Anti-LGBTQ+ extremist Daily Wire employee Matt Walsh formedthe Gender Unity Project with the express intent to deceive trans people into a faux “documentary”. This isn’t the first time Walsh deceived the LGBTQ+ community by fraudulently branding himself an “LGBT author” with his transphobic Johnny The Walrus book.
Nicole Fallert at BuzzFeed News:
It started with an email from an associated producer: Would she be up for an interview for a film “exploring the real lives of people in the LGBTQIA+ communities”? But Eli Erlick, a 26-year-old trans activist with over a decade of advocacy experience, soon noticed small warning signs that the film by a group called Gender Unity Project wasn’t genuine.
Her intuition turned out to be correct, and Erlick went public with her findings in a Twitter thread exposing what appears to be an effort by far-right author and podcaster Matt Walsh to trick transgender people and medical professionals into appearing in an anti-trans documentary.
Trans writer and activist Eli Erlick detailed in social media posts what may be the latest and most harrowing tactics used in an attempt to attack trans people in recent memory. Apparently, anti-trans advocate Matt Walsh is behind it, too.
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As Erlick noted, Walsh has dedicated his work to denouncing trans people and disproving the existence of trans or gender-diverse people. “Gender ideology is so absurd that they realize that if they want to convince people of it, they have to get to them when they’re very, very young and they’re not able to distinguish between fantasy and reality and make these kinds of common-sense judgments,” Walsh said on FOX News a few months ago.
Last year, Walsh also wrote the picture book Johnny the Walrus, which made it seem as if being transgender was the same as pretending to be a walrus or other animal. It received praise from FOX News host Tucker Carlson and the creator of the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro.
He appeared on the Dr. Phil show last month to “debate” pronouns and gender identity. “It’s delusion, it could be mental illness,” he said about being trans.
Joe Berkowitz at Fast Company:
The start of a new year is the perfect time to assess what needs changing in the world, and taking action. For many lawmakers in the United States, what needed changing this year was the apparently too-abundant rights of transgender and nonbinary youths. At least seven states introduced anti-trans bills in just the first week of 2022.
The trans community is among the most persecuted in America and abroad. When they are not being excluded from the military or school sports, they are having their identity challenged by some of the most popular figures in mass media. As if trans people didn’t have enough to worry about already, a Twitter thread that surfaced on Monday, February 7, reveals they may have to watch out for fake-documentary sting operations.
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Fans of Matt Walsh will know him from his internet show, where he bloviates about various far-right concerns. Non-fans will know Walsh only from going viral every 90 days or so with a controversial, backward tweet. While Walsh’s regressive opinions have historically run the gamut on topics, they’ve mostly centered around biblically defined views about gender—the kind that fell from favor decades before anyone who disagreed with them could be accused of “wokeness.” Lately, however, he has narrowed his concentration to gender essentialism.
He wrote a hit children’s book, which equates being trans with pretending to be a walrus, so that parents can get a head start teaching their kids to stigmatize peers. He went on Dr. Phil to debate trans activists about pronouns in an episode that critics are calling “no longer available for public consumption.”
Eli Erlick has a Twitter thread explaining this:
Twitter has suspended the @GenderUnityProjaccount.