important point of consensus is that, despite the relentless corporate propaganda to the contrary, Americans still believe that basic, observable biology is indeed real. They have not fallen for the scam of gender ideology, at least not to the extent that many people assumed. Specifically, 79% of Americans do not believe that men should play in women’s sports.

We’ve talked about this poll before. It’s from the New York Times, which is one of the main proponents of gender ideology. But even the New York Times had to admit the truth in this case, which is that Americans can see through the propaganda. According to the results, 67% of Democrats agree that men, whether they’re supposedly “trans” or not, should stay out of women’s sports. To put that number in context, you will not be able to get 67% of Democrats to agree that Donald Trump shouldn’t be hauled before an Antifa firing squad and summarily executed without a trial. But on this issue, there’s broad agreement, across political parties. That’s why even Gavin Newsom is taking the side of the 67%.

And that makes sense of course, because in order to believe that men should be able to play against women in sports, you have to ignore what you can see with your own eyes. It’s one thing to harass and intimidate millions of Americans into going along with the fiction that biological sex is meaningless, and that men can become women, in the abstract sense. Yes, it’s an egregious lie, but it’s also tempting for many Democrats to go along with it. After all, if we’re just talking about words and pronouns, they might say, what’s the harm in “affirming” something that’s not true? This is the logic that many Democrats have internalized — in no small part because, in many cases, they know they’ll lose their jobs and their friendships if they don’t.

But it’s an entirely different proposition to convince people that there’s no issue with trans-identifying men playing sports against women. For someone to go along with that particular lie, it’s not enough for them to fall victim to propaganda from the human resources department or their university’s DEI office about how gender is supposedly malleable and meaningless. They have to go a step further than that. They have to also pretend that high school boys’ soccer teams can’t actually destroy the women’s Olympic soccer team, even though everyone can verify that it happened. They have to ignore the obvious strength differences between men and women that they see constantly in everyday life. They have to affirm, in other words, that what they’re seeing with their own eyes is, in fact, a lie. They have to go full “1984.” And it’s very difficult to get a majority of people to do that, even if they’re Democrats.

What’s remarkable is that despite this consensus among both conservative and liberal voters, politicians in the Democrat Party continue to insist on forcing women to play against men. They have continued to ride this 80-20 issue, where they are on the 20 side. They have continued to ram their egregiously unpopular agenda through, which is something that can only happen if people do not speak up. If 80% of voters want something, and their elected representatives ignore them, then we can deduce that voters aren’t holding their representatives accountable. They’re not showing up to hearings and making their opinions known. They’re not ejecting anyone from office for defying them. They’re staying silent, in the face of an extraordinary rejection of basic biology that everyone knows is completely insane.

That is why I flew across the country to speak at a hearing in the California state assembly. This hearing concerned a bill that was proposed by Republican lawmaker Bill Essayli. This bill would reverse California’s current law, which allows males to compete against females, from elementary levels all the way up through college, as long as those males claim that they’re really women. That law has been on the books since 2013 in California, and Essayli’s bill would overturn it — which, again, is what the overwhelming majority of voters want.

When it was my turn to speak, I knew I would only have two minutes. That’s why I focused on the single most important aspect of the entire debate, which is actually not fairness or safety — as important as those are. Here’s what I told the California assembly:

After I spoke, a student who lives in Riverside, California, named Taylor Starling testified about how her spot on the varsity cross-country team was stolen by a male student. Taylor worked very hard for her spot on the team, and she lost it because of California’s law. At no point did any Democrat on this committee express any sympathy for Taylor. They didn’t care at all, of course. Instead when it came time for the two Democrat witnesses to testify, they attempted to basically rebuke Taylor, indirectly.

Pay attention to the arguments these two activists are making, and the arguments they don’t make:

As you can hear, they offer a bunch of lame deflections that were geared towards the kind of testimony that Taylor Starling delivered. They implied that Taylor’s emotions didn’t matter, because their so-called “trans child” was getting tummy-aches when his gender wasn’t affirmed at all times. They suggested that trans-identifying males aren’t assaulting female athletes in locker rooms, and that conservatives are making a big deal out of a handful of incidents. Girls are saying that they don’t want to be forced to change in front of boys. And the answer from these activists is that the girls shouldn’t complain because the boys aren’t physically assaulting them — except when they do.

These deflections are morally deranged and, to put it mildly, unconvincing. But more importantly, they do absolutely nothing whatsoever to respond to the point that I made. At no point did either of these witnesses actually defend the proposition that men can become women or that boys can become girls. The “momma bear” of the alleged “trans child” didn’t launch into some sort of explanation of how sex is meaningless, and how she was really on the side of truth and basic biology. Instead she talked about how sad her son felt whenever people didn’t lie to him and say he’s really a girl. This is all trans activists have, because they know their underlying position is incoherent and massively unpopular. My point is that the fundamental claim they’re making — the claim that men can be women — is false. None of them address that point at all. As if the truth or falseness of their fundamental claim is somehow irrelevant.

As if to prove that point, prior to my testimony, a California lawmaker named Rick Chavez Zbur announced that everyone who believes in basic human biology is, in fact, a Nazi. Young girls who don’t want to change in front of boys are morally indistinguishable from concentration camp guards, according to this maniac. He made these comments during a hearing for a similar bill, which would have banned male athletes from competing against women in high school in California. Watch:

So, Nazis weren’t fans of transgenderism, he says. Therefore, if you don’t believe in the lie of transgenderism, you’re a Nazi. If you’re not familiar with basic logic or history, and if you have an IQ hovering around room temperature, this kind of reasoning might be persuasive to you. But very quickly, it would also lead you down a pretty unsustainable path. For example, you might come to believe that highways are racist, because after all, the Nazis created the autobahn. And we wouldn’t want to be like the Nazis. Therefore, you don’t get to drive on the interstate. Along the same lines, the Nazis banned many forms of animal experimentation. If you think that’s a good idea, well, I have bad news for you. You’re probably a Nazi.

So this lawmaker is not making any kind of coherent argument. Nor is he addressing the issue at hand, which is whether men should compete against women in sports. Even less is he addressing the fundamental issue underlying it, which is whether it’s actually true that a man who says he’s a woman really is a woman. He skips over all of that and instead accuses everyone else of being a Nazi.

For his part, the chair of the committee, Chris Ward, wasn’t much better. Here were his remarks towards the end of the hearing:

Throughout this entire hearing, the Democrats on the committee — including Chris Ward — refused to ask me any questions, nor did they ask Taylor or anyone else any questions. Instead, during the question period they gave little speeches like this one, accusing those of us on Team Sanity of being Nazis and bigots. They did not give us a chance to respond. And that culminated in this moment, when the assemblyman running the hearing looked right at me and claimed that “trans women” are indistinguishable from actual women. But he wouldn’t allow for any discussion of that point. Instead he invokes the gay-rights movement, comes up with a hypothetical about a tomboy in a girl’s locker room, and moves on. 

Of course, it’s not a remotely relevant hypothetical. It’s pretty obvious that women would much rather have an actual girl in their locker room (regardless of what that girl looks like), than a man who gains access to the locker room simply by claiming he’s a woman. Girls would also much rather compete against an actual girl, even if that girl somehow has “facial hair,” as he says. And the gay-rights comparison doesn’t make any sense either. The point is that a trans-identified male is not actually a woman. He claims to be a woman, but he isn’t. We are denying the fundamental claim of transgenderism. On other hand, nobody denies that gay people exist. What some of us do deny is that “gay marriage” can exist. But homosexuality itself is a real thing. Transgenderism is not.

The reason these lawmakers didn’t engage with me, in any way, is that they know they’re on the losing side and the indefensible side. They’re on the side of total incoherence — and everyone who was in that room could see it immediately. One thing I noticed as I watched each member of the public come up to voice their approval or opposition to the bill was that in almost every case you knew where they stood before they said anything. It was actually a fun game to play in your head. Before each person spoke, guess what their position was going to be. I played this game in my head and I was right probably 95% of the time. It was pretty simple. If a person looked normal and healthy — the kind of person you wouldn’t mind sitting next to on the subway — they were in almost every case on our side. If they looked like the kind of people you’d rather stand than sit next to, they were in almost every case on the other side. Here’s a few clips to show you what I’m talking about. Here’s what the opponents of the bill looked like:

Just to reiterate, in case you missed it, here was one of the opponents of the bill that we just showed:

It’s a person decked out in a full mask and face shield, in April of 2025. And this was not unusual. Without exception, every single person who wore a covid mask to this hearing, ended up announcing that they were opposed to the bill. In fact, every single person who looked like a patient who just escaped from an asylum, when they got up to the podium, came out against the bill.

By contrast, here’s what some of the supporters of the bill — meaning, sane people — looked like. And there were quite a few of them. Watch:

I’m not pointing out the differences here in order to get laughs or make a cheap point. This isn’t an incidental observation. The point is that the dividing line in our culture is increasingly a line between normal people and people who despise normalcy. Ironically, at one point, one of the members of the public went up to the microphone and took a shot at me. He pointed in my direction and said that he didn’t realize the circus was in town. I’m supposed to be the circus, apparently. But as he made that comment, there was an entire line of circus clowns behind him, and they were all on his side. Cross dressers, hypochondriacs in face shields, bearded women — all on his side. Yet the circus, in his mind, is all of the normal, well adjusted families who don’t want their daughters to be forced to change in front of boys. These people are so bizarre, so abnormal, that they see normal as abnormal. They hate normalcy. And that is, again, the dividing line.

Fortunately, contrary to what you may have heard, the normal side is actually very well-represented in California. A huge number of people showed up in favor of the bills. From talking to some of the lawmakers and staffers, they tell me that California voters are pretty firmly in their camp on this issue. It’s an 80-20 issue in California, just as it is across the country. But at the moment, this consensus isn’t reflected in their state assembly. Both bills to re-segregate sports based on sex were voted down 6-2 yesterday. The Democrats won’t even let the bills make it to the floor for a full debate. As a result, in California, males will continue to compete against females — even though no one, including the state’s government, can explain why that makes sense.

As a result, the Trump administration — which is already investigating the state of California for violating federal law in this area — should terminate funding to the state’s education department. That’s roughly $15 billion in funding. The state is openly defying both the federal government and its own voters, and there should be consequences for that. In the meantime, more voters in California — and every other state with demented legislation that forces women to compete against men — should attend hearings like this one. If that happens, then very quickly, these cowards will realize that they’re not anywhere near as powerful as they think they are.

This could not be more urgent or important. Acknowledging the truth is the basic prerequisite for a functioning society. But the leadership of the state of California (along with several other states) has established that they’re not concerned with the truth, or even what their voters want. They are committed to a path that will lead, inevitably, to absurdity, authoritarianism and ultimately destruction. Yesterday we made our position very clear on that point. The Democrats plugged their ears and pretended they couldn’t hear us. So we’ll keep going, until sanity reigns supreme again.