Uh-oh. Bill Maher just spoke up on the trans kids debate.

Genderfluid? Kids are fluid about everything. If kids knew what they wanted to be at age eight, the world would be filled with cowboys and princesses. I wanted to be a pirate, thank God nobody took me seriously and scheduled me for eye removal and peg leg surgery.

LOL

Dude, what's your problem? Too much $$$ kills the brain cells? Don't you see what's going on across the country? Yes, I'm talking about grooming.

Unless you are a climate denier, you should applaud the success of this programming. More than 20% of millenials are something other than cishet. This will go a long way towards solving our overpopulation problems going forward.

The L’s, G’s, and B’s are born, not made, but a child can get taken with the idea of exchanging his peepee for a choochoo or the other way round and parents have a choice on the extent to which they encourage that, so it’s not that outrageous that some T’s in CA could be the product of grooming even if most T’s in the country are born that way. Painting everything with an “LGBTQ” broad brush is specious.

All of this poo pooing of the LGBT community delegitimizes people are truly transgender.

We take guidance on these issues from stand-up comedians? I suppose that's an improvement on a "stable genius".

As someone who works in the mental health field, I would say the sudden surge in transgender/"non-binary" people, especially among the child and adolescent population is definitely something worth observing, especially before we start giving kids puberty blockers, hormones and removing their organs en masse by way of force through the legal system. Ever since working in a mental hospital, I've gone from meeting maybe one or two trans people in my lifetime, to meeting one or several almost every day with most of them being kids coming onto our adolescent unit. They all seem to fit a certain profile - colored hair and extremely anxious/depressed and possibly suicidal, and many have undergone serious physical and/or emotional trauma. This is just my observation, but if someone ran the numbers I would bet the house that a majority of this new wave of trans people coming out have undergone some sort of trauma. It really begs the question as to how much of this is related to mental illness, low self-esteem, identity issues etc. Then there are the cultural influences which may appeal to people's desire to form an identity and/or fit in to a certain group.

This is not to say that there aren't legitimate medical causes of gender dysphoria - the general consensus among the medical community was that it's caused by a developmental defect where the body develops as one sex and the brain develops as another - however, with all this talk about trans issues within the culture, and the sudden spark of rapid-onset gender dysphoria we really can't tell the difference. If this is true, maybe we as a society should think twice before testing out these procedures on kids in order to appease a very loud minority of people.

What sort of school were you at? How do you know the others were 'obviously gay', did you ask them, or is it your stereotype? What's wrong with girls being more tomboy and boys more feminine and softer. We are not all the same, but that doesn't mean new gender categories and surgery has to be performed.

Went to school in 70's. In my grade (120 kids) here was one guy that was gay , he didn't have to 'come out', he didn't pretend otherwise. Some guys were studs, others nerds, some wimps etc, but they all had balls and were all boys. Same for girls (well not the balls bit).

Nearly 50 yrs on and they are still men and women.

So as he says with his California/Ohio comparison, what was in the water in my area, my school, that somehow now every third person wants to identify?

Have a think about it rather than just blaming it on right wing religious extremists. I have spent a lifetime as a real liberal, fighting for equality and just causes and working in community, raising two now totally career independent girls...Go girl power. As far from right wing or religious as you can get.

People say this, but where is the science to back it up? I was born with a gene for blonde hair. Being blonde runs in my family. Does being gay mean that your dad was likely a closeted homosexual. Or maybe you get it from your mom's side, and your grandpa had to hide his true sexualiyy in the military.

I know a bunch of people that came out AFTER high school that weren't out in HS. It's really not that hard.

Kids in more liberal areas simply feel more comfortable bringing these things up. Maher is being a complete dipsh!t here

gay animals.

we know who the real groomers

are...

washingtonpost.com

Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says

Among the findings in the report was a previously unknown case of a pastor who was credibly accused of assaulting a woman a month after leaving the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Open link

13wham.com

Sex abuse survivors from Rochester Catholic Diocese getting their voices back

https://www.facebook.com/13wham

By the time Jim Cali graduated from Bishop Kearney in 1974, he says he'd been sexually abused by two trusted figures: Brother Thomas Kent at Kearney, and Father William Lum, while he was a student at St. Margaret Mary School...

Open link

I think its worth exploring. I was saying the same (in relation to a few specific examples, not the population), to friends of mine.

One old friend , first marriage ended in disaster soon after having two kids, lots of issues with the ex, the displacement of kids, them picking up the mental abuse etc. (they lived with dad because he gave them more 'freedom' ironically)

Long story short the daughter (now 44) came out as lesbian late teens, then gave that up and married a rich guy who ended up being a jerk, eventually back to being lesbian. The son ended up drug dependent, up and down, rehab...now having some semblance of normality with a family, but still distant.

The friend married one of my best friends, they have a son who now has a financial masters and in a top role, great dad himself. Their family unit extremely stable...different outcomes.

I made other private observations vis a vis other gay people I know, most of them great people in their own right, all with some sort of extremist behaviour.

All anecdotal of course, worth exploring, but you can bet whoever attempts to will get labelled homophobic. What you can say almost 10% certainty is that your upbringing shapes your adult life

I've been to 5 school reunions so far, nothing has changed. Maybe different water where I come from ;-)

maybe people don't want to tell you about their sex lives

So if you have some physical traits you don't share with either of your parents, that means it's not genetic?

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/doi/10.1542/peds.2021-056082/186992/Gender-Identity-5-Years-After-Social-Transition

Modern diets high in processed foods set a very poor foundation for proper hormonal and nutrient balance. A lot of this is in fact, not so much genetic, but indeed organic in that it is under the influence of poor diet and sedentary living.

Maher with another outdated take -- he's about 20 years too late on everything.

You can't do this conversation & completely ignore the violence the trans community endures & what individual states are doing to strip trans rights (Alabama, anyone?). That's my biggest problem with the segment. If you like this stuff, fine, but it's lazy to say he wanted to be a pirate & grew out of that. That's not the choice people are making. Why is being trans linked to what state you live in -- maybe some states treat the trans community better? Maybe you would move out of a state that has anti-trans laws. Maybe you're more willing to come out as trans in a state where your rights aren't constantly under attack.

It's much more real than he's trying to make it. Boiling his argument down to kids playing with dinosaurs or playing dress-up or whatever is deeply offensive. You can make a point without doing that.

He talked for 9 minutes, & didn't talk about what that community goes through on the day to day. He brought up abortion to raise up cis women -- ok but it's not an either/or. A civil liberties group highlighting how overturning Roe v Wade hurts the trans community is not an anti-cis woman thing. Cis women would have an easier time getting a safe abortion than trans people if Roe v Wade got overturned. Maher basically did an all lives matters thing. Nobody is debating that cis women are going to be negatively impacted by Roe v Wade. He's not making the point he thinks he's making. Identifying that the trans community will be hurt by overturning Roe v Wade doesn't mean that cis women won't be hurt by it too. Maher just can't see the solidarity people show with one another. A lot of cis women get that the trans community will be hurt by this. Maher thinks he needs to stand up for cis women. He doesn't -- he's just out of touch. Not everyone needs to hear their name in order to fully understand a social issue/problem. He's just torn because it's part of his traditional base that he sees as being left out when, in reality, they're happy to march side by side for trans rights.