Actor Mario Lopez apologized in the face of transgender and left-wing activists who slammed his statement that it was “dangerous” for young children to be allowed by their parents to choose their own gender.

“The comments I made were ignorant and insensitive, and I now have a deeper understanding of how hurtful they were,” Mario Lopez said in a statement according to Variety. “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. Moving forward, I will be more informed and thoughtful.”

The Saved by the Bell actor’s comments came from an appearance on the The Candace Owens Show, and a PragerU video he made recently. But the comments only recently riled the left.

During the Owens show, the host talked about the “weird trend” of Hollywood elites letting their kids become transgenders at the drop of a hat. Owens cited actress Charlize Theron who announced that she is allowing her 7-year-old boy to “choose” to be a girl.

According to Yahoo News:

“Yes, I thought she was a boy, too,” Theron told the Daily Mail. “Until she looked at me when she was three years old and said, ‘I am not a boy!’”

Owens told the new Access Hollywood host, “A lot of weird trends come out of Hollywood and one of the weirder ones, for me, is this new trend where celebrities are coming out — and I know Charlize Theron did this a few weeks ago — is saying that their child is picking their gender. And this is strange to me, and they say, ‘Oh, I looked at my child, and my child was swimming in a bathtub and looked up and said, “Mommy, I’m a boy’” and that’s weird …”

Owens worried that kids are far too young to know what they are saying and that parents need to be the adult in the relationship and not allow children to make such life-altering decisions.

Lopez agreed saying, “When you’re a kid … you don’t know anything about sexuality yet. You’re just a kid.”

“I am trying to understand it myself, and please don’t lump me into that whole [group],” Lopez added. “I’m kind of blown away too. Look, I’m never one to tell anyone how to parent their kids obviously and I think if you come from a place of love, you really can’t go wrong but at the same time, my God, if you’re 3 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, well, OK, then you’re going to a boy or a girl, whatever the case may be … It’s sort of alarming and my gosh, I just think about the repercussions later on.”

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