Mike Huckabee Transgender Joke Video: High School Showers With Girls Comment Slammed On Social Media

A day after transgender celebrity Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner revealed her new look on a Vanity Fair cover applauded by many for advancing LGBT rights, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was slammed on social media Tuesday for a joke about wishing he had pretended to be transgender in high school “when it came time to take showers in PE.” Huckabee, a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, made the comments at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this year, before Jenner's announcement. They were uploaded to YouTube over the weekend, Buzzfeed reported Tuesday.

“For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize 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,” Huckabee says in the video. He then adds that he would have been transgender in high school to shower with the girls.

“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,” said Huckabee. “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?”

Huckabee said there was “something inherently wrong about forcing little children to be a part of this social experiment. ... And yet today we are the ones who are ridiculed and scorned because we point out the obvious.”

Watch the video below, comments start at the 18:00 mark:

Huckabee announced last month that he is making a second bid for the Republican nomination. "Folks, it is a long way from a little brick red house on 2nd Street in Hope, Arkansas, to the White House. But here in this small town called Hope I was raised to believe that where a person's starting didn't mean that's where he had to stop," he said at a campaign event in the hometown he shares with former President Bill Clinton. "...So it seems perfectly fitting that it would be here that I announce that I am a candidate for president of the United States of America."

Huckabee also came in for criticism recently for defending the Duggars after Josh, the oldest son of the “19 Kids and Counting” reality TV family from Arkansas, said he had molested children, including his own siblings, when he was a teen.