CLAY: Buck, you have done Real Time with Bill Maher before.

BUCK: Couple times.

CLAY: You’ve been on his HBO show.

BUCK: Yes, sir.

CLAY: And if — I couldn’t believe this — Bill Maher has never won, I don’t believe, an Emmy for Real Time with Bill Maher, which is crazy when you consider how many people fall all over themselves to reward John Oliver, which is just a written show that he reads off a teleprompter every week. But Bill Maher has been increasing red-pilled — just looking at the facts, looking at the evidence. We’ve been talking about this on a variety of subjects.

BUCK: On some subjects.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: He is not red-pilled. He is not ever going to come over to our side, period, but on some issues, ’cause he’s a civil libertarian.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: He has old school… When I say old school, I don’t mean classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill On Liberty liberalism, which by the way, well worth the read if any of you haven’t ever gotten around to it. Seventeenth century, they knew some things. But he’s a 1980s-, 1990s-style liberal where you still believed in free speech even when it was offensive.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s where this comes from.

CLAY: So Bill Maher decided to address this transgender-related issue that has become a real fighting point for Democrats. And tying in with this, this was a big flash point in the comedy universe because of Dave Chappelle and what he said on his Netflix special. And, by the way, Buck, did you see the guy who attacked him on the stage said the reason why he attacked Dave Chappelle was because he was triggered by the jokes that Dave Chappelle had made.

And, by the way, what did they do to that clown who decided to attack Dave Chappelle on the stage in L.A. — with a weapon, mind you? They didn’t even charge him with a felony, Buck. He got charged with a misdemeanor because it’s almost impossible to get charged with a felony in many Democrat cities right now. So here is what Bill Maher had to say. We got a couple of different clips from the show. Let’s play cut 4 first. Bill Maher on the recent trend of people identifying as LGBTQ.

MAHER: And finally, new rule: If something about the human race is changing at a previously unprecedented rate, we have to at least discuss it. Broken down over time, the LGBTQ population of America seems to be roughly doubling every generation. According to a recent Gallup poll, less than 1% of Americans born before 1946 — that’s Joe Biden’s generation — identify that way, 2.6% of Boomers do, 4.2% of Gen X, 10.5% of Millennials, and 20.8% of Gen Z. Which means if we follow this trajectory, we will all be gay in 2053.

BUCK: Look, he’s using facts and figures here to make an argument that when you started to take in the full scope of it, it’s pretty jaw dropping. It’s pretty stunning that you now have 2020 of Gen Z identifying at LGBTQIA+, and I’m not trying to be controversial. At some point an acronym is just too long. I’m just —

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: I come from a CIA background. I used to be able to have whole conversations with people where instead of nouns it was just all acronyms and then you even sort of replaced some of the verbs with acronyms. So I come from an acronym culture and LGBTQIA+ is too long; so we have to come up with a different term just for ease of use, okay? It’s not even a political statement. And then put that aside.

Clay, for 20% of Gen Z to be identifying this way and you look at the numbers and you look at what Bill says about how this is not happening in equal measure all over the country, you get to a point where you either recognize that Santa Monica and Brooklyn and northwest D.C. and wherever the fancy liberals live in Chicago… I don’t really know. I didn’t study it enough. But either they’re producing through indoctrination more transgender youth or there’s something else going on.

Here’s Bill Maher talking to that point, actually.

If this spike in trans children is all biological, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them. pic.twitter.com/t3Tx23MOsu

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) May 21, 2022

MAHER: Dr. Erica Anderson is a prominent 71-year-old clinical psychologist who is herself transgender and who now says, “I think it’s off and on too far.” The L.A. Times summarizes, “She’s come to believe that some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media.’ If you attend a small dinner party of typically very liberal upper-income Angelinos, it is not uncommon to hear parents who each have a trans kid having a conservation about that.” What are the odds of that happening 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.

BUCK: There’s a couple of things he touched on there. One is just the statistics. It doesn’t add up, right? Numerically people understand, “Hold on. There’s something going on here that’s not just all of a sudden…” ‘Cause on the trans issue in particular, that’s where really young kids all of a sudden are becoming trans, and there was that study that Brown University published and then retracted on rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which was essentially social contagion among highly impressionable children for this for transgenderism to become very clustered.

So when you have one 5-year-old that says I’m trans all of a sudden it’s a thousand percent more likely you’re gonna have three other kids in the same class, you know, who are gonna decide that they’re trans. They’re attacking Bill Maher for this, by the way. GLAAD, which is a very powerful activist organization, tweeted:

This is not the first time Bill Maher has spouted inaccurate, anti-trans rhetoric. But this time he’s targeting youth. Pundits who fearmonger about trans youth and surgeries need to learn the facts. It’s not a trend. It’s not a phase. Youth are not rushed into medical transition.

— GLAAD (@glaad) May 21, 2022

BUCK: I think GLAAD is wrong on all counts there.

CLAY: Yeah, I do too. I was talking about this exact issue with a lot of parents. We had a graduation party, as many of you out there are doing, so many different kids graduating — and, by the way, now there’s like graduations… I got a graduation to go to tonight for my fifth graders, I mean, there are fifth graders that aren’t graduating, by the way? At some point there are kindergarten graduations?

It’s impossible for you not to graduate from fifth grade to sixth grade, right? It would actually be a crime. But, anyway, I’m going to one of those. So it’s graduation season and everybody is graduating at all ages. I got an eighth-grade graduation. So we’re having a big discussion about this, and I think these are the kinds of discussions that lots of parents are having out there, and this is one where I think Bill Maher is right in a big way and as a part of his discussion, Buck, he said (summarized):

“Hey, when I was 8, I wanted to be a pirate, and if someone had let me poke my eye out so I could wear an eye patch and saw off my leg so I could have a peg leg, that wouldn’t have been absolutely ridiculous.” Now, it’s humorous to think about, but every parent out there has kids who want to dress up and pretend that they are something other than what they are. This is a natural point of childhood.

My kids dressed up like Jedis, they dressed up like pirates, even outside of Halloween, right? And if you allow an 8- or 9- or 10- or 11- or 12-year-old kid to make all of the choices in their life, Buck, they often make bad choices. That’s why we have something called a parent. The idea that we are allowing people under the age of 18 to make lifelong, life-changing decisions about what gender they are is, to me, madness and child abuse, and it is a discussion we must have because if you want to get pumped full of hormones when you’re 19, that should be your right. But the idea that we’re allowing anybody to do it premajority is insane.

BUCK: What’s really happening — and this is where the fight, this is where the fight starts to become so intensely political right now — is that this is adults who are imposing their ideological and political fashions, in a sense, on children, deciding, “Oh, you’re 6 years old and you think you may be a girl?”

There are now laws in different states where you can’t even try to convince that child, “I don’t actually think that that’s true.” You always have to affirm. The conveyor belt toward affirmation of the beliefs of a 6-year-old… Let’s understand, to your point, Clay, you got three kids, right? We tell kids they’re wrong about stuff all the time. We tell them.

CLAY: That’s how parenting is.

BUCK: Right. We steer kids away from this all the time and for people who want to say, “Oh, but it’s all about self-actualization,” there is a real medical phenomenon called body integrity identity disorder. Now, you may not have heard of this. This is a real thing. You can find it on official, you know, psychiatric literature, it’s also called apotemnophilia, and it’s when someone is absolutely convinced they would be happier and better off if you amputate a healthy limb.

“Remove my leg and my life will be better.” Now, psychiatry obviously treats this as, “We are not removing your leg. You should do that. Your life will not be better.” But you start to wonder, “How different is it for a 12-year-old to believe I really need to have my organs removed, my gender organizations —

CLAY: Sex organs.

BUCK: “– sex organs removed, to try to become something I can never actually become despite what they say”? Men cannot get pregnant, men cannot get periods, et cetera, how different is it from body integrity identity disorder really? Because it wasn’t long ago that it was body dysmorphia — or, sorry, gender dysphoria. Pardon me. Gender dysphoria. Body dysmorphia is anorexia. Gender dysphoria, which was something that you treated from a psychiatric perspective as, “No, no, you aren’t actually a different gender.”

And over a long period of time if somebody was an adult and they say okay. Then you have a different process. But in children it was, “No, no, we’re not gonna do this right now.” The left has changed this, Clay. The White House itself is saying it is standard of care to “affirm the gender-transition decision of prepubescent kids,” even little kids, 6-year-olds, 7-year-olds. And this is why they’re so… Look, the American people just flatly aren’t with the activist community on this. They’re just not, and this is why the Democrat Party is scrambling.

CLAY: Well, and look, this is also… Take it outside of transgender-related issues. We don’t let kids sign contracts that bind them until they become 18 years old. We don’t let kids be able to serve in the military until they’re 18 years old. You can’t get a beer until you’re 21. And a lot of places won’t allow you to get a rental car until you’re 25. And yet we are telling young kids, “You can decide to cut your genitals off when you are below the age of consent in your state”?

BUCK: Clay?

CLAY: This is about why we make those choices about mental health because you know your brain’s not fully developed until you become an adult.

BUCK: You also will see… For a lot of you who aren’t spending your time involved in the discussions online about this and the tweets back and forth, there are smarmy blue checks who are either — some of them are — self-described doctors or medical personnel of some kind. Others work in the media who say, “Oh, getting puberty blockers is no big deal. It’s reversible.” No, I’m sorry, it’s a very big deal, and the notion of it being reversible as if NBD!

“Let’s just try this out and see how this goes!” The literature, the long-term studies for what happens to a 12-year-old that you give this stuff to in 20 years does not exist. And what we do know of it from particularly the chief of gender transition surgery at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center for decades is that long-term life outcomes are not good. Long-term mental health outcomes are not good. And you have a White House saying this is standard of care, and you have an activist community…

And like I said, a lot of my friends who are gay really resent the, “Oh, being gay means you have to stand up for trans indoctrination of 5-year-olds in school”? No, it doesn’t. They’ve come to me. I’ve interviewed. I’ve talked to them on air, talked to them in person. This has nothing to do with that. So there’s a lot here, and Bill Maher, look, he’s poking the dragon on the left here. He’s actually taking a risk, ’cause they come after people for this stuff. You speak out on this one, they want to ruin your life.