Screen Shot 2015-06-02 at 1.23.05 PMIn a speech at the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee earlier this year, Mike Huckabee joked that he should have pretended to be transgender in high school so he could “shower with the girls” whenever he wanted to.

The comments have recently been uploaded to YouTube by World Net Daily.

Here’s how Huckabee framed it:

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.

Related: Selfie Campaign Shows How Absurd It Is To Force Trans People To Use The Wrong Bathroom

Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. 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.” You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous doesn’t it?

Yes, it does sound ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous that a person with so much money, power and amplification could be so willfully ignorant about something he purports to his flock to be a defender of — the truth.

What Huckabee does with one astoundingly flawed argument is downplay the real and present experience of transgender youth who look at their peers, at their families and at themselves and think “something is wrong with me.”

But the painful truth is there isn’t anything wrong with them — it’s Huckabee and people like him who think their “right to be offended” somehow outweighs someone’s right to live authentically that are doing damage.

Consider a transgender teen grappling with overwhelming questions of identity and expression and compare it to Mike Huckabee, a 59-year-old man fantasizing about perving out in a high school girls locker room.

Which one sounds like the bigger threat?

Here’s the full speech. The above section begins at 18:10:

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