Fox News host Jesse Watters on Friday claimed there is no difference between being gay and being transgender.
During a segment about puberty blockers and minors transitioning from one gender to another, Watters began by arguing that gender reassignment surgery is some sort of money-making conspiracy among doctors.
“So, surgeons can only make so much money until they invent new surgeries,” he said. “When plastic surgery came along, a lot of surgeons got very, very wealthy, and that’s fine—on adults,” he said.
“So all of a sudden, they found out a way to make more money, and it’s off children. So what they do, Jessica,” he continued, addressing the show’s liberal co-host, Jessica Tarlov, “is fund studies that say, ‘It’s fine, we’re saving lives, no one has ever regretted [transitioning].’ So, there are studies on both sides.”
Watters added that the issue should be considered as if it were affecting someone in one’s own family. He then told his colleagues about something that had happened in his family years ago that he apparently felt was relevant.
“We adopted a young child, and at age five, he was playing with dolls, and everybody knew he was gay, or was going to be gay. And it’s not like all of a sudden we took him to the doctor and chopped him off. No one would ever do that,” Watters said.
Tarlov didn’t let that slide, though.
“Well, ‘gay’ and ‘trans’ are different, and that’s not how ‘gay’ works, either,” she rebutted.
Yet Watters insisted otherwise. “I don’t believe it is. A lot of these people are just gay—or lesbian,” he asserted. “And what they’re doing is they’re intervening in a regular gay or lesbian life, and that’s a new experience, and it never used to be like that.”
Watters, whose previous forays into gender issues include amplifying comments claiming that Vice President Kamala Harris was having a “typical female problem” a year into her role, didn’t seem to change course after Tarlov’s input.
“Someone at this table shared some intimate details about their adolescence with me, and now I feel like it’s my right to say what they told me. They said they experienced feelings when they were in middle school that they, perhaps, were a lesbian,” Watters said, after which Jeanine Pirro interjected: “She was in college.”
“And that person was Judge Jeanine!” Watters said, perhaps joking.
Pirro responded by exclaiming, “Liar! Liar!”
“And thank God they didn’t transition you!” Watters said, apparently still not understanding the difference between being gay or lesbian and transgender. “You were a beautiful woman.”
