There is a revealing moment in a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience when the conversation briefly brushes against empathy before veering back into familiar anti-trans rhetoric. Cisgender men, not transgender women, are the real danger to all women, the conservative podcaster said.

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On Wednesday’s episode, Steve-O, the comedian and stunt performer whose public persona has long depended on doing things other people would never dare, was recounting an interaction that had shaken him out of a joke. He had been considering getting breast implants as part of a bit for his act, he said, when a chance conversation with a transgender cashier in Los Angeles caused him to stop and think. He asked whether the stunt might be offensive. The answer, as he told it, was not an abstract lecture but a description of ordinary indignities and exclusions.

Related: Donald Trump briefly attacks transgender people on Joe Rogan’s podcast

It was a story about what happens when someone hears another person’s pain and lets it complicate their own assumptions. On a different show, or in a different media culture, that might have been the point.

“They described to me a level of oppression that genuinely f***ing broke my heart,” Steve-O said.

Trying to recall the conversation, Steve-O said the worker told him how some trans people were not even allowed to use the bathroom at their workplace because of politics. Rogan immediately pushed back, insisting that the claim was inaccurate and arguing the issue was simply that transgender people were not allowed to use restrooms that did not “align with their biological sex.”

But Rogan, whose podcast is among the most influential platforms in the country, which has become a central platform in the online ecosystem of male grievance politics, quickly redirected the exchange into something more familiar: a circular argument in which he intermittently sounded compassionate, even reasonable, only to negate that posture almost immediately with bigotry, falsehoods, and anti-trans misinformation.

He began with what can sound, to an inattentive listener, like a concession. “I genuinely think there’s people that feel like they are in the wrong biological sex,” Rogan said.

Related: Aaron Rodgers and Joe Rogan spout harmful, transphobic nonsense on recent podcast episode

But Rogan did not leave the thought there. Almost at once, he pivoted to the old insinuation that some trans women are merely “perverts” looking for access to women’s spaces. It is one of the oldest and most durable myths in anti-trans politics that policies protecting transgender people in bathrooms, locker rooms, or other sex-segregated spaces function as a cover for predatory men.

According to a 2025 Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law review of the research, there is ”no evidence that privacy and safety in restrooms changed as a result of transgender people having, by law, access to restrooms and other facilities in accordance with their gender identity.”

Instead, the data suggests the opposite dynamic, that transgender people themselves face heightened risk of harassment and violence in restrooms.

The report found that transgender people who are forced to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex assigned to them at birth experience higher levels of harassment and denial of access. For example, about 10 percent of transgender men who used women’s restrooms reported being denied access, and nearly 11 percent experienced verbal harassment, rates higher than when they used restrooms consistent with their gender identity.

In other words, the people Rogan described as potential threats are far more likely to be the targets of hostility themselves.

The circularity of Rogan’s argument became even clearer as the discussion continued. After warning about dangers to women’s safety, he offered a blunt explanation for why gender-segregated spaces exist in the first place.

“It’s because some men are f***ing creeps,” Rogan said. Moments later, he put a finer point on his argument. “It’s men that are the problem,” he said.

Research shows that violence against women is overwhelmingly committed by cisgender men. Rogan even admitted to the hypocrisy over anxieties about the existence of transgender people. Rogan highlighted how concerns on the right are mostly about transgender women and not trans men.

“No one gives a f**k about trans men going into the men’s bathroom,” he said. “Come on in. Who cares?”

Rogan insisted that while some transgender people legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria, in his opinion, many were pretending to be women in order to get sexual gratification out of being in women’s spaces.

Related: Joe Rogan Continues to Spew Anti-Trans Rhetoric on His Spotify Podcast

“It doesn’t mean you can’t be kind. I try to be kind to everyone,” he said.

He also described gender dysphoria as “a mental illness,” presenting trans identity as pathology rather than human variation. But according to the American Psychiatric Association, gender nonconformity is not itself a mental disorder. The APA says gender dysphoria refers specifically to clinically significant distress that can arise from incongruence between a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth, and it notes that not all transgender or gender-diverse people experience gender dysphoria.

Rogan, in one of the more reckless moments of the episode, claimed that transgender mass shooters had killed more people than ICE this year and suggested that “the majority” of high school shootings had been committed by transgender people.

“I did not know that,” Steve-O responded. Rogan’s claim is false. Most mass shooters are cisgender men.

According to a Reuters fact check published in 2024, transgender individuals accounted for less than 1 percent of all mass shootings in the Gun Violence Archive over the previous decade and only about 2 percent of school mass shootings in that period. Reuters also reported that a 2023 U.S. Secret Service study of 180 public mass attackers from 2016 to 2020 identified only three transgender individuals. FactCheck.org, reviewing later claims of a supposed “trans shooter” pattern, similarly found that transgender or nonbinary suspects accounted for a very small share of mass shootings in the Gun Violence Archive database since 2013, less than 0.1 percent.

And if one is genuinely concerned with who faces violence, the available evidence points in the opposite direction from Rogan’s insinuations. According to the Williams Institute, transgender people are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to suffer violent victimization.

Rogan continued to claim that trans women are not women, to raise alarms about prisons and bathrooms, and to imply that social recognition of transgender people creates a loophole for abuse.

“My experience was that I didn’t get any of this sense that this was a creepy pervert, anything like that,” Steve-O told Rogan.

The Jackass alum, for his part, kept trying to return to what had actually moved him. “My only takeaway from my experience,” Steve-O said, “is that it made me feel compassionate.”

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