Matt Walsh challenges transgender narrative targeting kids with new children's book

Amid the gender dysphoria craze consuming America's youth, Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh has released a new children's book that fights back against the left's transgender narrative targeting kids.

Walsh's colorful picture book, Johnny the Walrus, tells the allegorical story of a little boy named Johnny who is seemingly confused about his species identity and believes he's a walrus. Johnny even dons wooden spoons for ivory tusks and striped tube socks for fins to dress up as the Arctic creature.

At first in Walsh's illustrated book, Johnny's mother is charmed by her son's wild imagination, following along with what she believes is just an innocent game of make believe. Hilarity ensues as she tries to raise Johnny as the flippered marine mammal. But then she struggles to resist the unhinged voices of the trans species epidemic. "Stop Anti-Walrusism" activists on social media call Johnny's mother "literally walrusphobic," demanding she respect his pronouns, "he/him/walrux," and enable her son's transition to full-on walrushood.

Soon the family's pretend play manifests in the real world. Unable to ignore the woke army's marching orders, the progressive mother covers Johnny in itchy grey make-up, bathes the boy in ice-cold water, and feeds the young child "wormones"—per the Twitter-verified doctor's prescription.

Walsh announced the launching of his "magnum opus" on Fox News host Tucker Carlson's show Monday night. The "beloved" cardigan-clad children’s author narrated the whimsical tale, which he has dubbed the "finest piece of literature" he's ever written, drawing concrete parallels to the culture war waging in schoolyards and at home. "Biology is not malleable. It's not relative. It's an objective reality," Walsh told Carlson in the on-air segment.

In a video interview, Walsh spoke to The Post Millennial about the book's apropos release, arriving at a time when concerned parents are rallying communities and battling administrators at local school board meetings across America.

"I want to send a message of basic sanity, understanding what it means to be a child, because that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle," Walsh said.

"We've completely lost sight of the mentality of a child and that children live in a world where there's not firm distinctions between fantasy and reality, where they quite literally don't understand the difference between what is real and what's not real," he added in the pre-recorded interview.

Walsh noted during the conversation that there are far-left societal actors who are exploiting children's confusion about gender identity and childhood innocence to impose a gender ideology on kids.

Johnny's mother is a fictional example of a parent caving to the woke mob even if it jeopardizes his or her child's health. Beyond the pages of Walsh's written work, mothers and fathers are obliging group think. Walsh pointed to mob mentality and how social pressure can compel parents to comply with even the most radical, irrational notions despite parental instincts.

"But there are certainly parents who want to be accepted by society," Walsh pivoted. "And they want to put their kids up as trophies and say, 'Look how enlightened I am. I have a trans child. I have a gender non-conforming child.' And so there are parents who make a decision, even apart from the mob, to themselves impose these kinds of identities on their kids."

Walsh also made the distinction between adolescent and early childhood susceptibility to political influence. When a four-year-old boy insists he's a girl, Walsh said that parents are told by the left to accept the childish statement as a declaration of identity, a lifestyle decision. Walsh said parents should ask a critical follow-up question that is often overlooked: "What is a girl?"

"When you pry a little bit deeper, you'll find that what the child is really saying is that he finds certain things appealing that his little child brain associates with girlhood," Walsh elucidated. "So he might really be saying something like, 'Hey, my sister has a dollhouse, and it looks cool, and I want to play with it.' That's what he really means when he says, 'I'm a girl,' because he doesn't even know what a girl is. And he doesn't really know what a boy is either."

When asked why teenagers are obsessed with micro-labels when it comes to gender and sexuality, Walsh cited a handful of factors at play beyond Internet culture feeding on the generation's formative need to feel special and understood.

Walsh said that girls and boys in the throes of puberty don't feel quite at home in their bodies yet as they search for their place in the world.

Leftist culture then attempts to foist "a pre-made framework" upon pubescent tweens and angst-ridden teenagers. "That's not really your body," Walsh parodied trans activism rhetoric that adolescents fall victim to and glom onto. "You were supposed to have a male body," he parroted the leftist talking point.

A sector of the medical community has supported gender transitioning at a young and impressionable age despite the long-term consequences. Pro-trans doctors are endorsing hormonal treatment and reassignment surgery for children.

Walsh called out the shameless exploitation, stating that doctors are "following the money" with a monetary incentive. "There's a lot of money to be made for these doctors," Walsh said. He also named incentivized pharmaceutical companies that hand out pills like Lupron, leuprolide acetate, that's sold as "a puberty blocker." But it's "chemical castration of children," Walsh stated, noting that Lupron is the same drug used to castrate convicted sex offenders.

Walsh urged parents to continue the nationwide trend of fighting back for control over their children's education. For a long time, parents have surrendered their children to the public school system, Walsh stated, sending them to a government building for seven to eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for 12 to 13 years. "And you are allowing the state to not just educate your child, but to decide in many ways, what kind of person your child is going to be," said Walsh, whose young children are homeschooled.

Walsh said that parents have "passively" abided the status quo until recently, when there's been "a reckoning and awakening of sorts" to hold the school administrative apparatus accountable. "And then on a deeper level too, you have to hold your kids close to you. We have this idea that we're not supposed to insulate our kids from the world, because then you're putting them in a bubble," Walsh stated. "But there's quite a lot in the world that your child, especially at a young age, is not psychologically ready to encounter and to confront."

Walsh warned not to give elementary-aged children smartphones with Internet access where they're going to be bombarded by mature content.

Their vulnerable minds don't have the capability to sift through the trove of information, Walsh said. "Protect your kids," he quipped.

"Ideally, I'd like to see a society that's grounded in truth and sanity—and when it comes to kids, values a child's innocence and endeavors to protect that innocence," Walsh said. The conservative commentator said that societies should be structured around safeguarding kids. "I think you could tell a lot about a culture based on how it treats children," Walsh stated.

"I don't expect that any magical switch is going to be flipped anytime soon," Walsh said, advising parents to teach their kids the intellectual, moral training they need to endure and navigate the chaotic world they're being raised in where children are hypersexualized by a perverted agenda.

Walsh underscored the importance of tracing society's obsession with sexuality back to its psychological roots, derriving from "quacks" like sexologist John Money and Indiana University's Institute for Sex Research founder Alfred Kinsey from the mid-20th century who viewed human beings as inherently sexual from birth.

Johnny the Walrus is not just a children's book. It should be read by adults everywhere so parents understand the essence of gender theory indoctrination.