Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee spoke at the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, TN earlier this year. During the speech, he made an offensive comment about transgender issues, reported Talking Points Memo.
“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” said Huckabee. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.”
“You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?” he continued.
Huckabee makes a disturbing connection between transgender people and his own perverted mind. Transgender men reclaim themselves as women because that’s the gender they most identify with. Huckabee thinks it’s a ploy to see naked women.
Like many other fundamentalist conservatives, Huckabee believes that America is under attack by the LGBT community. He said “something in inherently wrong about forcing little children to be a part of this social experiment.” This is incorrect. No one is forcing children to be gay or transgender.
This is a changing world and civil rights are an ever-expanding concept. However, Huckabee continues to stoke the fire of conservative fear and paranoia.
“For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize the fact that we are now in city after city watching ordinances say that your seven-year-old daughter – if she goes into the bathroom – cannot be offended and you can’t be offended is she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man.”
That’s not how being transgender necessarily works. A man can’t simply say he “feels like a woman” and be considered a woman. Even a man who dresses like a woman is still considered a man. It’s a long, transformative process that takes months of hormonal therapy and surgery.
Huckabee is merely offering the short-sighted Christian view of things.
