Republican candidate for U.S. senator from Georgia and former NFL player Herschel Walker went on a rant opposing transgender rights where he claimed to not even know what a pronoun is.
Flagpole, an Athens, Georgia website, said that Walker gave a speech at a Jackson County, Georgia warehouse last Tuesday with cisgender University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines. Gaines has been campaigning for several Republicans this cycle, telling her story of tying for fifth place at a swim meet with a transgender college swimmer and how that made her feel bad. Worse, in fact, than losing to four other cisgender swimmers.
Walker himself also talked about his opposition to transgender girls participating in school sports.
“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?”
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“I will get men out of women’s sports,” he said, even though no one is lobbying for men to compete in women’s sports.
His rant then became an attack on transgender people in general, saying that the Bible condemns 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,” adding 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.”
Cisgender people – even cisgender people in the military – get referred to with pronouns all the time, and Walker didn’t explain how he thinks pronouns will decrease military readiness.
LGBTQ leaders condemned Walker’s comments.
“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.”
Incumbent Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) got 49.4% of the vote in November’s general election and Walker got 48.5% of the vote. Because of a Georgia law that requires a winning candidate to get over 50% of the vote, Warnock and Walker will face off in a runoff election on December 6.
Numerous women have come forward saying that they have had children fathered by Walker or have been pressured to abort their pregnancies by Walker. His son, conservative influencer Christian Walker, says that he and his mother had to move six times to escape his father after he threatened to kill them.
Christian Walker’s mother and Herschel Walker’s ex-wife Cynthia Grossman has said that Herschel Walker physically abused her and threatened to shoot her.
Herschel Walker claims that all the new accusations from this year are lies. He has not denied his physical abuse of Grossman, which he claims he doesn’t remember.
