There are probably at this point more people defending Mario Lopez than attacking him over his comments about the dangers of the #BelieveWomen and of affirming young children who claim to be transgendered. But so long as the social justice movement exists, the hazards of both of those things will, too.

It’s worth recalling an article in the Atlantic magazine last year that told the stories of minors who mistakenly believed that they did not mentally identify with their physical sex.

One young girl profiled by the magazine was 14-year-old “Claire.” She recalled previous, internalized feelings that she was male and she had pleaded for her parents to help her find hormone therapy. She eventually asked them to support her in undergoing a double mastectomy to remove her breasts. The feelings grew over the course of several years, but one day in late 2017, Claire looked in the mirror and realized that the changes she was making to her appearance, which was now considerably more masculine, weren’t helping her feelings of anxiety and depression.

“I was still miserable, and I still hated myself,” she said.

With more consideration, she determined that her feelings were driven by an inability to fit in with many of the girls she knew in school. But she in time found some who shared her interests. “It was kind of sudden when I thought, ‘You know, maybe this isn’t the right answer — maybe it’s something else.’ But it took a while to actually set in that yes, I was definitely a girl.”

The article addressed the quandary of parents confronted with children who claim to be transgender and a culture that tells the parents to act on those claims with haste, erring on the side of believing and affirming the children.

As detailed in my forthcoming book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, there are countless stories just like Claire’s, and this is exactly what Lopez was talking about. In a recent interview, Lopez, an actor, said it’s “dangerous” for a parent to affirm children, especially prepubescent ones, who claim or think themselves to be transgender.

“I think parents need to allow their kids to be kids but at the same time, you gotta be the adult in the situation,” he said. “Pause with that and — I think the formative years is when you start having those discussions and really start making these declarations.”

Liberals suffered similar conniption when Lopez went on in the same interview to say that it’s not the best policy to assume every accusation of rape and sexual assault is true.

He said that the #BelieveWomen trend on social media, which is an outgrowth of the #MeToo movement, is a “dangerous hashtag because people lie and sometimes those people are women.”

It was just last week that Democrats and New Yorker magazine were trying to rehabilitate former Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., now that he is claiming he was wrongly accused of sexual assault, which resulted in his resignation from the Senate.

Franken’s experience, according to the New Yorker, “has led him to spend time thinking about such matters as due process, proportionality of punishment, and the consequences of Internet-fueled outrage.”

Well, yes, that might happen, and that’s why Lopez, along with every other normal person, might want to hear all the facts before they decide to #BelieveWomen, just as they might want to sleep on things for a year or ten before supporting their 9-year-old’s iron-clad decision to get a sex-change.

Lopez on Wednesday did end up issuing an apology for his comments, even if they should have never been controversial. But no one is safe from the social justice mob.