WASHINGTON, D.C., July 17, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – A transgender man threatened to put a smaller, weaker conservative journalist “in an ambulance” during an on-air altercation on Friday.
Robert Albert “Zoey” Tur, a onetime helicopter pilot and journalist, lowered his voice as he put his hand on conservative writer Ben Shapiro, who was seated next to him.
The heated exchange took place during a panel discussion about whether Bruce Jenner deserved to win ESPY's Arthur Ashe Courage Award on Dr. Drew Pinsky's HLN show, Dr. Drew on Call.
Shapiro refused to acknowledge that Jenner – or Tur – were actually “women.”
“Facts don’t care about your feelings,” said Shapiro, an editor-at-large at Breitbart News and proprietor of TruthRevolt.org. “It turns out that every chromosome, every cell in Caitlyn Jenner’s body, is male, with the exception of some of his sperm cells,” Shapiro said.
“We both know chromosomes don’t necessarily mean you’re male or female,” Tur insisted.
“What are your genetics, sir?” Shapiro replied.
Tur then put his hand around the back of Shapiro's neck, lowered his voice, and made eye contact as he promised physical violence for Shapiro's use of male terminology.
“You cut that out now, or you’ll go home in an ambulance,” Tur said.
Unflapped, Shapiro replied, “That seems mildly inappropriate in a political discussion…I'm sorry. It's not rude to say that someone who is biologically male is a male.”
“You just called me 'sir,'” Tur responded.
“Someone who is biologically male is a male,” Shapiro said.
Other panelists later accused him of being “egregiously” and “aggressively offensive.”
At another point in the discussion, Pop Trigger host Samantha Schacher objected to Shapiro's use of male pronouns to refer to the biological male. “You’re not being polite to the pronouns,” Schacher said. “It’s disrespectful.”
Shapiro refused to bow, saying, “The entire discussion is whether we're embracing mental illness and delusion as a society.”
The threat takes place at 5:30 of the video.
Dr. Drew acknowledged on the air that Shapiro was correct, and transgender identification is indeed considered a mental illness.
The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders reclassified “gender identity disorder” as “gender dysphoria” in 2012, but the underlying condition – the inability to accept one's biological sex – remains a mental condition.
Dr. Kenneth Zucker, chairman of the task force that proposed the change, told LifeSiteNews at the time, “I’ve seen a lot of banner headlines referring to the ‘removal’ of gender identity disorder from the manual. I’m not sure that is entirely accurate.”
In his view, gender dysphoria was not necessarily a defining mark of the person suffering from it. “For some people, it’s a lifelong condition, and there are some people for whom it comes and goes, or goes away completely,” he said.