- Kirk Herbstreit has been a college football analyst for ESPN since 1996.
- He admitted that Lee Corso told him to avoid discussing certain topics.
ESPN host Kirk Herbstreit says he “doesn’t give a shit” about any backlash he might receive for his views on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.
Herbstreit responded “of course not” last week when an X-fan asked her, “Do men have a place in women’s sports?”
And the football analyst expanded his thoughts on ‘Don’t @ me with Dan Dakich This week, he said he had been “biting my tongue on many issues for three years.”
“I don’t care about any of this anymore,” he told Fox News. “It’s almost like there are two different sets of rules, and if you have a slightly more traditional view, or if I’m a Christian, it’s like there’s a different set of rules for that view. It’s hard to just turn the other cheek over and over again.”
‘Yeah, I didn’t really care and I don’t care at all. Which is good, I think it’s good and healthy to get to that point compared to saying, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to get cancelled. I don’t want people to get mad.’ I don’t give a shit. I’m just going to say certain things. My problem is I have a temper, so if I get to that point, if that fuse gets lit, I let it go and then I explode and say something. I have to be careful with that.’
Kirk Herbstreit has said he has been “biting my tongue on a lot of issues for three years”
Herbstreit also spoke more specifically about her “of course not” response to a follower, in which she also called the issue of women competing in men’s sports “ridiculous.”
“I didn’t think about it too much, I didn’t give a long answer, that was all,” he said. “I didn’t realize it would be so much more positive than negative. I’m sure people were upset by that. I think it’s kind of obvious. I don’t have a daughter; I have four sons.”
“If I had a daughter, I would probably be more open about this issue. I took it as her saying, ‘Why are you asking me this question?'”
The college football icon also added that fellow college football player Lee Corso had advised him over the years to avoid discussing topics such as race, politics and religion in public.
Imane Khelif took the gold medal after a fight with China’s Liu Yang on Friday at the Olympics.
“I try to stay out of it for a lot of that process, but you can only take it so long that you want to start talking a little bit and really speak your mind,” Herbstreit told Dakich.
The comments come after an extremely tense Olympics in Paris, with gold medallists Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting at the centre of a fierce gender debate.
Both boxers, who competed in the women’s division, 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 and Khelif’s coach Georges Cazorla confirmed the Algerian had a “chromosome problem” before being banned from the tournament.
However, the International Olympic Committee has not conducted chromosome testing since 1999, and stopped testing for elevated testosterone levels in 2021 after concluding that they impeded “equity, inclusion and non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual variation.”