Comedian Bill Maher warned that Democrats could find themselves losing “every election” if they continue to embrace policies that require or encourage schools to hide information from parents about their children’s self-declared gender identity.
During an appearance on the “Pod Save America” podcast on Sunday, Maher strongly criticized aspects of LGBT ideology. He specifically singled out the push to tell children that “maybe you’re not in the right body,” and criticized the New England Journal of Medicine’s push to remove babies’ sex from birth certificates by using the phrase “assigned sex at birth.”
“I was assigned it by my [genitals],” Maher asserted. After using profanity to illustrate his displeasure with the insistence that sex is “assigned,” Maher condemned the attempt to instill in children the “mentality” that “it doesn’t always have to be and isn’t always the default setting” when it comes to one’s birth sex. He also lamented the prevalence of the view that “even if you just have this debate, it makes you a bigot; you just have to roll over.”
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The conversation also touched upon the electability of Democrats, the Biden administration, in particular, and adopting the perspective that “if you even question this, you’re some sort of a bigot.”
After the discussion shifted to whether the government should ban experimental and body-deforming sex-change procedures for minors and the phenomenon of schools withholding students’ struggles with gender dysphoria from their parents, Maher added, “If you want to lose every election, just keep coming down on the side of parents coming in second in a ‘who gets to decide what goes on with my kid’ contest.”
At the beginning of the exchange about what podcast host Jon Lovett referred to as the “trans” issue, Maher said California was an example of the Democrat Party adopting the belief that “the school has the right to hide it from the parents.”
“That is something that’s not going to go well with the average voter,” Maher added.
In a 2023 letter to school district superintendents and school boards across the state, California’s Democrat Attorney General Rob Bonta asserted that “forced disclosure provisions” that require schools to inform parents if their child desire to identify as the opposite sex “violate the California Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.”
“By forcing disclosure of a transgender or gender nonconforming student’s gender expression or gender identity — even against a student’s wishes, and with no exception for situations involving a potential threat of parental harm or violence — forced disclosure policies not only violate transgender and gender nonconforming students’ rights to equal protection, nondiscrimination and privacy, but they risk breaching the duty of care school districts owe to these and all students,” Bonta wrote.
Polling has shown that Maher is correct in pointing out that policies allowing schools to withhold information from parents about a child’s gender confusion are unpopular with the American public. According to a poll of 1,000 American parents with children younger than 18 conducted by CRC Research on behalf of Parents Defending Education between Dec. 12-18, 2024, 80% of respondents disagreed that “schools should help a child change their gender identity” without informing their parents and 62% strongly disagreed.
Seventy-five percent of those surveyed disagreed with “teachers, counselors, school nurses, classroom aides, coaches or administration withholding information about a child’s gender identity from parents,” with 59% indicating strong disapproval for school officials taking such a course of action. Meanwhile, 77% of respondents agreed that “schools should require teachers or staff to inform parents if their child wants to use a different name or pronoun at school,” with 57% strongly agreeing.
A report from the public opinion research firm Blueprint published shortly after the 2024 presidential election found that 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” as the most frequently listed reason why swing voters who backed President Donald Trump over Harris made their decision.
Seventy-eight percent of swing voters who supported Trump over Harris cited trans issues as the reason why they did not vote for her.
As school districts across the country face lawsuits over policies allowing schools to withhold information about students’ gender identity from their parents, Florida and Idaho have passed measures requiring schools and healthcare providers to keep parents informed about all aspects of their children’s physical and mental health.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
