ROOKE: Trump’s Joke Sprung A Trap For Media

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss Trump’s ability to expose the left for the frauds they are.

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It has been funny to watch the left attack President Trump over his joke about Kaitlin Collins and Bud Light. Their media headlines keep calling it “transphobic.” Yet the same coverage repeatedly described the comparison as an attempt to demean or insult Collins by linking her to Dylan Mulvaney. They come so close to reality, but their adherence to transgender ideology won’t allow them to tell the truth about why they found it offensive.

The ideology demands they attack Trump and use the approved language of “transphobia,” while their emotional reaction treats the comparison between Collins and Mulvaney as lowering a biological woman by association with a biological man. Trump’s joke was for us. He told it in a room full of people who pretend not to get it, but their cold expressions and silence exposed how hard it truly hit.

A man who had plastic surgery and is apparently on hormone replacement therapy to feminize his body can never be a woman. If Mulvaney was simply another woman, you wouldn’t have heard of the joke at all. If the slogan “trans women are women” were taken as literal truth rather than a loyalty test, then comparing a woman to a trans woman would carry no weight. The fact that leftist commentators and media treated it as demeaning to Collins reveals that, beneath the required affirmations, they still register Mulvaney as male.

A man in a dress, a man on cross-sex hormones, a man who has undergone facial feminization and other procedures, remains a man. Our bodies cannot be rewritten. Sex is binary. No amount of exogenous estrogen, breast implants, or voice training changes the underlying reality of chromosomes, skeletal structure, or the developmental pathway that produced a male human. If they truly believed that Mulvaney was a woman, the outrage wouldn’t be necessary.

Still, women are expected to pretend otherwise. They are told that noticing the difference is bigotry, that protecting single-sex spaces is exclusion. The ideology demands that women rewrite their language, their boundaries, and sometimes their physical safety in service of the ideology. A woman who says “I do not want to share a changing room with a man, no matter how he identifies” is labeled hateful. A female athlete who loses medals, scholarships, or records to a male is told to get over the loss and pretend it’s a sign of our society progressing.

The same ideology that insists Mulvaney is a woman also insists that any woman who refuses the premise is the problem.

This is why Collins could only post vague messages about not allowing others to make you feel inferior. And also why media outlets were only allowed to call Trump’s joke “transphobic” and not what it was.

Of course the joke was insulting. It was meant to be a roast. Still, no woman wants to be compared to a man, regardless of how much surgery or hormone therapy he has undergone. Female identity is not a costume or a feeling. When a man is held up as the equivalent or the aspirational version of womanhood, it erases that reality. It tells women their sex is optional and easily mimicked. Women know they are different from men. The media reaction confirms they know it too, but they are too cowardly to admit it.

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As a mother, I can’t help but be mad at women like Collins. She has the pulpit to call this insanity out. She sits in the White House briefing room, on national television, with a platform that reaches millions. She could state the obvious: that a man cannot become a woman, that sex is real, and that forcing women and girls to pretend otherwise is an attack on their rights and safety. Instead, when Trump compared her to Mulvaney, her response was weak.

If Collins truly believed that Mulvaney was a woman, she would have accepted Trump’s joke as a compliment. The cameras would have captured her smiling and proud to have been compared to a cultural icon. Instead, she posted an Eleanor Roosevelt quote about not consenting to feel inferior and later told Jon Stewart she was unsurprised by the insults and preferred to keep the focus off her personal reaction. Doing this leaves the larger issue unaddressed.

Women in positions of visibility and influence have a particular responsibility when an ideology demands the erasure of their sex. Her remaining silent or treating the comparison purely as a personal slight leaves the rest of us to fight the battles alone. Collins is not alone in this; many high-profile women in media and politics have chosen to normalize the idea that female reality is negotiable and that mothers who object are the ones being unreasonable.

Trump’s joke forced the left to demonstrate, in real time, that they do not actually believe the doctrine they enforce. They could not simply shrug and say two women were being compared.

Women should not have to pretend. My daughters should not have to accept that a man using their bathroom is normal. They should not have to smile through the erasure of their sex. They should not have to accept that a male body, however altered, is the same as theirs. Collins and women like her ignore those of us raising the next generation of girls who will inherit the consequences of their inaction.

Trump’s joke exposed all of this. The emperor has no clothes. The man in the dress is still a man, and women are being asked to pretend otherwise at the cost of their own clarity and rights. Our daughters deserve so much more than this.

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