John Oliver, Host Of Last Week Tonight Goes Viral Defending Trans Rights
John Oliver, host of the satirical TV news show Last Week Tonight, has gone viral for a pro-trans speech he made during his October 16 show.
During the segment, Oliver discussed the fight for trans rights, with a focus on how conservatives have “truly lost their minds” about it.
The host of the Emmy-winning series started by stating that over 100 anti-trans bills have been introduced in states across the United States, with 12 states signing them into law.
Oliver then explained that, during the segment, “we’re gonna be taking the arguments behind a lot of these anti-trans bills seriously because of what they’re doing, but not sincerely, because so often they seem to be based more on political calculation than what is actually happening.”
Total Horseshit
Oliver went on to talk about the tactic used by conservatives to explain the rise in kids identifying as trans as “due to social contagion” or a “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” which Oliver said is, “total horseshit.”
Oliver then pointed out that “there is ample evidence of gender variance throughout human history and as far back as historians have found evidence of trans people, they found trans children.
“As for the rapid rise in kids identifying as trans, as the writer Julia Serano has pointed out, when you look at a chart of left-handers among Americans over the 20th century, you see a massive spike when we stopped forcing kids to write with their right hand, and then a plateau. That doesn’t mean everyone became left-handed, or that there was a rapid onset southpaw dysphoria. It means people were free to be who they fucking were.
Who The Fuck Are They Hurting?
“And, to the extent that some young people are just exploring their gender identity, how exactly is that a bad thing? Who the fuck are they hurting?
“Watching the conversation around this, it is hard not to feel like, to the extent that there is any social contagion here, it is among adults who have whipped themselves into such a frenzy that they can find themselves repeating some humiliating nonsense.”
Holy shit pic.twitter.com/jAxYqytO8M
— Ari Drennen (@AriDrennen) October 17, 2022
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver airs Sunday nights and can be watched on Binge.