The Daily Wire is one of the most anti-LGBTQ+ media outlets online, which means that it’s oddly appropriate that they’re selling gender-affirming care products now.
For cisgender, heterosexual men only, of course.
The far-right platform that features Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and, until recently, Candace Owens – all commentators with long histories of extreme and even violent rhetoric about trans people – announced this month that they will sell supplements under the brand name “Responsible Man.”
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“The woke Left loves to celebrate when it sees men fail,” the Responsible Man announcement says. “With so much wokeness causing chaos and uncertainty, it’s crucial that you take charge of your mind and body.”
The “manly green vitamin capsules” – which they claim are made with “19 hand-selected nutrients and antioxidants” – are selling for $44.98 for a one-month supply, with shipping.
These aren’t just normal multivitamins, Responsible Man insists. Their non-FDA-approved claims include that the vitamins will “support your immune system, maintain energy production, sharpen brain cognition, and support the health of your heart and muscles.”
And while they don’t exactly say that these pills will increase sperm count, they do make sure to mention that “sperm concentration has fallen drastically over the past 50 years and the drop is accelerating.” Consumers would be forgiven for thinking that Responsible Man is claiming that their pills will help increase sperm count with carefully worded statements like this: “That’s why men’s health is vitally important, not just for every man, but for the survival of the human race. And Responsible Man has something that can help you keep your health a priority.”
Part of the message behind the sales pitch is, of course, the same resentment toward contemporary American culture that The Daily Wire pushes every day. “As a man, you have people relying on you and the world conspires to see you fail,” the website says, even though, no, the world does not want men – as a gender – to fail if they’re not doing anything antisocial in the name of gender.
Another major idea underlying the ad copy is one of gender affirmation for cisgender men. “A men’s vitamin and supplement brand that isn’t just for gym bros, but for every man on a journey to be his best – as a husband, as a father, and as a citizen,” Responsible Man’s site reads. That’s a lot of masculine archetypes for one sentence.
The phrase “gender-affirming care” is usually used in the media to describe health care for transgender people, but cisgender people have genders too that they are attached to and are much bigger consumers of gender-affirming care, in the form of self-care, beauty, clothing, and other products. The difference between cisgender and transgender people isn’t that trans people have a gender identity and cis people don’t, but that cisgender people’s gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth.
And cis people can be very attached to their gender identity.
“Gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves,” gender theorist Judith Butler said in an interview with Verso Books. “If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood.”
“I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.”
Gender dysphoria is associated with transgender people, but the feeling that one’s body doesn’t fit one’s idea of what one’s gender should look like can also be distressing for cisgender people.
For example, gynecomastia is a benign condition where cis boys grow breasts, often during their teen years. It usually goes away on its own, but in severe cases, the only way to reduce the breast tissue is through surgery.
But why would that be necessary? The growth is benign. It isn’t fatal. And there are plenty of people their age – namely, girls – who have breast tissue and don’t seem bothered at all. Well, according to the American Academy of Plastic Surgeons, gynecomastia, no matter the severity, can have a big effect on self-esteem. And it’s not hard to imagine why: being a teenager is already awkward enough without having one’s body defy deeply and widely held notions about what one’s gender should look like.
While most people can understand that motivation to get male breast reduction surgery, it’s not common to hear it referred to as gender-affirming care when it’s for cis boys. But that’s definitely what it is: a medical intervention “designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity,” to use the World Health Organization’s definition.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. If a teen girl wants to look or feel or act more feminine, that’s totally fine, she’s not hurting anyone. If a teen wants a simple surgical procedure to feel more masculine – or wear certain clothes or have certain hobbies – well, more power to him.
The Daily Wire appears to agree, at least when it comes to cisgender people. They understand that people want their bodies to align with their own internal sense of gender identity, but that understanding doesn’t extend to transgender people.
“One problem is that many people who refuse to allow trans people to define themselves is that they feel that their own self-definition is destabilized,” Butler said in a video for Big Think. “The idea that we can change reality, transform reality to be more open, inclusive, just, less violent, there’s an instability in that that’s very frightening to people who want to understand their genders as fixed.”
The idea that a person’s gender identity isn’t the automatic and universal outgrowth of their body can be scary. If I’m not a man simply because I was born with a penis, a transphobic Daily Wire reader may be subconsciously thinking, then that creates the possibility that I’m not a man at all. If gender and sex aren’t always the same, then does that mean that I might not be a real man just because that’s what I was always told? But I want to feel certain I’m a man, so then gender has to always align with sex.
So it’s not at all surprising that people drawn to The Daily Wire because of their hatred of transgender people are the exact kind of people who would really, really want to believe that an overpriced vitamin can affirm and secure their own sense of gender identity.
“You can’t magically change your gender. You can’t magically change your sex. You can’t magically change your age,” Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro said in 2017, assuring his audience that their sex and gender are not vulnerable. This was, of course, years before he would be selling magic pills with the promise that they’ll make you a man.
The reality is that many people want to feel like their gender, and gender isn’t a universal truth but something everyone grows into and has to define for themselves. It’s not a simple, lifeless fact inscribed in DNA or body parts. It is a concept and therefore it can be nebulous and ill-defined and that’s OK because it also means that it’s ours to cultivate and experience.
Perhaps what would help cisgender people have more empathy for transgender people would be admitting that we all have insecurities about our gender to some extent, that we really aren’t all that different.
