Bill Maher Isn’t a Liberal Anymore
Maybe the 66-year-old celebrity isn’t the progressive he thinks he is.
What’s the opposite of a coveted endorsement? To some, it’s Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor “Space Laser” Greene tweeting at you to say thank you for your cable-TV monologue. But maybe Bill Maher, who earlier this week received this exact cursed endorsement from Greene, welcomed it. After all, he may identify as a liberal, but he prides himself on just asking questions (a lot of which sound suspiciously like GOP talking points). Last Friday, on his HBO show, Real Time With Bill Maher, he was questioning whether LGBTQ kids really are, you know, LGBTQ: “Yes, part of the rise in LGBT numbers is from people feeling free enough to tell it to a pollster, and that’s all to the good,” he said, “but some of it is—it's trendy."
Greene endorsed this message because the GOP is desperate to drag trans kids into their wider culture war, even though only a fraction of them are undergoing gender-affirming surgery or hormone therapy, and evidence shows that “access to gender-affirming care is associated with better mental health outcomes—and that lack of access to such care is associated with higher rates of suicidality, depression and self-harming behavior,” according to Scientific American. In a January 2017 report, UCLA’s Williams Institute estimated that 0.7 percent of U.S. kids ages 13 to 17—about 150,000 children—identified as transgender.
During his monologue, Maher neglected to mention the plethora of anti-LGBTQ laws that Republican lawmakers have introduced. According to NPR, “In just the first 3 months of 2022, lawmakers in more than 20 states brought forward legislation targeting LGBTQ youth.” Many of these laws run afoul of principles Maher claims to believe in, like free speech. Florida’s badly written “Don’t Say Gay” law is carte blanche for the censorship Maher supposedly loathes. The youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit against the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the recent high-school graduate and class president Zander Moricz, claimed in a tweet that his principal called him “into his office and informed me that if my graduation speech referenced my activism or role as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, school administration had a signal to cut off my microphone, end my speech, and halt the ceremony.” (A spokesperson for the school district confirmed to The Washington Post in an email that the principal had met with Moricz, “but did not say he had been told not to say ‘gay.’”) Instead of saying “gay,” Moricz talked about his “curly hair.”
LGBTQ kids are under attack: They are bullied, harassed, and murdered. By dismissing how they identify as a trendy pose, the thing Maher is ultimately questioning is their very existence. And this isn’t the first time he’s flaunted his prejudices: “This is a guy,” Mehdi Hasan said in a 2020 interview with The Daily Beast, “who says Islam acts like the mafia, and the guy who says stuff like, ‘Muslims bring that desert stuff to the West.’ I mean, that’s not just Islamophobia, that’s old-fashioned racism.” (Even Ben Affleck once called Maher out for his views on Islam.)
As Parker Molloy, a transgender woman and the author of The Present Age newsletter, told me, “Bill Maher is, as he has always been, an out-of-touch nincompoop. His meandering nine-minute rant about trans people was filled with lies and right-wing propaganda.”
“If people want to get their information about LGBTQ people from Bill Maher or their COVID-19 treatment options from Joe Rogan, that's up to them,” Molloy continued. “I'm going to stick with what every major and legitimate medical organization on the planet has said on the matter.”
I’ve been reluctant to write about Bill Maher, because he was a great champion of my mother and, briefly in the 1990s, me. But in this attention economy, platforms like Maher’s have enormous power. Using even a few minutes of his airtime to target a marginalized group is unforgivable. Especially when Republicans across the country are trying to ban trans kids from sports, and in the home of horrifically bad Republican legislation, Texas, the GOP wants to charge parents who give their kids gender-affirming care with child abuse.
“Let’s get this straight,” Maher recently said. “It’s not me who’s changed; it’s the left, who is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental, and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it. But I will.” Maybe a 66-year-old millionaire who’s been on TV since 1993 isn’t the progressive he thinks he is. Maybe it's not the left that has changed. Maybe, just maybe, it’s Bill.