The latest episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver followed up to a theme that they tackled five years ago: transgender rights. It’s a subject that needs to be constantly revisited, since society is still very much distant from providing trans people with an ideal life in which they can worry about ordinary things, instead of having to interrupt their childhood and adolescence to teach adults about respect and basic human decency.
Before that, however, the show stopped by Europe to show war between Ukraine and Russia is still happening with scary missile strikes, but one in particular was devastating to Vladimir Putin. Nope, not people dying: The Crimean Bridge got bombed last week. Putin loved this bridge so much that he allowed the Russian government to finance the production of a movie that advertised the architectural wonder as “made with love”. So, if you feel the time is right for a cheesy Russian romcom, you can check out the trailer on YouTube.
That doesn’t tie in to the main story, of course, because Putin has been fervently against LGBTQIA+ rights – and a huge slate of people in the Americas are also like that. John Oliver starts the segment by showing that we can celebrate having made some progress: In a 1967 CBS report, the network titled a segment “The Homosexuals” and made it look and sound like a true crime documentary. So at least we're past that.
The episode moves on to reveal how far-right representatives are going out of their way to spread misinformation about transgender kids and adults, going as far as making up stories in which children decided to identify as cats and asked to use a litter box. Those people ignore — or pretend they don't know — that transitioning is a complex process that involves the participation of parents, psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors, as well as a series of external factors including prejudice and rejection.
This type of prejudiced and misinformed behavior has prompted LGBTQIA+ kids – especially transgender and non-conforming gender kids – to speak out and having to make appointments to address their local government, when they should just have to worry about being kids. As Oliver points out, if a kid has to give an eloquent statement to a group of adults about how they should be more respectful, we’ve already failed as a society. And the worst part is, this won’t stop any time soon.
You can watch the whole main segment below: