Herschel Walker, a former NFL player running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate from Georgia, went on a tirade against transgender rights and claimed to not even understand what a pronoun is.
The cisgender University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines and Walker delivered a lecture at a Jackson County, Georgia warehouse on Tuesday, according to Flagpole, an Athens, Georgia website. Gaines has been advocating for a number of Republicans this election year, sharing her experience of finishing fifth in a swim meet beside a college swimmer who identified as transgender and how that made her feel horrible. In fact, losing to four other cisgender swimmers was worse.
Walker himself has also expressed his disapproval of transgender girls playing sports in schools.
“That’s like having Herschel Walker compete against your daughter,” he said, even though Walker is a cisgender man and not a transgender woman and Gaines’s story is about school sports, not professional sports. “You don’t want me to compete against your daughter, do you?”
“I will get men out of women’s sports,” he said, even though there is absolutely no one out there lobbying for men to compete in women’s sports.
Then, in the course of his tirade, he launched an attack on transgender persons generally by claiming that the Bible forbids trans identities.
“I’ll tell you the definition of a man and a woman because it’s in the Bible,” he said. “A man and a woman are two different people.” He then added that men can’t get pregnant.
“Pronouns? What’s a pronoun? I can tell you, a grenade don’t care about their pronouns,” he said in reference to transgender people being allowed to serve openly in the military. Walker has never served in the military, despite claiming in the past that he had a “military career.”
Walker didn’t elaborate on how he believes pronouns will affect military readiness, despite the fact that cisgender people frequently use pronouns, including those in the military.
LGBTQ activists denounced Walker’s remarks.
“Herschel Walker’s Bible is not the law of the land – period,” Cameron Harrelson of the Athens PRIDE + Queer Collective told Flagpole. “This is clearly a desperate attempt by the far right to mobilize their most extreme base around issues that are complex and often misrepresented by conservatives and the media.
“The last time I checked, Herschel Walker does not identify as trans, therefore his comparison and comments are irrelevant. This rhetoric by Walker is dangerous and only seeks to further marginalize a group of people who continually experience discrimination, hate, and extreme violence. Trans youth and individuals belong everywhere, from sports to leadership, end of discussion.”
In the general election held in November, incumbent Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) received 49.4% of the vote while Walker received 48.5%. Warnock and Walker will compete in a runoff election on December 6 because of a Georgia statute requiring a victorious candidate to receive more than 50% of the vote.
Many women have come forward to claim that Walker was the father of their children or that Walker had coerced them to terminate their pregnancies. His son, the conservative influencer Christian Walker, claims that after his father threatened to kill them, he and his mother were forced to flee six different times.
Herschel Walker allegedly threatened to shoot Cynthia Grossman, the mother of Christian Walker and Herschel Walker’s ex-wife.
All of the fresh accusations from this year, according to Herschel Walker, are untrue. He claims he doesn’t remember physically abusing Grossman, but he has not refuted this.
Walker received a lot of criticism earlier this week when he attributed his kid Christian Walker’s “ugly” appearance to his wife’s “awful genes.”
After Twitter user PatriotTakes posted clips of a speech Herschel Walker gave to military members and civilian workers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, the statements received additional attention online.
The comments were from the 2019 event, according to PatriotTakes, which bills itself as “researchers tracking and exposing right-wing extremism,” in a Twitter thread.
By early Friday morning, the video of Walker talking about his new kid received hundreds of thousands of views.
Prior to the midterm elections on November 8, Christian Walker, who is now 23 years old, sharply criticized and accused his father of lying and being a disengaged father in a number of social media postings and videos.
In the Georgia Senate contest, the Republican will now face Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in a runoff election on December 6.
