A popular progressive streamer has been ridiculed after going on a convoluted rant about the definition of a woman.
Destiny, real name Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, who attracts 3million viewers to his YouTube channel, said that defining a female was ‘insanely complicated’ and ‘depends on the circumstances.’
He compared the question to considering ‘what makes a table a table’, and whether or not a hot dog qualifies as a sandwich.
Campaigners have slammed the internet personality’s ‘rambling’ explanation, describing it as ‘a reflection of a society that has lost its way.’
Jay Richards, a research fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, told DailyMail.com that the question of what is a woman is ‘easy for anyone not in the thrall of gender ideology.’
‘A woman is an adult human female.’
Progressive streamer Destiny, real name Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, appeared on TwinsPod, hosted by identical twin brothers known as the Hodgetwins, where he took two full minutes to define a woman
The twin brothers could not hide their amusement at their guest’s struggle to define the term
Bonell, who is most well-known for his video game steaming, made the comments on TwinsPod, hosted by identical twin brothers known as the Hodgetwins, who have over three million subscribers on YouTube.
The conversation covered a number of different topics, including Joe Biden, Destiny’s sexuality and transgenderism.
At one point in the interview, the twins asked: ‘What is a woman to you?’
Destiny responded, ‘it really kind of depends on the circumstance’, 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, psychotherapist and director of the campaign group Genspect, said the YouTuber was clearly ‘tying himself in knots’.
‘I believe that this man knows that a woman is an adult human female: we all know this,’ she said.
During the conversation, Destiny oddly recounts a philosophical concept called a qualia, which he says is ‘what is it like to experience something.’
‘Behind you is a red curtain,’ he told the podcast hosts. ‘If you’d never seen the color red before and I say there’s a red curtain behind you, I can never actually express what that qualia is to you. You’re not going to know unless you experience it yourself right.
‘So there are things that we experience and when we have two brains, I can’t actually ever send you an idea. I can’t do it. It’s impossible, because our brains are separate.
Destiny said that instead, people use words and hope that other people have their own experience they can relate to, to understand the meaning of the word.
‘So when I say like, oh, this blanket is really soft, you might think soft like a dog or a kitty cat or a pillow. You’ve got other experiences that map onto 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, what is a woman as so complex that it can’t really be answered. He invokes qualia — the contents 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 easy for anyone not in the thrall of gender ideology. A woman is an adult human female.’
But Destiny explained that the experiences don’t always match up.
‘For all of the language that we use, when we say words, there’s a whole bunch of associated concepts that like pop up when we say those words. Now they might not map cleanly onto some universal, platonistic form of a thing,’ he said.
‘So for instance, when I say table and I tell you to define a table, you can never give me a definition that encompasses all tables and excludes all 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, it lights up a whole bunch of concepts,’ he continued.
Destiny added: ‘So it really kind of depends on the circumstance, right…’
One of the twins interjected: ‘When somebody say a woman, I think of t*ts and a vagina.’
To which Destiny said, ‘Um, sure, maybe.’
He added: ‘When you see somebody in a store, you’re never seeing their genitals. You have no idea.
The podcasting duo said that they could tell Destiny was a man just by looking at him.
‘I might have the tightest binding in the f***ing world on right now hiding these 32 double Ds,’ Destiny countered.
‘You’re making that evaluation based on my voice, probably my beard, maybe the shape of my body, but you’re not actually seeing my genitals.’
We don’t typically define gender, Destiny claimed.
‘When we use words we don’t have strict definitions of what a word is,’ he said, adding: ‘We even playfully joke about this, like, is a hot dog a sandwich?’
‘How crazy is it that sandwiches are things that everybody’s familiar with but you can’t actually give a strict definition of what a sandwich is.’
Politics-focused streamer Destiny, who has almost a quarter of a million followers on Twitter, often advocates for progressivism and liberal politics, and he 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 linked to his comments about transgender women. During a Twitch livestream, he stated that transwomen should not compete with ciswomen 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 guidance.
In December 2023, the erasure of the term women was seen in recommendations for a host of respiratory virus vaccinations for pregnant women.
A doctors’ organization said the CDC was ‘cowering to political forces’ at the expense of sound medical advice.