FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Ph.D. biologist Colin Wright is publicly inviting the Southern Poverty Law Center to debate him on the subject of what the SPLC calls “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience,” specifically on the transgender issue.

The SPLC released a 41,000-word report claiming that “the controversy over trans health care is manufactured to reinforce both white supremacy and the political goals of the Christian Right.” The report claims to reveal “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience,” but it does not seriously address the concerns of critics of the transgender movement.

The report mentions Wright, a Manhattan Institute fellow, as part of the movement pushing “pseudoscience.”

“It’s almost not really worth responding to,” Wright tells “The Daily Signal Podcast” of the SPLC report. “It is such a poor, poorly put together document, riddled with typos.”

“Most importantly, it justs makes all these accusations that I’m peddling ‘pseudoscience,’ that type of thing,” he adds. “It doesn’t engage with any of the actual arguments and the substance of what I’m saying, or what anyone else mentioned in the report is saying. There’s not really anything to respond to.”

He calls the report “completely ridiculous.”

“It’s purely just a smear piece,” Wright says. “They just want to garner attention and stir outrage.”

“But if anyone from the SPLC wants to actually have a conversation with me about anything that I’ve ever said on this topic, if you think I’m peddling ‘pseudoscience,’ expose me in front of a huge audience,” the biologist says. “Let’s have a one-on-one conversation with the moderator of your choice.”

“I’m just here to have a conversation about the biology of sex, so let’s have that conversation,” Wright says.

He recalls getting ostracized from academia for daring to question gender ideology.

“There’s a concerted movement by activists coming from various humanities disciplines, like queer theory, that are trying to just muddy the waters about what males and females are, and it’s difficult just trying to engage with them, because they’re doing a political project,” Wright says. “I’m doing sort of a scientific truth-finding project here, and so that’s what kind of started me down this path.”

He warns that “there’s major consequences, not just for individuals, but for society as a whole, when you’re denying fundamental aspects of our biology.”

As for claims that Wright is pushing a “Christian Right” ideology, the biologist recalls his history of arguing for evolution against some of the very people the SPLC says he is supporting.

“I used to argue against creationists and Intelligent Design proponents back in the day as an evolutionary biologist, because I think evolution is a very important part of who we are as a species,” he says.

Wright said the idea of giving patients hormones and surgeries “to make your body sex align with your mind sex” is “wildly regressive and anti-scientific and horrific, grotesque.”

He says he does not object to adults going under the knife for cosmetic surgeries, “but the thing that makes the ‘gender-affirming care’ so bad is that this is covered by insurance, as though it’s life-saving, and it’s clearly not.”

As for the SPLC, it has become an enforcer of the Left’s ideology. As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has leveraged its track record of suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy to develop a “hate map” it uses to smear enemies. The SPLC has put conservative Christian groups, immigration-reform groups, parental rights groups, and other organizations that oppose its leftist agenda on the “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.

The SPLC’s education arm, which rejected the name “Teaching Tolerance” to become “Learning for Justice” in 2021, has long pushed transgender identity lessons, even for preschoolers.

Listen to the interview with Colin Wright here:

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