Comedian Bill Maher predicted Democrats will “lose every election” without a shift on transgender issues, a culture war debate that President Trump made a focus of his winning 2024 campaign.
Maher and “Pod Save America” co-host Jon Lovett discussed transgender rights in a Sunday episode of the podcast, highlighted by Mediaite, with Maher pushing back on Lovett over the topic.
“You want the government to ban gender-affirming care for kids?” Lovett asked Maher.
“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?’” he responded.
Lovett responded that he was “not talking about winning or losing elections, I agree that there’s a salience to this issue, I agree … this has been weaponized … but I’m just talking about the issue itself.”
Some Democrats have also been critical of their party’s messaging around transgender rights in the wake of the 2024 election.
Democratic centrist Reps. Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) and Seth Moulton (Mass.) criticized their party’s stances on the rights of transgender people, seeking to draw a contrast with social justice-oriented progressives.
“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” Moulton told the The New York Times soon after November’s election.
In recent years, restrictions on gender-affirming care across the country have increased amid anti-transgender rhetoric mostly from Republicans. During the 2024 presidential race, President Trump’s campaign put out advertisements framing Vice President Harris as extreme for previous support of trans-inclusive policies.
Maher also went after progressives more generally on the podcast, saying “they’re so progressive that they do things that are completely anti-progressive,” pointing to the anti-Israel stance of those who, during campus protests last year, chanted “from the river to the sea.”
“‘Yes, let’s align with the people who give women no rights, because we’re the liberal people?’” Maher said mockingly, apparently referring to Hamas.
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