Author and journalist Abigail Adams joins Betsy and Amanda to discuss the controversial topic of transgender teens and their impact on the culture and the way we view them. She talks about her new book, Irreversible Damage: How Teenage Girls Are Seduced by the Trans Craze, and why she thinks it s a big deal. She also talks about the effects of hormones and surgeries on teenage girls and how they affect their mental health, and why it s so important to address the issue of trans teens and the effects they have on our perception of them as "not good enough" or "not enough at all." And she explains why she believes it s important to talk about it at all, even if it s not a hot button issue for her own daughters. This episode was produced by Annie-Rose Strasser and edited by Rachel Goodman. Additional editing and production by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song was written and performed by Haley Shaw. Our ad music was made by Mark Phillips and our ad music is by Ian Dorsch. We were mixed by Matthew Boll. We are a production of Gimlet Media and produced by Ben Koppel. We have good sound design and editing assistance from Matthew Boll, and our editing and mixing was provided by Matt Knott, with additional mixing and mastering by Matt Newell Williams, and additional editing by Matthew Keyser, and a little help from Matthew Kuchins, and Rachel Ward, and music by Ben Kotnik, and Sarah Abdurrahman, and Matthew Herndon, and Bobby Lord, and Ben Kuchinsk, and Jack Williams, for this episode was edited and mixed by Rachel Barnard, and Alex Ward, for the music in this episode. . Thanks to our sponsor, Kaitlyn DeKorte for producing the music for the intro and outro music and background music, and for the sound design, and editing, and thanks to our mixing and mixing, and mastering of the background music by Bobby Lord for the score and editing by Jeff Perla, for our score and mixing by Rachel Ward for the mixing and sound design by Matthew McElroy, and the editing and editing and mastering, and Jeff Perlan for the background score, and also for the mastering and mastering and editing for the ambiance at this episode, and thank you for the editing by Andrew Wyderrowski for our mastering and mixing and editing at the mixing of the sound effects, and so much more.
00:02:31.000Yeah, because it's a minefield, because for some reason the activists who are not representative of transgender adults that I've met at all, but the activists had convinced the world that because, you know, they object to anyone's transition being questioned,
00:02:49.000we can't talk about a mental health issue facing teenage girls.
00:02:56.000There's an issue with some teenage girls who are on the spectrum who wind up getting sort of roped into this idea that that's what's wrong with them.
00:03:06.000Is that one of the things you cover in your book?
00:03:08.000Yeah, I actually don't deal with that specifically very much.
00:03:12.000And the reason is that's a whole book in and of itself.
00:03:15.000Because it is true that a lot of girls who are high-functioning autistic, and I did interview some experts in autism, and that's when I realized that's a book of its own, which is that a lot of girls who are high-functioning autistic, you know, they tend to fixate.
00:03:30.000And they are particularly susceptible to fixating on the idea that they might be a boy when it's introduced to them.
00:03:38.000So, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
00:03:40.000And they are one part of this phenomenon, but they're a big part.
00:03:43.000So the teenage girl part, so you're talking about teenage girls that are susceptible to influence?
00:03:51.000Are you talking about teenage girls that are confused?
00:03:54.000Like, why are there so many teenage girls that are going wrong?
00:03:58.000In this direction, like what do you think is happening?
00:04:00.000So these are the same girls that would have been anorexic, they would have been bulimic, and they would have been the high anxiety, very precocious girls, but they don't really fit in.
00:04:09.000They come to high school and they don't have friends, they don't have a clique for them.
00:04:12.000And they're so smart and they're so lonely because they're on the internet all the time and they're with mom all the time.
00:04:35.000You knew of people that their children were going through this.
00:04:39.000And how long did it take you before you decided to commit to pen to paper on this?
00:04:44.000So, I spent maybe a month or so just hearing the reports of the parents and reading the original study.
00:04:50.000There's an original study that the book is...
00:04:53.000Jumps off from, which is the Lisa Littman paper at Brown University, she's a public health researcher who looked into this, and she found that there was all of a sudden this huge epidemic in America of teenage girls deciding they were trans with their friends after social media emerging and pushing for hormones and surgeries.
00:05:11.000Have you had a conversation about this with someone who's a trans activist that says, well, maybe what's really going on, I mean, I'm just taking the argument of it, Maybe what's going on is there are a lot of trans women and there would be more or there's a lot of women who would turn trans become a man there would be more But they never had that door open to them before.
00:05:33.000And that maybe there's more trans people than we think.
00:05:41.000I like to look at ideas in both sides.
00:05:43.000I didn't have, like, I did not have a dog in this race.
00:05:45.000So let me tell you three reasons I don't think that's compelling.
00:05:48.000Number one, when Lisa Littman looked at the prevalence rate, she found that it's 70 times what we would expect within a friend group, which means it's highly concentrated in groups of friends.
00:06:01.000So we wouldn't expect that if it were randomly distributed among the population.
00:06:05.000But there are two other reasons I don't think that's right.
00:06:07.000Number one, if we're just revert to normal now that there's greater societal acceptance, say we're just reverting to a normal base rate of transgender women.
00:06:18.000Why are all the women in their 40s and 60s coming out as trans?
00:06:30.000We're seeing the same population that gets involved in cutting, demonic possession, witchcraft, anorexia bulimia, and convinces themselves there's a problem.
00:06:40.000And there's one – anyway, there's one last reason is that suicide rates are going up.
00:06:46.000But if these women who were living under a prior – you know, supposedly these – all these transgender, these real transgender people who are living under a more repressive regime and are now just finding themselves, you would think the suicide rate would be going down with greater acceptance.
00:07:01.000So when you're saying suicide rates are going up, you mean suicide rates with teens who turn trans?
00:07:07.000The rate of suicide among this population, first of all, among girls in general, is extraordinarily high.
00:07:14.000This is just one part of the mental health crisis they're in.
00:07:17.000And second of all, we know that the rate that these kids, these trans-identified kids, have very high rates of suicide, suicidal ideation.
00:07:25.000It's really, you know, an area of real concern.
00:07:28.000Well, there's definitely an area of real concern as well with social media.
00:07:33.000Did you read Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling of the American Mind?
00:07:37.000Yeah, and it was on your show that I really like this light bulb went on when I rewatched it because he talked about exactly this.
00:07:45.000He connects it to social media and he talked about on your show the huge rates we're seeing and anxiety, depression, all among these same girls.
00:07:55.000And, you know, putting it together with Lisa Littman's research and the other investigation I'd done I think it's really pretty clear that one more manifestation of these girls who we know are involved in a lot of cutting and all kinds of self-harm, this is one form of self-harm for them.
00:08:09.000So let's essentially say there's young teenagers that are confused and they're looking for something that makes them feel whole or something that makes them feel normal or something that gives them some sort of an escape from this angst that they suffer from.
00:08:27.000And you're thinking that turning trans is one of those pathways that they gravitate towards, but it might not necessarily be a good idea for them.
00:08:38.000If these girls were transitioning to boys and they were living great lives and their mental health was great, like it is for so many transgender adults, I wouldn't have written this book.
00:09:34.000I don't mean strange in a negative way.
00:09:39.000I mean you're dealing with hormones in a human body.
00:09:44.000Like you're taking a woman and you're injecting hormones into her body and you're saying that these exogenous hormones are what's going to fix her.
00:10:50.000We now have informed consent, which means you walk into Planned Parenthood, you sign a waiver, you decide you have gender dysphoria, you walk out that day with testosterone.
00:11:16.000So you could be a confused 18-year-old girl and walk into a Planned Parenthood self-diagnosing with no therapy at all and they'll prescribe testosterone and you can get your breast removed?
00:12:08.000They say you don't destroy the biological function.
00:12:10.000Like I didn't become a doctor to destroy someone's biological function for something that they've decided they have without even any oversight or – But the ones who do it say, look, this population is really desperate for surgery.
00:13:16.000So at 21, she wakes up with a hysterectomy.
00:13:20.000And she realized this whole thing had been a giant mistake.
00:13:23.000Her mental health had not improved at all and this was a huge like mistake and path she had gone on and all of a sudden she didn't know what to do.
00:13:31.000There was no one cheering her on anymore.
00:13:34.000Why do you think people get cheered on for this decision?
00:13:39.000I think in America we have a weakness for anything that gets cloaked in civil rights and part of that is very noble and good.
00:13:46.000Obviously the civil rights movement was extremely important in our country and extremely valuable and valorous.
00:13:55.000But now anything that's called a civil rights issue, you can't question.
00:13:59.000So I interview parents and they'll tell me they're almost all politically progressive.
00:14:04.000Most of the parents I call me are politically progressive and I interviewed almost five dozen of them now.
00:14:09.000And they'll tell me, like, I support LGBTQ, but I really – I'm not sure this is right for my daughter.
00:14:15.000Like, I don't think she's really gender dysphoric.
00:15:22.000I mean, you see it with artists and sometimes for the worst, right?
00:15:27.000You see it with comedians, which is my general area of expertise when it comes to this.
00:15:33.000You see Sometimes a comic will do something, particularly online, and then they get sort of celebrated for that, and then they start doing a lot of it.
00:15:42.000And it seems just ingenuous and weird, but they're like fishing for love.
00:15:46.000And you see it with social media, in particular with people.
00:15:49.000I mean, this is a lot of what happens with social justice warriors and online virtue signaling, right?
00:15:54.000They're trying to get this reaction from people.
00:15:57.000So if someone comes out as trans and everyone celebrates, if perhaps they're a little confused, And they come out as trans and no one says anything.
00:16:06.000And then they're just sort of, they have to sit and think about it for themselves.
00:16:57.000And I talked to transgender adults, like I talked to this, I interviewed this trans woman, Crystal, in my book, who was, you know, very, very nice.
00:17:05.000I interviewed her and she made the decision as an adult to transition.
00:17:09.000And she said to me, it was biological man, now a woman.
00:17:12.000And she said to me, you know, when Caitlin happened, it was a nightmare for me because I had been going wrong in my job.
00:17:20.000I know I didn't look perfectly like a woman, but I felt comfortable.
00:17:23.000Like I wasn't – now I had people crossing the street to hug me.
00:17:34.000Well, it's on one hand, see, this is where I'm torn.
00:17:37.000Because on one hand, if you are trans and you do feel better about this, but you confuse how people are going to react, and then all of a sudden people are celebrating you like, yes, this is great.
00:17:46.000I love the idea of an accepting society and people are open, loving, and happy that someone is making this transition.
00:17:54.000But on the other hand, I'm very aware of the influence of the masses and of just people's love and praise.
00:19:34.000And then all of a sudden she looks like someone who's an anime character, like the perfect woman, you know, in terms of like society's beauty standards.
00:19:42.000And that's not even really what she looks like.
00:19:45.000So if you're a kid and you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're looking at this picture of her, you're like, fuck!
00:21:57.000Because there's a reason that social contagion spreads among teenage girls specifically.
00:22:02.000Because you don't see tons of boys going around becoming anorexic because their friends are.
00:22:06.000If a teenage boy is depressed, his friend says to him, let's go play basketball or video game.
00:22:11.000He doesn't say, let's sit and talk about it.
00:22:14.000And because girls try to take on their friend's pain very naturally and meet their friends where they are and they care, they take on the pain of other people, especially their girlfriends, they are more likely to share and spread a peer contagion like Like anorexia,
00:22:31.000like cutting, and like trans identification.
00:22:44.000Anorexics, they are always really careful when they put them together.
00:22:47.000They have to be on hospital wards because we know that it will cause it to spread.
00:22:50.000Anorexia will become more severe and they'll spread it if you put a bunch of anorexic girls together And you don't take precautions to make sure that they're not just encouraging each other to lose more and more weight.
00:23:01.000Well, that sort of phenomenon exists in men as well, but it exists like a good aspect of it is if you have friends that are very ambitious and work really hard, you'll want to be ambitious and work really hard as well.
00:23:16.000And if you have friends that are losers and they want to drink and just waste their life, you tend to gravitate towards that, too, because you get reinforced by the behavior and the acceptance of your peers.
00:23:27.000Yeah, and men are more competitive, for sure.
00:23:30.000I think men are more outwardly competitive.
00:24:14.000Anybody who said that's fat is a troll.
00:24:18.000That's just a guy, probably, who's an asshole.
00:24:21.000I think it looked like it was a woman posting, actually, because I was curious about that.
00:24:26.000If I was going to be a troll, I'd pretend to be a woman and just be the meanest woman ever and just go on these women's pages and make them feel bad.
00:24:33.000I think there's a lot of people, men and women, that really enjoy hurting people's feelings online.
00:25:15.000Like, I just saw A Star is Born with Lady Gaga.
00:25:18.000She's not perfect looking, but she's an awesomely talented human being, like a woman that every young actress and singer should be looking up to.
00:25:28.000And she said to me, and I'll never forget this, she said to me, are you kidding?
00:25:31.000Do you see how they talk about her online?
00:25:35.000And I realized I was only listening to her albums and seeing her in the movie.
00:25:40.000But Helena was looking at social media and she was seeing women, you know, even as amazing as Lady Gaga torn apart.
00:25:48.000Yeah, again, this is the problem with social media that we kind of discussed in the green room about the percentage of people that are really fucking stupid that are posting.
00:25:59.000See, if you just have people commenting on things without knowing who they are...
00:26:05.000Like, if you work in an office and you have a bunch of people in your office that you respect and they're your peers and they say, Abigail, I think this.
00:26:15.000And you go, hmm, that's interesting, Mary, because...
00:26:18.000I respect your opinion, so I'm going to have to take that into consideration.
00:26:21.000But if you just read some no face, no name, you don't know who the fuck it is, blocked account, and they write something mean, you will take that Into your brain the same way you'll take your friend Mary, who you respect and love.
00:26:38.000It's like, it's a problem with human beings the way we process information.
00:26:41.000If we don't have, like, if you know that someone's a moron, they say something to you, you're like, well, Mike's a moron.
00:27:00.000And when people are doing it specifically just to be mean, it can be very, very confusing.
00:27:06.000And it just highlights the really poor quality of discourse that you get when you're reading comments and you're dealing with social media.
00:27:15.000YouTube comments and Twitter and all that stuff.
00:27:17.000It's just a really bad way to communicate with people and most of the people that are saying shitty things would not say those shitty things if they were right in front of you.
00:31:16.000I mean, everybody's different, but some of them are stuck with a 5 o'clock shadow for life.
00:31:21.000How does a kid know whether they are someone who's being easily influenced and someone who is giving in to this anxiety and you are a part of the way you're describing a contagion amongst your friends?
00:31:37.000Versus someone who's genuinely trans, like someone who genuinely is born in the wrong body.
00:31:42.000So we have a hundred year diagnostic history of gender dysphoria.
00:32:03.000Only want to Do you know play with girl toys and they sometimes they hate their sexual organ.
00:32:08.000I mean sometimes you know it's a severe persistent insistent consistent feeling and then a lot of them would grow out of it and some of them wouldn't and they would become what we used to call transsexuals.
00:32:19.000Now we're seeing an explosion of young women.
00:35:47.000Is it a good sign that we're, like, more progressive now, more open-minded?
00:35:51.000But because of that, things have gotten a little slippery in terms of what we celebrate and what we should rationally step back and objectively analyze and say, hey, is this really the right way to handle this?
00:36:03.000I think one of the things that happened was in 2012, WPATH, which is the transgender health organization, worldwide organization, changed to an informed consent model saying that people should be able to get the drugs they want or claim to need Based on their own recognizance.
00:36:27.000You sign a form, you're aware of the risk, and then you get it.
00:36:29.000And the problem was, maybe they felt that there was too much gatekeeping, as they call it, or too much questioning.
00:36:36.000They felt that there were people who weren't getting the medical care they needed.
00:36:40.000The problem was, you hit 18, and the age of medical consent varies by state.
00:37:00.000We were talking before we got on the air about Children like really young children transitioning you were saying that most people who transition know when they're very young That is a real That's a hot-button topic for people children and hormone blockers and children What I keep going to is if you are a woman and You you know,
00:37:29.000you're a woman Why do you need to get these hormones injected into your body?
00:37:38.000What are we doing with all these hormones?
00:37:42.000Imagine you're a person who says, I need to transition to be a woman and I know that I need a chemical that I've never had in my body before.
00:37:52.000And if I get that chemical injected, then I'm going to be happy.
00:38:48.000Yeah, which bans so-called conversion therapy, even on gender identity, which means that therapists could lose their license if they say, hold on, I know you want to transition.
00:38:56.000I know you think your problem is gender dysphoria.
00:38:58.000Let's talk about some of your other problems.
00:39:01.000So a therapist, if you're a 15 year old kid and you come to a therapist and you say, all my friends are going trans and I think I'm trans too, the doctor has to essentially go with you on this little path you're on?
00:39:16.000I mean, the American, the number of associations, American Medical Association, Endocrine Society, I mean, you name it, American Pediatric Society, you know, all these medical professional organizations, most of them have adopted affirmative care, which means their job is to affirm the patient's self-diagnosis with regard to this one issue.
00:39:34.000I mean, they're, you know, it's turning doctors into, I don't know, life coaches, right?
00:39:41.000How much time have we been doing this for?
00:39:43.000How long is the time period when this really started to escalate?
00:40:11.000I mean, these girls are getting these things so easily, and they're 15, they're 16, they're 17, they're 18. How many did you interview when you were doing this book?
00:43:27.000I can give you a bunch of other statistics.
00:43:30.000One of the reasons it's hard to know exactly how many, aside from the fact that we don't have a centralized control of this, Is because you don't need an actual diagnosis of gender dysphoria to get testosterone.
00:43:44.000In England, where you have a centralized medical care and you do need a diagnosis, they know that the numbers for adolescent girls are up over 4,000%.
00:45:30.000Cults don't start because they make sense.
00:45:33.000Cults start because people want to belong.
00:45:35.000And the idea that there's not a difference between someone who's willing to join some crazy radical cult to belong versus any other sort of social movement That's a lot of what people do.
00:45:50.000You're seeing it now with a lot of our society.
00:45:55.000There's paths that people go on to where they see other people doing it, and they see a lot of people getting celebrated, and so they go down that path.
00:46:03.000This really is a lot of the foundation of the social media influencer.
00:46:07.000One of the reasons why they're doing that.
00:46:10.000It's because they see other people do it, and they get this sort of positive reaction from it, and then they wind up saying, oh, well, this is the path that I'm going to go on.
00:46:19.000To make the jump from that sort of thinking and behavior to changing your gender is where people hesitate.
00:46:26.000They're like, is she right about this?
00:47:31.000I mean, I get so many doctors will contact me like we live in the Soviet Union.
00:47:36.000They will say, oh my god, I can't talk about this, but I really, you know, I have to let you know that what's going on here is crazy and I don't agree with this diagnosis and it's clearly socially influenced and, you know, all this stuff.
00:47:47.000And you think, like, you can't give your medical opinion without getting fired?
00:47:53.000Yeah, this is dangerous, but one of the things that I see is when women or trans women, when a male transitions to being a woman and then enters into women's spaces, they do so with the aggressiveness of a male.
00:48:10.000And this is something that a lot of women have been very upset about, particularly TERFs, you know, trans, exclusionary, radical feminists.
00:48:18.000They have a real hard time with Biological males talking about feminist issues and shutting down discussion about whether or not trans people are women, whether or not they should be in these spaces, whether or not they should be in these conversations.
00:49:20.000Like, you're not even gonna make the commitment?
00:49:22.000Like, if you're gonna be in a shower with a woman, Jesus Christ.
00:49:25.000Like, saying you're a woman and having a penis and being in a shower with a bunch of women, I mean, we gotta come up with some sort of a way of protecting young girls from people who are doing things like that.
00:49:37.000You shouldn't have to see a naked man In a shower, if you're a biological female and, you know, you're 15 years old and you think you're showering with your team and a male comes in.
00:50:59.000And it's this denial of reality that it's not like you don't want someone to be happy, but for someone to say that it's fair for a biological male to compete against biological females, that's crazy.
00:51:13.000And when you have this conversation with people, I always say, okay, well, do you think men should be able to join women's teams?
00:51:42.000You know, when one of those gets in your division and you're a woman and she happens to also be a woman and she has naturally more testosterone, well, I guess you're fucked.
00:53:08.000I would love it if everybody just treated them like they're a woman and respected them with their new name or whatever they want to do.
00:53:13.000But when you get involved in athletic competition, where I took a lot of heat was when it was about mixed martial arts, where there was a mixed martial arts fighter who transitioned.
00:53:22.000And there was just a story written about it the other day.
00:53:24.000It was a ridiculous story saying that the science...
00:53:28.000Protesting it is junk science which is horse shit and this person was a male for 30 years Became a woman for two and started beating the fuck out of women without telling them that she had been a male most of her life and And people were so that was where I really realized that's when I first started to realize that There's some crazy psychological connection to this.
00:53:54.000The arguments that people have, these progressive arguments, they're saying these things not necessarily because they've objectively, rationally dissected this problem and looked at it in terms of pros and cons and what's really happening.
00:54:11.000They looked at it from an ideological standpoint and a very rigid one.
00:54:14.000Like if you want to be accepted by progressive people, that is a woman, always a woman.
00:54:19.000This was back when I used to talk to people on Twitter, but I had this one conversation with this woman and she said that she was always a woman.
00:54:25.000And I said, no, she was a man for 30 years.
00:54:28.000And she goes, no, she was always a woman.
00:54:29.000I said, even when she got a woman pregnant and had a baby?
00:54:51.000Because the idea is that trans women in this Olympics of oppression, trans women are deemed higher on the scale.
00:55:00.000They're more oppressed and more marginalized than biological women.
00:55:04.000So biological women get fucked over in this design.
00:55:07.000Because so few people are trans, This person can do this and everyone can celebrate and if you're not competing against her, so what?
00:55:17.000No one has a stake in the game, so they don't really care.
00:55:21.000And the women that fought her without knowing...
00:55:23.000See, I'm in full support of people fighting her if they know that she's to be a man.
00:55:28.000If that's what you want to do, I'm in full support of people skydiving, riding bulls, you want to jump motocross bikes and do flips, do whatever the fuck you want.
00:55:36.000But you should know what you're getting into.
00:55:38.000If you show up to go on a pony ride and someone puts you on a bull, that's not good.
00:55:45.000You should know that you're about to get on a bull.
00:55:47.000If you think you're going to fight a biological female, it turns out to be a man who was a man for 30 years and then transitioned to be a female.
00:55:56.000And has been on natural male hormones all throughout puberty, all through his life, and then becomes a she, and now you're going to fight her and they're not going to tell you?
00:56:44.000And lesbians, he's like, it's like different things.
00:56:47.000They don't necessarily pal around together.
00:56:49.000Yeah, I interviewed a lot of lesbians for the book who have really like taught me a lot about just how beaten down they are in the broader culture today.
00:56:57.000Because, you know, their groups get infiltrated.
00:56:59.000They have these underground social groups now.
00:57:02.000I've heard this from many lesbians across the country.
00:57:04.000They have underground – and the reason they need these vetting processes for their social groups is trans activists will try to come in insisting they're lesbians.
00:57:13.000Men – That become women, they retain some of the characteristics that make men gross.
00:57:20.000And part of that is being aggressive and competitive and wanting to dominate spaces.
00:57:25.000And this is some of the things that a lot of these TERFs have had a problem with.
00:57:28.000And this is why they became trans-exclusionary radical feminists, because they felt like these biological males were entering into their spaces with that sort of male energy.
00:57:38.000I mean even the name TERF, like they don't call them – nobody calls themselves – I mean I guess they do now as a joke.
00:58:42.000I've seen people say things that they really believe and then get attacked and then adjust and say something that is more to appease the masses than it is their actual thoughts on the matter.
00:58:52.000And it's hard because they can get fired.
00:58:54.000You know, you can get in real trouble.
01:00:37.000We vary so wildly that I think for someone to look at a teenager and come to this conclusion that you, in fact, would be happier, That should be an arduous process where you're presented with all sorts of opposing information.
01:00:52.000It's almost like you should be at a debate.
01:00:55.000There should be pros and cons presented.
01:00:59.000It should be something where you're looking at all life.
01:01:03.000Like your future will be radically different if you take path A versus path B. Right.
01:01:10.000So that's how medicine is discussed at other types of medicine at medical conferences, right?
01:01:15.000They have a new drug out for cholesterol and there's a conference and everyone discusses the risks and benefits and what are the harms and what is the percent chance that this could hurt?
01:01:23.000You know, everybody is open in discussing it.
01:01:25.000And whenever I talk to doctors who, you know, work around this issue, maybe they're an endocrinologist or whatever, they will tell me that when they attend medical conferences and transgender medicine comes up, it is a purely celebration festival.
01:02:46.000The one that I think I really struggled with or that surprised me big time was people always try to get me to say it's child abuse to put your kid on puberty blockers and whatnot.
01:03:00.000And I don't say that for a reason because I've interviewed the parents.
01:03:03.000And once you interview parents of kids that – you know, parents who have transitioned their kids, you start talking to them and you realize that they thought they were doing what was right for their kid.
01:03:18.000And they've been encouraged by mental health professionals who should have been looking out for the child that if you don't do this, your child could kill herself or himself, you know.
01:03:30.000And sometimes I'll bring up the risks with them and they won't have heard about them.
01:03:34.000I'll say, but, you know, just checking with you, you know, what about the long-term, you know, maybe you're foreclosing orgasm.
01:03:42.000Like if your kid goes through all this and goes on the, you know, that to testosterone and then gets the surgeries, because they never went through normal puberty, they may never experience orgasm.
01:03:56.000Or, you know, we're putting so many capacities at risk.
01:04:00.000Well, there's a real problem with the way people are willing to discuss things, that they're not willing to, in any way, address the negative aspects of transitioning.
01:04:10.000And one of the things about hormone blockers that drove me mad was they were trying to say that you could put a child on hormone blockers, and if the child changed their mind, there would be no problem whatsoever.
01:05:48.000But that, when you're talking about a boy hating their penis and the way they react, they'll let you know.
01:05:53.000Not everybody lets you know when they're in agony or in pain or...
01:05:57.000Kids, preschool age kids are pretty, in a typical family where there's not, you know, been abuse or mistrust or whatever, you know, kids pretty much announce, in my experience, announce almost everything.
01:06:47.000I've never taken that out of position because a lot of psychologists that I really respect haven't said that.
01:06:52.000A lot of doctors that I respect haven't said that there's no one they could help.
01:06:57.000Could you imagine that those doctors and psychologists would be in fear of expressing that they don't think it's a good idea the same way you were discussing therapists will secretly talk to you about the problems of them expressing themselves honestly?
01:07:13.000Like, say there's one kid who could be helped by puberty blockers.
01:07:16.000Until – I mean, I explored a lot of these issues with a lot of people.
01:07:19.000Until, you know, psychologists I respect, people who have been very open on a lot of this stuff, until they tell me there's no children who could ever be helped by puberty blockers, I'm not someone who will come out in favor of abandoning.
01:07:32.000But that begs the question, how would one know whether your kid is the kid that could benefit from puberty blockers versus one who you really should just let become an adult and go through all the various changes that children go through?
01:07:53.000So not doing anything, not doing a major intervention is probably in many cases a totally safe bet.
01:08:01.000In other words, you don't have to go in there and immediately – I mean part of what's crazy about our age is we think the moment our kids are in distress, we need to medicate them.
01:08:15.000We are pushing this accommodation of every discomfort and everything our kids say.
01:08:21.000And it's pretty safe to say that there's going to be a lot of people listening to this that don't even want us talking about this because you're a stereotypical biological female.
01:09:12.000They'll say to me, you know, basically, and what they don't say is, a bunch of trans activists are offended that you're talking about teenage girls, the mental health of teenage girls, not the activists.
01:10:39.000And objectively, the way you're describing that particular time period in a child's development, it is fraught with peril, right?
01:10:49.000There's so much going on in a girl's life as she's transitioning from being a kid to being a woman and going through all the hormones and all the society and all the chaos of school and social stuff.
01:12:57.000They're starting to ban biological males from competing in women's divisions of powerlifting because they've literally blown the roof off what world records used to be.
01:13:10.000I mean, there's one who was winning these world records and you looked at her and you're like, what in the fuck are you even talking about?
01:13:20.000They can probably bench twice or something, right?
01:13:22.000Well, we're talking about squats and cleans and presses and Olympic lifts, which are particularly...
01:13:28.000I mean, these are really difficult to do anyway.
01:13:33.000And to achieve the type of numbers that these trans women are achieving, they're world record numbers because they've never had a woman do that before because they really weren't born women.
01:15:31.000And what if all of a sudden not only did you never get to hear about Chris Everett because she was beaten long ago by a biological man, now you have a man who says he's a woman who's now—well, how many girls are lining up to be just like him?
01:15:58.000I mean, literally, she was out before anybody.
01:16:02.000I mean, we're dealing with a really insane byproduct of these times where people are dealing with social media, Organized groups of people attack people for having divergent opinions and this need that people have to be loved and not have people attack them.
01:16:22.000So they'll alter their stance on things in order to appease the mob, in order to align themselves with the progressive groupthink.
01:16:57.000If it was your child that got screwed over, if your kid was going for a basketball scholarship and all of a sudden a biological male was on her team, I don't know if you know the story about the 50-year-old biological male who transitioned, went to high school, played college basketball,
01:17:12.000and then transitioned to being a woman and then went back to school as a woman and was in his 50s.
01:17:19.000And playing women's college basketball.
01:20:18.000And I think these activists would prefer to keep scaring people to the point where nobody does read this because they think being trans should never be questioned.
01:20:29.000Nothing about being trans ever should be questioned.
01:20:32.000Right, which is crazy because you know what?
01:20:36.000This has nothing to do with the activists.
01:20:55.000And that just shouldn't be controversial.
01:20:58.000Yeah, and if this book reaches one parent that can reach one child and show them this book and explain to them that there's something going on that can influence you physically, mentally, psychologically, you could be very confused and you could think that this is the path towards happiness and cause yourself irreparable damage and still not be happy.
01:22:01.000I can't believe I get – my daughter started down this road and I can't believe I get the benefit because of other parents who went through this who were brave enough to talk.
01:22:21.000Like what an amazing – like that's who I get calls from.
01:22:24.000Yeah, and it seems like that's really the only way these people that are going through this with their children are ever going to get any light at the end of the tunnel is to see that some people have already done this and to learn from the mistakes of the past and to learn from the problems that these kids have encountered.
01:22:41.000Upon transitioning and that this group think model, this contagion as you describe it, does happen to kids.
01:24:14.000But kids who are looking for a way to manifest their distress, they look to the culture and they look to their friends.
01:24:23.000What could be done different in terms of some education or programs or some sort of psychological help in groups of kids to let kids know in school like we address all these different aspects of a child's development like mathematics and English and history but we spend very little time addressing the one thing that is probably most important is how they interface with the world psychology and what what's wrong what's going on inside of them and We're
01:25:19.000The problem is, is that these kids are getting indoctrinated instead of, you know, instead of exploring a topic, they're getting indoctrinated in gender ideology.
01:27:33.000It sounds like you're doing a good thing.
01:27:35.000You know, like all activism is under the same blanket, whether it's, you know, anti-racism activism or, you know, gender nonconformity, non-binary, 50 different pronoun activism.
01:27:49.000And, you know, it's a lot of it is indoctrination.
01:27:51.000It's indoctrination to progressive groupthink.
01:27:54.000And it's not necessarily what you would really think of.
01:27:57.000When you think of activism, you think of the civil rights movement.
01:28:01.000You think of positive things and changes that we want to take place.
01:28:05.000But when you're dealing with children and developing human beings and minds, and you're dealing with an influential person who's standing in front of these people who's older, We're good to go.
01:28:47.000So they're reading books like I Am Jazz in California to kids, and that suggests that you might – and it tells kids that you might have a boy's brain and a girl's body.
01:28:55.000They're being taught this as if this is true, right?
01:28:58.000Now, of course, there's no evidence that you could ever have a boy's brain in a girl's body.
01:29:04.000But they're taught that alongside things that are factual, that are biological.
01:29:09.000But if someone is a trans person, so if you are a boy who feels like you should be a girl, wouldn't you think that that is how you would describe it?
01:29:18.000You have a girl's brain in a boy's body?
01:29:23.000I mean, there are some evidence that there are neurological differences, you know, that, you know, is certainly worthy of study.
01:29:32.000I mean, it's open to various kinds of interpretation and it's a new area that's being studied and there may be differences in transgender people's brains.
01:30:14.000I mean, it's such a hot-button subject.
01:30:19.000And when this gets discussed, anytime it gets discussed on this podcast, and I'm assuming on any podcast, It's just people explode and they get so angry about it.
01:30:28.000But where people are getting more and more sensible is when it comes to sports.
01:30:33.000I mean, that seems to be where the rubber hits the road.
01:30:38.000It seems to be where people are going, hey, this doesn't seem right.
01:30:43.000You know, and particularly like the fighting one to me was like so egregious and so obvious.
01:30:49.000I'm hopeful that this is a transitionary period for our culture and that we realize, like, yes, you should be kind.
01:30:57.000Yes, you should be progressive and open to all these different people that have all these different ways of being and existing in this world, but not at the expense of other people.
01:31:07.000In particular, let's not pretend that that 6'5 gentleman who's 50 is the same as your 18-year-old daughter who's in college.
01:31:58.000Did they have similar sort of issues with transitioning?
01:32:01.000Yeah, so teenage boys is a harder case because I think for a few reasons.
01:32:05.000Are there boys whose moms will call me and say, And I didn't focus on the boys and I didn't do it for a really important reason,
01:32:28.000but I think it's worthy of explanation and exploration.
01:32:32.000I didn't focus on the boys because with the girls it's clear.
01:32:36.000Because we have known for 100 years that there's a thing called gender dysphoria and it overwhelmingly afflicts males.
01:32:42.000And now, out of nowhere, across America and across the West, the predominant demographic is teenage girls with no childhood history.
01:32:51.000We know that's not typical gender dysphoria.
01:32:55.000So then the question is, what is it, right?
01:32:58.000But with boys, it's more complicated because there have always been these boys, these males, who have had real gender dysphoria.
01:33:03.000So I think a lot more research has to be done in that area.
01:33:07.000And the problem is, it's hard to do it.
01:33:10.000Lisa Littman, who's the one who did the study on the teenage girls, she's been trying to study detransitioners.
01:33:16.000She's doing great studies on detransitioners, women who regret it because, well, all people who regret it, but a lot of them are now women.
01:33:23.000And the reason, of course, they're now women is because they never had gender dysphoria.
01:33:26.000So they weren't cured by medical transition.
01:33:29.000And they're called detransitioners, right?
01:33:32.000And she's already had her study undermined because a bunch of people, trans activists on social media said, everyone come and validate the study essentially.
01:34:08.000And that's cancel culture right there.
01:34:11.000That's shutting down medical study that will help us understand more about gender transition and more about gender dysphoria and also this population of teenage girls.
01:34:24.000Yeah, I was looking at a discussion about, there was a particular website that was dealing with male to female transitioners who then went back to being male again.
01:34:33.000And they were furious at this page and furious at these people for expressing their story.
01:34:40.000And I was like, I was looking at this and I was thinking to myself, it's so strange that you're looking at, when you're talking about someone who transitions, You're talking about a very small percentage of the population that is a male that feels they should be a female to begin with.
01:34:59.000And then you have this surgery, and you have this chemical or hormonal intervention, and you change your body, and you change who you are, and then regret.
01:35:22.000Imagine a person who's gone through this change, so you know that you are very different than someone like Jamie, who doesn't have this issue, right?
01:35:35.000So why would you think that there's no way anybody could go through that and have regret?
01:35:42.000Because people vary so much, but they were so in opposition to these people's stories, and they were saying that essentially this is These people putting this website out was hate speech, and this is promoting anti-trans feelings and thinking.
01:36:01.000Because their line is that detransitioners don't exist, or they're so marginal, we shouldn't even discuss it.
01:36:29.000And I guess they would point to someone who's anti-trans would point to that website and go see these anecdotal stories of people that transitioned that had a horrible time of it and hated it and went back.
01:37:06.000OK. So you've got two types of people who say they're transgender.
01:37:10.000One who's genuinely suffering gender dysphoria and always has in childhood and another who discovered it on the internet with her friends.
01:37:16.000So now we're supposed to pretend those are the exact same conditions and we're not supposed to look at them or explore them or figure out what's the difference.
01:37:24.000Now, when you present – have you ever presented this discussion to someone who opposes you and how – or this argument to someone who opposes you and how do they treat that?
01:37:33.000Just what you just said right there, which is very concise.
01:37:51.000So sometimes people will say, and I get this, and I actually think this is a good response to me.
01:37:56.000They'll say to me, but if you make it harder, if your book makes it harder, number one, people are going to misconstrue it.
01:38:03.000They're going to think this applies to everybody, which is a legitimate concern, right?
01:38:08.000And then somebody who's really gender dysphoric who needs these surgeries won't be able to get them, right?
01:38:14.000And also they're going to think that everybody would regret and no one's helped by transition and some of these people might, you know, come to harm because of that.
01:38:22.000I think that's a legitimate response, right?
01:38:24.000And it's not compelling to me because my attitude is let's discuss it all.
01:38:49.000This agenda is very ideologically driven that anybody who even thinks they might be trans should be trans.
01:38:55.000And the more trans people, the better.
01:38:58.000The more kids that transition, the better.
01:39:00.000And then they say, but some are gender fluid.
01:39:03.000So the activists will say, some kids are gender fluid.
01:39:05.000And you say, well, then why would you push permanent hormonal intervention and surgeries on someone who might later decide that they were fine as a woman, right?
01:39:14.000I mean, that you've just acknowledged with gender fluid.
01:39:16.000I mean, this thing is all over the place.
01:40:00.000If someone feels they were born a woman, why can't you just be a woman?
01:40:06.000If someone feels they're born binary or asexual or whatever, or gender fluid, just be who you are.
01:40:14.000I think in part because of social media and in part because of the gender ideology in the schools, everybody needs their little identity, right?
01:40:22.000So we're dividing people up like insects, right?
01:40:25.000Everybody needs their special bucket, their special label.
01:40:28.000Well, that was one of the weirdest things about the Caitlyn Jenner thing, when she transitioned and then had surgery.
01:40:33.000You know, there was an interview where she was saying, well, I finally did get the surgery.
01:40:39.000Not that I wasn't completely a woman before the surgery.
01:40:44.000And I was thinking, well, why would you get the surgery then?
01:42:19.000Because, yeah, when I was 13, I was a fucking moron.
01:42:23.000Thank God I never had an idea to change my gender when I was 13. Right.
01:42:28.000It's, I'm hoping that over time people realize you can be both open-minded and progressive and kind and also aware of the pitfalls of a very real problem.
01:43:00.000They're not doing themselves any good and they're not doing the whole idea of being a trans person any good because they make people associate trans people With the types of mobs that attack Martina Navratilova, the type of mobs that go after these studies that show detransitioners and what their experience were and fuck up the study.
01:43:35.000And I just say that, you know, whenever I'm interviewed, I say, listen, this is not, you know, the activists don't represent all transgender adults by a long shot.
01:44:57.000This is a condition that young girls are facing as they become adults and going through these crazy hormonal transitions and social transitions, and it can damage them.