Hi everyone. I have a video started to address a lot of what happened. But I had a horrible week and only wanted to hide from life. Long story short if I don’t finish the video as so often happen. At the beginning of the week I talked to my primary care doctor about my childhood in vague terms, the intrusive thoughts that have gotten worse, and the nightmares / yelling out at night. He admitted he was out of his depth on the issue but would help as much as they could and that they have a therapist on site that works with a psychiatrist and if I would see her she could help me better. Next week I will call her. He prescribed a medication to help me but I won’t take it. It kills your sex drive and ability entirely. Ron got on it before we knew what it did, and so now he will try to get off it. For a long time we did not know or understand why his desire and ability just stopped, now we know that it was the medication. Then Thursday coming home from the allergist the car broke down. I was lucky I was able to get it safety off the road on to a side street. Then I dealt with the getting it towed and all that. Then Friday I saw a podiatrist and found out that there is nothing they can do to help me, another one thing I have to learn to live with. It was all too much for me. Today we are finishing the floor in the small bathroom and reseating the toilet which is a horrible hard job for a weakening 70 year old man and a disabled 62 yr old with bone / muscle / nerve problems. My plan for this weekend is to catch up on all the comments I missed over the week by withdrawing from everything. Thanks to everyone for being here and to Ali and Randy for all the posts they make. Hugs
Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.
If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.
Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.
On race
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024
If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
– Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.
Prove me wrong.
– Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
– Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025
The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
– Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024
We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
– Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
On immigration
America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
Both Ron and I worked ICUs and we have seen people who had strokes. I had a small stroke in early 2023. Ron and I agree that tRump has suffered a stroke and that was why he was out of sight for a week and why he has repeated bruising on his hand. Hugs
Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland unpack Bernie Sanders’s high-energy “Fight Oligarchy” rally featuring Zohran Mamdani. They discuss the disconnect between this grassroots enthusiasm and the lack of support from mainstream Democratic leaders. The MR crew argues that this demonstrates a core ideological conflict within the Democratic Party itself.
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Republican Josh Breecheen spews Islamophobic rhetoric at a recent town hall, connecting to a broader pattern of fear-mongering and political attacks against Muslims in America. Emma Vigeland and Francesca Fiorentini draw a direct line from the “Sharia law” conspiracies of the Bush and Obama eras to the current dehumanization of Muslim Americans and the use of technology from the war on terror against citizens at home.
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The latest jobs report paints a grim picture, with job losses under Donald Trump’s administration mounting and key industries sliding into decline. While Trump’s team struggles to blame Biden while also promising explosive growth in the future, economists and analysts are sounding the alarm that a US recession, or worse, is near.
Billionaire hedge fund manager, Ray Dalio, is in the news for warning about the dangers of extreme wealth inequality. Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland highlight how Dalio’s comments, which are a major news story because of his status, echo what many others have been saying for years.
The U.S. government has acknowledged Donald Trump’s military strike on a boat in international waters, resulting in the deaths of 11 individuals. This action, targeting Venezuelans en route to Trinidad, has raised significant questions about Trump’s legal authority behind such a strike, particularly given the lack of clear evidence of the individuals’ involvement in drug trafficking or any threat to U.S. interests. Despite the gravity of the situation, the incident has reportedly garnered minimal attention in mainstream news, with some segments of the media appearing to endorse the action.
Trump was asked about a bizarre video showing someone throwing bags out of a second-floor White House window by Peter Doocy of Fox News. Trump insisted that the video was “AI-generated” because, according to him, the windows of the White House are “heavily armored and bulletproof,” sealed shut, and each one weighs 600 pounds. Trump also added that if anything “really bad” were to happen, he could simply “blame AI.”
These bans have been successful in part because of a toxic and ruthless ecosystem of far-right influencers, like Riley Gaines, who have formed entire careers around attacking trans athletes by prioritizing hate and misinformation.
“So much of what we see … just seems like it’s wrapped up in really hateful and negative messages that aren’t good for anyone,” says Mary Fry, a professor of sport and exercise psychology at the University of Kansas. “We’re creating issues where maybe we don’t need to.”
The anti-trans attacks in sports are also affecting cis women. Ayala, a competitive cyclist, remembers one race where she and her trans friend both made the podium. When photos of the event were posted on Facebook, people accused her of being trans, and she was added to a “list of males who have competed in female sports” maintained by Save Women’s Sports.
Earlier this year, 16-year-old AB Hernandez became the target of nationwide hate and harassment when the president of a local school board publicly doxxed the track and field athlete and outed her as transgender. Right-wing activists misgendered her and called her mom “evil;” swarms of adults showed up to heckle her at games; Charlie Kirk pushed state governor Gavin Newsom to condemn her; and President Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from California over her participation.
While transgender athletes are very rare, this type of harassment towards them is playing out across the country and internationally. A trans girl was harassed at a soccer game in Bow, New Hampshire, by adult protestors wearing XX/XY armbands, representing an anti-trans sports clothing brand. And in British Columbia, a 9-year-old cis girl was accosted by a grown man who accused her of being trans and demanded that she prove her sex to him.
While research into the relative athletic capabilities of trans and cis women is ongoing, far-right groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Leadership Institute, have been putting hate before science to turn the public against trans athletes since at least 2014. And it’s working.
Laws, rules or regulations currently ban trans athletes from competing in sports consistent with their gender identity in 29 states, with 21 beginning the ban in kindergarten. The majority-conservative Supreme Court announced this month that it’ll be taking on the question of the constitutionality of the bans. Meanwhile, the federal government is pressuringstates without bans to change their policies in compliance with a Trump executive order that attempts to institute a nationwide ban.
Trump signs an executive order calling for bans on trans women and girls from women’s sports. Photo by: The White House.
These bans have been successful in part because of a toxic and ruthless ecosystem of far-right influencers, like Riley Gaines, who have formed entire careers around attacking trans athletes by prioritizing hate and misinformation.
“So much of what we see … just seems like it’s wrapped up in really hateful and negative messages that aren’t good for anyone,” says Mary Fry, a professor of sport and exercise psychology at the University of Kansas. “We’re creating issues where maybe we don’t need to.”
Harassment and Mental Health
Grace McKenzie has been deeply affected by these hate campaigns. A lifelong athlete, McKenzie has stayed healthy by playing multiple sports where she’s met “amazing people.” Shortly after she transitioned in 2018, she was thrilled when she was invited to join a women’s rugby team at the afterparty of a Lesbians Who Tech conference.
Grace McKenzie. Photo courtesy of McKenzie.
“Rugby became my home, it was my first queer community, it was the space where I really discovered my own womanhood,” McKenzie told Uncloseted Media. “I could be the sometimes-masculine, soft-feminine person who play[s] rugby and loves sports.”
But that started to change in 2019, when McKenzie and others on her team started to hear rumors that World Rugby was considering a ban on trans athletes. Fearing the loss of her community, she started a petition that racked up 25,000 signatures—but it wasn’t enough, and the ban took effect in 2020.
As anti-trans rhetoric in sports has ramped up, McKenzie says she’s had soul-crushing breakdowns that have left her “sobbing uncontrollably and unconsolably.”
“It would be these waves of such intense despair and rage—it was like going through grief for five years,” she says. “I have to wake up every single day and read about another state or another group of people who say that they don’t want me to exist.”
While McKenzie says she’s found the strength to keep playing where she can, sports psychologist Erin Ayala has seen clients leave sports altogether due to the hate toward trans athletes.
“It can be really difficult when they feel like they’re doing everything right … and they still don’t belong,” says Ayala, the founder of the Minnesota-based Skadi Sport Psychology, a therapy clinic for competitive athletes. “Depression can be really high. They don’t have the strength to keep fighting to show up. And then that can further damage their mental health because they’re not getting the exercise and that sense of social support and community.”
That was the story of Andraya Yearwood, who made national headlines in high school when she and another trans girl placed first and second in Connecticut’s high school track competitions. The vitriol directed at her was intense: Parents circulated petitions to have her banned; crowds cheered for her disqualification; the anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom launched a lawsuit against the state for letting her play; and she faced a torrent of transphobic and racist harassment.
“It’s a very shitty experience,” Yearwood, now 23, told Uncloseted Media.
Fearing more harassment, she quit running in college.
“I understood that collegiate athletics is on a much larger and much more visible scale. … I just didn’t want to go through all that again for the next four years,” she says. “Track obviously meant a lot to me, and to have to let that go was difficult.”
It’s understandable that Yearwood and other trans athletes struggle when they have to ditch their favorite sport. A litany of research demonstrates that playing sports fosters camaraderie and teamwork and improves mental and physical health. Since trans people disproportionately struggle from poor mental health, social isolation and suicidality, these benefits can be especially crucial.
“In some of these cases, kids have been participating with a peer group for years, and then rules were made and all of a sudden they’re pulled away,” says Fry. “It’s a hard world to be a trans individual in, so it’d be easy to feel lonely and separated.”
Caught in the Crossfire
The anti-trans attacks in sports are also affecting cis women. Ayala, a competitive cyclist, remembers one race where she and her trans friend both made the podium. When photos of the event were posted on Facebook, people accused her of being trans, and she was added to a “list of males who have competed in female sports” maintained by Save Women’s Sports.
Ayala isn’t alone. Numerous cis female athletes have been “transvestigated,” or accused of being trans, including Serena Williams and Brittney Griner. During the 2024 Paris Olympics, Donald Trump and Elon Musk publicly accused Algerian boxer Imane Khelif of being trans after her gold medal win, as part of a wave of online hate against her. She would later file a cyberbullying complaint against Musk’s X.
While women of all races have been targeted, Black women have faced harsher scrutiny due to stereotypes that portray them as more masculine.
Yearwood remembers posts that would fixate on her muscle definition and compare her to LeBron James.
“I think that is attributed to the overall hyper-masculinization and de-feminization of Black women, and I know that’s a lot more prevalent for Black trans women,” she says. “It made it easier to come for us in the way that they did.”
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A Big Distraction
Joanna Harper, a post-doctoral scholar at Oregon Health & Science University and one of the world’s leading researchers on the subject, says that the jury is still out on whether the differences in athletic performance between trans and cis women are significant enough to warrant policy changes.
“People want simple solutions, they want things to be black and white, they want good guys and bad guys,” Harper says, adding that the loudest voices against trans women’s participation do not actually care about what the science says.
“This idea that trans women are bigger than cis women, therefore it can’t be fair, is a very simple idea, and so it is definitely one that people who want to create trans people as villains have pushed.”
Even Harper herself has been the victim of the far-right’s anti-trans attacks. Earlier this year, she was featured in a New York Times article where she discussed a study she was working on with funding from Nike into the effects of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) on adolescents’ athletic performance.
Riley Gaines and OutKick founder Clay Travis attack Harper’s study on X.
“That Nike chose to fund a study on trans athletes doesn’t actually say that they’re supporting trans athletes. They’re merely supporting research looking into the capabilities of trans athletes,” Harper says. “You don’t know what the research will show until you get the data … but the haters don’t want any data coming out that doesn’t support what they want to say.”
Harper says this anti-trans fervor and HRT bans are making it more difficult to conduct studies in the first place.
And while the far-right argues that they are “protecting women’s sports” in their war on trans athletes, multiple athletes and experts told Uncloseted Media that this distracts from bigger issues in women’s sports, including sexualharassment by coaches and a lack of funding.
“If the real goal was to help women’s sports, they would try to increase funding [and] support for athletes,” says Harper, noting that women’s sports receive half as much money as men’s sports at the Division I collegiate level. “But that’s not what they’re doing, and it becomes pretty evident the real motivation behind these people.”
Since Trump’s reelection, Grace McKenzie has somewhat resigned herself to the likelihood of attacks on trans people getting worse. Despite this, she finds hope in building community with other trans athletes, such as the New York City-based trans basketball league Basketdolls.
“If that’s the legacy that [the anti-trans movement] wants to leave behind, good for them,” McKenzie says. “Our legacy is going to be one about hope, and collective solidarity, and mutual aid, and I would much rather be on that side of the fence.”
Meanwhile, Fry remains hopeful that conflicts can be resolved and that trans people may be able to find a place in sports over time.
“If we could all have more positive conversations and not create such a hateful environment around this issue, it would just benefit everyone.”
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