Hannity, Loesch Mock California Transgender Protections: “You're Gonna Force Acceptance?”

Fox News host Sean Hannity and conservative radio host Dana Loesch continued Fox's crusade against a new California law ensuring equal protection for transgender students, dismissing transgender individuals as an insignificant minority and engaging in demagogic fear-mongering about inappropriate bathroom behavior.

On the August 13 edition of Hannity, Loesch and radio host Leslie Marshall debated the California law, which affirms the right of transgender students to use facilities and participate in programs that match their gender identities. Hannity opened the segment with an obviously ridiculous scenario, asking, “What do we do with the seven year-old girl that goes into the locker room and there's the 14-year-old boy naked in the girls' locker room because that's where he chooses to be?”

It was a fitting prelude to the ignorant attacks on transgender individuals that followed:

LOESCH: You know, I don't know what kind of crazy world we live in exactly, Sean, when we decide that the best way to stop bullying is to pass a law where we introduce opposite members of the sex into opposite-sex bathrooms and locker rooms, where regardless of the - yeah, and in sports teams, regardless of how other students feel. You're gonna force acceptance? I mean that's something that, again, you know, this comes back to things that are taught in the home.

Loesch then compared transgender students' identities with her childhood wish that she could be a flower, displaying a fundamental lack of understanding of transgender identities, described by the American Psychological Association as “part of the human condition.”

Neither Loesch nor Hannity seemed to appreciate the significant problem of anti-transgender bullying, which could lead to physical and mental health problems later in life. Hannity dismissed such concerns out of hand: “So forget about the 99 percent. The accommodation goes to the .00001 percent.” Loesch snarked, “Let's go ahead and have a boy go on a girls' team. Because that's going to get him less bullied?”

Hannity could have hosted a psychologist steeped in the scientific literature on transgender issues to shed insight on the story. Instead, he and Loesch traded baseless smears and fears about transgender people, indicating that Fox is uninterested in putting an end to its longstanding transphobia problem.