The Ben Shapiro Show - Abigail Shrier | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 108

00:00:00.000 I have had calls from parents who say, I'm terrified of losing custody.

00:00:03.000 But listen, I know my kid.

00:00:06.000 I only spent, oh, I don't know, 100,000 hours raising her.

00:00:10.000 I know her.

00:00:11.000 I'm a political progressive, but this doesn't seem right.

00:00:13.000 It came out of nowhere.

00:00:15.000 And I'm supposed to trust the judgment of a therapist who spent one 45-minute session with her and claims to know her better than I do?

00:00:24.000 The trend of silencing and cancellation from the left has created a reality where many institutions simply cannot be trusted to be speaking the truth.

00:00:32.000 Last week, after a single angry tweet, Target removed Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters, from their book section. 0.70

00:00:39.000 Beyond that, a GoFundMe raising awareness for the book was taken down by the site.

00:00:43.000 Amazon has even gone so far as to restrict the book's advertising.

00:00:47.000 The author, Abigail Schreier, joins us today to tell us why everyone is so afraid of what she has to say.

00:00:53.000 Abigail's book, Irreversible Damage, focuses on the transgender epidemic that has swept the nation, a craze mostly now affecting young women. 1.00

00:01:00.000 That wasn't the case a decade ago.

00:01:02.000 In writing it, Abigail conducted a bevy of interviews with transgender individuals, transition surgeons, social media influencers, therapists, and parents who have had to watch their teens be caught up in this trend.

00:01:12.000 Abigail's writing explores these findings, as well as a 2018 paper from Lisa Littman of Brown University, which we will dive into in our episode.

00:01:20.000 Today, we also discuss the harrowing biological consequences associated with self-diagnosed gender dysphoria and the medical, scientific, and educational institutions that encourage it.

00:01:29.000 Plus, the battle to keep Abigail's book available to readers despite attempts to bury it, as well as if conservatives and common-sense liberals can ever find unity to speak out against the transgender censorship.

00:01:40.000 Hey, hey, and welcome to...

00:01:43.000 Hey, hey, and welcome to...

00:01:45.000 Hey hey and welcome to- This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

00:01:52.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:01:55.000 Your data is your business protected at expressvpn.com slash Ben.

00:01:59.000 Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Abigail Schreier.

00:02:02.000 The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.

00:02:06.000 Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.

00:02:12.000 Abigail, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:02:14.000 Thanks so much for having me on.

00:02:16.000 Okay, so why don't we just jump right into the topic at hand, which of course is the topic of your book, Transgenderism, Gender Dysphoria.

00:02:24.000 Why don't we start with the very basics?

00:02:26.000 What is gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder?

00:02:29.000 Which term is correct?

00:02:29.000 Which term is commonly used?

00:02:31.000 And what exactly are the biological indicia of this condition?

00:02:35.000 So gender dysphoria is sort of the preferred term now.

00:02:39.000 It's the updated term from the new Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders.

00:02:45.000 So gender dysphoria used to be called gender identity disorder, and it's severe discomfort in one's biological sex.

00:02:53.000 It always began in early childhood.

00:02:56.000 We have a hundred year diagnostic history of it and it always began in early childhood and was overwhelmingly male.

00:03:02.000 It was little boys saying, no mommy, I'm a girl.

00:03:05.000 I'm not a boy.

00:03:06.000 I'm not a boy.

00:03:06.000 I'm very insistent, persistent, consistent is the language they use.

00:03:11.000 And most of the criteria for assessing it, especially in small children, were readily observable.

00:03:17.000 Kids, you know, sometimes in the most extreme cases, punching their penises or Absolutely, refusing to play with boys or, you know, absolutely being attracted to everything, you know, female and wanting to wear girls clothes and whatnot. 0.66

00:03:32.000 And today, out of nowhere in the last 10 years, the dominant demographic of those claiming to have gender dysphoria are teenage girls with no childhood history. 0.68

00:03:44.000 So we know this isn't what typical gender dysphoria looks like.

00:03:47.000 We know these girls are not the typical, you know, So let's start from kind of the basic idea of what causes gender dysphoria.

00:03:53.000 book just looks at why. Why are we seeing this explosion in a population that never before claimed to have this illness?

00:04:01.000 So let's start from kind of the basic idea of what causes gender dysphoria. Now you mentioned there is a shift in the language from DSM-IV to DSM-V, gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rationale for that other than just sort There was no additional evidence presented that said we're no longer going to call it a disorder even though it appears in the DSM.

00:04:21.000 We're just going to retitle it dysphoria.

00:04:23.000 I believe they changed the diagnosis itself to suggest that if you believe that you are a member of the opposite sex, that is not in fact a sign of gender dysphoria.

00:04:33.000 It's only depression or self-harm caused by that belief.

00:04:37.000 That is now gender dysphoria, which is a sort of weird description in and of itself.

00:04:41.000 So what are the biological causes of the condition and how is this defined?

00:04:46.000 How's the condition actually defined now?

00:04:47.000 So you're right.

00:04:49.000 The change was largely, they found it less stigmatizing to the patient to refer to it as gender dysphoria rather than to put the word disorder in it, in the name.

00:05:02.000 What are the biological I don't know.

00:05:07.000 I'm not sure anyone knows.

00:05:09.000 There is some research into the neurological markers of this, although there isn't a lot.

00:05:19.000 Honestly, it's a highly contentious area even to look into, but I really don't know the causes.

00:05:27.000 Yeah, well, one of the things that has become so sort of fraught about all of this is that the definition of transgenderism itself seems to have changed fairly radically from a diagnosable, observable disorder to, if anybody suggests that they are a member of the opposite sex, then this is in and of itself evidence that they are actually members of the opposite sex.

00:05:47.000 How do we distinguish I know this is getting very political very quickly, but how do we distinguish between sort of the claim that gender dysphoria requires treatment and the claim that gender dysphoria ought to be treated with an entire society saying that you are a member of the sex to which you claim you are actually a member, meaning that if you're a man who says you're a woman, the entire society should now call you by female pronouns and say that you are a woman.

00:06:11.000 How did that become sort of the default mainstream media-driven and academic-setting-driven treatment for gender dysphoria?

00:06:19.000 One of the key parts in all this is affirmative care, which may be the most sort of horrifying medical scandal of our time. 0.98

00:06:28.000 And that is that every medical accrediting organization told doctors that the standard only with regard to gender dysphoria, so just this one ailment, is to affirm the patient, to agree with the patient's self-diagnosis.

00:06:43.000 Absolutely, to hand over the judgment and the prescription pad to the patients with regard to this ailment.

00:06:50.000 And so you have a population that is completely self-diagnosing, that is able to demand, you know, effectively the course of treatment.

00:06:59.000 And they're getting that treatment on what's called informed consent basis, meaning you walk into a gender clinic and you sign a waiver and you walk out that day with a course of testosterone. 0.89

00:07:09.000 And of course, even young girls are doing this, even minors.

00:07:12.000 I mean, that's obviously very scary stuff.

00:07:15.000 What is the rate of desistance among young people who seem to be exhibiting signs of gender dysphoria?

00:07:20.000 I know this has also been somewhat controversial, trying to determine how many kids who say that they are members of the opposite sex just stop doing that over the course of their childhood and adolescence.

00:07:30.000 So historically, the rate of desistance was extremely high among kids who had childhood gender dysphoria.

00:07:36.000 The rate of desistance was over 70%.

00:07:39.000 Some studies showed over 80% of kids would naturally outgrow this.

00:07:43.000 We're not going to see that today because Right now, everybody is immediately telling, you know, as I said, the standard is affirmative care.

00:07:50.000 So, psychologists are told to affirm the child.

00:07:53.000 Pediatricians are told to affirm the child.

00:07:55.000 Everyone's agreeing with the child.

00:07:57.000 Yes, Jimmy, sorry, you're Jane.

00:07:58.000 You are a girl.

00:08:00.000 So, because these kids are now being socialized in it, I don't think we'll see the same rates of desistance.

00:08:06.000 But what we are seeing among the young women who go through this is a tremendous amount of regret.

00:08:12.000 Although the numbers are hard to obtain, partly because activists really shut down and interfere with all kinds of research efforts, but we're already seeing very, very large social media groups of what they call detransitioners, young women who transition and then regret it.

00:08:29.000 I think at last count, the Reddit on this, the social media site Reddit hosts detransitioners and it was over 16,000 members and that was up from, I think I had checked it six months before and it was around 6,000 members.

00:08:46.000 So you see this population burgeoning of people who have gone through medicalization and regret it.

00:08:53.000 So let's talk for a second about what exactly happened here.

00:08:55.000 So you mentioned up top that there's been this massive shift in sort of the crowd that is undergoing gender transition or suffering from gender dysphoria or claiming to do so.

00:09:05.000 There's this huge shift from boys to girls.

00:09:08.000 What's going on there?

00:09:09.000 Why did that happen?

00:09:10.000 Well, you know, teenage girls fall for every hysteria. 0.90

00:09:14.000 I mean, it's the population most susceptible to social contagion, whether it's anorexia, bulimia, or multiple personality disorder.

00:09:21.000 And, of course, that doesn't mean that the illness itself isn't real.

00:09:24.000 Of course it is.

00:09:26.000 And, you know, or that the, you know, disorder isn't real.

00:09:28.000 If there are people who are really afflicted with gender dysphoria, absolutely.

00:09:32.000 I've talked to them.

00:09:32.000 I've met them.

00:09:33.000 I've interviewed them.

00:09:34.000 But what it does mean is that girls have, we know that teenage girls have a susceptibility to spreading and sharing their pain and to talking themselves into certain conditions.

00:09:43.000 So we know that in hospitals, for instance, they have to be very careful when putting anorexics together because they will encourage each other in their anorexia.

00:09:53.000 They will actually start to compete to lose more and more weight.

00:09:57.000 And that seems to be what's going on with gender dysphoria. 1.00

00:09:59.000 These young women are talking themselves into it. 1.00

00:10:03.000 With social media, because there's all these social media influencers, they're convincing themselves that their problem is their gender.

00:10:09.000 They're encouraging each other to try testosterone.

00:10:12.000 And you're seeing whole groups of friends, gender dysphoria is clustering in friend groups of teenage girls.

00:10:20.000 So we know that there's a strong social component.

00:10:23.000 So in one second, I wanna get to the fact that if you mention this sort of thing, then obviously you end up on the wrong side of the social sensors, which is of course what has happened to your book.

00:10:33.000 But actually started, as far as I am aware, at Brown University with a particular study.

00:10:37.000 We're gonna get to that in just one second.

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00:11:45.000 So the first I was made aware of rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is what you write about in your book, was a study from Brown.

00:11:51.000 It was a preliminary study that was put out talking about this phenomenon that you're talking about.

00:11:55.000 groups of young girls who were sort of, one, they were all experiencing discomfort in various ways and for various different reasons, and one girl would then suggest, well, I'm actually transgender, and then many of the girls would suddenly decide that they were transgender as well.

00:12:09.000 And this was put out by a scholar at Brown University, and Brown immediately walked back the study and then apologized for ever having put out the study in the first place.

00:12:17.000 What's been your experience with censorship now that you've actually talked openly about this phenomenon?

00:12:22.000 From the moment I got a publisher, there was a campaign to have my book dropped by my publisher, to have my publisher drop me as a client, and then as an author.

00:12:32.000 Then, of course, when my book was coming out, Amazon refused to allow my publisher to sponsor ads.

00:12:43.000 Then, you know, journalists, all kinds of top journalists wanted to review the book because it's an interesting topic.

00:12:49.000 There is, you know, you talk to most parents and you ask them if they have middle school students, they know that all of a sudden all their kids, you know, friends, a huge number of them are trans and they want to know why.

00:13:00.000 And it's an interesting topic, so a lot of people wanted to review it.

00:13:03.000 And all the major newspapers and magazines told them, absolutely not, we are not touching this book.

00:13:09.000 And then Joe Rogan had me on, which was wonderful.

00:13:14.000 And Spotify employees threw a fit, and they demanded that the episode be stripped from his platform.

00:13:22.000 And he's stood up to them, and so has Spotify, which has really been a huge victory against cancel culture.

00:13:28.000 But you see what they had to go through.

00:13:30.000 And then most recently, Target.com stripped my book from being available for purchase.

00:13:37.000 I mean, it is pretty incredible.

00:13:39.000 I mean, we've seen people like Chase Strangio, who is a trans justice advisor over at the ACLU calling for your book to be banned because the American Civil Liberties Union is no longer the American Civil Liberties Union.

00:13:51.000 It is actually just a left-wing interest group that is fully fine, apparently, with shutting down civil liberties up to and including censorship of particular tracts they don't like.

00:13:59.000 So, the reason that a lot of these people say that they are trying to ban your book or censor your book is because of the suggestion that it somehow threatens the safety of trans people.

00:14:10.000 And we get this in a wide variety of settings.

00:14:11.000 We saw this with Senator Tom Cotton writing an op-ed about the use of the Insurrection Act to put down rioting and looting in major cities, and the New York Times staffers saying that this threatened their safety somehow, and the New York Times op-ed editor James Bennett being canned on that basis.

00:14:25.000 This constant call that things I don't like threaten me has been carried pretty far, particularly with regard to trans issues.

00:14:30.000 The idea being that if you don't use someone's preferred pronoun, you should be barred from social media because you might be dead naming them and this threatens their safety.

00:14:37.000 What do you make of the arguments that, you know, books that question the reality of the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, not overall, but in particular cases, threaten people's safety?

00:14:47.000 I think that the reason that this issue engenders such extremist response is because they know that if word gets out what teenagers are doing, that people, that most Americans will be so horrified that it will be shut down.

00:15:08.000 I mean, right now, A teenager can walk into a clinic at 15 and without her parents' permission, after being goaded by her therapist, her teachers, and social media influencers, she can go into a clinic on her own, walk out that day with a course of testosterone, a schedule 3 controlled substance, and forever alter her body.

00:15:31.000 And she doesn't even need a therapist's note.

00:15:34.000 And so I think the hysteria is really because this isn't a right or left issue, to the extent that most of the parents who call me are politically progressive.

00:15:43.000 But universally, Americans are horrified as soon as they learn about what's going on.

00:15:48.000 It seems like there's obviously an attempt, not just to shut down you, but also even parents who are asking questions about their own kids' activities.

00:15:55.000 Parents are being shamed by social media.

00:15:57.000 Their own kids are saying that you're a bad parent if you refuse to allow me to go get a testosterone treatment.

00:16:02.000 Or parents who say that we ought to engage in watchful waiting are labeled transphobes if you have a two-year-old and your two-year-old goes to school.

00:16:08.000 I foresee a future here where there are going to be child protective services calls being made if your kid goes to school and says they're a member of the opposite gender. 0.99

00:16:17.000 Then you say at home, no, you're not.

00:16:19.000 And the kid goes to school and tells a teacher.

00:16:20.000 I think Child Protective Services shows up sometime in the next five years, given the way the trends are moving.

00:16:24.000 That's already happening.

00:16:26.000 And in fact, this is probably the most egregious example of gaslighting today is what's happening to these parents.

00:16:33.000 So so they will have their it's not this is such a horror.

00:16:37.000 to parents because they're being lied to and backstabbed by everyone.

00:16:41.000 So the teachers will lie to their faces about what's going on at school.

00:16:44.000 They'll let the child rename himself and let him use the opposite sex bathrooms, never telling the teacher that they've officially changed him or her within the school. 0.91

00:16:54.000 The therapists lie to the parents.

00:16:56.000 The social workers interfere.

00:16:59.000 The doctors will supply medicine without the parents' permission.

00:17:03.000 I mean, these parents are are so attacked.

00:17:07.000 And as you said, you know, their friends consider them transphobes and whatever.

00:17:12.000 I mean, the, you know, sanctity and autonomy and integrity of the family is so under assault on this issue.

00:17:20.000 And I have had calls from parents who say, I'm terrified of losing custody, but listen, I know my kid.

00:17:27.000 I only spent, oh, I don't know, a hundred thousand hours raising her.

00:17:31.000 I know her.

00:17:32.000 I'm a political progressive, but this doesn't seem right.

00:17:34.000 It came out of nowhere.

00:17:36.000 And I'm supposed to trust the judgment of a therapist who spent one 45-minute session with her and claims to know her better than I do?

00:17:43.000 It's really horrifying what's going on.

00:17:48.000 I mean, do you think that there is going to be a push for legislation along this basis?

00:17:53.000 We have seen some pushes in some of the Republican states for legislation prohibiting gender transition before the age of maturity.

00:18:01.000 The kind of counter from folks on the political left has been that if you don't start transition early, then it may be too late to actually make the physical changes that make looking like a member of the opposite sex easier, that once you've hit a certain age and you've hit puberty, that you'll have developed bone structure and facial structure that is difficult to change.

00:18:21.000 How do you think that debate is going to go?

00:18:22.000 You know, I don't know, but that's such a great example of what's wrong with this.

00:18:26.000 What you just said is exactly the claim they advance.

00:18:32.000 We need to get involved and arrest puberty right now because later, if this person wants to live as a trans adult, she or he will regret having had to go through the other sex puberty or whatever. 0.87

00:18:47.000 But of course, that's a claim that's made really by biological men.

00:18:53.000 Why?

00:18:53.000 Because once biological men go through the changes of puberty, it's very hard to look like a woman again.

00:19:00.000 But for women, there isn't the same thing. 1.00

00:19:03.000 Yes, they'll be a little smaller, but they're not going to have the same obstacles.

00:19:08.000 I mean, a young woman who takes a course of testosterone at 10 to 40 times what her body would normally handle can grow a pretty impressive beard. 0.87

00:19:18.000 I know a lot of trans men at this point.

00:19:19.000 I've interviewed them and they pass pretty impressively, except that they're a little bit smaller.

00:19:27.000 So the rationale is made on behalf of biological men, but they're applying it to teenage girls.

00:19:36.000 And no one stops to say, I mean, this is where the lack of questioning come in.

00:19:39.000 No one stops to say, hold on, I understand that rationale.

00:19:42.000 It may apply to you, but it's not applying in the same way to teenage girls.

00:19:46.000 They're going to need the mastectomy anyway, if they decide as adults, you know, cause you, you can only arrest puberty starting in once that's already, you know, underway Tanner stage two.

00:19:57.000 So it's not, it's not an appropriate rationale for this other population, but we're not even allowed to ask those questions.

00:20:04.000 So why did this become so political?

00:20:05.000 Because it seems like we started off this conversation and most of these conversations start off with like an actual medical conversation about a condition and how best to treat the condition.

00:20:14.000 And there's a debate between watchful waiting and as you say sort of affirmation watchful waiting in most of these areas was considered sort of the traditional way to go about these things.

00:20:22.000 And there's been an attempt, even politically there, to treat watchful waiting as quote-unquote conversion therapy.

00:20:26.000 That if you go to a therapist and the therapist does not immediately recommend a course of treatment, then this is now considered conversion therapy in some places like California.

00:20:36.000 How did this become so political when it really should be about how do we best treat people who have an obvious medical condition?

00:20:42.000 That's right.

00:20:43.000 I think it happened in a series of lies that we allowed to, you know, that we were too polite to contradict.

00:20:51.000 Like we started with, you know, okay, you know, this is a civil rights issue to allow them to have that medication. 1.00

00:21:00.000 Well, You know, giving someone access to a medication that could harm them isn't really a civil rights issue when it means suspending all medical judgment.

00:21:08.000 Hold on.

00:21:09.000 I mean, we should still subject it to the same scrutiny because we don't want transgender people to come to great harm.

00:21:15.000 I mean, a lot of this medical is enormously dangerous.

00:21:19.000 We don't know the long-term side effects and implications of giving a woman 10 to 40 times her normal testosterone levels for decades.

00:21:28.000 And that's what you would have to do if she becomes a lifetime patient.

00:21:31.000 So we allow these little lies to be told.

00:21:35.000 She really is a man.

00:21:35.000 It's okay.

00:21:37.000 She is a man.

00:21:38.000 Let's change her birth certificate. 1.00

00:21:40.000 And then we ended up in a place where we could no longer object.

00:21:44.000 And that is, you know, I think a lot of the mission here is this idea that, you know, I've said publicly, obviously, that when I'm discussing somebody who is trans, I use their biological pronouns.

00:21:54.000 I say a man who believes he is a woman if we are talking about a trans woman, or I say a trans woman, but I won't say that somebody is a woman when they're not, in fact, a biological woman. 0.59

00:22:03.000 Now, if I'm In the middle of a conversation with somebody who is trans, I'll call them whatever they want because you don't want to be impolite when you're in the middle of dinner with somebody.

00:22:11.000 But there is this broader conversation that's now happening on social media, for example, where if you point out that Caitlyn Jenner is in fact a biological man, should you be banned from social media?

00:22:19.000 I mean, it's reached the stage where full-scale First Amendment conversations are being shut down in the name of niceness.

00:22:27.000 That's right, and you know, I talk to a lot of older, what they used to call transsexuals, now referred to as transgender, but they never lie about the fact that they grew up as boys, even though they now present as women.

00:22:44.000 They never demand that everyone pretend they were always a woman.

00:22:47.000 This is a very new thing.

00:22:50.000 It's part of the intolerance and extremism of this very young, woke generation of young, you know, the millennials and the Gen Z who are so coercive, who are so intolerant, who are so illiberal, and who demand you recite after them.

00:23:05.000 And it really is more part of that than it is part of the, you know, traditional experience of transgender adults who are lovely, sober, rational, and they don't lie.

00:23:18.000 I've interviewed a lot of them, and they're wonderful people, and these activists don't represent them at all.

00:23:24.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about the gender ideology that seems to have infused this entire political conversation because this obviously ties into broader themes about gender that are pushed by one side of the particular political aisle.

00:23:34.000 We'll get to that in just one second, but first, let's talk about the fact that holidays are coming up and you're going to be spending people a lot of mail.

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00:25:09.000 So let's talk about the gender ideology that is being brought to bear on this conversation. 1.00

00:25:13.000 So transgenderism has become this sort of weird, unlikely flashpoint, considering that until five minutes ago, The number of transgender people in American society was exorbitantly low.

00:25:23.000 I mean, massively, massively, massively low.

00:25:25.000 Like a fraction of a percentage point of the population.

00:25:28.000 Now, of course, it seems like it is rising rather rapidly, and I have a huge number of young people identifying as gender-fluid, which is not a biological term.

00:25:37.000 There's no such biological thing as gender-fluid.

00:25:40.000 What is the gender ideology that's being brought to bear in what should be medical and biological conversations? 1.00

00:25:45.000 I'll tell you about a call I got from a young woman in medical school about a year ago now who was really alarmed because they were being told the med students at her medical school were being told to effectively pretend that, you know, let's say a woman was a man.

00:26:04.000 Okay, if she presented as such.

00:26:06.000 And the problem with that, of course, is how to take care of her.

00:26:10.000 I mean, we know that, for instance, pregnancies have been missed when doctors didn't realize that they needed to check for that because they really thought that the forms were accurate.

00:26:21.000 But she was also being told in medical school never to do a breast exam on a trans man, meaning a biological woman who presents as man because it could be upsetting to her.

00:26:31.000 Well, of course, when you have a double mastectomy, what they call stop surgery, for aesthetic purposes because you're a trans man, they don't remove all the breast tissue.

00:26:43.000 They don't remove every cell the way they would if they were removing it for cancerous, you know, to avoid cancer or to eliminate cancer.

00:26:51.000 So you still do need a breast exam. 1.00

00:26:54.000 But there were protocols in place.

00:26:56.000 It was so driven by political correctness.

00:27:00.000 And that is what's happening in medical schools.

00:27:03.000 It's really, there's a lot of political correctness.

00:27:06.000 There's a lot of wokeism.

00:27:07.000 And you're getting, I think, a lot less good care Certainly from the doctors I've talked to.

00:27:14.000 There was one case I know of in Michigan where a trans man presented as a man to medical attendings and complained of stomach pain and it turns out that the trans man was in fact a woman and was heavily pregnant and delivered birth to a stillborn baby because people were not aware that this person was actually a biological female until after they had done all of the examinations.

00:27:37.000 This stuff does have real ramifications.

00:27:39.000 So what exactly in your research is the correlation between, for example, Gender and biological sex.

00:27:45.000 I know this is a, again, a more broadly fraught topic, but there is this theory out there that gender is completely disconnected from sex, it's a social construct, but then also that it is deeply important and your gender orientation is biologically inborn and unchangeable.

00:27:59.000 So, on the one hand, gender is completely made up by society.

00:28:02.000 On the other hand, you can be a boy in a girl's body. 0.87

00:28:05.000 Is there any logic to this, or is it basically just catch-as-catch-can?

00:28:08.000 There really isn't.

00:28:09.000 And Debra So does a wonderful job of explaining this. 0.99

00:28:12.000 She's a sex researcher in her book, The End of Gender.

00:28:16.000 There is a biological basis to gender. 0.98

00:28:18.000 We know this.

00:28:20.000 We know that girls naturally come out with certain tendencies. 1.00

00:28:26.000 And, you know, behaviors and they're attracted to certain things.

00:28:29.000 I mean, this is not a mystery.

00:28:30.000 If you've ever raised children, you're aware that, you know, girls are different. 1.00

00:28:35.000 They tend to be more talkative from the moment of birth.

00:28:37.000 They tend to, you know, be neater.

00:28:41.000 They tend to be less physically aggressive.

00:28:43.000 I mean, this isn't socialization.

00:28:45.000 That's part of biology.

00:28:48.000 And so, if you were a parent, how would you be handling, what do you think is the best way for parents to be handling sort of the gauntlets that they're being forced to run right now?

00:28:56.000 They have a little kid, the little kid starts exhibiting opposite gender tendencies. 0.98

00:29:03.000 How should they handle that?

00:29:04.000 Because I'd be wary of sending my kid to a public school now, given how things are going.

00:29:08.000 That's right.

00:29:09.000 The number of people who will interfere is really legion and it's alarming.

00:29:14.000 I mean, I got a call from a man, um, who is an immigrant to this country, uh, two weeks ago and he did not know.

00:29:21.000 And this is what happens by the way, parents reach out, they're desperate.

00:29:24.000 They literally don't know who else to talk to.

00:29:27.000 I, I'm, you know, I'm not a psychologist, which I always tell them, you know, I'm not a doctor, but they're desperate to be believed and taken seriously.

00:29:35.000 And this man's, I've written about young women, but this man had a son who was suicidal, so they had checked him into a hospital in Seattle.

00:29:47.000 In the state of Washington, you're entitled to mental health care without parental permission from age 13 on.

00:29:54.000 So they had checked him into a hospital because he was suicidal, and during his stay, he was admitted, and during his stay, somehow with the psychologist, They had decided that his problem was gender and they had referred him to a gender clinic and the man called me because he was desperate to remove his child from this hospital.

00:30:17.000 I tried to put him in touch with someone who could help, a social worker, and what they worked out was he was entitled to take his son out of the hospital as long as he agreed that the child was really a girl.

00:30:30.000 The young, you know, the young person was really a girl.

00:30:32.000 That was the condition for releasing the son to him.

00:30:36.000 One of the things that there have been stories about, I know there were some studies that were done in Britain that were really disturbing about the number of young girls who are being referred for gender transitioning, particularly in autistic communities.

00:30:48.000 So what is the crossover?

00:30:50.000 Are you aware of any crossover between other conditions and claims of gender dysphoria?

00:30:55.000 The claim of autism, again, was the predominant one in Britain, that there were thousands of young people in Britain who actually were autistic, but they were being referred to as gender dysphoric.

00:31:04.000 Right, so usually this coincides with what they call high-functioning autism.

00:31:12.000 Young women who are, you know, they're very, very smart.

00:31:16.000 They have some trouble connecting socially and empathizing with other people.

00:31:22.000 And they tend to be very rigid in their thinking.

00:31:25.000 Unfortunately, I can tell you that in this country, I started researching this and in some sense I had to back away because I interviewed some autism experts and I started realizing that doctors were introducing the idea of gender to this population that tended to fixate.

00:31:44.000 They were introducing the idea that they might be a different gender and this population was susceptible to fixating. 0.72

00:31:52.000 So they, you know, it was like giving a drug to an addict.

00:31:55.000 And in fact, you know, when I asked one of the autism experts about this, she agreed that's exactly what it was like.

00:32:02.000 And so we do see, and there's research on this, very, very high rates of transgender identification among young autistic teenagers.

00:32:11.000 One of the things that I've pointed out before is that all the talk about this stuff is not impact-free.

00:32:17.000 The media's mainstreaming of this stuff does have some pretty significant effects, and you can see it in the statistics.

00:32:22.000 What you would expect is that if all of this, if all gender dysphoria were simply a biological phenomenon presenting as a medical phenomenon, then you would expect a consistent number of diagnoses of this over time.

00:32:33.000 You wouldn't expect massive spikes in diagnosis of a particularly specific phenomenon that applies to a small percentage of the population, but you are seeing huge spikes all over the place in Britain, in the United States.

00:32:45.000 You're not seeing similar spikes in places that have not decided to sort of follow this gender ideology.

00:32:49.000 You know, because people who are in psychological pain, and these young people are, especially young women today, we've never seen such high rates of anxiety and depression among young women as we see today.

00:33:00.000 They look to the culture to help explain what they're feeling.

00:33:03.000 And in previous generations, they might have said, oh, I'm so fat.

00:33:06.000 The problem is I'm so fat.

00:33:08.000 And today they look to the culture and say, oh my God, I'm really a boy.

00:33:11.000 That's my problem.

00:33:12.000 And the moment they start down that path, there are so many people prepared to agree with them and to help them transition.

00:33:21.000 Even though the reality is, look, if this was just taking a new name and dressing differently, I wouldn't have written this book.

00:33:28.000 But the reality is the treatments are so aggressive, they're so irreversible, and because these young women had a lot of other problems besides gender dysphoria, they are very likely to experience very high rates of regret.

00:33:43.000 So let's talk about regret and also what are the effects of some of the treatments that are being talked about.

00:33:48.000 So, there is this sort of blasé idea that you can easily transition to be a member of the other sex and then you look just like a member of the other sex. 0.79

00:33:55.000 There really is no high cost.

00:33:57.000 There's nothing to worry about.

00:33:57.000 What are the medical costs and procedures that are done in order to achieve what would be considered a successful transition?

00:34:04.000 There are a lot of different procedures.

00:34:07.000 Let's start with testosterone. 1.00

00:34:09.000 A young woman who goes on a course of testosterone, and before that you would start with puberty blockers in the earliest stages of puberty, but young women who are experiencing this spike usually go straight to testosterone.

00:34:25.000 It leads to vaginal atrophy, uterine atrophy. 0.60

00:34:29.000 There's a very high risk of endometrial cancer.

00:34:33.000 That's why they usually recommend a prophylactic hysterectomy after she's been on testosterone for say five years. 1.00

00:34:39.000 She'll grow a beard. 1.00

00:34:41.000 Her facial features will change.

00:34:42.000 Her private anatomy will be permanently altered. 1.00

00:34:48.000 It also does some good things and I have to mention those and I'll tell you why.

00:34:53.000 Because that's the reason young women can't wait to tell their friends they should go on it. 0.96

00:34:56.000 Because it delivers euphoria and it suppresses anxiety.

00:34:59.000 And anxieties are these women's biggest problem. 1.00

00:35:03.000 So they feel great.

00:35:04.000 They feel bold.

00:35:05.000 They have a young man's sort of swagger.

00:35:08.000 And they can't wait to tell their friends how amazing they feel.

00:35:11.000 And it tends to confirm in their minds that the problem was they really were supposed to be a boy.

00:35:16.000 And do those effects wear off over time?

00:35:18.000 I mean, in terms of the anxiety and the euphoria?

00:35:22.000 So I think the anxiety does wear off because it depends.

00:35:27.000 I have talked to trans men who say, wow, look, the moment I went on that testosterone, it took care of my depression and anxiety.

00:35:35.000 So I know that the anxiety, you know, It can powerfully control anxiety.

00:35:43.000 Of course, we have other medications that are less risky that control anxiety, but testosterone does seem to do that effectively.

00:35:51.000 The problem is we really don't know what this massive dose of testosterone does to a young woman's body when she's been on it for decades, and patients don't know that we don't know that.

00:36:03.000 They aren't being told how risky these things are.

00:36:05.000 Do we have any longitudinal studies about suicidality with regard to transitioning?

00:36:10.000 I know that there's been a lot of talk about how in the immediate aftermath of transitioning, suicidality rates go down fairly dramatically, but because all of these treatments are fairly recent, as in the last 20 years mainly, do we have any longitudinal studies over time as to whether suicidality remains at lower levels and how those levels relate to baseline suicidality in the general population?

00:36:30.000 Right.

00:36:32.000 We don't know two things.

00:36:33.000 We know that there are high rates of suicidality among this population.

00:36:39.000 What we don't know is whether gender dysphoria is the cause of that, and we don't know whether transitioning will cure suicidality.

00:36:48.000 So there are a lot of conflicting studies on this.

00:36:51.000 You know, one out of Tavistock Clinic in England showed that the young women who were put on puberty blockers, actually their suicidality did not go down, their suicidal ideation did not go down.

00:37:03.000 So it's not clear that medical transitioning will cure suicidality.

00:37:10.000 It may for some number of these patients, and it certainly seems to, as you said, in the short term.

00:37:18.000 But we just don't know long term whether it will cure it.

00:37:21.000 And I think, you know, we're dealing with a different population today.

00:37:24.000 Usually when they do these long term studies, they were always done on men because that's who had gender dysphoria.

00:37:31.000 And now for the first time it's teenage girls.

00:37:33.000 So we really don't know, you know, these teenage girls who exhibit very different kind of thing, meaning they decided this with their friends after social media influences.

00:37:44.000 We don't know what their long-term rates of suicidality will be.

00:37:48.000 So let's talk about the impact of social media, because you've referenced it a few times.

00:37:51.000 Obviously, we have seen suicidality rates in all sort of cohorts of young people go up pretty dramatically in the aftermath of social media.

00:37:59.000 What is the impact of social media on all of this?

00:38:01.000 Well, social media tends to make young women kind of crazy. 1.00

00:38:04.000 I mean, it exacerbates anxiety enormously.

00:38:08.000 It makes them feel like they are constantly left out.

00:38:10.000 It makes them feel like they are constantly less than and unable to achieve the perfect, you know, airbrushed images they see online.

00:38:18.000 And it sort of torments them with a constant, you know, threat of being so much less than the beautiful, even classmates that are, you know, face-tuned images online.

00:38:29.000 So I think it's a really cruel thing.

00:38:32.000 It's sort of the debutante ball that never ends.

00:38:35.000 It's a very cruel thing that we're putting young women through.

00:38:38.000 It's not doing them any good.

00:38:40.000 And unfortunately, you know, we're just inventing more and more of it.

00:38:45.000 One of the things that's been so stunning about watching the blowback on your book is to note how many of the folks who are pushing the blowback have said that they are simply following the science in order to actually stop science from being done.

00:38:59.000 I mean, there are studies that are literally being suppressed on this sort of stuff.

00:39:02.000 Ignored, suppressed.

00:39:04.000 Scientists are being dissuaded from reporting on this sort of stuff.

00:39:07.000 And this is actually, I think people need to understand, this is actually really, really common inside the scientific community that any sort of That's right.

00:39:13.000 sort of politically averse possible scientific result gets the study shut down from beginning and reporting on it also gets shut down.

00:39:19.000 That's right in England for instance they are you know they are really considering banning things like puberty blockers because they are starting to doubt based on the you know the evidence they've collected that it's doing these young women any good that this transition in fact one of the authors of one of the big studies said look this is a different population I don't even think, you know, my earlier studies applied to this teenage girls and they do seem to be socially influenced.

00:39:49.000 If you look at the evidence, it tends to lead you to caution.

00:39:53.000 But what we're seeing is exactly right.

00:39:55.000 These young doctors who are pushing this are activists.

00:40:00.000 They're really not behaving like doctors.

00:40:02.000 I mean, look, My book, for all the blowback and all the extremism around it, all my book does is show, is argue that there may be social influence involved and that we should be very cautious here.

00:40:14.000 That's, I mean, that's something you get for, you were told about every medication, right?

00:40:19.000 Where they list all the side effects in every ad on television.

00:40:22.000 I mean, we promote caution when we talk about this, you know, really You know, extremely involved medications and treatments.

00:40:32.000 But for this area, you're never supposed to exercise caution.

00:40:36.000 In fact, caution is considered hateful somehow.

00:40:39.000 If they were really concerned about the health and welfare of transgender people, they would want more studies done.

00:40:46.000 Instead, the activists want less.

00:40:49.000 So in a moment, I'm going to talk to you more about the censorship of science because that is a major issue across the board.

00:40:53.000 We'll get to that in a second.

00:40:54.000 First, why would you trust the people in Silicon Valley?

00:40:57.000 I mean, I don't trust the people in Silicon Valley.

00:40:58.000 They're not treating conservatives fairly.

00:41:00.000 They suppress content you want to see.

00:41:01.000 And then, they monetize your personal online data.

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00:41:29.000 So, if you're like me and you believe that your internet data belongs to you and not to giant tech companies who aren't friendly to conservatives, ExpressVPN is the answer.

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00:42:03.000 Okay, so let's talk about the censorship of science.

00:42:05.000 So, I remember recently I was at a dinner with a person who is a very high-ranking scientist at a major global organization, and he was talking about how he was about to bring out an enormous study all about the genetic versus environmental bases of homosexuality.

00:42:20.000 And he was really nervous about this because what the study showed is that it was both Partially biological and partly environmental, which is what pretty much everybody who's ever studied nearly any human psychiatric issue says, right?

00:42:32.000 It's almost entirely a combination of biological and environmental and it differs circumstance to circumstance.

00:42:37.000 He was petrified of how this study was going to be brought out.

00:42:40.000 When it was in fact brought out, the media immediately said, homosexuality is... the study shows homosexuality is biologically driven, ignoring the fact that That the study itself suggested that a percentage of homosexual behavior is biologically driven, but some of it is environmental, which of course is true of virtually every human behavior.

00:42:58.000 The willingness of the media to suppress science they don't like or to pressure universities into refusing to fund studies they don't like is really overwhelming on a variety of levels where it crosses swords with sort of leftist political agendas, it seems like.

00:43:12.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:43:13.000 I mean, when you start looking into the science and you see how politicized it is, it's really alarming.

00:43:19.000 Quillette ran a wonderful piece by some researchers and psychologists who came out and tried to show that a lot of the studies that were really poorly done around this issue of gender dysphoria, and they were using all kinds of surveys done by activist organizations that were not well done surveys.

00:43:37.000 I think that, you know, Well, when I talk to doctors, and I talk about them in my book, when I talk to doctors who attend conferences that discuss gender dysphoria, they say, you know, one researcher, Lisa Littman, who wrote the Brown University study you mentioned earlier, she said it was like an infomercial for early transition.

00:44:00.000 Every other issue discussed at a medical conference, they always talk about risks.

00:44:05.000 That's really important for doctors to be aware of.

00:44:09.000 But around this issue, every honest doctor I've spoken to, they say it's just a celebration-only zone.

00:44:15.000 And of course, if you're concerned about the damage that could be done to a population, you don't want to sit around celebrating the medication.

00:44:22.000 You want to be evaluating it.

00:44:24.000 And you know, it's interesting because we've talked about censorship of scientists and censorship of people who are writing about this journalistically.

00:44:29.000 But the one area we haven't talked about censorship of is people who have detransitioned.

00:44:33.000 And there's been a complete media blackout on people who detransition or who experience regret about transitioning in the first place.

00:44:41.000 Those people are treated as unpersons by the media.

00:44:44.000 You're not allowed to mention them under any circumstances.

00:44:47.000 Maybe you can talk about that a little bit.

00:44:48.000 That's right.

00:44:49.000 You know, Reddit did something a few months ago now.

00:44:52.000 They actually removed their, they had a large, that I mentioned, group of detransitioners, so young women who had undergone medical treatments and regretted it and talked about it. 1.00

00:45:04.000 And they had a social media group.

00:45:06.000 These young women live with a lot of a lot of pain. I mean, it's embarrassing to have gone through this and made a mistake and come out and said so. And frankly, I admire them. They're really wonderful. The ones I've interviewed and spoken to are a really wonderful, impressive group of young women. But they've been through a lot.

00:45:25.000 And they had this discussion forum as a place to meet and talk to each other and share their experiences and Reddit shut it down after activists complained.

00:45:34.000 Now they reinstituted it, but of course, like all these things, it has the effect of, you know, We're just sending you a warning, effectively, right?

00:45:45.000 When one of these corporations shuts you down overnight, one of these dot-coms, it has the effect of chilling speech, which I'm sure it has done, and just sort of instilling just enough fear that, you know, tomorrow we can disappear you.

00:45:59.000 It is mind-boggling to think that there are activists who are specifically dedicated to preventing people who have undergone an experience and now regret the experience from speaking out.

00:46:06.000 I mean, it does beg the question as to what exactly is driving these activists, because most of this stuff is legal, and for adults, all of it is legal.

00:46:15.000 What is the specific drive that we have to now make it nearly mandatory for a child at the age of four or five to be considering transition outside of the parent's permission?

00:46:24.000 What is driving all of this?

00:46:26.000 It's a good question.

00:46:30.000 I think that to understand these activists, you have to look more to Antifa and other extremist leftist groups than you look to normal liberals.

00:46:40.000 They're the most illiberal group.

00:46:46.000 They want to completely shame, destroy and coerce.

00:46:51.000 They are aggressively going after dissenters, very much like the people cheering on rioters in the streets or cheering on banning of books.

00:47:03.000 They are not people you can reason with.

00:47:06.000 Unfortunately, a lot of them anyway.

00:47:08.000 You've mentioned institutions that are pushing this.

00:47:10.000 When my wife was in medical school, they were propagandized to about this.

00:47:14.000 I mean, there's just no other way of putting it.

00:47:15.000 It was not as though it was a medical presentation.

00:47:18.000 You were simply told what you were supposed to do without any supporting evidence whatsoever for it, which led to bizarre actual circumstances with patients where you would walk into a room with a patient of a particular sex And you had no idea what you were supposed to do with this person because the person was actually not of the sex it said on their medical form.

00:47:37.000 But it's not just that.

00:47:38.000 We saw in presidential town halls, Joe Biden suggesting to a mother that her son be treated as a girl at the age of eight.

00:47:48.000 We saw Elizabeth Warren saying that she wanted to appoint her Her secretary of education would not be approved unless the secretary of education was approved of by a transgender child.

00:48:00.000 I mean, this is insanity. 0.80

00:48:02.000 It's crazy stuff.

00:48:03.000 It is, and I interviewed one really top plastic surgeon who specialized in microsurgery, and he did not do gender transition surgeries because he said, look, I didn't get involved in medicine in order to do that to young children.

00:48:20.000 I don't wanna do it.

00:48:22.000 But because he refused to do it at his top hospital, he said the people who were doing these surgeries were in his view, completely unqualified to do the kind of.

00:48:33.000 You know, incredibly difficult transfers of peripheral nerves and arteries and whatnot that are required for some of these procedures.

00:48:42.000 And that's what you're seeing.

00:48:45.000 You're seeing the best people in medicine take a step back because they don't want to be just told by activists what they have to do.

00:48:54.000 They're real doctors.

00:48:55.000 So they take a step back.

00:48:56.000 They say, I don't want anything to do with this population.

00:48:59.000 And the people rushing forward to treat them and to take the directives from the activists are often not the best doctors.

00:49:07.000 Do you think that we're gonna reach a point here where doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists are basically forced by law to push this sort of stuff?

00:49:14.000 Because, again, we've already seen so-called conversion therapy bills pushed in places like New Jersey and California.

00:49:20.000 And if we were talking about electro-shocking kids who think they're gay, that'd be one thing, but that's not what these bills do.

00:49:25.000 They literally suggest, in some cases, that you are not allowed to discuss with a child their actual biological sex, because that amounts to conversion therapy.

00:49:34.000 And you've already seen with regard to things like abortion, an attempt to force doctors or hospitals to perform medical procedures that doctors and hospitals may not want to perform.

00:49:43.000 Do you think that's the direction we're moving here to make this sort of stuff mandatory for doctors to provide?

00:49:48.000 I think, I mean, yes, I do.

00:49:50.000 But I also think what we're gonna see is, as with everyone else, everyone with integrity, who's skilled and has integrity in a particular field, bow out.

00:50:01.000 So they'll go to a different field, or they will make up some excuse.

00:50:05.000 Oh, I'm not qualified to do that.

00:50:06.000 And then the people rushing forward and will say, I'll do it.

00:50:09.000 I can make, you know, I'd love to make those that money are often, you know, not as frankly qualified or sometimes as ethical.

00:50:18.000 And we see that across the board, right?

00:50:19.000 You see that with, you know, any number of professions where people realize that if they are a teacher in a classroom who doesn't want to teach, you know, the 1619 Project, they don't want to, you know, propagandize to children, they actually want to teach history, they're going to be more inclined to choose another profession.

00:50:40.000 So we've discussed a lot about how much more common this is becoming.

00:50:43.000 Do you have any sort of statistical analysis of how much more common these sorts of gender dysphoric claims are?

00:50:51.000 How big is this phenomenon?

00:50:52.000 It's big.

00:50:53.000 It's really big.

00:50:54.000 So in England, the rise in young women presenting with gender dysphoria at clinics was up 4,400% over the previous decade.

00:51:04.000 In America, it's harder to know the numbers because we, of course, don't have the same centralized care.

00:51:09.000 And we don't actually require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in order to get the hormones.

00:51:20.000 So it's much harder to track.

00:51:22.000 But we know that as of 2018, 2% of high school students were identifying as transgender.

00:51:28.000 And I see numbers.

00:51:31.000 higher than that in middle school. So 2 percent of American high school kids, that's over 300,000 kids. That's very high. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of young women presenting for gender surgeries in America quadrupled. We're seeing an extremely high spike.

00:51:50.000 And that's what I'm going to do.

00:51:51.000 And the fact that you can't even ask why is partly what's fueling this.

00:51:57.000 There's this code of silence around just asking basic questions.

00:52:02.000 This also has aspects of religious freedom here, because if you are a religious person, then obviously you disagree with the basic gender ideology that's being presented by the left, and yet, as we mentioned before, there is, on a non-religious basis, the possibility that Child Protective Services shows up at your door if you disagree with this sort of stuff.

00:52:20.000 If you're a religious person, this seems like a perfect First Amendment issue, where you say, I'm not raising my kid the way you want me to raise my kid, and they just show up with Child Protective Services and take the kid away. 0.71

00:52:30.000 Yeah, one thing I tell parents is to oppose gender ideology in the schools.

00:52:34.000 I mean, I think you're right about the religious issue, but I also think that gender ideology in the schools is doing so much damage, and it's part of why we're going to see a massive spike of trans identification, even bigger than we're seeing. 0.61

00:52:48.000 Because young kids in California, kids as young as five, are being told That only they know their true gender, and they're encouraged along a path of self-discovery.

00:52:58.000 They're told their parents don't know their gender.

00:53:00.000 Only they get to decide it.

00:53:02.000 This is confusing a population.

00:53:04.000 It's not necessary to prevent bullying.

00:53:07.000 You can absolutely insist that everyone be decent to each other without encouraging this.

00:53:11.000 And, you know, it's really confusing a whole generation of young kids.

00:53:16.000 So what got you into writing about this in the first place?

00:53:18.000 Because you went to Yale Law School, you clerked, I believe it was on the D.C.

00:53:21.000 Circuit Court of Appeals, and all of a sudden you find yourself writing books about gender dysphoria.

00:53:26.000 So how did you end up, and you'd obviously written a lot on different subjects for the Wall Street Journal, how'd you end up in sort of this subject area?

00:53:34.000 Sure.

00:53:34.000 So I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on pronoun laws, you know, the laws that mandate use of certain pronouns in assigned criminal or civil penalties.

00:53:42.000 And I just pointed out this is straightforwardly unconstitutional in America.

00:53:46.000 The government can't make people say anything.

00:53:48.000 They can't even make people salute a flag.

00:53:50.000 And a reader wrote to me and she told me about this phenomenon and she said no journalist would take it up but her daughter had been caught up in this craze and she asked me to investigate it.

00:54:02.000 So I tried to pass it on to an investigative journalist and when I couldn't take one to To get one to take it up, it really bothered me.

00:54:10.000 Parents were crying out for journalists to take this seriously.

00:54:15.000 Parents were crying out for some help.

00:54:17.000 They were being gaslit everywhere.

00:54:19.000 And journalists, whose job it is to ask these uncomfortable questions and find out what's really going on, were backing away from it.

00:54:27.000 What's been kind of the blowback in your personal life from all of this?

00:54:29.000 Because obviously, you know, we tend to walk... I know your husband.

00:54:33.000 I've known him since I was a kid, actually.

00:54:35.000 So we tend to walk in kind of similar circles.

00:54:38.000 But, you know, you're in a major blue city where all of your viewpoints are taken as evidence of your malicious intent and evil.

00:54:47.000 So how has all of this impacted you on a personal level, writing about this and becoming sort of a national story for being quashed?

00:54:53.000 No, it's interesting.

00:54:55.000 I think we're all liberals, classical liberals, and anyone who's ever said something where you're being canceled, we're all in the same position, and that is we're fighting for the possibility for Americans to say things that aren't pre-approved, that aren't Hateful or offensive.

00:55:16.000 We're trying to stay within the bounds of normal discussion.

00:55:21.000 We're trying to keep that open.

00:55:23.000 I mean, when I think about, look, this is sort of an exhausting endeavor, honestly, defending the ability to talk about this issue.

00:55:32.000 But the reason I do it is they are expanding the list of all All the categories of inquiry that they're putting in the same bucket as Richard Spencer or really hateful speech and completely off limits.

00:55:48.000 And the more victories we hand them, the fewer topics we're allowed to question.

00:55:53.000 And right now the medical care for young people who think they might be transgender all of a sudden is terrible.

00:55:59.000 It's terrible.

00:56:01.000 Doctors aren't behaving like doctors, and no one's asking the appropriate questions.

00:56:05.000 And if we allow that to be verboten, they'll just move on to the next thing.

00:56:10.000 Let's talk about, you know, corporate America and the entertainment industry, both of which have had a significant impact on how people view this sort of stuff.

00:56:17.000 So obviously Hollywood has decided to present this phenomenon in only the most sort of hallmarkified fashion.

00:56:23.000 It's all shot through yellow haze and wonder.

00:56:26.000 The Babysitters Club, which originally was a book series designed for, you know, preteens, is now being filmed on Netflix and there's a transgender character and there's a full scene in which Parents and doctors are being lectured about how a seven-year-old child who identifies as transgender is supposed to be treated in a hospital setting.

00:56:42.000 The doctors have to be made aware by a woke babysitter. 0.97

00:56:45.000 You know, Hollywood has bought into this wholesale.

00:56:50.000 When did this happen?

00:56:50.000 I mean, it seems like it's been relatively recent.

00:56:52.000 I'm old enough to remember when Hollywood sort of made the transition to we're going to have a lot of gay and lesbian characters in film and TV, which, you know, fine.

00:56:59.000 And now they've decided that every series has to have a transgender character as well.

00:57:03.000 And not only that, you're going to have to To be Oscar eligible, you have to include, you know, one of these sort of woke social justice group characters.

00:57:12.000 When did Hollywood jump into this?

00:57:14.000 So I think the tipping point for a lot of people was Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair.

00:57:19.000 People who look at the culture and even transgender adults that I interview tend to look at that as a really sea change in the culture.

00:57:29.000 But you're right and when I talk about the lies that get told around this, perhaps the most concerning lie is that transition is easy.

00:57:37.000 And when I interview transgender adults, they are horrified that young kids are pushed to this and told, no problem, you can just switch.

00:57:44.000 Because, look, this is not easy.

00:57:47.000 It's not true that you just take some medication and all of a sudden you're a boy.

00:57:51.000 Depending on what medications, what hormones you try and what course you take, there's problems.

00:57:59.000 There's real potential for permanent sexual dysfunction and all kinds of other problems.

00:58:03.000 This is not something to take lightly but Hollywood glamorizing it is really fueling kids thinking this is an easy cure all for whatever's troubling them.

00:58:14.000 It is really amazing.

00:58:15.000 I mean, if you do watch movies about this sort of stuff or TV shows, it is treated as though you one day are just a burly man and the next day you look like Laverne Cox and it's like there's no in-between and there are no surgeries required.

00:58:27.000 It was all just magic.

00:58:28.000 You just walk into a box and you came out the other side as a member of the opposite gender. 1.00

00:58:32.000 No one ever in the media will ever detail the actual details of transgender surgery, particularly male-to-female transgender surgery, which is Pretty extensive and can be absolutely horrific over time. 0.53

00:58:42.000 I mean, if you actually detail the maintenance and care of the new sort of construction, it is not a pretty picture.

00:58:50.000 And obviously, you know, I think there's a stake for a lot of people in never describing this sort of stuff.

00:58:55.000 And the number of surgeries.

00:58:56.000 I mean, even young women.

00:58:58.000 I talked to young women who had top surgeries.

00:59:00.000 They often need, you know, repeated, you know, more surgeries in order to fix the appearance because they're unhappy with that.

00:59:10.000 Sometimes if a young woman's breasts are removed, then it's obvious she has hips. 1.00

00:59:14.000 So then she's concerned about that.

00:59:16.000 The surgeries are unending.

00:59:19.000 I mean, all you need is a doctor willing to take money for it, and there are so many who are only too happy to.

00:59:26.000 So you have Hollywood pushing this stuff, and now you have corporate America pushing this stuff and censoring.

00:59:30.000 So this breaks down into a couple categories.

00:59:32.000 Here you have social media, and then you have actual corporations.

00:59:35.000 So you mentioned Amazon refused to allow any advertising of your book.

00:59:38.000 They'll allow I Am Jazz to be advertised up the wazoo.

00:59:41.000 They'll make it their book of the year.

00:59:42.000 But your book, You Can't Advertise on Amazon, Target took down your book for a brief time after, I believe, a single tweet suggesting that your book should not be put in Target stores or be made available on their website.

00:59:54.000 Was it only a single tweet that got Target to commit to taking it down briefly?

00:59:57.000 I mean, it seems like it.

00:59:58.000 I saw another one.

01:00:00.000 So I saw at most two.

01:00:02.000 So it was either one or two that that triggered that response.

01:00:05.000 But, you know, it was it was really unbelievable.

01:00:08.000 And Americans today, we still don't believe we're not OK with censorship.

01:00:12.000 I mean, it was I would never have seen this if parents who've lived through this Hadn't objected and brought it to my attention and said look what they did to your book So there are a lot of other books that could easily be quietly disappeared where you don't have this, you know large population You know so excited for someone to tell their story who are who is out there frankly You know being vigilant on your behalf because they want to get the message out you know, I

01:00:41.000 There was a group of parents, actually, who put up billboards in Los Angeles because they saw how suppressed the book was.

01:00:50.000 And they actually dug into their own pockets and put up a billboard to advertise the book and raised money to do more billboards.

01:00:58.000 And other parents around the country were so excited about this.

01:01:01.000 They started a campaign on GoFundMe and GoFundMe shut it down.

01:01:06.000 So GovFundMe, which allows 35,000 fundraisers for young women to pay for the removal of their healthy breasts, shut down as hateful an effort by parents to get the word out that really there are a lot of risks involved and really urging caution.

01:01:26.000 I mean, this is the scariest aspect for the broad society, is the willingness of corporations to do the work that government won't.

01:01:31.000 So government doesn't have the ability to prevent the dissemination of your book, at least for now.

01:01:36.000 Although, we'll see where anti-discrimination law goes, because California's getting into some dicey areas there.

01:01:41.000 But when it comes to corporations, corporations seem to be taking the lead in this sort of stuff.

01:01:46.000 Is it just that they're afraid of the woke blowback?

01:01:48.000 That they're afraid of A very concerted group of people making Target famous for having allowed your book, and they believe that there aren't enough people out there to sort of counterbalance that?

01:01:57.000 Or is it that there are woke staffers inside these various institutions who suggest that they are just not going to go to work tomorrow if your book doesn't get taken down, like they were sort of suggesting at Spotify after your podcast with Joe?

01:02:08.000 So, a few things.

01:02:10.000 I actually, I've thought about this.

01:02:12.000 I think that Target knows its customers, and frankly, its customers are a lot of parents who are concerned and are interested in, you know, what are the medical risks, and why are there so many of my kids' friends suddenly trans, and are very interested in this topic.

01:02:28.000 So why do they take it down?

01:02:29.000 I actually think it has more to, it's not the number of people.

01:02:34.000 I think it has more to do with the halo that they're looking for.

01:02:37.000 They don't want to lose their halo.

01:02:38.000 They think they're really great people.

01:02:41.000 And the idea that they could be called bigoted is horrifying to them, especially when they think they're such swell guys.

01:02:48.000 They'd rather get rid of a book and commit to book banning, essentially, than ever be thought of as going against civil rights.

01:02:57.000 Of course, I fully support civil rights for transgender people.

01:03:00.000 It's not a civil rights issue at all.

01:03:03.000 It really is just a medical issue and a mental health issue, and it's one that's being ignored.

01:03:07.000 My main concern right now is that I think that we are at the precipice as a society in terms of whether we're going to be allowed to have these conversations.

01:03:14.000 And to me, the future of those conversations actually does not rely on conservatives.

01:03:19.000 It relies on Liberals who are not leftists.

01:03:21.000 And it seems like the culture has sort of broken down into three categories.

01:03:24.000 There are conservatives, there are liberals who are not leftists, and then there are leftists.

01:03:28.000 And leftists are people who actually want to shut down the debate, who are interested in their policy prescriptions above all, and who want to ensure that conversations can't actually happen.

01:03:35.000 The sort of people who will go after you, the sort of people who will go after Joe Rogan for even talking with you, the sort of people who get very angry that You are allowed to put your book even up for sale on Amazon.com.

01:03:47.000 And then there are a bunch of mainstream liberals who may not even agree with you, but agree with the fundamental premise, which is that we should be able to have these conversations.

01:03:55.000 And I wonder if there are enough liberals who are going to side with a broader conversation versus their sort of policy prescriptions, because I think this is sort of the battle we're now being forced to, is that there are liberals who are gonna be able to choose to move along with people they generally agree with about policy prescriptions on the left, And that's easy.

01:04:11.000 They just have to go along with getting rid of the individual rights to speak out about it.

01:04:15.000 Or they can make their own life, in terms of policy, a little bit more difficult by allowing the debate, but maintain the power of the debate.

01:04:22.000 And I wonder, in your experience, I mean, how many folks who are of the political left have expressed sympathy for your ability to get the message out there?

01:04:29.000 So overwhelmingly the parents who call me are political, are liberal, as you say, and they describe themselves now as politically homeless.

01:04:37.000 They are people who are uncomfortable with conservatism.

01:04:41.000 They are really uncomfortable about, you know, pro-life, with things like pro-life positions.

01:04:48.000 They're not, you know, very often are not religious and they're not really comfortable with religion.

01:04:53.000 Right?

01:04:53.000 in many cases, but they do believe in American freedoms.

01:04:57.000 They do believe that they know their kids better than these so-called experts who have seen them for 45 minutes.

01:05:03.000 And they do believe that even though they're supportive of gay rights, their daughter is not suddenly magically trans, right?

01:05:10.000 They've known her her whole life.

01:05:12.000 So I think that the liberals who, certainly the ones who have lived through this, they almost always tell me they're politically homeless now because they do not feel that the Democrats, they are horrified by a lot of things going on in the Democratic Party and a lot of support for this.

01:05:28.000 But whether they will find common cause with conservatives on this, I just don't know.

01:05:32.000 I know that Women's Liberation Front, which is an organization I really respect, they're a radical feminist group in America, and they have, you know, worked with conservatives even though they're not.

01:05:45.000 They have worked with conservatives around these issues and around women's rights issues because they believe that what's happening to young women today is horrifying and they're concerned about it and they're willing to work with people who are willing to work with them.

01:06:00.000 Constant attacks for it.

01:06:02.000 I mean, constant.

01:06:04.000 How could you work with a pro-life organization and whatnot?

01:06:07.000 So I think you're right.

01:06:09.000 Classical liberals are going to have to decide what issues they care about.

01:06:12.000 Do they care about free speech?

01:06:14.000 Do they care about an open society with free inquiry and where that's allowed?

01:06:20.000 How about in the media?

01:06:20.000 So obviously, you've worked with a lot of folks in the media, and in the media, it seems to me that we have what I've termed the happy birthday problem, which is where I have a lot of liberal friends in the media who will privately text me on my birthday, happy birthday, but will never ever tweet happy birthday, because that would assume that I'm a human being who was born, and that is not allowed on Twitter.

01:06:41.000 I know that you know a lot of folks in the media.

01:06:43.000 Have you experienced something similar, or are they at least openly supporting your ability to speak out freely?

01:06:47.000 That's hilarious.

01:06:48.000 OK, so I love that.

01:06:50.000 And I also have the happy birthday problem, as you can imagine.

01:06:53.000 I get a lot of private, I really love your book.

01:06:55.000 I really agree with it.

01:06:56.000 But don't tell anyone.

01:06:59.000 So, you know, yeah, you do see that a lot.

01:07:02.000 I think we just have to fight to keep the Overton window open.

01:07:05.000 I mean, look, I think there are a lot of people in the media who are mostly horrified when liberals are censored.

01:07:13.000 But they don't really care at all when conservatives are, because frankly, they think they deserve it.

01:07:19.000 So I just think we have to fight to keep rational inquiry accessible and possible.

01:07:27.000 And I think the more we just speak honestly and reasonably, The more people will feel comfortable, I think, eventually joining the side of people who are making sense.

01:07:44.000 But yeah, there are a lot of people very afraid to openly say, Happy Birthday!

01:07:49.000 I really like your book!

01:07:50.000 So in a second, we're going to get to some bonus content.

01:07:53.000 I want to ask you specifically about what you think the path forward is in terms of society's treatment of transgender people, particularly both children and adults.

01:08:01.000 But first, if you want to hear Abigail Schreier's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.

01:08:04.000 Head on over to dailywire.com.

01:08:06.000 Click join at the top of the page.

01:08:07.000 You can hear the rest of our conversation there.

01:08:10.000 Abigail Shryer, really appreciate the time, and as always, appreciate the bravery.

01:08:14.000 It's Abigail Shryer.

01:08:15.000 If you enjoyed this Sunday Special, check out all of our others.

01:08:18.000 And everybody, make sure to go out and get a copy of Abigail's new book, Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters. 1.00

01:08:24.000 Abigail Shryer, thank you so much for joining the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

01:08:27.000 Thank you.

01:08:28.000 Thanks for watching.

01:08:29.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Mathis Blumberg.

01:08:42.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:08:44.000 Our technical director is Austin Stevens, and our assistant director is Pavel Wydowski.

01:08:48.000 Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.

01:08:50.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:08:52.000 Editing is by Jim Nichol.

01:08:53.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

01:08:55.000 Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.

01:08:57.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:08:59.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 22, 2020

Abigail Shrier | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 108

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