Last week, writer and radio host Dennis Prager was on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” where he pushed back against the absurd claim that men can menstruate, which, believe it or not, is a thing over which some people actually argue.
But when Prager, who served as the conservative panelist on Maher’s show Friday, brought up the issue, Maher and his other guests — including journalist Ronan Farrow — appeared to have no idea what the writer was talking about.
Prager used his time on the HBO show to dispel what he believes to be the numerous lies propagated by many on the left, among them the idea that genetic males “can menstruate.”
“To say that men can menstruate is a lie and that is now — that is what is said,” Prager asserted. “Check it out, folks. Anyone who says a man cannot menstruate is considered transphobic. … Just Google it.”
Maher, for his part, said he was wholly unaware of such a belief and laughed off Prager’s comment. Maher’s ignorance on the subject is relatively hard to believe because he has been critical of the political wing of the LGBTQ community in the past. In late September, in fact, he defended TV personality Mario Lopez after he said in July that it’s “sort of alarming” to think some parents would allow their 3-year-old children to determine their own sexuality and gender identity.
Nevertheless, Maher either was or played dumb last week with Prager. But the facts are definitely in Prager’s corner.
In 2017, HuffPost ran a story about a female-to-male transgender person who posted a graphic photo of him(her)self wearing pants covered with menstrual blood, attempting to make the point that “men” can also menstruate.
“Not all people who menstruate are women, and not all women menstruate,” Cass Clemmer, who identifies as “them,” told HuffPost at the time.
One year before, in September 2016, The Daily Beast ran a column titled, “Yes, Men Can Have Periods and We Need to Talk About Them,” in which writer Zoyander Street lambasted social media activists who, at the time, were calling awareness to the fact that feminine hygiene products are overpriced and, to their thinking, would be universally available “if men had periods.”
That quoted phrase soon began to trend on Twitter, at which point Zoyander, who is a female-to-male transgender person, argued the hashtag was “inaccurate and oppressive” because “some men do have periods — and many women don’t.”
There are plenty more examples of this, but you get the point: Prager’s comments, much to Maher’s chagrin, are not unfounded or out of left field. With that said, the fact it even needs to be discussed is as bizarre as the issue itself.