Rogan Calls Trans People “Perverts,” Spreads School Shooting Lies On Show

This week, on The Joe Rogan Experience: Steve-O and more anti-trans hate.

Screenshot from The Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube, Ep #2463.

Like death and taxes, “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast is a painful and inescapable part of modern life. For transgender people, Rogan is downright malicious. This week was no different, as Rogan spouted anti-trans myths and vitriol during his sit-down with Jackass comedian Steve-O. The segment was posted March 4.

Steve-O was recounting the time he almost got breast implants as a publicity stunt. While grocery shopping, he encountered a transgender cashier, which seemed to inspire a rare moment of sincere reflection and empathy in the stuntman known for lewd and outlandish “comedy” acts.

“They described to me a level of oppression that genuinely f-cking broke my heart,” Steve-O said of his talk with a trans person. “They said, ‘Hey, let me tell you, like, I am not allowed to use the bathroom at my own place of work.’”

Rogan immediately cut him off, launching full-throttle into a rant, where he boosted the lie that trans women are largely “perverts” putting on an elaborate charade to gain access to women’s spaces, or that they are men who fetishize femininity:

“I genuinely think there’s people that feel like they are in the wrong biological sex, right?” Rogan said. Then he continued:

“But there’s also people that are fucking perverts, and they have a thing called autogynephilia, and what that is, is they get a turn on by pretending to be a woman, they get excited by it, and they want to be around women, and they’re creeps and so you give them a fucking Willy Wonka golden ticket to go into [...] the women’s locker room and the women’s bathroom and stare at women and pretend you’re a woman when you’re just a crazy man and you’re actually into women.”

“Okay, that’s real too, man,” Steve-O said, adding that trans issues are “complex” and “nuanced.”

There may be no transgender cashier this time around to correct Steve-O, but there is this transgender newsletter. So let’s be clear: There is no evidence that trans-inclusive bathrooms, changing rooms, or locker rooms lead to increased instances of sexual assault. There is a strong correlation between trans-exclusionary policies, sex-based segregation, and gendered violence that victimizes trans people and cisgender people alike. And the concept that transgender women are merely carrying out a subversive fetish is empirically false, hateful, and the kind of sentiment that leads to real-life violence.

This was proven true mere minutes later as Joe Rogan beat his chest about transgender people, namely trans women.

“Their entire life, they would get beaten up for that,” Rogan said. “And now all of a sudden, they have to be accepted.” The implication, it seems, is that Rogan thinks getting “beaten up” is an appropriate response to gender variance.

Paradoxically, he goes on to say that transgender boys and men should be allowed in the bathroom of their choice because, in his mind, they pose no such threat to others.

“It’s men that are the problem,” Rogan said. “No one gives a f-ck about trans men going into the men’s bathroom. Come on in. Who cares, right? Who cares? Oh, a girl’s going to sh-t next to you, or what is she going to do? Is she going to pee out of a funnel? What is she going to do? Like, no one’s going to get hurt.”

Rogan also bolsters the dangerous lie that trans people are disproportionately violent. The reality: trans people, especially trans women, are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators.

“Do you know the majority of these high school shootings have been transgender people?” Rogan asks, which is unequivocally false.

“All right. You’ve convinced me,” Steve-O finally said. But later in the exchange, which took up at least ten minutes of the show, he also added: “My only takeaway, from my experience that I was relating to you, is that it made me feel compassionate.”

The fact remains that the vast majority of school shootings are cisgender men. Still, this kind of heinous rhetoric spurred rumblings of efforts to strip trans Americans’ Second Amendment rights, added ammo to conservatives who talk about forcibly institutionalizing trans people for being “violently ill,” and lends credence—at least in the popular imagination—to (so far unsuccessful) efforts to categorically label trans people “domestic terrorists.”

It’s far from the first time Rogan has used his massive influence to attack trans people, from promoting the litterboxes for kids conspiracy to pushing comparisons of transness to demon possession or being trapped in a cult. Yet in the same breath he says none of this precludes him from being “kind” to trans people, emphasizing that he had a friend, Jim Norton, whose wife is trans.

For those who are unfamiliar, Joe Rogan is not just any right-wing personality. His influence and rise have been meteoric. In 2025, “The Joe Rogan Experience” was the top podcast both in the U.S. and globally. In 2024, it was reported that his show had 14.5 million followers on Spotify, and he currently has an additional 20 million subscribers on YouTube. Together, that’s 34.5 million combined followers—which means he has more followers on those platforms alone than most countries have citizens. And that doesn’t even scrape the surface of the reach of his social media and viral clips that circulate online.

As of this writing, the Steve-O episode—a whopping 2.5 hours—has already surpassed half a million views on YouTube within 24 hours of being posted, which again, does not include all the viewers and listeners who engage with his content on podcast streaming services, or who see his clips circulate on social media.

With that kind of reach, one can see why some Democrats have eyed the show as a misguided attempt at “reaching across the aisle.” Some Democrats indeed have gone on the podcast, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator John Fetterman. Vice President Kamala Harris said after her 2024 campaign defeat that she “definitely regret[s] that we didn’t do it.”

But when doing so puts money in the pockets of a man whose business model is dripping with vitriol towards marginalized people, it can also be said that going on the show is tantamount to lending your voice, your time, and your views to a man whose hate-filled monologues can lead to violence.

Ultimately, Steve-O didn’t go through with his publicity “boob job”—part of the medical team backed out, and after the exchange with his cashier, so did Steve-O. It’s almost as if gender dysphoria is a serious issue; that anti-trans violence is a growing crisis stoked by right-wing propaganda; and that medically altering one’s body and sex traits is life-saving health care, not some laughing matter.