Christian conservative and former presidential candidate Ben Carson has called changing gender the “height of absurdity.”

Carson endorsed Donald Trump's presidential ambitions on Tuesday, telling Republican National Convention (RNC) attendees in Cleveland that America “may never recover” from a Hillary Clinton administration and asking, “Are we willing to elect as president someone who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer?” Carson was talking about community organizer Saul Alinsky, whom Carson said had dedicated his book Rules for Radicals to Lucifer. Alinsky dedicated his book to his wife Irene, but in the book he describes Lucifer as the “first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.”

Speaking at the Florida delegation breakfast in a Cleveland suburb, Carson, a vocal opponent of LGBT rights, compared changing gender to changing ethnicity.

“I gotta tell you, for thousands of years mankind has known what a man is and what a woman is. And now all of the sudden we don't know anymore,” Carson said to applause. “Is that the height of absurdity?”

“Because today you feel like a woman, even though everything about you genetically says that you're a man, or vice versa.”

“Wouldn't that be the same as if you woke up tomorrow morning after seeing a movie about Afghanistan or reading some books and you say, 'You know what, I'm Afghanistan. I know I don't look that way, my ancestors came from Sweden, or something, I don't know, but I really am. And if you say I'm not, you're a racist.' This is how absurd we have become.”