ESPN star admits he ‘doesn’t give a s***’ about getting criticized for slamming transgender athletes competing in women’s sports

ESPN broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit has claimed he ‘doesn’t give a s***’ about any pushback he may receive for his view on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.

Herbstreit answered ‘of course not’ last week when an X follower asked him: ‘Do men belong in women’s sports?’

And the football analyst expanded on his thinking on ‘Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich’ this week, saying he had been ‘biting my tongue on a lot of topics for three years.’

‘I’m done giving any s***s at all about any of it,’ he said, via Fox News. ‘It’s almost like there are two different sets of rules, and if you have a view that’s a little more traditional, or I’m a Christian guy, it’s like there is a different set of rules for that viewpoint. It’s hard to just turn the other cheek time after time after time.

‘So, yeah, I didn’t really care, and I don’t care at all. Which is a good thing, I think it’s good and healthy to get to that place compared to, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t want to get canceled. I don’t want to get people upset.” I don’t give a s***. I’m just going to say certain things. My problem is I have a temper, and so if I get to that point, if that fuse gets lit, I let it go, and then I’ll explode and say something. That I have to be careful of.’

Herbstreit also spoke more specifically about his ‘of course not’ response to a follower, in which he also called the question of women competing in men’s sports ‘ridiculous.’

 ‘I didn’t dwell on it, I didn’t give a long answer, that was it,’ he said. I didn’t realize it would be – way more positive than negative. I’m sure people were upset about it. I think it’s kind of a no-brainer. I don’t have a daughter; I have four sons. 

‘If I had a daughter, I would probably be way more outspoken about this discussion on this topic. I just kind of made it sound like, ‘Why are you even asking this question,’ is the way I took it. 

The college football icon also added that colleague Lee Corso had advised him over the years to avoid discussing subjects like race, politics and religion publicly.

Imane Khelif took the gold medal after a bout with Liu Yang of China on Friday in the Olympics

‘I try to stay on the sidelines for a lot of that, but you can only take so much until you want to start to speak up a little bit and actually say what you think,’ Herbstreit told Dakich.

The remarks come after an extremely charged Olympic Games in Paris, with gold medal boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting at the heart of a fierce gender debate.

Both boxers, who competed in the women’s divisions, saw their eligibility to compete questioned by critics after they were both disqualified from last year’s world championships.

Yu-Tang failed a gender test then and Khelif’s coach, Georges Cazorla, confirmed that the Algerian had a ‘problem with chromosomes’ before being banned with the tournament.

The International Olympic Committee, though, has not conducted chromosomal tests since 1999, and stopped testing for elevated testosterone levels in 2021 after concluding that they prevented ‘fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination on the basis of gender identify and sex variation’.