After spending the entire day complaining on Twitter about being vilified, Piers Morgan welcomed back trans memoirist Janet Mock to his show in order to attempt to shame her.
His first segment with Mock had featured the chyron "was a boy until age 18." And Morgan brandished like a trophy a Marie Claire profile entitled "I Was Born a Boy." A gotcha moment this was not: Not merely had Mock not written the headline, she hadn't written the piece, and indeed disavowed it as unrepresentative. "I wrote the record of my life," said Mock, referring to the memoir she was about to publish, and one Morgan had accused Mock of trying to hype her book by claiming mistreatment.
The interview was a fairly civil affair, all things considered; Mock offered to meet Morgan for coffee off-air to discuss trans issues. And when asked if she had been "born a boy," Mock was the picture of calm. "I was born a baby who was assigned male at birth," she said, before explaining that some things are too complicated for Twitter, the medium in which Morgan had felt so disrespected. Morgan continually pushed the notion that Mock had, indeed, been a boy early in life, a notion that Mock contested. "This didn't start at 18" when Mock got her surgery, she said.
Morgan's follow-up segment was pegged in the run-up to commercial as being about Jerry Seinfeld's battle against political correctness, but was a panel discussion about Mock, and she was not there to defend herself.
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