Joe Rogan Warns About Transgender UFC Fighters: People Will Get ‘Murdered’

Podcast host Joe Rogan jokingly warned against the possibility of having transgender fighters in the UFC, saying that people would get “murdered.”

During a recent episode of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan and his guests, Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin, spoke about diversity recruiting in the armed forces across different countries.

“Imagine if the UFC had to have diversity,” Rogan said. “Do you know what a problem that would be? If they had to have like a certain amount of trans folks…if you had numbers you had to achieve, it wasn’t the best fighters, it was just like who can meet certain criteria. There’s gonna be a bunch of people who get murdered.”

“There’s gonna be a certain percentage of people who are there because they’re just awesome and a certain percentage of people that they have to hire in order to meet these DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] standards,” Rogan said as a hypothetical situation for the UFC.

Rogan continued and joked about the possibility of having transgender fighter requirements in the UFC, saying “Imagine if the U.K. had one representative that was supposed to be fighting Francis Ngannou, you have one person who’s supposed to step up and fight that guy and it says ‘well the right move is to send in a non-binary woman because they don’t get represented in the UFC.'”

There are currently no transgender fighters in the UFC and Rogan’s joking remarks about the possibility sparked laughs from his two guests during the recent episode.

The comments by Rogan, who is also a UFC commentator, come as transgender rights and LGBTQ+ issues have remained a topic of conversation over the past few months. Several Republican-led states have sought to pass legislation banning gender-affirming medical care for minors and other conservatives have called for boycotts against companies supporting transgender individuals and their rights.

There has also been a wide-ranging discussion on whether transgender women should be allowed to compete in female sports categories. In July, a cycling race organizer, Monuments of Cycling, announced an updated gender classification policy after a transgender woman won a race. “Female: In the interest of protecting the parity of sports between women and men, racers who were born female may compete in the classification,” the race said in its new policy.

Similarly, in August, the International Powerlifting Federation (IPF) announced a policy change for transgender athletes saying, “For a transgender athlete to compete in the sport of powerlifting at any level, he/she must declare before competing that he/she is a transgender athlete. If an athlete fails to declare that he/she is a transgender and competes that violation leads to Disqualification of the result obtained in that Competition with all resulting Consequences, including forfeiture of any medals, points and prizes.”

Newsweek reached out to an ESPN representative for the UFC via email for comment, as well as to Rogan’s publicist.