BUFFALO, NY – Less than a year ago, a white man from out of town drove to Buffalo before posting a white supremacist screed online blaming, among other things, “transgenderism.” He then open fire at the local grocery store, killing 10 Black Buffalonians.
On Thursday afternoon, there was another white man from out of town, who had just left stated that “transgenderism” must “be eradicated from public life entirely,” stepped up to the lectern at the University of Buffalo. He smiled.
“Oh, what a wonderful welcome to Buffalo,” Michael Knowles told a crowd of several hundred, mostly fans, in the Slee Hall auditorium. “Thank you for having me.”
He was immediately interrupted. “Trans lives matter!” shouted two protesters near the front of the audience. “Trans lives matter!” As the chants continued, an angry middle-aged woman in the front row stood up and demanded that school security remove the protesters. Security eventually obliged, even dragging one protester from his seat as they chanted, “Fucking fascists!”
“That’s not an appropriate word for a woman,” Knowles said with a laugh. “That’s not how women should speak. And we’re going to talk about how women should speak here tonight. The title of the speech is “How Radical Feminism Destroys Women and Everything Else.”
Finally, after calling the two protesters “screaming banshee maniacs,” Knowles launched into a speech — repeating calls for “transgenderism” to be “debunked.”
Knowles, a prominent right-wing commentator for The Daily Wire, had been invited by the school’s branch of the Young America’s Foundation, a right-wing student group. He arrived on campus less than a week after making national headlines for his “eradication” tirade delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which many interpreted as proto-genocidal or eliminationist.
“Transgenderism is not a coherent concept used by anyone other than anti-trans people,” Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical law instructor at Harvard and LGTBQ rights advocate, explained to HuffPost this week. “They can get rid of the most troubling things about trans people by just saying ‘gender ideology’ or ‘transgenderism’ and just say, ‘Oh, we’re not talking about trans people, we’re talking about. ideologies,’
Knowles’ viral comments are the latest and most alarming escalation of rhetoric from America’s conservative movement mischievous about stripping trans people of their right to be trans.
“The problem with transgenderism is not that it’s not appropriate for children under the age of 9, the problem with transgenderism is that it’s not true,” Knowles said at CPAC. “There is no middle ground to deal with transgenderism – all or nothing… Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life, an entire immoral ideology at every level.”
But on Thursday, before his arrival, trans students marched around the University of Buffalo campus, where he was. Their existence as trans people, they say, is not an -ism or an ideology. It’s the same thing. Trans people have is always there, they said. And there’s no way in hell he’s going to let Knowles, the GOP, or his friends at YAF exterminate him.
Abigail Reinbold, a 21-year-old trans student, was among about 50 students who gathered in Clemens Hall on Thursday to hold signs in protest. “OUR RESPECT, OR EXPECT OUR RESISTANCE,” Reinbold’s sign states.
Reinbold watched Knowles’ CPAC speech in horror and then watched Knowles claim that his comments did not involve genocide.
“They’re trying to make a distinction between eliminating transgender people and transgenderism as an ideology,” Reinbold told HuffPost. “But when he actually talks about the effect of the various policies that he wants, it has to do with removing transgender people from public life, which actually forces us out of the public space, forces us out of our society, from the place where we can find a job, find a house, find support. That is the elimination of the people.”
Reinbold added: “It’s very scary for me as a transgender person to hear people talk about me like that to talk about people like me.”
Trans scholars and other political observers agree with Reinbold, arguing Knowles is making a dubious distinction — using a rhetorical hand.
“You often see with the Nazis in the 1920s, and in the early ’30s, there would be overt antisemitism, but often they would say ‘anti-Bolshevism’ or ‘anti-Marxism’ and just say ‘Judeo-Bolshevism .’ as a term, and saying that it’s a broader ideology, not necessarily the individual. Then it just escalates,” Caraballo said.
Carrie Bramen, head of the Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo, also noted that if Knowles called for the abolition of other “-isms”, like Judaism, people would understand that “it also means the extermination of the Jews.”
Bramen, an English professor at the university, also told HuffPost that if you break down Knowles’ speech — look at his use of dependent clauses — it’s clear he’s talking about the exclusion of trans people.
“In rhetoric, they will use transgenderism in the speech in the subject position, the main agent of the sentence,” he explained. “But if you look at the dependent clause … he will refer to transgender people. When the dependent clause is tucked into the sentence, it really says the person. But when it is the subject of the sentence, he is very careful to switch to ‘-ism. ‘ So it’s a grammar lesson for today.”
Earlier this week, Bramen sent a letter to the school’s president asking him to cancel Knowles’ speech. “We believe that this inflammatory language is effectively a call for genocidal violence against members of the transgender community and will, at the very least, encourage acts of violence against members of that community,” Bramen wrote.
But the school’s president, citing the First Amendment, blocked Knowles’ speech as planned. So, on Thursday, members of several LGBTQ+ groups set up tables inside the student union, handing out pamphlets and Pride flags, as straight and cis friends stopped by to show their support.
Jack Kavanaugh, University at Buffalo graduate executive director of GLYS, an organization that helps queer youth, sits at a table talking with undergraduate students. “Knowles wants to use terms like eradication,” he told HuffPost. “As a Jew, I’m used to hearing that term in history books, less about people – about people I love.”
Hundreds of students gathered outside Slee Hall to protest moments later. They carried signs that read “Down with bigotry” and “Fascism is not family values.” He also brought speakers to play music, dancing while Beyoncé sang, “You’ll never break my soul.”
And they chanted at the right-wing students at the Young America’s Foundation, who were waiting in line to get to Knowles’ speech. “We’re here, we’re weird, we’re great, don’t fuck with us!” they screamed at the almost uniform young white man.
“Michael Knowles, go! Racist, sexist, anti-gay,” the protesters chanted. “Michel Knowles, go! Trans rights are here to stay!”
Police watched closely as two groups of students traded barbs. HuffPost saw police arresting one pro-trans protester, though the circumstances of the arrest are unclear.
JB Pena-Batista, a 19-year-old trans student from nearby Niagara University, entered the event carrying a sign. “To say that you want to eliminate transgenderism is to say that you want to eliminate the complete body, the breathing, bleeding human body that we do,” he said.
“We are not -isms to throw away,” he added.
After 7pm, the Slee Hall doors open. No bags are allowed. No weapons. A security guard waved a metal detector wand through student after student. The crowd sat down and waited for Knowles to arrive. A couple of young conservatives discuss what speakers they can invite next to piss off liberals on campus. Jordan Peterson, maybe. Or Charlie Kirk. Maybe even a white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
At the end, Knowles took the stage to huge cheers. Although she had been invited to a university to give a speech about “illogical feminism,” she overcame all the uproar over her comments about trans people.
Knowles read his speech at CPAC word for word and then explained how he did not call for genocide. “If someone is asking to eradicate cancer, no one is asking to kill cancer patients,” he said.
At various points during the speech and during the Q&A, Knowles seemed to suggest that conversion therapy could be the solution to making trans people not trans — an argument that also appeared on Twitter.
“I think if you feel a conflict between your biological type and your perception of your gender identity, then it’s your duty to make your gender identity more in line with reality,” she said. “I think you have no right to fiction, to the illusion that men can be women and women can be men. I think that if you are a man, to quote Don Corleone, ‘you must act like a man,’ and if you are a woman, you should act like a woman.
In 2019 NBC reported on a new study that found trans people who received conversion therapy – a widely discredited practice – were more than twice as likely to attempt suicide.
Michelle Williams, 24, a queer second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Buffalo, said this is part of why Knowles’ call to eradicate “transgenderism” is inherently violent.
“The logical end of what he’s saying is that we’re taking away access to gender-affirming care, we’re taking away people’s ability to medically transition or socially transition,” Williams said. “When he says he’s talking about ideology, and not people like him, he doesn’t… he calls for direct physical violence against trans people directly, like loudly… he wants to be able to care. And this will cause physical harm.
Knowles received a standing ovation at the end of his speech. As fans left Slee Hall, they were greeted by the “walk of shame”, protesters on either side of police barricades shouting, jeers and flashing middle fingers. Some of Knowles’ trollish fans enjoyed the attention, smiling and filming themselves.
Back in the student union, disco lights danced on the floor as queer students and their straight/cis friends cleaned up from the party they threw during Knowles’ speech — a way to provide trans students who don’t feel safe sharing a place to have joy.
Clayton Shanahan, a medical student, was among the volunteers who took the balloons that popped and wrapped the wires from the speakers. The party was great, he said, a celebration of transness and queerness.
Knowles’ deletion comment, Shanahan said, was ultimately absurd. Trans people have always been there and always will be.
“You can’t exclude transgender people,” he told HuffPost. “You can’t get rid of us. We’re resilient, and we’re here to stay.