“I’m too pregnant for this,” conservative commentator Candance Owens snapped at a student during a Turning Point USA event at the University of Albany in New York.
The student asked Owens: “What do you have to say to the trans students on this campus who actively feel victimized by your presence here today?”
‘Life’s tough, get a helmet,” retorted Owens before referencing her pregnancy. A clip of the interaction has gone viral, with more than 1 million likes alone on the Turning Point USA Instagram page.
In a follow-up X post, Owens elaborated.
“I am over 8 months pregnant with two toddlers at home,” she said. “If you are a 20 year old adult who feels ‘actively victimized’ by my standing on stage to speak about social and economic conservatism, it is because your parents failed you, entirely. It is not my job to coddle adults.”
Turning Point USA is a conservative grassroots organization founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk. It is focused on events at high schools and college campuses. Owens is the founder of BLEXIT, an organization that is focused on the Black American community and is “powered” by TPUSA.
“The TPUSA Live Free Tour, featuring Candace Owens and TPUSA Founder and CEO Charlie Kirk, aims to empower students to engage with conservative ideas and counter the prevailing left-wing ideology that has dominated college campuses across the country,” said the organization. Tour dates run through next month.
Earlier this year, students at the University of Albany protested another TPUSA event due to views about the LGBTQ+ community expressed by its speakers. Owens also has a history of making comments about the LGBTQ+ community. She was recently blocked on YouTube for her comments, Newsweek reported.
According to GLAAD, “Owens’ Twitter feed is an ongoing stream of false claims and hostile rhetoric toward trans people and supporters who believe trans people exist and need protecting.”
In another clip from the TPUSA Live Free Tour Albany event, a student asked Owens about rhetoric regarding transphobia.
“The idea that – if somebody looks at a man and calls him a man – that they’re suddenly ‘unsafe’ because they created a false reality in their own head, yeah I don’t abide by that,” said Owens. She also likened it to an experience she had with a stalker.
Survey results released last year by the Pew Research Center show that Americans have complicated views on transgender issues. While most believed that transgender people should be protected, just 38% said that a person’s gender could be different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
This summer, CBS News polling found that 56% of Americans believe efforts to promote transgender rights are going too far. Even more (62%) said that student athletes should play on teams that match their sex assigned at birth.
However, acceptance appears to be growing amidst young Americans, according to Time magazine.
“In late 2020 and early 2021, Gen Z was the only U.S. generation in which a majority believed there are more than two genders,” said the outlet. “As recently as the first half of 2020, this was a minority opinion even among Gen Z’ers—a remarkable amount of change over just six months. In contrast, there was only a small uptick in this belief among older generations.”