“Real Time” host and comedian Bill Maher sparred with former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett over the issue of Democrats supporting gender transition treatments for children.
On the “Pod Saves America” podcast on Sunday, Maher called out the position as a woke “outlier” from not only Americans but the world as a whole, alienating them from average voters.
“The Democratic position in [California] has been that the school has the right to hide it from the parents,” Maher said. “That is not something that’s going to go well with the average voter.”
He later added, “And the fact that you think, or a lot of people on the left think, that even if you just have this debate, it makes you a bigot, you just have to roll over…that was their position. If you even question this, you’re some sort of a bigot. And this is new science. And it has to do with children. And it’s not going to look good in the future, that position.”
Lovett pushed back by comparing the situation to gay people being accused of “grooming” young boys, insisting that the treatments shouldn’t be discarded because a “few” may regret transitioning.
“But they’re also really important surgeries that people get for their heart. And they go wrong and somebody dies and nobody says, we must stop the cardiologists. No one says we must stop the surgeons,” Lovett continued.
“That’s your analogy?” Maher interrupted incredulously.
“We don’t get rid of the specific surgery,” Lovett continued as the two spoke over each other. “We don’t throw out a whole field of medicine. We say, let’s make sure we’re doing it in a way that’s healthy. The science, the research, alright, makes clear that, yes, there are exceptions. Yes, there are people practicing it in ways that maybe go too far, but for the most part, study after study shows that gender-affirming care saves a lot of lives.”
Lovett also accused Republicans of taking “edge cases” like transgender athletes in girls’ locker rooms to try and make a “war” against all transgender people. Maher agreed but called out Lovett’s claim that “study after study” has shown the treatment’s benefits.
He pointed to a report from 2024 that revealed that a study on the effects of puberty blockers on kids’ mental health went unpublished out of concern it would be “weaponized” by critics.
“So in other words, it came out not the way you wanted the study to come out, not what you said, that ‘Oh, all the studies show that.’ No, it is a mixed bag,” Maher said.
Lovett grew more heated as he argued there would be some times when parents must be left out of the decision on gender transition treatments.
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“Look, we all believe that parents should have the decisions over their children, but we also recognize that some parents do such a bad f—ing job that the kids are in danger,” Lovett said. “That happens in outside of trans issues. That happens all the time. It’s terrible. Some parents are f—ing terrible, but somehow that the fact that there are terrible parents in the world gets erased on these questions. Do I think that schools should, but as a baseline, be keeping a secret from parents? Of f—ing course not. No one thinks that. No one thinks that.”
“Apparently that’s not true,” Maher interjected. “People do think that. And there is no perfect answer to this. It’s as many knotty questions, the least bad answer—”
“The least bad answer is to not have the government decide from above is just to leave it up to people and parents, then the kids and the doctors. Right? You want the government to ban gender affirming care for kids?” Lovett fired back.
“You want to lose every election? Just keep coming down on the side of parents coming in second and a ‘who gets to decide what goes on with your kid’ contest,” Maher said.
