Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is standing by comments he made earlier this year against transgender people.

During a National Religious Broadcasters convention in February, Huckabee joked that he wishes he had thought to claim he was a transgender woman in high school to gain access to the girls' locker room.

“Wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” Huckabee said. “I'm pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, 'Coach, I think I'd rather shower with the girls today.'”

Huckabee also suggested that transgender people are a threat to society.

“For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize that the fact that we are now in city after city watching ordinances say that your 7-year-old daughter, if she goes into the restroom, cannot be offended, and you can't be offended, if she's greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man,” he said.

BuzzFeed brought attention to the comments the day after the debut of Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair.

Huckabee defended his remarks during an appearance on the radio talk show of Iowa conservative Steve Deace.

Huckabee agree with Deace's description of the criticism of his off-color joke as an example of the media's “misplaced priorities.”

“And by the way, Steve, I take nothing back from that speech,” he continued. “I’m kind of glad it's posted because people, if they watch the whole clip, what they're going to see is that I'm giving a commonsense answer to the insanity that's going on out there. Because I hear people, everybody wants to be politically correct. Everybody wants to be loved by the media and loved by the left and loved by the elitists. But, you know, I know I'm not going to be, so let's just get it over with. I'd rather be a commonsense candidate for people who did take their brains to work today.”

Huckabee had earlier dismissed the criticism by saying that the only people focused on the comments were the media.

“What people talk to me about is not some speech I made four months ago, and it's not some cultural issue,” he told reporters in Little Rock, Arkansas. “People talk to me about the loss of their job, they talk to me about the threats to this country, and that's what I'm focused on. It's why I'm running for president. It's not to entertain the masses with comments on the culture news of the day.”