TWIBS: Jeez, Bill Maher Stinks
Late-Night’s King of Smug Buffoons has weighed in on the “trans debate” once more, revealing he’s incapable of holding opinions that aren’t repulsive.
by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Listen, it’s been a hard year, hasn’t it? This Week in Barrel Scraping was always meant to be a humor column, but these days, the best I can do is report some godawful news and try to put a funny spin on it. Well, today we’re going old school, TWIBSies. That’s right: I’m gonna pick an annoying loser and make fun of him for like, eight hundred words or so, and you’re gonna love it. Absolutely unrepentant, scathing critique of a feckless dweeb who doesn’t deserve to go around and do things, or have anything good in his life, ever.
Today’s lucky oxygen deficit? Bill Maher.
If you’re a big leagues hater like me, a professional when it comes to despising public figures, you should be rubbing your hands together a la that Birdman gif right now. Holy shit, what a repugnant scumbag of a human being Bill Maher is. I really don’t have time to get into every single reason that Maher is the worst of the worst when it comes to Late-Night hosts, and also being a human being in general, but here are a few highlights: He supports our war against Iran (I guess he loves the idea of innocent children being blown to bits) and, believe it or not, the Vietnam war; he supported Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court by brushing off credible accusations of rape as the whimsical misbehavior of a young man; he has described leftists and progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders as “a cancer” who are “scarier and crazier than Trump”; he’s platformed anti-vax conspiracy theorists on his show; and, most insanely, does not believe in germ theory or the broadly accepted tenets of illness as medical science understands it (DISTURBING CONTENT WARNING: Barefoot Woody Harrelson).
A brave and irreverent Late-Night iconoclast, Bill Maher is not. He is the embodiment of smugness, one of the great proponents of nu-Atheism, anti-intellectualism, and healthcare pseudoscience in modern America. He is the sort of confidently wrong dickhead plaguing every layer of American authority in 2026, misconstrued as something akin to a liberal when all of his behaviors and beliefs make it clear that he is a paint by numbers conservative.
Sorry for burying the lede, but it feels important contextually to make it clear that Bill Maher is a know-nothing faux-intellectual, a foolish man’s idea of an elitist’s idea of a smart man, when I tell you that Maher has once again waded into the cultural war against transgender Americans, this time to tell actor and normal guy David Cross that protecting trans children means JD Vance will become president. Somehow.
It’s worth pointing out here that, despite some pundits’ ignorant assertions, the existence and civil liberties of trans Americans is not actually a particularly divisive issue in many ways, and we are not even remotely responsible for Dems shitting the bed in 2024. Find another whipping boy and/or girl, please and thank you!
Anyway, in Maher’s exchange with Cross, the comedian (to be clear I mean Cross, because I can’t in good conscience call you a comedian if you aren’t funny) says that his nine-year-old daughter has many trans friends, some of whom began transitioning as young as three. I find that a little hard to believe, honestly, but even if it’s true… so what? It wouldn’t entail anything more than using a new name and pronouns and maybe growing their hair out or trying new clothes. Like, let’s be clear, nobody’s dosing toddlers with fucking sex hormones.
“Three? Well, sure … who can believe a 3-year-old? Kids are confused,” Maher replied, citing the most commonly perpetuated argument against trans youth existing and being affirmed. In case you weren’t aware, the primary study used to suggest huge numbers of trans youth “desist” or detransition has been thoroughly debunked for its incredibly lackluster methodology, and there exists more trustworthy data that suggests the number of trans kids who go on to identify themselves as cisgender post-puberty is unbelievably low.
Maher went on to share the meaningless anecdote of a woman he knows who says she was a “tomboy” in her youth, and would have been pathologized as transgender today. Cross pushes back and says that is obviously not true, and nobody is coercing or forcing children to transition, to which Maher says, “Somebody is doing something because 8- or 9-year-olds can’t do anything on their own.”
I’ve said it countless times, and I’ll say it again: The paternalistic belief that children have and deserve no autonomy over themselves and their bodies is rooted in a desire to control and abuse them. People who truly believe that children, even young children, cannot possibly know themselves or make decisions regarding their bodies typically want to have sole authority over children’s bodies themselves. That is, in a word, worrisome.
Children are, believe it or not, full human beings. Yes, they need to be monitored and controlled in some small ways; they can’t eat cake for every meal, or be allowed to toddle into traffic, or be given sharp instruments to play with as a gag. That does not mean that they are incapable of knowing things about themselves, and expressing their own wants and desires. Kids know what brings them joy, like any thinking creature of any age. If a child feels happy being address by a typically feminine name, or addressed with gender neutral pronouns, or wearing clothes that society believes they should not wear… who the fuck are we to tell them no? Who is Bill Maher to suggest that the trans kids David Cross knows aren’t allowed to be trans?
Cross tells Maher that he wants to shield his daughter from a world that has become increasingly abusive and mean. In response, Maher says, “Good luck with President Vance. As I always say to my woke friends, we voted for the same person. You’re just why she lost.”
I’ve already outlined why he’s wrong, about this and so much else. He’s a petulant, mean-spirited little dweeb whose head I’d like to pop like a zit. Since I can’t do that, let me close out with some more stupid shit Maher has said and done:
Maher is pro-domestic violence, and thinks women he personally finds annoying should be violently attacked. Maher considers Islam “a cancer,” and believes in the shockingly Islamophobic and racist Great Replacement Theory. Maher is pro-Israel. He hates refugees from nations that are too brown, saying that Syrians’ “values” are simply at odds with ours… wink, wink! If that wasn’t enough racism for you, don’t worry, he once referred to himself as a “house N-word,” and has bravely come out against critical race theory, a thing I am completely certain he could not define if you put a gun to his head.
Maher is a low caliber shock jock who considers himself a thinking man’s Howard Stern, a more erudite Tucker Carlson for a libertarian audience, but he is in actuality one of the most annoying schmucks to ever pollute the cultural zeitgeist, and he should shut the hell up about everything forever.
