A popular progressive streamer has been ridiculed after delivering a rambling rant about the definition of a woman.
Destiny, real name Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, who attracts 3 million viewers to his YouTube channel, said defining a woman was “insanely complicated” and “depends on the circumstances.”
He compared the question to asking “what makes a table a table,” and whether or not a hot dog qualifies as a sandwich.
Campaigners have dismissed the internet personality’s ‘incoherent’ statement, describing it as: ‘a reflection of a society that has lost its way.’
Jay Richards, a researcher at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, told DailyMail.com that the question of what a woman is “is an easy one for anyone who is not in the thrall of gender ideology.”
“A woman is an adult human woman.”
Progressive streamer Destiny, real name Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, appeared on TwinsPod, hosted by identical twin brothers known as the Hodgetwins, where he took a full two minutes to define a woman
The twin brothers couldn’t hide their amusement at their guest’s struggle to define the term
Bonell, who is best known for his video game steaming, made the comments on TwinsPod, hosted by identical twin brothers known as the Hodgetwins, who have more than three million subscribers on YouTube.
The conversation touched on a number of different topics, including Joe Biden, Destiny’s sexuality and transgenderism.
At one point in the interview the twins asked, “What does a woman mean to you?”
Destiny responded, “It really depends on the circumstances,” but added that “they tend to dress a certain way, they tend to have certain hair, they tend to exhibit certain characteristics, they tend to have certain body parts.”
Stella O’Malley, a psychotherapist and director of the campaign group Genspect, said the YouTuber was clearly ‘tying himself in knots’.
“I believe this man knows that a woman is an adult human woman: we all know that,” she said.
During the conversation, Destiny strangely talks about a philosophical concept called a qualia, which he says is “what it’s like to experience something.”
“Behind you is a red curtain,” he told the podcast hosts. ‘If you’ve never seen the color red before and I say there’s a red curtain behind you, I can never really express what that quality means to you. You won’t know until you experience it yourself.
“So there are things that we go through and if we have two brains, I can never actually send you an idea. I can not do it. That’s impossible because our brains are separate.
Destiny said that people instead use words and hope that other people have their own experiences that they can relate to, to understand the meaning of the word.
‘So when I say, oh, this blanket is very soft, you might think as soft as a dog, a cat or a pillow. You have other experiences that relate to it, right.’
Mr Richards of the Heritage Foundation told DailyMail.com: ‘Destiny’s answer is a perfect illustration of the danger of knowing too little philosophy. He treats the question of what a woman is so complex that it cannot really be answered. He appeals to qualia – the content of our first-person experience. But this has nothing to do with anything.
‘The question wasn’t, “What is it like to be a woman?” The original question is an easy one for anyone not in thrall to gender ideology. A woman is an adult human woman.”
But Destiny explained that the experiences don’t always match.
‘For all the language we use, when we say words, there are a whole set of associated concepts that like to pop up when we say those words. Now they may not fit neatly into a universal, platonistic form of something,” he said.
“So, for example, if I say table and you tell me to define a table, you can never give me a definition that includes all the tables and excludes all the things that aren’t tables. Do they always have four legs, is it something you can sit on or not? It’s really complicated.
“So when you say, what is a woman, well, when you say woman, depending on the context, a whole bunch of concepts come up,” he continued.
Destiny added, “So it really kind of depends on the circumstance, right…”
One of the twins interjected: “When someone says woman, I think of t*ts and a vagina.”
To which Destiny said, “Um, sure, maybe.”
He added: ‘When you see someone in a shop you never see their genitals. You have no idea.
The podcast duo said they could tell Destiny was a man just by looking at him.
“I might have the tightest binding in the world right now to hide these 32 double Ds,” Destiny countered.
“You make that judgment based on my voice, probably my beard, maybe the shape of my body, but you don’t really see my genitals.”
We don’t normally define gender, Destiny claimed.
“When we use words, we don’t have a strict definition of what a word is,” he said, adding, “We even playfully joke about it, like, is a hot dog a sandwich?”
‘How crazy is it that sandwiches are things that everyone knows, but you can’t actually give a strict definition of what a sandwich is.’
Politically focused streamer Destiny, who has nearly a quarter of a million followers on Twitter, often advocates progressivism and liberal politics, and has described himself as “a very big social democrat.”
However, the online sensation was banned from streaming platform Twitch in March 2022.
Destiny himself said the ban may have been related to his comments about transgender women. During a Twitch livestream, he stated that trans women should not compete with cis women in women’s athletics.
The CDC has previously come under fire for replacing the word “woman” with the vaguer term “pregnant people” in its health guidelines.
In December 2023, the removal of the term women was seen in recommendations for a wide range of respiratory virus vaccinations for pregnant women.
A doctors’ organization said the CDC was “crouching before political forces” at the expense of sound medical advice.