Mike Huckabee says there’s a time when he wouldn’t have minded being transgender – after gym class in the locker rooms.
“I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today’,” said Huckabee while addressing the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention back in February.
“If a child—a boy—says, you know what, today I really am feeling my girl’s side, he gets to go shower with the girls when he’s 14,” Huckabee said. “I’m just thinking of all the 14-year-old boys I went to school with, and how many of them would have awakened with that revelation.”
Huckabee followed his “joke” with a warning to the public, voicing his opinion that transgender people are dangerous in gendered spaces.
“For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize that the fact that we are now in city after city watching ordinances say that your 7-year-old daughter, if she goes into the restroom cannot be offended, and you can’t be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man,” said Huckabee.
The comments the Republican presidential candidate made were uploaded to YouTube over the weekend, and began circulating after the release of Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover in which the former Olympic champion, and self described Republican, came out as a female. When a CNN reporter asked for his reaction to Jenner’s statement and the acceptance surrounding it, he replied, “Not going there.”
