Based Camp - April 22, 2024


2024: Trans Pendulum in Retrograde (The Study, The Leaks, & The Cass Report)


Episode Stats

Length

57 minutes

Words per Minute

186.54236

Word Count

10,665

Sentence Count

643

Misogynist Sentences

11

Hate Speech Sentences

35


Summary

In this episode, Caitlin and Simone discuss the new data from the Canadian Sexuality Research Collaborative and the controversial Cass report on gender non-contentedness in early adolescence and early adulthood. They discuss what it means and why it's important to know more about it.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone! It is exciting to be here with you today.
00:00:03.680 You and I have done a number of episodes around trans issues before
00:00:07.960 and trying to get to what is most likely the truth about this stuff
00:00:12.200 because it is so politically charged.
00:00:14.640 It is very hard to get accurate readings of what's going on one way or the other.
00:00:19.240 If you're the type of person who's really into sexuality research, which we are,
00:00:22.040 we've written a book on the subject.
00:00:23.440 While I consider those episodes pretty comprehensive in terms of our views of the issue,
00:00:29.000 there have been three really big events that have happened since the recording of those episodes
00:00:35.600 and each of which are really worth diving into and we'll use that episode to do this.
00:00:42.960 The three events that I am speaking, of course, are about the CAS report.
00:00:47.840 Huge.
00:00:48.600 For people who don't know what this is, this is a report that did a review
00:00:52.720 and it's like now the gold standard that the UK is using to determine how they relate
00:00:58.320 to trans treatment, particularly in individuals under the age of 18.
00:01:03.340 And it came out pretty critical of a lot of the stuff going out on the field right now.
00:01:07.180 Another was a big study on longitudinally on trans individuals
00:01:12.700 and the trans community was pretty unhappy with the findings that it had.
00:01:17.180 With the biggest, from my perspective, being that of gender-conforming youth,
00:01:23.040 over 90% end up being totally okay with their gender when they're adults.
00:01:30.140 This is obviously a very important thing to know when you're looking at things like affirming gender care.
00:01:35.420 And then the final one was a leak of one of the major trans organizations
00:01:39.760 that sets a lot of the policy positions for Canada and the United States.
00:01:43.620 And the leak, a lot of people who are really anti-trans or I'd say overly trans-skeptical
00:01:51.560 have taken this leak to be uniquely damning.
00:01:54.900 And I think that there's actually a more nuanced perspective on some of these emails
00:01:58.460 and what's going on with this.
00:02:00.280 So I want to go over every one of these in turn with you and with our audience
00:02:05.020 to try to find out what's really going on here.
00:02:08.000 Would you like to know more?
00:02:09.040 So the first thing I wanted to do was to go into the study,
00:02:12.660 because to me, this is most interesting.
00:02:15.040 The Cass Report is more just like a political thing that's happening.
00:02:18.240 It's not really new information.
00:02:20.560 This study is new information.
00:02:23.320 And it's really interesting information.
00:02:25.400 And it's called Development of Gender Non-Contentedness During Adolescence and Early Adulthood.
00:02:30.960 And it came out in February 2024.
00:02:33.600 So this is what the study says.
00:02:35.000 We found that gender non-contentedness is most common around the age of 11
00:02:40.880 and that the prevalence decreases with age.
00:02:44.540 Moreover, we identified three different developmental trajectory types of gender non-contentedness
00:02:49.980 throughout adolescent and early adulthood.
00:02:52.420 One, the majority, 78% of the sample,
00:02:55.360 consistently indicated to never experience any gender non-contentedness.
00:02:59.600 So 78% of people at around the age of 11 just are totally okay with their gender.
00:03:04.140 All right.
00:03:06.380 Two, a group reporting gender non-contentedness in early adolescence,
00:03:11.100 but not any longer in adulthood.
00:03:13.920 19% of the sample.
00:03:15.320 So this is a population that starts feeling very non-contented with their gender
00:03:20.260 and then gets over it as they get older or no longer has these feelings.
00:03:24.160 These are transient feelings to them.
00:03:25.780 And we'll go into this group in a bit more detail in a second.
00:03:28.420 Three, a small group, 2% of the sample,
00:03:31.440 showing the opposite pattern of increasingly reporting gendered non-contentedness with age.
00:03:37.600 We found that female sex and participating in the clinical rather than the population cohort
00:03:42.980 was associated with increasing gendered non-contentedness.
00:03:46.660 So this is actually really important, what they said there,
00:03:51.320 being in the clinical, not the population cohort.
00:03:54.500 So what that means is when this study was conducted,
00:03:57.940 a portion of the participants that they were using were from the general population.
00:04:03.820 A portion of the population they were using was from clinical transitioning groups.
00:04:10.000 Okay.
00:04:10.220 All right.
00:04:10.540 So what they're saying here is that this percentage,
00:04:13.780 so if you're taking like a random shotgunning,
00:04:15.760 and just in case you haven't done the numbers in your head,
00:04:18.140 this means that of the people who at the age of 11 feel gendered non-contentedness,
00:04:21.920 over 90%, this feeling persists in them.
00:04:25.600 They do not feel this in adults.
00:04:26.900 It's actually mentioned in the studies that of this percent of the cohort,
00:04:30.440 not a single one of them felt gendered non-contentedness by the time they hit their 20s.
00:04:35.280 And this harkens back to the research that you had done when writing
00:04:37.980 the pragmatist's guide to sexuality, that sort of showed that a lot of people
00:04:40.960 either weren't super married to their birth sex, or otherwise just not like...
00:04:47.200 We're okay with playing around with different genders.
00:04:49.500 Yeah.
00:04:49.940 Now, what gets really interesting here is because this comes from the clinical cohort,
00:04:55.520 it means that actually in the gender, the general population more broadly,
00:04:59.780 these numbers are probably even lower of this group where this feeling increases over time,
00:05:04.180 which means that it's probably low, like the number of people who have gendered non-contentedness
00:05:09.260 when they're around 11 that end up not having it when they're adults,
00:05:12.200 this part of the cohort is likely much, much larger than 90%.
00:05:15.860 I might go as far as to say 98%, given what the data is showing here,
00:05:21.220 which is obviously a really devastating point for trans individuals.
00:05:28.960 So a lot of them have been attacking this study pretty vociferously.
00:05:32.760 But I think that this shows a...
00:05:36.920 But there's also individuals in the trans community who see the study and are quite excited about it
00:05:40.980 because they're like, it does show that you have this 2% where the problem gets bigger over time.
00:05:46.260 And this is really interesting.
00:05:48.440 So I'm going to keep reading some more because the key question then for the trans community
00:05:53.120 is how do you distinguish between these two groups?
00:05:56.640 Yeah. How do you tell when it's like real trans versus transient trans?
00:06:03.060 Yeah. Transient gendered non-contentedness that has to do with puberty,
00:06:06.700 which I've said in previous videos is a common part of childhood as being non-content with your gender
00:06:11.480 or the changes that are happening with your body over puberty.
00:06:14.660 That's normal.
00:06:15.800 And so what this study now does is it changes the entire playing field of transness
00:06:19.960 because we're also going to go over it in the context of previous studies
00:06:22.400 because it really is the best of the long-term studies in this space.
00:06:26.640 And it shows very exactly that if a young adolescent comes to you and says they do not feel content with their gender,
00:06:36.400 odds are hugely on the side that they're not going to feel like this as they get older
00:06:40.740 and therefore affirming these feelings is a bad idea.
00:06:44.360 Yeah. Yeah. Especially affirming them in any way that is biologically irreversible.
00:06:49.440 If, for example, they decide that their pronouns are going to be whatever, then okay.
00:06:54.000 But what it means is that right now the standard of care, trans-affirming care, takes it as a given.
00:07:01.800 Like a medical prognosis, or not prognosis, a medical mandate.
00:07:06.780 Yes. If a child comes to you saying this, use a mandate to affirm them.
00:07:11.000 And now we are seeing that is probably not the best course of action,
00:07:15.980 which changes what would be the recommended standard of care in youths who are gender non-conforming.
00:07:22.880 Well, just to highlight, one of the things that makes this really meaningful is that before this came out,
00:07:28.800 because the research is so bad, and one of the big themes of the cast report is the research is just so bad,
00:07:36.920 it's not like there's a ton of information showing it's damaging,
00:07:40.300 but there's also not any information that says it's really useful.
00:07:43.240 Hold on. We'll get to the cast report when we get to the cast report,
00:07:45.820 because if somebody who has only heard the trans side of the cast report argument,
00:07:50.020 they will hear, oh, they threw out X kind of research, which actually isn't bad.
00:07:54.180 And there's a lot of misinformation going on around the cast report.
00:07:57.340 So we need to wait till we get to that. We're going to focus on this study first, okay?
00:08:00.540 Okay.
00:08:01.000 Because I do want to go down a big rabbit hole on good versus bad studies
00:08:04.760 and what studies have actually been done and haven't been done,
00:08:07.220 but that's more related to the cast report than this stuff.
00:08:09.040 Okay. Okay.
00:08:10.120 So to keep going, in addition, individuals with increasing or decreasing gender non-continues,
00:08:15.820 trajectories had lower global self-worth, more behavioral and emotional problems,
00:08:21.280 and more often had homosexual or bisexual orientation compared to individuals
00:08:25.560 without gender non-contentedness. And so right here, I'm talking about the cohort
00:08:30.600 that ended up getting more of these feelings over time.
00:08:34.780 An increasing gender non-contentedness trajectory was significantly associated with a clinical cohort,
00:08:39.740 a homosexual or bisexual orientation, the self-concept subscale global self-worth,
00:08:44.680 and female sex, but not the self-concept subscale physical appearance.
00:08:50.820 Now, this is just so fascinating. I'm going to unpack what this means.
00:08:55.420 Please do.
00:08:55.980 We're seeing a few things here, right? One is that if you are a male assigned at birth
00:09:03.060 and you feel non-content with your gender in your youth, you are actually very unlikely to be in
00:09:08.640 this cohort where those feelings get worse over time.
00:09:10.520 If you do nothing, if you do not engage with the communities that are extra affirming of this,
00:09:16.560 it desists. So that's one thing that this is saying, which goes against what a lot of people
00:09:21.200 would intuit. Two, and this is what I think, why is it that the people with the gay and bisexual
00:09:26.060 orientations are more likely to have this increase over time?
00:09:29.540 I think it's because they are more likely to be in communities that affirm these feelings
00:09:33.680 than individuals without this. And so the feelings are more likely to get snowballed or sound echoed.
00:09:40.960 I think it's very similar to when you put a microphone too close to the speakers and then
00:09:44.340 you end up getting that screeching sound and you can get that within these communities.
00:09:47.820 Well, and the fact that you can gain status in those communities by showing how extreme you are
00:09:52.240 and a more extreme form of being in those communities is often turning trans.
00:09:56.100 So that's why I think, and then especially if you have low global self-worth, you are more likely to.
00:10:01.320 Oh, because you feel like you need to appreciate your value in those communities. Yeah.
00:10:05.240 And the self-affirmment that those communities are giving you for leaning into this,
00:10:09.680 the sort of love bombing behavior you have.
00:10:11.320 Oh yeah. So yeah, the affirmation you get, if you do lean into being trans,
00:10:14.840 if you're feeling really insecure, that's going to feel all the much better.
00:10:19.480 Yeah. Now let's argue this from the other perspective. This is me arguing from a more
00:10:23.680 critical perspective. What an individual could say is that if an individual is in these communities
00:10:28.360 that are more accepting of trans identities, i.e. they're gay and bisexual anyway, they are more
00:10:32.900 likely to transition and it's less of a jump because they're already presenting a non-normal
00:10:37.560 sexuality. So why not also go in this additional direction as well? With the global self-worth,
00:10:44.900 they'd say if you live in a transphobic society, wouldn't you have lower global self-worth if you fell
00:10:50.480 into one of these groups? But here is why I do not think that's a strong argument, the global self-worth
00:10:56.180 argument. Because individuals who felt equal amounts of gender discontentedness, but had higher
00:11:03.740 global self-worth as a use, so clearly they were okay with showing that they felt this, ended up
00:11:08.860 desisting in those feelings over time. So that doesn't explain to me, like the lower global self-worth
00:11:15.700 is clearly not a result or downstream of these feelings. It is what guides how these feelings,
00:11:22.400 whether these feelings end up persisting or not persisting in the individual, which is really
00:11:26.080 interesting. Now one of the most interesting things is the final thing where you're like, I don't know
00:11:29.240 what that means. The physical appearance scale. So what this is showing is contrary to what a lot of
00:11:36.160 people think, how attractive you are and how comfortable you are with how you look has no
00:11:43.520 correlation with whether you're in this true trans group, the group that, where the gender
00:11:49.660 discontentedness gets worse. Golly, wait, so the researchers are like grading the, he's a seven,
00:11:57.280 he's a four. Well, yeah, and self-conceptual subscale. So it's how they judge their own attractiveness.
00:12:02.420 But this is important, right? Because we've had, we've talked a lot with groups like the
00:12:07.720 Transmaxers. Transmaxers, which is a group of like incel males who are transitioning.
00:12:12.760 Yeah. And you can be a three as a male and like a seven as a female, depending on
00:12:17.420 the way that you may be unattractive as a male. If you look to effeminate or skinny or whatever,
00:12:22.140 like suddenly you're a gorgeous woman. Yeah. And there's this stereotype of becoming trans
00:12:26.360 is failing at your own gender. And so you go with the other one. That's just not true in the data
00:12:31.860 right now. What we're seeing that does not appear to be correlated with this group. So that's really
00:12:36.820 important. Now, one thing I wanted to know, cause I had mentioned this, but I want to read the quote
00:12:42.480 from the study here. The second largest group that was identified 19% had a decreasing trajectory of
00:12:48.100 gender non-contentedness at the sixth assessment wave around the age of 25. None of these individuals
00:12:55.000 reported experiencing gender non-contentedness anymore. Wow. All right.
00:12:59.960 So it's not like a iffy thing. It just goes away. Interesting. Now here I'm going to read a chunk
00:13:07.760 because this goes into the lack, because I think people are generally pretty surprised by the lack
00:13:13.200 of longitudinal studies done in this space. And this is something we could go way deeper on
00:13:17.780 with another episode potentially, but people may be like, wait, why haven't a lot of good long-term
00:13:23.060 studies been done of trans individuals? And the core answer is because the data banks for in the
00:13:29.860 social communities for trans individuals really push against them participating in studies and the,
00:13:36.420 and they push against releasing data. Now, if you want to take it from a kind perspective,
00:13:41.500 you could say they're afraid of scrutiny or scrutiny. I guess the data being used to what data will say.
00:13:47.740 And they're afraid of the studies being run, which is damning, which is really damning,
00:13:52.280 but I will go over what studies had been run in the past from the abstract of this. Sorry,
00:13:57.380 not from the abstract, from the intro to the paper. Furthermore, the few longitudinal studies
00:14:02.640 that have been conducted in a clinical setting found low persistent rates of early childhood gender
00:14:06.960 dysphoric feelings into adolescence and adulthood. And then it lists a few studies here. It was found
00:14:11.680 that children who socially transitioned in early childhood were more likely to have persisting
00:14:16.600 feelings of dysphoria. A non-clinical sample of 317 children mean the age of eight years who
00:14:23.720 identified as transgender, but who were not assessed according to the DSM-5 criteria for dysphoria.
00:14:29.100 94% still had binary transgender identity and 4% had non-binary identity at a five-year follow-up
00:14:35.940 assessment at 13 years of age. In this sample, it was also suggested that gender transition before
00:14:41.680 puberty is associated with continuing transgender identity. However, with only one follow-up
00:14:47.300 assessment until the age of 13, the further gender identity development into mid and late
00:14:52.240 adolescence remains unknown. So what they're showing here is like the big studies in this space that
00:14:57.380 have been done recently either showed that most of these feelings desisted or stopped at a very young
00:15:03.780 age at the age of 13, which this study would have shown a large level that you would still have
00:15:08.740 these feelings. So the lines is what this study found. And from another study here, they're saying,
00:15:14.680 or only contained one follow-up. In the Taiwanese sample, 87% never reported any dissatisfaction.
00:15:21.160 8% reported dissatisfaction at the age of 13, but not at the age of 21. 5% at 22 and not at 13.
00:15:28.680 And 1% reported persistent dissatisfaction. So this is a different sample. This is Pottery Barnet
00:15:35.300 called 2021. And this was in the Taiwanese data set. And what this study showed, again,
00:15:41.040 is that feelings of gender dissatisfaction are actually very transient between the ages of 13 and
00:15:47.420 22. Well, which really matches with our general thesis around adolescence being a period of body
00:15:54.500 dysmorphia in general, which makes sense because your hormones are going out of control and your body's
00:15:58.920 changing a lot. And it's super gross. Yeah. Yeah. No, it does make perfect sense. And it's
00:16:05.340 just worth noting that this is being repeatedly found across studies. Yeah. When people bothered
00:16:10.060 to do longitudinal research. Yeah. That's not just, and I would note if you heard from the earlier
00:16:15.660 study, actually, I'm not going to go over that. I'll just do that. Okay. So to go further in clinical
00:16:20.860 samples, it was found that gender dysphoria is associated with homosexual orientation also,
00:16:26.140 and this is from a different study, not theirs. So this is again showing that if you hang out in
00:16:30.300 gay population clusters, you are more likely to experience gender dysphoria. Also in population
00:16:35.280 based samples, associations between gender typical behavior in children and sexual orientation are
00:16:39.820 found. For example, in one population based study, children with gender nonconformity regarding play
00:16:45.600 behavior at ages three to five were more likely to report a bisexual or gay orientation later in life.
00:16:51.880 That's from... Oh, this sort of ties into what we always talk about with the TIDE studies, right?
00:16:56.140 Yes. This indicates that this could be downstream of... Okay. I just need to... Simone is referring
00:17:00.940 to studies that look at endocrine disruptors that are present in utero when male fetuses are
00:17:05.620 developing. It's been shown that it is correlated with more female-like than male-like play behavior
00:17:10.700 at a seven-year follow-up study. And so this would correlate to then say, if you're looking at this
00:17:15.640 play behavior as a correlatory thing here, and then you look at another study that looked at like
00:17:19.380 basically three to five-year-olds to then see if they became gay growing up, it suggests that even at a
00:17:25.520 biological level, we should see far more gay individuals in the general population than used
00:17:31.280 to exist before these endocrine disruptors came into companies. Became pervasive. Yeah.
00:17:36.480 Yeah. So very interesting to me. I find this study to be... It's absolutely game-changing for me because
00:17:43.600 before all I had to go on was my assumptions around this, right? Like... Yeah. And your intuitions and also
00:17:50.160 we'll say related research that we've seen, such as the TIDE studies, such as people's responses to
00:17:57.460 surveys about arousal pathways and sexuality, et cetera. And unfortunately, what this stuff indicates
00:18:03.460 to me is that just this first study in isolation, right? Is that you pretty much are better off
00:18:10.240 always delaying gender-affirming care until after the age of 18. Actually, preferably from the data
00:18:16.420 after the age of 22 or 25. Yeah. And an individual can say, but then it's harder for an individual to
00:18:22.080 really fully transition, right? But then I would say, yeah, except it's easier for women to really
00:18:28.680 fully transition to men. That's more a problem with male to female transition, which it turns out is a
00:18:33.940 category where the desire to transition desist if it is not affirmed. Yeah. It's... The population that would
00:18:42.000 have the most inclination to do this is a population that should most be dissuaded from doing it. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:48.520 In addition to that, you've got the problem of what is the thing that really distinguishes these two
00:18:54.720 populations? It is an increased desire over time in a desire to transition between the age of the 13 to 25.
00:19:03.240 And I think that is perfectly reasonable. Basically, it says that for the individuals who actually are
00:19:09.180 trans, they do end up figuring this out eventually. And that seems to be the safest way to sort them
00:19:15.220 within the population. Yeah. And I think what we tell our kids too, and what I really expect to have
00:19:21.580 happen, is that treatment for transitioning is going to improve over time. This is all pretty new stuff.
00:19:28.560 And I think a lot of what's going on, for example, the dysphoria continues or could possibly worsen when
00:19:35.360 people actually do go on treatment. I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that honing in
00:19:39.760 on the right levels of hormones and everything, getting everything right, is really difficult.
00:19:46.720 Yeah. I mean, consider that we're on the edge of having like plasmid gene therapy, for example.
00:19:51.180 Exactly. Yeah. So like in the future, it might not even matter if you're trying to transition after
00:19:56.800 age 25, because through the help of AI and many other medical advancements, you'll be able to
00:20:03.180 handle it really well. It might actually be better to delay. And I think that will be one of the core
00:20:09.040 areas of complaint that many of these individuals are going to have, is there will be like the first
00:20:13.180 generation of people who get cybernetic implants. And then a few years later, the implants are
00:20:17.660 dramatically better. And the first generation was like, why did I get stuck with Gen 1 tech?
00:20:21.580 Yeah.
00:20:21.940 So that's, I think, another really important thing that you're pointing out there.
00:20:25.420 But let's go into the CAS report really quickly. So I'm going to read some notes on this because it
00:20:29.400 is absolutely critical. This report, while it is not really new information, it's almost a meta study
00:20:35.360 of what's been going on, is critical because it is completely changing the general narrative
00:20:41.420 around the way governments deal with trans individuals.
00:20:45.260 I would say doctors, like general practitioners, like just doctors and therapists in general.
00:20:50.380 Yeah. This study has been accepted among a lot of people in the mainstream left, not among the
00:20:56.220 extreme cultists, but in the mainstream left, this is seen as the voice of the authority. And so we're
00:21:01.180 going to go over both the study and the complaints about the study and the counters to those complaints.
00:21:05.880 Goody.
00:21:06.080 Okay. So Dr. Hilary Cass, the pediatrician commissioned to conduct a review by the NHS
00:21:12.500 to children and young people questioning their gender identity, said that while doctors tended to
00:21:16.900 be cautious in implementing new findings in emerging areas of medicine, quote, quite the reverse happened
00:21:22.800 in the field of gender care for children, end quote. They studied a total of 23 guidelines published
00:21:27.720 by different countries between 1998 and 2022. All but two were published after 2010. Quote,
00:21:33.880 health care services and professionals should take into account the poor quality and interrelated
00:21:39.220 nature of the published guidance to support the management of children and adolescents experiencing
00:21:44.220 gender dysphoria and incongruence. In one study, she said a single Dutch medical study,
00:21:49.840 quote, suggested puberty blockers may improve psychological well-being for a narrowly defined
00:21:54.660 group of children with gender incongruence, end quote, has formed the basis for their use to,
00:22:00.060 quote, spread at pace to other countries, end quote. Subsequently, there was a, quote,
00:22:05.740 greater readiness to start masculinizing slash feminizing hormones in mid-teens, end quote.
00:22:12.500 She added, quote, some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches, holistic assessment,
00:22:18.460 which has meant that this group of young people have been extra-petitionalized compared to other
00:22:24.140 young people with similar complex presentations. They deserve much better, end quote.
00:22:28.620 So here, what I want to pull out is a few things that she said here, which are really important.
00:22:33.860 One is that she's noting that most of the government guidelines that they're using for
00:22:37.520 transition and gender nonconformity in minors are really just based on other government reports
00:22:44.340 on the same thing. It's a bunch of studies pointing at each other without a lot of primary
00:22:49.760 evidence. And we're going to get to this claim because this is the thing that a lot of trans activists
00:22:55.000 will have a complaint about is the not a lot of primary evidence. So just to keep going here,
00:23:00.720 most of them lacked, quote, an independent and evidence-based approach and information about
00:23:05.780 how recommendations were developed, end quote, the researcher said. Few guidelines were informed by
00:23:11.020 a systemic review of empirical evidence, and they lacked transparency about how their recommendations
00:23:16.700 were developed. Only two reported consulting directly with children and young people during
00:23:20.940 their development, the York academics found. Data from the gender clinics reported in the CAST review
00:23:26.320 showed that the vast majority of people who started puberty suppression went on to have
00:23:31.140 masculinizing or feminizing hormones, suggesting that puberty blockers did not buy people time to
00:23:35.840 think. Now, this is actually really important because this is seen in a lot of data. The moment you start
00:23:40.000 puberty blockers or really any form of gender-affirming care, you're basically in the pipeline
00:23:45.720 and almost nobody leaves the pipeline, which is why this other study is really important because
00:23:50.540 it's looking at people who don't fall into the pipeline. And a lot of the studies that were done
00:23:55.000 on quote-unquote trans individuals in the clinical population only looked at people who had pre-gone
00:24:00.040 into the pipeline. And that's why it was so important for her to find control groups in blind studies,
00:24:05.700 which was her core complaint of a lot of these studies. And we know from other studies, once you're in
00:24:09.840 the pipeline, you're in the pipeline, there's really no getting out of it. Yeah. Which makes sense if
00:24:14.360 your entire social community at that point affirms this decision. And if you detransition,
00:24:19.640 and we're going to see this from the leaked emails, you get completely ostracized from your entire
00:24:24.740 community. It's like, you know, converting out of being a Jehovah's Witness or an Amish or something
00:24:31.380 like that. It is incredibly difficult to do. And it is incredibly difficult to stop from a social
00:24:37.900 perspective if you're in these systems. And for the individuals who are like, can't you understand that
00:24:42.900 they feel threatened by the narrative around detransition? And you're the very people who
00:24:46.740 criticize people like Jehovah's Witnesses for the way they ostracize people who form new beliefs and
00:24:51.500 systems. Like, how can you not see how hurtful what you're doing is and why it makes people afraid
00:24:57.160 to leave the pipeline and why it creates these psychological cycles where it becomes very difficult
00:25:02.960 to leave the pipeline? Okay. But now let's keep going. I want to then talk about debunking the
00:25:08.620 cast report, right? Because I went through a lot of people who were talking about debunking this
00:25:13.680 and it is very interesting and worth digging into. Here's from a Reddit post. Now, here are the four
00:25:21.880 points that they had found for debunking if they're just arguing against it. Point one, the report engaged
00:25:27.900 with anti-trans hate groups and was written by someone affiliated with them. Does anyone have a source
00:25:33.060 for this? Question mark. Basically, the sources for this are, here, I'll give it to you. Cass follows
00:25:38.900 the LGB alliance and transgender trend, both recognized as anti-trans groups. She doesn't
00:25:45.000 follow any pro-trans groups. That is the full extent of that. So yeah, basically, hate group is
00:25:50.020 anyone who's, oh, let's be careful about this. Hate. Yeah. Yeah. And that's because as in the same way
00:25:56.040 that like if you're in Scientology, anyone who even questions Scientology, what are they called again?
00:26:00.280 What's the word for them? Subversive persons is the term. I think it sounds surprisingly corporate.
00:26:05.440 Yeah. Yeah. You're not allowed to. Like problematic individuals. Hold on. You're not allowed to in any
00:26:10.240 way. And this makes sense if this is more like a religion than like an actual, and it is that as
00:26:16.380 we've argued in our episode, has a cult evolved under the trans movement? And I think that one kind
00:26:20.920 of has. So the second one here is puberty blockers are seen as perfectly safe for cis children who have
00:26:26.680 precocious puberty. So they shouldn't be any different for trans children. This is just
00:26:30.880 comical. Cis children who are using them to delay precocious puberty are undergoing puberty at a time
00:26:36.300 when they shouldn't be undergoing puberty. Trans children are undergoing puberty when they shouldn't
00:26:41.360 be undergoing puberty. Basically, cis children are using this so that their puberty happens as it
00:26:45.340 normally happens. Trans individuals are using this to attempt to turn off puberty and then attempt to
00:26:49.900 restart it later, which we know just doesn't work. You do not get your full puberty if you would try to
00:26:56.520 start it later. That's what a lot of, when I like go over the data, that's what it seems to indicate.
00:27:00.940 So this is a really bad point, which I think is great that we're seeing how bad the points against
00:27:05.700 this are, because to me, when I want to know, should I take something seriously? I should look
00:27:09.920 at the people who are arguing against it and see how strong their arguments are. The third one is,
00:27:14.300 if any antidepressant was successful at improving mental health slash suicidality as blockers slash
00:27:19.800 HTRR for trans people, it would be considered a miracle drug. Again, does anyone have any numbers to back this up?
00:27:25.780 What?
00:27:27.120 Numbers don't back this up.
00:27:30.160 Wow.
00:27:31.180 There's positions they want to be true and then they look for numbers, right? The final point is,
00:27:36.360 wait times for accessing this healthcare are so high that there have been several people dying of
00:27:40.840 suicide before they reach the end of the waiting list. And there is currently functionally almost
00:27:45.000 no NHS care for trans people who need to access it. And this is just one of those things where we
00:27:50.140 already know that the suicidality within this group is really high regardless, even after they get
00:27:54.780 gender affirming care. I'm not going to, I think it's really twisted to consider everyone in this
00:28:00.060 pipeline who ends up committing suicide as killed by the treatment. I would say that if we're going
00:28:05.700 to do that, then we should count as everyone who has transitioned and then commit suicide as being
00:28:10.040 killed by transition. It's not going to look good for the trans community.
00:28:12.820 No one mentions that. No.
00:28:15.100 Yeah. And here is the key argument that you see used against it, this report. And I'm going to quote
00:28:21.780 here. Some have focused on the report's omission of evidence, including studies around puberty
00:28:26.680 blockers that have not used control groups. People have argued that control groups in these studies
00:28:31.220 would be impossible because people would know if they'd been assigned a placebo or not a placebo.
00:28:36.320 Yeah. And here you see a lot of people complaining just over and over again, complaining about you
00:28:44.240 cannot block all the studies that didn't use blind control groups because you can't really use blind
00:28:49.180 control groups here. Now I am going to post on the page over the screen here so people can see
00:28:55.400 highlighted in the report, why she threw out these studies. Because you're being lied to if you believe
00:29:05.000 they were thrown out because they didn't have a blind control group. The specific line that was used
00:29:14.600 over and over again was lack of blinding and no control group. This is critical. These are two different
00:29:29.240 things. They both did not have blinding and did not have a control group. Now I want to be clear
00:29:37.640 because a lot of people, my background's in medical research, a lot of people here might not understand
00:29:41.780 how freaking horrific it is if you had no control group. Okay. You don't need to like assign people
00:29:51.240 placebo meds or something like that and blind them to put them in a control group. What you need to do,
00:29:55.940 for example, if I'm looking at rates of suicidality, what I would do is I would contrast people who
00:30:01.380 didn't like just totally normal members of the population with individuals who are undergoing
00:30:06.540 this kind of trans care, right? Like people undergoing this treatment and to the earlier
00:30:10.080 point, those who are stuck on the wait list. Yeah. And I can get to the wait list. Perfect control
00:30:15.020 group. Perfect control group stuck on the wait list. Very easy to do. They're not using this,
00:30:19.960 right? So the goal is to get the control group as close to the population that you're doing as
00:30:24.300 possible, but they don't have to be exactly like the population. They can be quite different
00:30:28.380 to have a no control group at all. You're basically not even trying for real data at that point. You
00:30:34.320 are just trying to affirm a position. And this is what really gets me is this lie that she was
00:30:41.920 discarding studies because they didn't have a blind control group. She was discarding studies
00:30:45.760 because they didn't have any control group at all, which is a basic thing in most medical research.
00:30:51.500 Okay. And this is, and people were like, with some cancer patients, you wouldn't have a control
00:30:58.240 group with like chemo or something like that. And it's like, yeah, but this isn't like that.
00:31:02.580 There are comparable groups that you wouldn't be using. Yeah. There are lotteries, there are wait
00:31:07.000 lists, there are, yeah, it's, there are those who can financially afford it and those who can't,
00:31:11.380 all sorts of things. What this says to me, like my big takeaway from this is because the
00:31:17.260 criticisms of the cast report were so weak. She engaged with naughty people so we cannot
00:31:22.300 like think about her as human anymore. And that is what cults do. If you talk to people
00:31:26.780 who are critical of the cult, they will say, we just can't trust anything you're saying anymore.
00:31:30.760 That is a just complete nonsense. This complaining about her throwing out studies that were poorly
00:31:35.860 conducted, again, just complete nonsense. And they'll be like, she included studies that didn't
00:31:40.540 use blind controls. And it's like, no, they still had controls. That was what the big mistake was.
00:31:47.600 You're including this blind word, which wasn't the critical word. So now we're going to go to one
00:31:54.140 final thing that you haven't really looked into yet. Actually, did you have any other things you
00:31:57.420 wanted to say from like, you went over the block and reported on this and everything?
00:32:00.980 I think the important thing is pointing out that this isn't because she's found any particular
00:32:06.960 outcome. It's a lot of it's just the research is so bad. While there isn't a lot of information
00:32:12.240 about it being very, oh, definitely you're going to die if you go through this, but also definitely
00:32:17.400 going through this isn't going to help you. I think the important thing is in the past and what may be
00:32:22.380 changing now and what gives me a lot of hope is if you are a therapist or you are a doctor and
00:32:27.660 someone sends you their child and their child appears to have some form of gender dysphoria,
00:32:31.920 the responsible thing for you to do and what you would do to avoid any like form of
00:32:38.260 liability is to just send them to a gender transition or a gender treatment clinic.
00:32:44.120 Just refer them to that. This is off my plate. There's no, I don't know what to do. The only
00:32:49.320 evidence out there that's being shouted from the hilltops is cherry picked studies saying your child
00:32:54.680 is going to die if you don't do this. So people from a sort of media standpoint and from a public
00:33:01.040 discourse standpoint, doctors and clinicians and therapists were forced to throw people into this
00:33:06.240 pipeline, which as you point out, then is a very slippery slope. You can't get out of it.
00:33:10.100 A Chinese finger trap. So now with the cast report, what makes me so hopeful is doctors, therapists,
00:33:16.400 et cetera, have something else to point to, to say, no, this is not necessarily the best pathway.
00:33:23.800 I'm not being necessarily responsible by telling you to sit this out, find some other interventions,
00:33:31.980 work on self-confidence, et cetera, which is really encouraging.
00:33:36.140 Yeah. And now we're going to get to the last study here, which I find really interesting. And I don't
00:33:40.400 think that you had heard about this. There's not a study. It's a major event. So there was a leak of
00:33:44.600 files from an organization called the World's Professional Association for Transgender Health,
00:33:48.960 W-P-A-A-T-H or WPATH, I guess is how I read it.
00:33:54.620 Yeah. WPATH. Yeah. That's how they go. WPATH.
00:33:57.900 Yeah. And you heard about this?
00:33:59.380 Yeah. When Blockton reported, because I love them, they talk about the WPATH files a lot. Yeah.
00:34:03.520 Oh, they do. Okay. This was really interesting. So this organization has, you know how I mentioned
00:34:08.540 that there was like an echo chamber that a lot of countries were using for their use,
00:34:12.460 gender affirming care.
00:34:13.720 Yeah. That people just kept referring to the same, like other studies and no one actually,
00:34:20.620 when making claims about this is the best way to go, everyone agrees that this is true,
00:34:24.400 was actually referring to real profoundly robust research.
00:34:29.540 Yeah. It was coming from this organization. And we began to, through these leaks, get an
00:34:34.860 understanding of how individuals within this organization really saw what they were doing.
00:34:38.980 And the biggest sort of thing that came out of the WPATH files was really two things. And we'll get
00:34:45.420 into some specific quotes around this, but the first being that they understood that many of the kids
00:34:54.120 could not make an informed consent to what they were doing.
00:34:58.820 What? Wow. What indicates that? That's pretty damning.
00:35:02.460 Oh, here, I'll give you some quotes then.
00:35:03.820 Yeah.
00:35:04.300 I think the thing you have to remember about kids is we're often explaining these sorts of
00:35:09.100 things to people who haven't had biology in high school yet. He says, discussing the potential of
00:35:14.220 loss of fertility and options to preserve fertility with a 14-year-old is, quote, always good in theory,
00:35:19.220 end quote, he said in the video, because many will go on to cross-sex hormones that will leave them
00:35:23.980 sterile. But, quote, I know I'm talking to a blank wall, end quote, he says, end quote. And the same would
00:35:30.960 happen for a cisgender kid, right? They'd be like, ew, kids, babies, gross, end quote.
00:35:35.500 Quote, we try to talk about it, but most of these kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space,
00:35:41.460 really, to talk about it in a serious way, end quote. And he adds, quote, I, that's always bothered me,
00:35:48.560 but we still want the kids to be happy. Happier in the moment, right?
00:35:52.100 Happier in the moment. Happier for now. Damned in the future.
00:35:57.420 Why are you a doctor? This is like the Hayes movie, where it's like it makes them happier in
00:36:02.640 the moment to tell them that overeating isn't going to make them unhappy in the long term or
00:36:06.600 cause long-term negative bodily repercussions in the long term or be unhealthy. So you just don't
00:36:11.620 tell them that. That's why it's able to tell people that taking in far more calories than you
00:36:17.780 burn is unhealthy for you because it makes them happier in the moment to not tell them that.
00:36:22.280 And this is what we talk about when we talk about this virus or this form of engaging with this.
00:36:26.760 No, you're a doctor. And you are saying right now, I understand that children cannot make an
00:36:34.420 informed consent to the surgeries that we are allowing them to consent to, the treatments that
00:36:39.580 we are allowing them to consent to. And they will have major repercussions later in their life,
00:36:43.960 specifically sterility and never being able to orgasm again, or never being able to experience
00:36:50.000 an orgasm at all. They don't know what these things are. They can't understand these things.
00:36:55.220 And as we talk about within prenatalism, many people develop their identities when they're young.
00:36:59.300 So they don't understand that if they found kids gross when they were a teenager, that doesn't mean
00:37:03.520 they're going to find them gross as an adult. And it is natural for young teens around this age for
00:37:08.460 biological reasons to have an instant like gross young kids. I don't want to be around that.
00:37:13.040 Beyond that too, I think even if like, even if a young teen can comprehend that as an adult,
00:37:18.320 they're going to want something different, there is a rebellious streak in many. And I felt this
00:37:22.960 myself as a teen that would take away the ability of that person in the future to have that choice.
00:37:32.480 I hate the idea so much now that I'm going to make sure that my future self doesn't have the ability
00:37:37.780 to do it when they try to. Like someone who's trying to get rid of eating sweets decides that
00:37:42.820 they're going to make sure they never have sweets in their house in the future. So their future self
00:37:45.980 that wants sweets can't even get them. So I think even when they can comprehend, even when they know
00:37:51.120 the biological consequences, they, in their current state of mind may still choose intentionally
00:37:56.580 to override the wishes of their future self.
00:38:00.100 Yeah. And we know that kids have poor self-control. This is why we don't generally allow kids to sign
00:38:07.120 lifelong contracts and stuff like this.
00:38:09.200 Yeah. They can't join the military. You can't sell organs.
00:38:12.920 It is wild. It is wild, but, but it gets worse than that. They are showing how little the kids
00:38:19.140 understand from some of these quotes that you have here. Right.
00:38:21.980 I guess what's wild to me is that they acknowledge that these things are damaging.
00:38:27.100 And this is where I'd say that I think the far, like the far anti-trans movement goes a little
00:38:31.080 far with this stuff and maybe reading a little too much into it, but I'm going to read another quote
00:38:34.500 here. All right. One clinician had written about a number of her patients, quote, they seem to feel
00:38:41.140 that they should be allowed to switch back and forth merely at their requests. I'm not comfortable with
00:38:45.780 this at this point. We need to be better at understanding how to handle this type of situation,
00:38:50.000 end quote. Now that an individual, they had started transitioning, thought that this was
00:38:55.260 something that you could just switch whenever you wanted to really easily. What that shows to me is
00:39:01.120 that this individual didn't understand what they were committing to or how permanent it was at all.
00:39:08.260 And this again shows why people don't think that young people should be allowed to consent to them.
00:39:12.800 Well, this is again, another reason why this is so important to put off as long as possible,
00:39:17.620 because in the future, I have plenty of confidence that people will be able to seamlessly switch
00:39:23.340 whenever they want to. Maybe not in our lifetime, but it'll happen, but not now.
00:39:28.180 And they show some really concerns about this. One clinician wrote, quote,
00:39:32.780 kids can't fully understand what they're agreeing to, end quote. Sorry. Kids can't understand what
00:39:37.880 they're agreeing to. We can never do this. And it's abuse to do it. Even when a parent or doctor are on
00:39:45.600 board, that it is the right thing for the child. Who is this? Anyway, I'll look at this later.
00:39:51.720 So here, I want to note something right here that is really interesting. But Bowers has also said
00:39:57.140 that acknowledging detransition exists, quote, even to a minor extent is considered off limits
00:40:02.340 for many in our community. I do see talk of the phenomenon as distracting from the major challenges
00:40:09.000 we face, end quote. There is a mission within the transitioning community and within the medical
00:40:13.880 community around this to just pretend that detransitioners don't exist. And this is another
00:40:18.180 big problem, right? Because this is a very big and growing movement that it seems like if somebody
00:40:23.320 was forming informed consent and they had been given both sides, they would know this. And this is a
00:40:29.360 big problem because when I look at transforms and they're attacking detransitioners, they're like,
00:40:34.620 look, didn't you read the back of the like pill bottle? Weren't you told about everything that
00:40:39.340 could go wrong? Like, why are you out there complaining now and complaining about our community now?
00:40:43.080 And the answer is because they were transitioned at 11 and they obviously didn't understand.
00:40:49.260 And doctors giving them the transition knew that they didn't understand. And it was well known among
00:40:54.800 the people who are writing the national guidelines, like in countries like Canada, that the people who
00:40:59.740 are transitioning didn't understand. So you don't get to come out here. You cannot both be pro the
00:41:04.120 transitioning of children and say that they shouldn't have the right to say, I didn't fully
00:41:09.020 understand this. Now, one of the particularly damaging things that came out was this was many
00:41:14.120 cases of people who ended up getting cancer because of this. Whoa, whoa, whoa, why didn't wait? What
00:41:19.260 correlates with cancer? Is it the estrogen justice or what? Yes, if male to female correlates with cancer,
00:41:26.680 which is actually really interesting because there was one study done recently that shows to
00:41:30.240 female to male might actually lower rates of cancer in individuals because you don't have the
00:41:34.800 mammary tissue anymore or the uterus sometimes. Two of them are common locations that females get
00:41:40.160 cancer. But I'm going to quote here. In one, a doctor writes about a 16-year-old patient who
00:41:45.480 developed two benign liver tumors after several years of taking birth control and one year of
00:41:50.380 gender-reforming testosterone. In another, a different doctor recalled a colleague who died of liver cancer
00:41:54.980 after nearly a decade of taking testosterone. That doctor wrote that, quote,
00:41:58.900 to the best of my knowledge, the cancer was linked to the hormone treatment, end quote.
00:42:03.760 The doctor was noted that they didn't have any other details because the patient had died.
00:42:09.380 That's so interesting that, yeah, this isn't discussed, whereas people going through IVF or
00:42:13.280 people concerned about IVF often bring up concerns about cancer because they're like, oh gosh, if I take
00:42:17.700 even for a freaking month extra estrogen, I'm going to get more cancer. And yet that like that. So I also,
00:42:24.040 I don't think it's poorly known that this is a risk because if people are concerned about one month.
00:42:31.800 Fringe risk and it is not a complete fringe risk. It's a known right effect of these drugs taken over
00:42:38.260 short periods of time. And that's the thing that you're pointing out here, which is really important
00:42:41.420 to note, is that individuals know they're like, oh, but this has been used in other treatments for a
00:42:47.280 long time. Yeah, but people worry about those other treatments. They worry about it in the other
00:42:52.120 treatments and the use of it is extremely limited in terms of time windows. And they're like, oh,
00:42:59.160 but like hormonal therapy has been used in birth control for a long time. And if those are different
00:43:04.560 hormones at different levels and then the ones that are causing cancer in these individuals,
00:43:09.920 so this doesn't matter. But I will also say that to an extent, these leaks have been blown out of
00:43:13.860 proportion. Really as bad as the leaks could have been, this is pretty minor to me. It was in how
00:43:19.600 extreme some of these communities get. And it does show that the doctors do actually have some level
00:43:24.660 of self-reflection and concern about what's happening and knowledge that kids can't really
00:43:29.160 consent. They just have fears around acknowledging that was in their community, which I think is
00:43:35.260 something that like anyone who is looking at this situation with any level of sanity already knew was
00:43:41.140 a phenomenon. Yeah. So between these three things, my question is now, what has this changed for you
00:43:50.280 in terms of your perspective of what's going on? And do you think that the battle is genuinely tipping
00:43:55.400 against the transitioning children activists?
00:43:58.940 I think it, yeah, already things, programs for youth gender transition were being defunded, criticized,
00:44:09.260 shut down. I think youth gender clinics are going to be a thing of the past very soon. And my hope
00:44:18.180 is that this means that transitioning, like those who are trans activists and who do, to your earlier
00:44:24.020 point, really care about that 2% that really does have persistent gender dysphoria and that really
00:44:29.720 does need and want to transition, that it gets them to focus on instead identifying those people,
00:44:37.140 validating their concerns and preparing that, like giving them something to do in the interim while they
00:44:42.080 wait until they are old enough to make that transition safely, we'll say after age 25. I think that
00:44:48.960 would be such an amazing change. Oh yeah, it would be great. If you could get better studies on
00:44:53.660 that would be fantastic. And I think that the direction that the trans community and trans activists
00:44:59.080 should go from this. For me, the major thing that's shifted about this is one, it's a shift in the public
00:45:05.200 narrative. It is now, and J.K. Rowling with all her stuff, she recently like absolutely went after
00:45:10.360 someone. They're like, now that it's okay to say the things that I've risked my career saying for a long
00:45:14.280 time, that many individuals lost their career for saying, you now are jumping on the bandwagon with this.
00:45:18.960 When you didn't stand up for this, when you could actually really suffer for this. And the other
00:45:24.040 big thing was in trans news that's happened is this law in Scotland, right? This hate crime law
00:45:27.700 and J.K. Rowling standing up against it and setting precedent. In a way that nullified it. Yeah.
00:45:33.660 Yeah. And I think that she's right. We have to remember the things that we're saying now that are
00:45:39.420 actually like not that spicy anymore, that transitioning kids is probably not a good idea,
00:45:44.640 are things that individuals, even trans individuals have lost their careers for saying,
00:45:49.580 like Buck Angel, the original trans activist who really brought the community into the mainstream
00:45:54.760 and then was completely isolated from the community from saying that kids shouldn't be allowed to
00:45:59.300 transition. That was, or that we should have some skepticism around this. That was to me, really
00:46:04.700 heartbreaking to see how many people in the left, even when they change their mainstream position on
00:46:09.240 this. When they're like, oh, we were wrong about that whole transitioning kids thing. They will never
00:46:13.180 rehabilitate the people that they have excommunicated or that they have labeled as heretics.
00:46:20.520 They will never really put up the law, the wall of people we attacked for things we now accept as
00:46:25.680 common knowledge.
00:46:27.000 I think it goes both ways. I don't think Buck Angel is going to embrace them after everything that
00:46:31.020 they've done.
00:46:32.060 I think he's like a very understanding person. So I think that this is, it's tragic that that
00:46:37.800 has happened. But the other thing, the big thing for me that changes is I now believe that the
00:46:43.400 evidence states, and I think that if I was a trans activist and I was trying to help the trans
00:46:46.720 community, I think the core thing that needs to change now is the understanding that most teens
00:46:53.080 and preteens who are not comfortable with their gender are not trans. They're just going to grow out
00:46:59.540 of this. The vast majority of preteens who are not comfortable with their gender are not trans.
00:47:05.420 And so now the question is, how do you sort out of the people who aren't comfortable with their
00:47:09.480 gender, which should undergo further treatment and which shouldn't? Where the previous go-to thing
00:47:17.960 within the trans community is if you are not comfortable with your gender, you are trans and
00:47:23.080 you should be treated as trans and you should immediately put on a gender affirming pipeline.
00:47:26.680 You should immediately be put on puberty blockers to give you more time to think.
00:47:29.540 And what this research just shows is they don't give you more time to think. You're basically
00:47:32.460 locking in a decision. The moment you go into gender affirming care, you go to a psychologist
00:47:37.640 that is gender affirming, or you undergo puberty blockers.
00:47:41.600 And what I would take in a hot second is if there was just, if we nuked youth medicalization,
00:47:47.500 if it was, all right, we're going to change your pronouns and now you're going to dress differently
00:47:50.880 and you're going to have this different, fine. Because at least that enables people
00:47:55.540 to maintain optionality until they're fully myelinated, until they're in their twenties
00:48:00.700 and they can decide. If it's just, if it becomes the equivalent of going goth for a few years
00:48:05.660 and being different, I'm super happy with that.
00:48:08.940 The most...
00:48:09.800 Even when I was a kid, I wore like a girl pants and stuff like that in like the goth days
00:48:14.620 where you'd get these super tight, like hot puppet pants and stuff.
00:48:17.420 And that was like a...
00:48:18.200 That's fine.
00:48:18.780 It was the style at the time for young men.
00:48:21.440 So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
00:48:25.600 You were like an extra rebellious young guy or whatever.
00:48:28.100 And it's one of those things where it's totally cool.
00:48:32.180 If my kids were like, okay, I'm going to do dresses now or something like that.
00:48:35.440 And that was like the rebellious style at the time.
00:48:37.380 I think we need to differentiate developing your identity in contrast to mainstream social
00:48:44.000 mores and medicalization.
00:48:46.300 And these two things have unfortunately been conflated due to the trans movement, not allowing
00:48:52.100 you to say, hey, that teenager who is doing this rebellious thing in terms of their identity,
00:48:57.920 that's probably not a medical issue.
00:48:59.380 That's probably just being a teenager.
00:49:01.300 And we need to respect them while also telling them tattoos are bad.
00:49:05.360 They're permanent.
00:49:05.880 You probably shouldn't be going out and doing that.
00:49:07.340 Even if it is a medical issue, I think the important thing that we've realized now is
00:49:11.000 that it's a medical issue that will pass for the majority of people.
00:49:16.200 And that really does really ought to be addressed for a very small minority of people.
00:49:20.020 And we cannot make a medical decision until someone's in their mid-20s.
00:49:24.860 That's an important thing too.
00:49:26.540 So that's so comforting.
00:49:27.660 This is just great news.
00:49:29.020 This is wonderful.
00:49:29.780 It's fantastic.
00:49:30.640 You don't know how far the pendulum is going to swing in the other direction yet.
00:49:33.560 It's been swinging and it could swing far.
00:49:37.440 What do you expect to happen?
00:49:39.340 We could see a general pushback on transness in general.
00:49:43.480 Oh, like even trans identities?
00:49:45.900 Yeah, I can see, for example, if we're talking about an extremely hard pushback, and I can see
00:49:50.940 this being very realistic, laws being pushed in conservative states that disallow trans people
00:49:56.120 from teaching kids, because they've just basically found that if you don't lean into it at all,
00:50:00.540 it typically passes, especially for men.
00:50:03.640 Yeah.
00:50:04.120 Keep in mind, the other thing that I noted here is engagement with the LGBTQ community.
00:50:08.960 Oh, it's like a contagion.
00:50:10.320 It could be correlated with this persisting of your gender dissatisfaction.
00:50:15.800 Yeah.
00:50:16.200 So disallowing a young person who seems at risk of this from engaging with other LGBT
00:50:21.840 individuals appears to be one of the best ways to prevent them from falling into this
00:50:25.920 group.
00:50:26.460 Oh boy.
00:50:26.820 Which can lead to a lot of negative action, even among well-meaning parents.
00:50:31.560 Yeah.
00:50:32.100 Or even among like perfectly normal, non-extreme, non-brainwashy people who just happen to be
00:50:39.620 gay.
00:50:40.420 Thinking about this was my kids, right?
00:50:42.060 Is it just dangerous, even if they are same-sex attracted, to allow them to engage with that
00:50:45.880 community so long as that community is overly friendly with the trans community?
00:50:50.360 I don't know.
00:50:50.800 I think every community has to be approached on a case-by-case basis.
00:50:55.260 And if you see that, I think the key, and this goes back to what you always talk about
00:50:59.960 with dominance hierarchies within a community, you have to look at what the virtue spiral
00:51:05.000 of that community is going to turn into.
00:51:07.100 Every community that's tightly knit is going to have a virtue spiral.
00:51:10.520 You have to figure out what that virtue spiral is going to be.
00:51:13.840 Like, I guess in the pernadalist community, a virtue of spiral is probably someone going
00:51:17.440 crazy hard in on kids and telling everyone they should have kids and being really annoying
00:51:22.120 and obnoxious about it or whatever it might be.
00:51:25.200 But you have to be, you have to know what that is.
00:51:27.380 So if you're-
00:51:28.760 Hold on.
00:51:29.320 There's two, most communities are actually not that at risk of virtue spiraling.
00:51:33.080 Really?
00:51:33.500 What makes you say that?
00:51:34.300 The thing that's for virtue spiraling in a community is-
00:51:37.680 Isolation?
00:51:38.360 There aren't protected classes.
00:51:41.000 As soon as you have a protected class, some thing that you can attempt to maximize that
00:51:45.920 you cannot be attacked for attempting to maximize.
00:51:48.420 So for example, within conservative circles, this might be like dedication to Trump, right?
00:51:52.680 Within certain Trumpist circles, you cannot be criticized for being overly anti-immigration
00:51:57.660 or overly anti-Trump or overly-
00:52:00.480 And because of that, you get these virtue spirals where individuals will be like, you
00:52:04.900 guys aren't conservative at all in your beliefs.
00:52:06.680 And I'm like, I think you might just be in a community that's like virtue spiraling because
00:52:10.860 actually we very much are for our generation.
00:52:14.000 When you look at any mainstream statistics about population belief systems and stuff
00:52:18.140 like that, you have just surrounded yourself with a virtue spiral until you don't know
00:52:21.400 this.
00:52:21.560 So you do get this in the right, but the, and within the left, if you can't attack trans
00:52:25.920 community, if you can't attack people who see psychologists, these are seen as protected
00:52:29.720 classes.
00:52:30.060 You're going to get virtue spirals there of dedication, of intenseness.
00:52:33.440 As soon as you remove the protected class concept, you remove the risk of virtue spirals.
00:52:38.160 Within the prenatalist community, we haven't really seen any virtue spirals because there
00:52:41.240 is no protected class individuals who have a lot of kids.
00:52:44.460 We are still very critical of like their child rearing practices, stuff like that.
00:52:48.020 And across the community, there is not like when extremes can be criticized within a community,
00:52:54.560 that community is safe from virtue cycles or sorry, sorry, virtue spirals.
00:52:58.800 And then when extremes are not ever criticized within a community, that is when it goes crazy.
00:53:03.560 That's when you have Salem, which trials, that's when you have goths doing insane things
00:53:09.120 to their bodies, that's when all this happens.
00:53:11.140 Exactly.
00:53:12.400 Okay.
00:53:12.800 Then that's what we do with our kids.
00:53:14.500 If we, because again, as we've discovered with so many LGBTQIA or poly or rationalist or
00:53:21.180 whatever communities out there, any niche community of the same like general name, there are some
00:53:27.720 which are super cool and there are some which are super toxic.
00:53:31.360 So all we have to do is determine whether or not they criticize extremism.
00:53:36.180 And if they do, it's fine if our kids hang out with them, like, I think this is such
00:53:41.280 an important concept.
00:53:41.960 It might even be worth building a holiday around it.
00:53:44.040 Don't engage with communities that have protected classes, whether those communities are on the
00:53:48.220 right or the left or anything else, recognize the danger of this concept of a protected class
00:53:52.980 and stay away from it.
00:53:53.940 Or communities that don't criticize extremism.
00:53:56.820 Yeah.
00:53:57.080 How we can build that into a holiday?
00:53:58.460 I don't know yet, but I'll think about it.
00:54:01.600 Fun.
00:54:02.360 Yeah.
00:54:02.740 People can weigh in the comments too.
00:54:04.220 How can this be turned into something cute, photographable?
00:54:07.960 I think the extremism is different from the protected class concept.
00:54:11.560 And I would really focus on the protected class concept because I think it's much more
00:54:14.280 defensive than the extremism concept, which is to say you can be extreme in beliefs, but
00:54:19.280 there are certain beliefs where you're like, you just cannot criticize this group.
00:54:22.620 Whenever you get that, that's the extremism.
00:54:26.500 I see.
00:54:27.240 I see.
00:54:27.600 Like in, in, still in many conservative circles, and this is something that we're seeing dividing
00:54:33.900 the Republican party and causing a lot of problems.
00:54:36.320 There is no level of extremism regarding restricting abortion access that people get criticized for.
00:54:44.160 I actually had this guy call me out of the blue, call me as a candidate out of the blue
00:54:48.620 and just start yelling at me like a madman about abortion.
00:54:55.000 So I think that like,
00:54:56.340 Did he just want you to know?
00:54:58.880 He was like, I just want to know your positions on this.
00:55:01.040 I'm like, okay, fine.
00:55:01.760 Ask away.
00:55:02.260 I'll tell you my positions on whatever you want.
00:55:04.440 And I'll be perfectly honest.
00:55:05.380 And he asked, what's your position on abortion?
00:55:07.140 And I said, like, obviously America pretty much agrees on this moderate approach to abortion
00:55:13.180 before this period, more freedom.
00:55:14.940 More restrictive than the current stuff in our state.
00:55:17.520 And I said that, yes.
00:55:18.680 But he's, no, it, life begins at conception and blah, blah, blah.
00:55:22.100 And I'm like, yeah, that is your belief system.
00:55:24.400 You are Catholic.
00:55:25.620 I understand that.
00:55:26.480 That's totally acceptable.
00:55:27.540 Although the Catholics didn't always view it that way.
00:55:30.040 So let's be honest here, but you have no more right to impose that on other people
00:55:36.120 outside the Catholic culture than other cultures have the right to impose transition,
00:55:41.260 like youth gender transition on your children.
00:55:43.700 And he's, no, God said this.
00:55:46.100 And therefore I'm telling you to do that.
00:55:48.400 And I hung up on him because he wouldn't stop talking.
00:55:51.620 But that's one of those things where he's never been criticized for that view.
00:55:56.680 Because I also told him, I'm like, you can have that view.
00:55:58.680 And that's, that is 100% legitimate.
00:56:00.420 I too am not really comfortable with abortion,
00:56:02.500 but you will not see your party get elected if you maintain a hard line stance like that,
00:56:09.520 because you are not in the majority.
00:56:11.340 And then you will not get the further restrictions on abortion that are realistic to impose.
00:56:15.800 Exactly.
00:56:16.300 And he, and that's what I said to him.
00:56:17.580 Like, there's no way that you're going to get anywhere close to where you want to be
00:56:20.140 with that current stance.
00:56:21.780 And it's, he was incapable of seeing that.
00:56:24.820 And so that, that is a really good example of a protected status, right?
00:56:27.520 He would never be questioned for that by most people.
00:56:31.120 And also he has this attitude of, if you do question me,
00:56:34.080 I'm going to immediately shut you down.
00:56:35.960 So I guess that's what we're talking about when it comes to protected status, right?
00:56:39.300 Yeah.
00:56:40.120 Oh, I'm so mad at him.
00:56:41.840 I love you, Simone.
00:56:42.880 You are the best.
00:56:43.880 And I appreciate your anger as a citizen of this country.
00:56:47.600 This is what I get for answering unknown calls.
00:56:50.020 I should be answering potential constituent calls.
00:56:52.840 But when you're an idiot like that, I love you pick up and you're like, fuck off.
00:56:58.060 We need to get, we need to get, that needs to go viral.
00:57:01.080 It's like you telling some constituent.
00:57:02.720 Yeah.
00:57:02.960 Just people get to call into me as a political candidate and I'm like, fuck you.
00:57:09.480 I love you.