Sometimes, revolutions begin in unexpected places.

One such example came on Friday night at Bill Maher’s TV studio in Los Angeles where I was appearing on his “Real Time” show alongside rising Democrat star Rep. Katie Porter – the woman who wants to replace Dianne Feinstein as Senator for California.

We debated the backlash to 26-year-old transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s controversial promotion of Bud Light beer, and I made the point that far more concerning was Mulvaney’s mockery of sportswomen in a new Nike commercial.

I said that for someone who identified as a gay man until last year to be sporting a women’s sports bra, despite having no breasts, as “they” pranced around like a clueless non-athlete, mimicking how a misogynist would scornfully depict a woman doing sport, struck me as an offensive slap in the face to actual women.

And to my surprise given how liberal Maher’s audience tends to be, my comments were met with loud applause.

The same thing happened when I interrupted Porter’s disingenuously deflecting defense of trans people’s rights to say: “Nobody’s questioning trans rights to fairness and equality, what I would question is where trans rights to fairness and equality begin to erode or even destroy, as we’re seeing in women’s sport, the rights of women to fairness and equality.”

The audience again clapped enthusiastically again when I reminded Porter, who by now was staring at me with withering contempt, what just happened in Scotland where the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was forced to quit after endorsing a male rapist being sent to a women’s prison because he identified as a woman at his trial.

It was then that a rattled Porter exposed the shocking fragility at the heart of the woke defense of the indefensible when it comes to transgender athletes in sport, by saying she strongly disagrees with Riley Gaines, the swimmer who spoke out against trans rival Lia Thomas’s physical advantage over biological females and who last week was physically attacked by a mob of trans activists at San Francisco State University.

“What do you disagree with, out of interest?” I interjected. “What is it she’s said that’s actually wrong?”

Porter looked startled before stammering, to silence, that Gaines was only campaigning “to get likes and get clicks.”

“That’s not what she’s doing,” I said. “All I’ve seen her do is stand up for women’s rights for fairness and equality.”

“Riley is speaking up for herself,” said Porter. “And that is her prerogative and I respect her free speech.”

“I think she’s speaking up for pretty much every female athlete in the world,” I retorted, to yet more loud applause.

Within minutes, our exchange was trending on Twitter.

It felt like a moment of reckoning, where an insane ideology hits the buffers of basic common sense, and the public knows it.

As Maher observed, also to big claps: “Wokeness is the opposite of what I grew up as liberalism. Liberalism was, ‘Let’s give the women an equal shot, this is like, let’s put a male in the swimming pool with women. I don’t get it.”

Nor do most people.

Many viewers commented on social media that it was shocking to witness two middle-aged men vociferously stand up for women’s rights, and not the only woman at the desk.

I’d go further and say it was shameful.

Porter’s Senate bid launch video boasted that “California needs a warrior in Washington…I speak hard truths… I demand justice…”

But not, it seems, when it comes to defending her own sex.

On her website, she describes herself as “smart, tough, fearless.”

Yet by so spectacularly failing to defend women on such a clear-cut issue, she came across as unintelligent, weak and cowardly.

Of course, Porter was just following the lead of Democrat leaders like President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris whose endless transgender virtue-signaling includes recently proposing a new rule legally barring schools from prohibiting most biological male trans athletes from competing with females.

By doing this, they’ve become active participants in eroding women’s rights, which is beyond parody for a supposedly “progressive” administration.

It’s also politically stupid.

They should heed the gender red flags coming from Britain, where the left has been left looking ridiculous both by the Sturgeon fiasco and by opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer’s repeated refusal to say whether a woman can have male genitals.

Under mounting pressure, Starmer finally declared last week that ‘99.9% of women haven’t got a penis’ only for Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to promptly counter him by saying the real percentage is 100% and emphasizing the “fundamental importance” of biological sex when it comes to protecting women’s rights and safety.

It took political courage for Sunak to say this in an atmosphere so illogically febrile that anyone who dares to defy the woke trans mindset gets shamed, abused, threatened, and even attacked – as we saw with Riley Gaines.

When I interviewed Sunak at No. 10 Downing Street earlier this year, I asked him the simple question that’s become such a hot potato for public figures, and which even the Supreme Court’s first black female justice Kentaji Brown Jackson pathetically failed to answer: “What is a woman?”

He didn’t hesitate before replying: “An adult human female.”

That’s where this whole debate needs to start, with a basic irrefutable biological fact.

Not, as Katie Porter demonstrated so feebly, with female-diminishing nonsensical woke garbage which denies science and destroys women’s rights.