Entire Right-Wing Anti-Trans Talking Points Destroyed in Minutes
Ann Coulter parroted the right-wing’s talking points on transgender people in restrooms Friday night on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and immediately lost the argument. The conservative pundit who grows increasingly extremist year by year admitted that “it’s not that transgender people are going to go and molest children” in public restrooms, but then added the utterly and embarrassingly false claim that “once you say that men can go into women’s bathrooms – men who are out shopping with their little daughters and don’t have mommy to bring her in there. It’s not that the trans are going to molest them. It’s that a child molester now has the right to go into that bathroom.”
That’s false, and for decades there have been laws to protect against that.
Dan Savage immediately called Coulter out on it.
“That’s bullshit,” he said. “A child molester doesn’t need to put on a dress to go into a bathroom. You can Google ‘sexually assaulted in a restroom’ and you get thousands of examples of cisgendered straight men.”
Savage is one hundred percent correct.
Earlier in the segment he made the same point, and exposed the far right’s strategy of using the exact same playbook against trans people that they used against gay people for decades.
“They couldn’t demagogue anymore about gays and lesbians because too many of us are out and too many people know us so they took the same old script – ‘Oh they’re recruiting children, preying on children, threatening children, creeping in bathrooms.’ That was what they said about gay men 40 years ago. And they’re just taking that now and applying that to trans women and it’s bullshit and trans women and men use bathrooms all over the country and have forever. And they have no cases to point to where a trans person has exploited a civil rights protection to prey on a child.”
To complete the destruction of Coulter’s and the far-right’s anti-trans talking points, Bill Maher offered up the now-convicted former and longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House.
“You know who the child molester is? It’s Dennis Hastert. Who was sitting watching boys shower year after year in a La-Z-boy chair – because he wanted to make sure nothing weird was going on in there – so he watched the boys shower…this is the child molesting we have.”
Watch:
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Image: Screenshot via Real Time with Bill Maher/YouTube
Hat tip: Towleroad
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