The Critical Compass Podcast - Discussing Fertility w⧸ Gender Dysphoric Kids Like 'Talking to a Blank Wall'

00:00:00.000 In the leaked WPATH files, internal communications from the World

00:00:06.640 Professional Association for Transgender Health, that Michael Schellenberger and

00:00:11.640 I released last year, a leading Canadian pediatric endocrinologist admitted

00:00:17.760 that discussing fertility preservation with a 14-year-old is like, and I quote,

00:00:22.720 talking to a blank wall. He also admitted that he sees significant regret about

00:00:30.280 fertility loss in his patients when they reach adulthood. Now I know this to be

00:00:36.400 true because I, at 14, like so many other women, was that blank wall. All the way

00:00:44.140 into my late 20s, I was adamant that I would never want children, and then at

00:00:49.600 30, it was as if someone flipped a switch inside me, and I needed to have a baby

00:00:55.600 right away. True story.

00:01:04.360 And today, at 47, I'm the proud mother of three children.

00:01:11.360 And they've brought more joy into my life than my teenage self ever could have

00:01:19.880 imagined. This is a completely normal life trajectory. It's the reason we would

00:01:27.600 never offer vasectomies or tubal ligation to adolescents, no matter how

00:01:32.320 strenuously they may insist that they will never want to be parents. Everything we

00:01:38.500 know about adolescent development tells us that this is a life stage defined by

00:01:44.140 experimentation and change. It's a period of identity exploration, where young people

00:01:51.580 try on different selves, when beliefs are held with passionate conviction one day only

00:01:57.580 to be discarded the next. And because we know that adolescents don't have fixed, stable identities,

00:02:05.500 we should also know that permanent irreversible medical interventions that

00:02:10.740 imprint adolescent identities onto the body could never be appropriate or ethical.

The Critical Compass Podcast - February 23, 2026