Ben Carson: Create transgender bathrooms

Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate, suggested in an interview Thursday that the U.S. should have bathrooms specifically for people who are transgender.

Carson was responding to questions about a recent ordinance in Houston that would have established nondiscrimination protections for gay and transgender people. Voters rejected the ordinance after an 18-month battle in which opponents argued that allowing transgender men and women to use their preferred public bathrooms would open the door to sexual predators who wanted to enter women's restrooms.

Carson's response: "How about we have a transgender bathroom?"

"It is not fair for them to make everybody else uncomfortable," he said. "It's one of the things that I don't particularly like about the [LGBT] movement. I think everybody has equal rights, but I'm not sure that anybody should have extra rights--extra rights when it comes to redefining everything for everybody else and imposing your view on everybody else."

His remarks came in an interview with Fusion's Jorge Ramos that was streamed live on Facebook.

He isn't the first candidate to wade into transgender issues during the 2016 campaign. During a speech to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention earlier this year, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee joked that he wished he had pretended to be transgender in high school "when it came time to take showers in PE."