Womanface Warrants A Culture War: Bobby Burack

This column originally ran on April 26, 2023. OutKick is re-running as part of our Memorial Day Best-Of.

The backlash over Bud Light partnering with apparent trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney was hardly about a can of beer. The boycott was a response to what the can symbolized:

The appropriation of gender.

Call it transgenderism, womanface, or physical cosplay. The latest restructuring of society proves there's no battle more consequential, more literal than the battle for culture.

Previously, the so-called racial reckoning demonstrated the path cultural leaders would take society if their control remained unilateral. Said leaders enriched themselves politically, socially, and financially by stoking a race war in the guise of anti-racism.

They will do the same with gender if left to their own perils. They've already begun.

Proponents of such treat gender as a costume and ignore the threats said theory poses. Sports is its epicenter, where men who call themselves women have infringed on female athletics.

Lia Thomas is the avatar, but not the extent. Women now compete against figures who possess innate biological advantages. Women now change naked in locker rooms next to teammates with male genitalia.

Last week, an 18-year-old male, who identifies as “trans,” entered the Wisconsin high school locker room and showered next to four freshman girls. Fearful of backlash, the girls kept silent.

Last fall, a middle school in Vermont banned a group of female students from the girls’ locker room — their locker room — for objecting to a biological male changing in the same space.

Females are told to either hush up and drop naked next to the girl with the penis, or bow out of competition.

A girls’ basketball team at a Christian high school competing for a state championship recently chose the latter.

Men imposing a physical and emotional threat to young female athletes should be a matter of not political drivel, but decency. And yet not a single Democrat voted to ban biological men from joining women’s sports on Friday.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration, without a hint of irony, plans to release updated Title IX rules that would bar states from banning trans students from competing against the gender they identify as that day.

Biden is governing to protect not the women but the "women."

Call Riley Gaines a culture warrior if you wish. She's on the frontlines of the greatest threat to female athletics since its inception. She's the most important voice in female sports and ought to be joined in raising awareness.

As Megyn Kelly warned last week, “If we don’t find our voices and start speaking up against …we can kiss women’s rights goodbye."

The American Left oft chalks up the culture war as a right-wing distraction. That is because the Left controls the state of culture, and thus forms cultural norms when left unchallenged.

And redefining our norms is among their most useful political tools.

Like race, embracing gender theory allows political leaders to make use of vulnerable groups. #TransRights can be as useful as #BLM. The word "transphobic" can become as weaponized and destructive as "racist."

Here's Joe Biden's press lady, Karine Jean-Pierre, last month stoking division:


Four states have now banned gender-affirming health care, while some of these laws are currently blocked by courts. This is a dangerous, a dangerous attack… This is awful news, well let's be very clear about that? LGBTQI+ kids are resilient, they are fierce, they fight back, they're not going anywhere, and we have their back. This administration has their back.

How is she not leading SNL weekly?

RELATED: ‘SNL’ CONTINUES TO IGNORE WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, A SKETCH COMEDY GOLD MINE

Speaking of dangerous attacks on trans kids, what about the literal attacks on children her party is ignoring and even promoting?

Unlike climate change and white supremacy, genital mutilation poses an actual threat to Americans.

A recent New York Times exposé details the harmful effects such surgeries cause. Specifically, the doctors detailed how a male body will regard a surgical vagina as a wound that never heals.

The article reports:

First, Dr. Chu acknowledges that the surgery won’t actually “reassign” sex: “My body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain.”

Sex reassignment is quite literally impossible. surgery can’t actually reassign sex, because sex isn’t “assigned” in the first place. As I point out in “When Harry Became Sally,” sex is a bodily reality—the reality of how an organism is organized with respect to sexual reproduction.

That reality isn’t “assigned” at birth or any time after. Sex—maleness or femaleness—is established at a child’s conception, can be ascertained even at the earliest stages of human development by technological means, and can be observed visually well before birth with ultrasound imaging. Cosmetic surgery and cross-sex hormones don’t change biological reality.

If there's one macro battle worth concerning yourself with, perhaps it's a battle over children cross-dressing on Tuesday and cutting off their body parts on Wednesday.

The cultural Left is aware of such eerie details. Yet still defends a movement that will morph into a nation of wounded trans persons -- who fell for the ruse they could become a woman overnight -- because it's politically advantageous.

Like all battles, the battle over culture begins with messaging.

Newsrooms remain at the center of cultural trends. They have the ability to define what's appropriate and what ignites outrage. It was they who promulgated a dispute over the term "woman," the most basic term in the English language.

Telling a nation they can be whatever they want to be, whenever they want to be it, strips them from the comfort of knowing who they are.

Doing so encourages not overcoming, but succumbing to self-loathe in order to undergo a vivid physical change.

Undoing the most objective truths we know, such as our own gender, creates a vulnerability. And there's no greater formula for a government to manipulate a population than by increasing its susceptibility.

That's the hallmark of a dystopian society, in which the culture has failed.

Thereby never before has there been such an immense need to support, consume, and share independent media sources.

It doesn't take an activist to surround oneself with the facts the corporate does not.


Recent Bobby Burack columns:


No other ongoing battle poses such a degree of literal consequences.

Womanface will almost certainly render female sports useless. Leave gender-affirming patients in chronic pain as the holes in their bodies burn. And cause humiliation for those who once treated their gender like a cheap dress.

Former Biden official Sam Brinton, who identifies as not trans but non-binary, epitomizes the downward spiral one can endure when wearing gender like a mask.

Brinton is currently undergoing a state-mandated mental health evaluation that almost certainly originated on the basis of gender theory.

But just as certainly, trans ideology will socially enrich leaders who never bear the burden of the physical and emotional distress they enabled.

As the saying goes, politics is downstream from culture.

The American Left's control over culture loosens when there's contention. By default, they win when there's no conflict.

Thus, detractors downplay the phrase "culture war" as a conservative fantasy, as a diversion from more consequential issues.

Cultural grievance now shifts to gender from race, a social justice initiative that proved successful for those who inflamed it.

Of course, it doesn't end with gender appropriation. A monopoly on culture allows one to readily place any group atop the Hierarchy of Victimhood, and then weaponize said group's purported injustices for status gain.

There's no greater weapon in 2023 than weaponizing a supposed victim.

Knowingly or not, Bud Light used its cultural influence to celebrate a phenomenon that makes a mockery of the female gender.

RELATED: NEW YORK TIMES BLAMES CONSERVATIVES FOR BUD LIGHT/DYLAN MULVANEY BACKLASH

Characters like Mulvaney, Thomas, and Brinton are, in fact, victims. They are victims of a culture that convinced them to abandon who they are. They are almost as victimized as the females who are being erased.

American culture is a tale of deceit, where identity has usurped reality, where the truth is the gravest inconvenience.

The appropriation of gender doesn't warrant a celebration. It warrants awareness, counter-messaging, and a battle for the state of culture. 

Written by
Bobby Burack is a writer for OutKick where he reports and analyzes the latest topics in media, culture, sports, and politics.. Burack has become a prominent voice in media and has been featured on several shows across OutKick and industry related podcasts and radio stations.