Transphobe of the Year: Matt Walsh

From book bans to bomb threats, 2022 has been characterized by a disturbing rise in right-wing violence brought on by the viral moral panic of very online fearmongers. And the biggest target of this mayhem has been the transgender community. Figures like Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo have joined conservative politicians in flooding right-wing airwaves with hate speech and misinformation on issues like gender-affirming care and children’s sports. But in a year when Transgender Day of Remembrance was marked by a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, one man stands out from the crowd: Matt Walsh.

The Daily Wire columnist and podcast host has made a name for himself by demonizing medical professionals and pushing conspiracy theories about “grooming” and pedophilia in the LGBTQ community. If the Club Q shooter is a “lone wolf” attacker, we should consider Walsh the unofficial pack leader. While the bodies were still warm, the host of The Matt Walsh Show would log on to say, “If [drag shows] are causing this much chaos and violence, why do you insist on continuing to do it? If, according to you, it’s like putting people’s lives at risk, if the effort to have men cross-dress in front of children is putting people’s lives at risk, why are you still doing it?” It’s a crowded field, but The New Republic has crowned Walsh 2022’s Transphobe of the Year.

Walsh launched his fetid career in the same manner as many of the worst of the right-wing swamp: conservative talk radio. Walsh has since gone on to create Johnny the Walrus, an allegorical children’s picture book about a boy who pretends to be a walrus (it reached No. 1 on Amazon’s LGBTQ bestsellers list), and What Is a Woman?, a feature-length documentary on “gender ideology.”