Mario Lopez Says Supporting Trans Kids Is ‘Dangerous’

UPDATE 08/01/19:

Mario Lopez has apologized for what he said about parenting transgender children, calling his comments "ignorant and insensitive."

"I have been and always will be an ardent supporter of the LGBTQ community, and I am going to use this opportunity to better educate myself," Lopez toldNBC News. "Moving forward I will be more informed and thoughtful."

The American Association of Pediatrics recommends taking a "gender-affirming," "nonjudgemental" approach to raising trans and gender-nonconforming kids. "The gender-affirming model strengthens family resiliency and takes the emphasis off heightened concerns over gender while allowing children the freedom to focus on academics, relationship-building and other typical developmental tasks," wrote the AAP in 2018.

ORIGINAL:

In a new interview with Candace Owens, Mario Lopez has made some extremely uninformed comments about the "weird trend" of trans kids, saying parents trusting their children to know their own gender identity is "dangerous."

Lopez and Owens were discussing Charlize Theron, who earlier this year announced that her seven-year-old child was living as a girl. "Yes, I thought she was a boy, too," Theron said in an interview with the Daily Mail. "Until she looked at me when she was 3 years-old and said, 'I am not a boy!'"

Owens, a conservative commentator and Trump supporter, said allowing children to make informed decisions about their gender was the same thing as them saying they're a mermaid or that they could fly.

"I am trying to understand it myself, and please don't lump me into that whole [group]," Lopez responded. "If you're three years old and you're saying you're feeling a certain way or you think you're a boy or a girl or whatever the case may be, I just think it's dangerous as a parent to make this determination then, okay, you're going to a boy or a girl."

Lopez added that he finds letting children transition "alarming" and he can't help but "think about the repercussions later on. When you're a kid ... you don't know anything about sexuality yet. You're just a kid." Gender and sexuality aren't the same thing, but go off! And by go off, I mean shut up!

Owen said parents who allow their kids to transition are "narcissists," and Lopez responded that those parents should "allow their kids to be kids but at the same time, you gotta be the adult in the situation."

Elsewhere in the interview, the Saved by the Bell star said the #BelieveWomen hashtag, which grew out of the #MeToo movement and Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Curt nomination and resulting sexual assault inquiry, is a "dangerous hashtag because people lie and sometimes those people are women." Oh boy, it just keeps getting worse.

"God forbid you have a son out there and a girl may have felt a certain way about a situation -- dismissed, hurt, whatever, and is feeling vengeful and just decides to tell a certain story that's not even exactly true, come back and hurt that individual." How about, god forbid you have a son who assaults a woman?

RELATED | Charlize Theron Reveals Her 7-Year-Old Child Is Actually a Girl