Bill Maher questions LGBT+ trend

Bill Maher took his biggest gamble yet with his liberal base. He actually questioned the validity of LGBT+ self-identification. More importantly still, he seemed to advise against being so quick to schedule surgical mutilation and hormonal poisoning of children.

What did Bill Maher say?

The best source for this story is BizPac review. We also have this tweet and video containing Bill Maher’s own words as he actually spoke them.

Bill Maher began with this February 17, 2022 Gallup poll on American alternative-lifestyle self-identification. It shows the proportion of such self-identification rising from 3.5 percent in 2012 to 5.6 percent in 2020 – and 7.1 percent in 2021. But then the report has this table:

Bill Maher plotted the LGBT column on a graph to highlight what he said was an apparent generational trend. He concluded, only half jokingly:

Which means, if we follow this trajectory, we will all be gay in 2054.

Somehow, that doesn’t mean quite the same as:

And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home!

Bill Maher then noticed that the ACLU seemed concerned that the likely overrule of Roe v. Wade would affect LGBT self-identifiers more highly, and not affect women!

Experimenting on children

He spent the rest of his monologue challenging the validity of this trend. Boasts about children opting out of heterosexuality dominate Los Angeles dinner parties among “typically very liberal upper-income” Los Angeles residents. Bill Maher challenged people to imagine such a scene in Youngstown, Ohio.

If this spike in trans children is all natural, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.

Furthermore, he questioned the judgment of parents who, while insisting that their children wear bicycle helmets and carry epinephrine dispensers and GPS trackers, would opt their children in for surgical mutilation and hormonal poisoning.

Children are impressionable, and very, very stupid. Kids don’t know why Mom drinks every day, or why Dad has two cellphones. Maybe the boy who thinks he’s a girl is just gay, or whatever Frazier was. Maybe the girl who hates girly stuff just need to learn that being female doesn’t mean you have to act like a Kardashian. [And] maybe childhood makes you sad sometimes and there are other solutions besides [gender reassignment surgery].

In sum, he accused trendy liberals of experimenting on children – their own and those of others.

And he cited other evidence, including Dr. Erica Anderson’s warning that

some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media.

And also, Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. In fact he finished by denouncing immediate gender reassignment for a child merely “going through a phase.”

The shutdown of discussion

But perhaps Bill Maher saved his most scathing critique for those wanting to shut down all discussion of the trend.

But someone needs to say it: not everything’s about you. And it’s OK to ask questions about something that’s very new, and involves children. The answer can’t always be that anyone from a marginalized community is automatically right, trump card, mike drop, end of discussion.

That includes Chase Strangio, a ranking ACLU lawyer, tweeting things like:

Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.

This person deleted that tweet, but others screen-captured it, repeated it, and denounced it.

As if to prove his very point, about half the responses Bill Maher got on his Twitter account went beyond scathing. At least one person had a halfway thoughtful critique, showing this graph of a trend of those self-identifying as left-handed.

It shows left-handedness leveling off at birth year 1960. Your editor can believe that. When he was in grammar and middle school, his teachers introduced left-handed scissors and left-handed desk chairs. The proportion of left-handed people has not grown since. But alternative lifestyles are clearly different, as ancient history clearly shows. The incidence (how many “come out” per year) and prevalence (how many self-identify at any time) of these lifestyles always vary directly as the propensity of the larger society to tolerate or especially celebrate them. A society that asks for more of it, gets it.

Bill Maher has a point

To conclude: Bill Maher has a point. If every successive generation really has more of its members self-identifying as “alternative” on polls, we should ask why. And if, as the “alternative community” insists, it’s all hereditary, therefore fixed, that should be easy enough to test. Do those numbers result merely from people wanting to be “hip,” as Bill Maher hints at? Or might they result from hormonal imbalances due to maternal stress during pregnancy? Indeed, might we not be poisoning ourselves with plastic containers and petrochemicals? Or might we be ignoring certain elements of psychological, including psycho-sexual, history?

One should be able to check these things easily enough with retrospective case-control studies, or even retrospective incidence studies. Why is no one doing such studies? Because the American psychiatric establishment does not want to do them. We should also consider one point on which Bill Maher did not touch. Maybe those who draw the checks for psychiatric clinical studies, want to foster the trend. Why? Because those same people don’t much want people reproducing. For once any generation turns “all alternative,” the next generation – wait! It doesn’t exist! Because it never forms. Except, that is, for those who carefully avoided practicing what they … But can we really call it preaching?

That’s why America must come to grips with the point Bill Maher made. If it does not, it will cease to exist. And remember: Russia will continue to exist, civilizational state that it is.

About the image

This portrait of Bill Maher receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is by Angela George. It carries the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.