The John-Henry Westen Show - Alliance Defending Freedom vs the LGBT Agenda ｜ John Bursch

00:00:00.000 Ave Maria Mutual Funds, seeking the moral high ground for 20 years.

00:00:10.000 Pro-life, pro-family, and Catholic values have guided us to the top.

00:00:30.000 We need to do the accompanying, we need to reach out, we need to show compassion, we need to show empathy, but then we have to go the next step and take it the rest of the way.

00:00:38.000 Explain to them, for example, that in the best long-term study that we have, adults who transition, that suicide rate goes from 12 times the general population to 19 times the general population.

00:00:49.000 Hello, my friends. You know, one of the most difficult things we deal with today is this whole issue of gender, gender ideology, but it gets real personal when we want to talk about it at our place of work or even sometimes in our families.

00:01:10.580 But then it gets even more complicated when it is a loved one, one of our children, who are engaging in some of those, some of our friends and family.

00:01:22.460 How in the world do we deal with it? How do we talk about it in a way that still honors the truth, but, you know, perhaps doesn't kill our family life or what do we do? It's so confusing.

00:01:35.200 It also involves the teaching of the church. And what exactly is that? Because there's a ton of voices out there that seem to speak for the church that are telling the opposite of what the church teaching is.

00:01:47.920 We need someone to help us suss out what is what. And there is a great lawyer who works for Alliance Defending Freedom, which is one of the premier groups defending life, faith, family and freedom all over the world.

00:01:59.500 And this lawyer, John Birch, has written a book about gender ideology and what it's about. It's called Loving God's Children.

00:02:10.300 And we're going to speak with him about this issue, the hardest of all issues.

00:02:14.480 He's actually argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court, including Obergefell, which was the homosexual marriage decision.

00:02:21.060 So stay tuned for this episode of The John Henry Weston Show.

00:02:26.640 John Birch, welcome to the program.

00:02:27.940 Thank you. So glad to be here.

00:02:30.940 Let's begin, as you always do, with the sign of the cross.

00:02:33.880 In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

00:02:40.420 So, John, if you can tell us first off, I mean, this is not an easy subject to address.

00:02:45.880 In fact, it's one that's caused lots of people to be canceled from their places of work,

00:02:50.320 gets them in trouble with their families and friends.

00:02:53.340 Why write about this?

00:02:54.520 Well, I don't worry about cancellation.

00:02:57.740 I've already argued about the church's definition of marriage to defend that.

00:03:01.760 I helped overturn Roe versus Wade, and I regularly speak and litigate on these issues.

00:03:06.420 So no fear there.

00:03:07.660 But the reason that I wanted to write this book, not something I ever aspired to do,

00:03:11.480 not something you go to law school thinking, yeah, I'll write a book on gender ideology someday. 0.99

00:03:14.880 But because it became such a pervasive part of our culture.

00:03:18.960 At Alliance Defending Freedom, where I work, over the last five years or so, our religious freedom and free speech dockets have changed dramatically.

00:03:28.560 And they now focus almost entirely on the issue of gender ideology.

00:03:32.160 It started with boys identifying as girls in private spaces, like showers and restrooms and locker rooms, dormitories.

00:03:41.160 There was even a case up in Alaska involving an abused women's shelter, where a man identifying as a woman wanted to sleep in the same room as these women who had been victimized and abused.

00:03:52.560 From there, it moved on to athletics.

00:03:54.540 We represent the athletes in Connecticut, the young women who lost 15 state track and field titles to two males who identify as female.

00:04:02.720 We passed the State Women's Sports Act in 22 states.

00:04:05.460 That's being challenged everywhere.

00:04:07.380 From there, it then moved on to preferred pronouns, people being compelled to use pronouns that they thought were a lie in schools, both at the high school and the college level, but also in their places of employment, even non-public employers.

00:04:19.720 And now we're to the point where you're seeing kids taken away from parents in California and some other states if they refuse to give in to a child's demand that they'd be transitioned.

00:04:30.100 We're seeing Catholics who are declining the ability to foster or adopt children unless they agree ahead of time that they'll transition the kids. 0.53

00:04:37.700 And we see states that are engaged in curriculum that not only ask kindergartners and first graders what their gender identity is and then encourage that, but they hide it from the parents.

00:04:50.000 So it's just unavoidable.

00:04:51.880 And I felt like it was time for someone writing from a Catholic perspective to bring all these pieces together, to talk about the way the church teaches and how we should understand that, to talk about the science and how that aligns completely with the church's teaching of the truth.

00:05:06.140 And then finally, how to interact with the rest of the world and our own family members in ways that show that we alone, not the other side, are the ones who are acting lovingly in this situation.

00:05:17.360 This is kind of like the one-stop soup to nuts package for any Catholic who wants to understand the topic. 0.69

00:05:23.380 Wow.

00:05:24.440 Loving God's Children, it's called.

00:05:26.240 It's out by Sophia Press.

00:05:27.720 You know, tell us, because this is really hard.

00:05:30.940 And before we get, because I want you to talk about the church teachings, but that mess you mentioned, it's mind-blowing.

00:05:40.620 One of the things people are going to pick on right away, though, is like, well, the pronoun wars.

00:05:45.960 Can we just, you know, just give in there?

00:05:48.300 Maybe that's the least harmful, the least kind of thing we can do, the easiest.

00:05:53.960 What's your response?

00:05:55.460 We absolutely have to hold that line.

00:05:57.420 And there are even many Catholics who say, well, it would be the loving thing to do to acknowledge the way that someone identifies themselves, whether that's through a name change or a change in pronouns or honorifics or whatever.

00:06:09.160 But the problem is to be truly loving.

00:06:11.640 We're not talking about the soupy, sentimental feelings that you see in movies or books, but loving the way the church defines it in the catechism as willing the best of the other person.

00:06:20.820 We know that affirming the pronouns leads to a lifetime of hardship.

00:06:24.720 And let me give you some stats on that.

00:06:26.580 For most children, we're talking, you know, adolescents, teenagers who are going through some kind of gender dysphoria.

00:06:32.840 And we're not talking about the kids who, because of social pressure, just en masse all of a sudden declare that they're transgender, 10 at a time in a classroom.

00:06:40.940 These are the kids who are suffering from a clinical psychology diagnosis that their mind is not aligned with their body.

00:06:47.980 Well, if you leave them to their own devices and you don't encourage them to pursue the gender identity, 80 to 95 percent of them will naturally align their mind with their body. 0.71

00:06:57.400 That's a great stat.

00:06:58.200 But if you start to affirm the pronouns and you allow them to wear the other sexes dress and you allow them to use the opposite sex bathroom and the athletic team, nearly 100 percent of them will continue with their dysphoria for the rest of their life. 0.82

00:07:10.480 And as I'm sure we'll get into, when you pursue the dysphoria by aligning your body with your mind, that leads to total failure, higher suicide rates, worse incidents of mental health issues, as well as other health problems and ultimately loss of fertility. 0.56

00:07:26.600 So the pronouns is kind of the camel's nose under the tent, and we have to stop it before it gets there.

00:07:33.720 Wow.

00:07:35.200 OK, so today, I hate to say it, but the church seems totally confused on the issue.

00:07:43.560 In 2015, Pope Francis had a transgender couple in the Vatican.

00:07:48.180 He called them married and happy.

00:07:50.420 You can see the photo on the screen in front of you now.

00:07:52.320 Well, it was two women, one of whom is so-called transitioned to become a man, so took drugs for many, many years, therefore has facial hair, altered her body to look like a man, destroying her physical look. 0.87

00:08:06.920 I mean, it's unbelievably harmful.

00:08:10.740 It appears the pope has given in on the pronoun wars. 0.97

00:08:14.100 So the teaching of the church, what is it nowadays?

00:08:17.240 Well, the church has taught for millennia that we are not souls trapped in a body that can be manipulated, however we might feel.

00:08:27.160 Instead, we are embodied souls, and that means that our body says something about who we are, our male or femaleness.

00:08:33.500 It's why we celebrate the fact that at the end of time, at the last judgment, our bodies will actually be reunited with our souls in heaven, and we will continue to be men or women.

00:08:42.280 And although Pope Francis made some of those comments, I think that's where he's trying to carefully balance this issue between accompanying individuals, welcoming them into the church and loving them.

00:08:54.140 But he has been crystal clear about the church's teachings about gender ideology.

00:08:59.120 He has said in no uncertain terms that it's a tragedy, that it's terrible that we're teaching kids in schools that they can be a gender identity that's different than their sex.

00:09:07.960 He has said in encyclicals and in public statements that if you deny the reality of your body as male or female, that you are rejecting a gift from God, and it puts a barrier between you and other people and prevents any kind of meaningful, intimate human relationships.

00:09:23.840 So we need to be careful that we don't fall for the media headlines, which take a picture like that and say, oh, that the church is confused about this, and look at the actual teaching documents.

00:09:35.480 And I have to say that the U.S. bishops have been absolutely terrific on this.

00:09:39.520 I'm sure many of your viewers heard about the USCCB's recent statement about Catholic health care and how we're not supposed to be doing gender transition therapies or surgeries in Catholic hospitals.

00:09:50.840 You know, that's all well and good. What people may not realize is that over 30 dioceses now have adopted policies making sure that their schools and their parishes comply with the church's teachings about the truth of the human body.

00:10:04.760 And some of them have gone into great depth about the theology.

00:10:07.720 I quote them that length in the book and in the question and answer session, you know, about this idea of an embodied soul, how, in some sense, the gender ideology movement is just a re-raising of the Gnosticism heresy from the second century, which said that our souls and our bodies were different, that they were separate somehow, that have talked about the medical transitions, how those are wrong, how the pronouns.

00:10:31.100 We have to continue to continue to tell the truth and about the importance of loving individuals in the way that we talk, the way that we teach, and the way that we respond to these things by willing the best of the person.

00:10:43.080 And that is only by recognizing the truth of their human sexuality as male or female.

00:10:48.220 So it's easy for folks to get confused, to look at the media and think the church is confused, but we've got a 2,000-year history, certainly through Jesus' teaching up today about the embodied soul, but all the way back to Genesis itself, about God intentionally creating us male and female, and how we need to accept that body as a gift, just as Pope Francis has said.

00:11:09.600 So how do we deal with the church leadership?

00:11:15.820 So the document that you were talking about put out by the USCCB, that's the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, that should, at Catholic hospitals, stop such transitions, came out from that part of the USCCB that studies theology.

00:11:29.700 It was a great document, very well done, laying out the church's teaching very clearly.

00:11:34.820 At the last US Conference of Bishops, they weren't able to implement it, because the document, which was just, as you said, church teaching from forever, was fought by Cardinal Slupich, Cardinal McElroy, you know, in the sort of flavor of Father James Martin, who are actually very much against the church's perennial teaching on the issue.

00:12:00.440 And talking about a more accompanying, welcoming approach, that truly does confuse the issue.

00:12:09.200 So how do we deal with that, when we know the church is teaching on one hand, and you're having this, let's fight the teaching, or let's, like, do it differently, so that in practice, we're able to affirm these individuals in their chosen gender?

00:12:22.160 Well, we need to be vocal about that.

00:12:25.160 I mean, first, we need to understand the issue, and I hope that people reading the book and some of the resources that I mentioned in there will help prepare them to have those conversations.

00:12:32.860 But we need to stand up, because it all has to do with what it means to authentically love someone.

00:12:39.500 And if you're not speaking in truth, then any attempt that you're making to help someone is going to be the opposite of love.

00:12:46.800 It's going to make things worse for them.

00:12:48.120 And an example that I like to use when I talk to young people about this, you know, the whole notion of loving someone and objective reality, is a child that really wants to touch a hot stove.

00:12:58.400 And every parent intuitively understands this, that no matter how badly they want it, no matter how much they think they're going to like it, the parent won't give in because they understand an objective truth that the child does not.

00:13:08.740 That if they touch the hot stove, it will burn them and seriously hurt them.

00:13:11.960 And in the same way, if we welcome, which we absolutely should do, you know, this book is all about accompanying and loving the other.

00:13:18.940 But if we welcome and then we don't speak the truth once they've been welcomed into the church, then we're condemning them to this lifetime of heartache and misery and bad outcomes.

00:13:28.040 And I'm glad you raised Father James Martin, because he's very famous about this issue, the marriage issue, and about building bridges.

00:13:34.720 And at one point, I contemplated naming this book, Building Better Bridges, because the type of bridges that he talks about is to love and to welcome, but then to never extend the truth of the church's teachings on human sexuality, whether that relates to the marriage issue or the human body and gender ideology.

00:13:52.740 And ultimately, those bridges are going to collapse and fail, and those individuals will be permanently harmed.

00:13:58.020 I mean, not only will they suffer all kinds of heartache in this life, because they are not following God's plan to make them the person that God wants them to be, but ultimately, depending on the choices that they engage in with his encouragement, they could lose their eternal salvation.

00:14:12.140 Those bridges are doomed to fail.

00:14:14.580 If we want to build better bridges, we need to do the accompanying, we need to reach out, we need to show compassion, we need to show empathy.

00:14:21.020 After all, this is a population, again, with a clinical diagnosis, that has a suicide rate 12 times the general population.

00:14:27.500 So they need our care and concern as Catholics.

00:14:30.800 But then we have to go the next step and take it the rest of the way.

00:14:33.820 Explain to them, for example, that in the best long-term study that we have, that over a long period of time, which is when you have to measure it, adults who transition, that suicide rate goes from 12 times the general population to 19 times the general population.

00:14:48.560 That incidence of mental health problems increases, that they have the loss of fertility, that they experience heart trouble, that they have bone loss, that they have developmental problems because of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

00:15:02.400 You know, all the things that people aren't telling them on the front end, you know, and the thing that should haunt, you know, Father Martin and any other church official and even lay Catholics who aren't willing to speak the truth on this issue is when that person realizes they made a mistake.

00:15:16.540 You know, we have thousands of detransitioners now in our country, those who initially made the transition to a different gender identity and then realized that was a mistake and came back. 1.00

00:15:25.660 We should all be haunted when they ask the question, why didn't anyone tell me the truth?

00:15:29.880 Because I can't imagine having to face someone, having not told them the truth ahead of time, only to watch them pursue this course of misery when it could have been prevented on the front end.

00:15:40.820 And keep in mind, too, that for many of these individuals, you know, 60% of them endured some kind of child sexual abuse that led to a gender dysphoria.

00:15:51.240 For others, it's a broken relationship with a mother or a father for others that may have been a grandparent who dressed them as the opposite sex because they wanted a granddaughter rather than a grandson.

00:16:01.180 Maybe it was broken friendships early on in their life.

00:16:03.440 You know, if we're just putting a bandaid on by giving them the drugs and giving them surgery, we're not addressing those underlying mental health issues that need to be resolved if they're going to have any kind of happiness and meaningfulness in this life.

00:16:16.280 So, again, building a bridge is great, but if you don't tell them the truth, it can be the most devastating, horrible, evil thing that you could do.

00:16:27.660 Hey, my friends, now is the time to stand up and fight.

00:16:30.800 We are just about to have the Synod on Synodality, and everything that you've seen indicates that it's going to be an absolute disaster.

00:16:40.280 We have Father James Martin as a personal appointee of the Pope speaking at it.

00:16:45.560 We've got Cardinal Cupich, Cardinal Tobin.

00:16:49.140 These picks of the Pope to engage in this Synod are indicative of where we're going.

00:16:55.980 We're going into heresy.

00:16:58.300 And at these times of great crisis, the Church, especially those called in the laity to work for the glory of Christ and His Church, are called to gather and strategize.

00:17:11.620 Back in 2014, LifeSite launched something called Rome Life Forum.

00:17:15.820 It was a gathering at that point of some 75 life and family leaders from all around the world to strategize as to what we could do.

00:17:24.280 And when we gathered, the majority of people were most concerned about what?

00:17:28.700 About Pope Francis, about what was going on in Rome.

00:17:31.920 But this was 2014, but the life and family leaders saw it first.

00:17:38.940 Now, a decade on, we are confronted with some of the most severe challenges the Church has ever faced.

00:17:46.280 And so, our tradition at LifeSite is to continue with Rome Life Forum, which has continued every year until we had to take a break over COVID because we weren't permitted.

00:17:55.160 But we're starting it up again.

00:17:57.720 Please come, if you feel so called, to Rome, October 31st and November 1st, the very end of the Synod on Synodality.

00:18:07.800 And we'll be there to strategize with His Eminence, with His Excellency, and with many life and family leaders from around the world.

00:18:17.100 For LifeSite News, this is John Henry Weston.

00:18:19.340 And may God bless you.

00:18:20.040 And your book, Loving God's Children, the Church and Gender Ideology, available through Sophia Press, actually does a great job in terms of giving people the actual references, the studies themselves.

00:18:33.820 But let's get into it a little bit.

00:18:36.940 The treatments that are used to, they say, help delay for children their onset of puberty so they can decide for themselves.

00:18:47.660 They seem to be indicating this way or that way.

00:18:51.740 What's the reality with regard to those drugs?

00:18:56.140 And then the reality also with regard to gender transition.

00:18:59.880 It sounds like such a wonderful thing.

00:19:01.460 You make your body align with your feelings and the way you believe who you are.

00:19:07.520 What's the reality on that?

00:19:09.660 Well, the reality is all of those things are lies.

00:19:11.900 That the gender transition community and health care professionals who get lots of money from these procedures are really peddling to people.

00:19:19.640 You know, Planned Parenthood now is getting millions of dollars from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

00:19:25.760 And these surgeries can cost up to $70,000.

00:19:28.800 You know, so there's a lucrative business on the other side of this.

00:19:31.020 But, you know, the reality, let's start with the puberty blockers.

00:19:33.560 Puberty blockers are a legitimate medicine for kids who are going through something called prepubescent puberty, where for whatever reason, socialization or chemicals in the water are going through puberty earlier than they're supposed to.

00:19:46.040 And they've been approved for that purpose, to delay puberty for a short time until they're at the appropriate age.

00:19:51.320 But the FDA has never studied and never certified puberty blockers for the off-label use of stopping someone from going through puberty because of gender identity issue.

00:20:01.700 And there is no such thing as a pause because you're missing out on that time when you're supposed to be growing, when your bones are going to be getting bigger, getting denser, your muscular system is developing, and all of your sexual organs are developing.

00:20:14.700 And if you stay on those puberty blockers for a sufficient amount of time, then those developments won't ever happen the way that they're supposed to.

00:20:21.240 You can develop permanent infertility just from using puberty blockers for an extensive period of time.

00:20:26.840 And then once you get to the cross-sex hormones and the surgeries, what you're doing is you're encouraging someone to do something to their body that will never accomplish what they want. 0.51

00:20:37.000 And I'll explain that in two ways.

00:20:40.020 First, physically, even if you go all the way through surgery, every single cell of your body is encoded in its DNA, its chromosomes, male or female.

00:20:48.380 And so you can look however they reconstruct you on the outside, but a doctor will always be able to tell what your body is on the inside.

00:20:55.300 So what you're doing is entirely cosmetic.

00:20:57.700 The second thing is that it's devastatingly dangerous to tell someone that they should align their body with their mind rather than the other way around.

00:21:07.540 And we would never do that with any other type of dysphoria. 0.97

00:21:10.000 So, for example, if you had a child suffering from anorexia, in their mind, they think that they're fat, even though the objective reality of their body is that they're not.

00:21:18.400 Maybe they're even too thin or emaciated.

00:21:20.860 No doctor, no loving parent, no one would encourage that person to eat less or to have a surgery, say, to make their stomach smaller so they eat less, to encourage them to align their body with their mind.

00:21:33.420 It would ultimately kill them.

00:21:35.080 And even before that, it would have devastating effects on their health.

00:21:38.300 We simply don't do that.

00:21:39.180 There's another mental health issue.

00:21:41.460 It's called body dysphoria or dysmorphia.

00:21:44.420 And that's where someone, you know, again, this is a real mental health issue.

00:21:47.640 They believe that a part of their body doesn't belong there.

00:21:50.140 So, for example, their right arm.

00:21:52.020 And it causes such distress, real distress, that they would do anything to get rid of that arm.

00:21:56.720 But no doctor will remove that arm, not without committing malpractice.

00:22:00.360 And no person would hand that person the tool to take their arm off because we recognize that removing the arm isn't going to solve the underlying issues that led to the dysphoria.

00:22:10.540 We need to treat the mind and allow it to recognize the reality of the body so that they can be in sync.

00:22:16.920 Now, when you get to gender dysphoria, it is the only mental health issue where you have these disconnects between mind and body, where we encourage the person to align the mind with the body with the mind rather than the other way around.

00:22:29.440 And it doesn't even make sense the way they talk about it, because on the front end, a gender activist will say that the whole notion of male and female is just a stereotype.

00:22:40.120 You know, that sex is assigned at birth because of stereotypes.

00:22:42.640 And so it doesn't matter.

00:22:44.040 But their solution to gender dysphoria is to change the body that doesn't matter, to fit with gross stereotypes of what it means to be a man or a woman. 0.91

00:22:52.880 You know, and one 11-year-old who's been a boy their entire life knows what it means to feel like a woman.

00:22:58.460 You know, it's not because they like to play with dolls and that they're emotional and empathetic.

00:23:02.960 You know, those are stereotypes about what it means to be a woman, but they're not actually being a woman. 0.99

00:23:07.340 And so you put all this together, and you can see why the science shows us that these treatments don't work the way they're supposed to.

00:23:14.120 That's why you end up with the higher suicide rates.

00:23:16.280 You end up with the greater incidences of mental health issues as well as all these physical malformities and problems.

00:23:23.100 It's because they're treating something in the exact opposite way psychologists and doctors have treated.

00:23:28.460 Dysporias for all of the existence of American medicine.

00:23:31.920 And the countries that really pioneered this type of medicine, places like the UK, Finland, Sweden, they are all countries now that are pulling back on these recommendations and going in the opposite direction and saying, you know what?

00:23:46.520 The best thing to do is get into counseling and watchfully wait and see what happens with these kids, because the best data that we have shows that it's not helping when we do this and in many cases is making the problem worse.

00:23:57.880 So here's something interesting, though.

00:24:00.200 Even though that is the right approach, that approach, in Canada at least, and several states in the United States, is illegal.

00:24:08.800 Psychologists can get disbarred.

00:24:10.820 Psychiatrists can get disbarred from properly aligning people with their body.

00:24:18.420 But in other words, for counseling people out of this kind of ideology, this kind of disorder that they're in.

00:24:28.020 And yet, if you wanted to go the other way, it's legal.

00:24:31.520 That's the most bizarre thing to me.

00:24:33.380 So if you're what they call a straight male, but you wanted to explore transgenderism, that's totally fine and good.

00:24:41.060 But yet, to come out of it is not.

00:24:43.200 At least in Canada, that's the way it is.

00:24:44.640 And I'd like to hear your take on how that is in some of the states.

00:24:47.500 Yeah, it's criminal what they're doing.

00:24:49.300 There are over 20 states that have passed what I call counseling censorship laws like that.

00:24:53.680 And when you include local jurisdictions, it's more than 100 different places that have these laws.

00:24:58.540 And I actually represent two people right now, one from Colorado, one from Washington State, both counselors, Christian counselors,

00:25:05.200 who want to be able to talk to young people to align their bodies with their minds.

00:25:09.320 And if they do that, then they can lose their professional license.

00:25:12.820 The gentleman from Washington State, Brian Tingley, we actually have a request where we're asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case.

00:25:20.320 And if it's not his, it'll be another one of these because it's outrageous what they're doing.

00:25:24.620 First, speaking from a constitutional sense and then from the medical sense,

00:25:28.540 constitutionally, there is one thing that the government cannot do when it comes to speech, and that is pick sides.

00:25:35.200 It cannot say we're going to promote one viewpoint and prevent the other viewpoint from speaking by censoring it.

00:25:41.480 And yet, that's what they're doing with these counseling censorship laws. 0.90

00:25:44.940 Like you said, if the counselor wants to encourage same-sex relationships or encourage the pursuit of a gender identity different than sex,

00:25:53.580 you're free to do that.

00:25:54.440 In fact, we encourage you to do that.

00:25:55.700 But if they do the opposite, even though they think that's what's best for the patient,

00:25:59.860 even if the minor wants that treatment, then they're prohibited from doing that.

00:26:04.440 And so that's a First Amendment free speech problem.

00:26:06.900 And I think it may take a while, but ultimately, we're going to win that in the end.

00:26:11.100 But, you know, medically speaking, it really is criminal.

00:26:15.640 We haven't really talked much about the detransitioners other than the, you know, 1.00

00:26:19.380 the comment about you'd want to be able to tell them the truth so that at the end of the road,

00:26:24.880 they don't say, why didn't you tell me?

00:26:26.960 But there are many detransitioners now, those who made the mistake of transitioning to a different gender 0.99

00:26:31.760 and then coming back again to present as their natal sex.

00:26:36.060 And worldwide medical organizations recognize that they have a huge need for counseling.

00:26:42.020 You know, it's rising, it's burgeoning.

00:26:44.460 And yet, in those hundred jurisdictions,

00:26:46.660 they can't even get a counselor to talk to them about the issue if they want it. 0.93

00:26:51.280 I mean, it's just criminal that states and local governments would tell therapists

00:26:55.800 that they can't talk about the very thing that their clients need in order to improve their mental health.

00:27:01.500 And so if you've got one of those in your jurisdiction,

00:27:04.120 please speak out about it publicly.

00:27:06.180 If your legislature is considering it, please let your legislators know that these are evil bills

00:27:11.180 and that the government should never be in the business of getting into the counselor's room

00:27:15.640 and telling them what they can and cannot say to consenting patients.

00:27:18.720 It's absolutely absurd.

00:27:20.820 Absolutely.

00:27:21.420 So, and for all those who might be in family situations, you can get online counseling.

00:27:26.420 Go to catholictherapist.com, check them out there.

00:27:28.960 A lot of the counselors there are able to still give sensible counseling.

00:27:36.060 I want to talk about this a little bit from a family perspective because that's probably where

00:27:41.100 the rubber meets the road in terms of the difficulty of sharing the truth.

00:27:46.220 So, very often now, you have situations right in your own family where a sibling or a cousin,

00:27:52.460 God forbid, a child and so on, are going down this road.

00:27:56.700 So, how do you speak with them?

00:28:00.000 How do you interact?

00:28:01.860 Do you go, like one of the big questions, do you go to a same-sex wedding of your daughter?

00:28:06.860 Do you go to the, you know, your transgiscent wedding or whatever you want to call it?

00:28:11.500 How do you deal with that?

00:28:13.880 And how in the world are parents to take this forward?

00:28:17.540 And in addition, because there's a question that goes along with that, you, in your friendship

00:28:23.320 circles, you basically cancel culture with your close friends as well.

00:28:28.660 Give us some insight there, if you would.

00:28:30.860 Yeah, those really are the hardest situations.

00:28:32.540 And I'll start by talking to parents who want to inoculate their kids from the gender 1.00

00:28:38.660 ideology disease from the get-go because what they may not realize is that if they're allowing

00:28:43.320 their kids on social media, they're already getting thousands, if not more, messages and

00:28:50.900 videos about this issue on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube.

00:28:55.220 There are literally tens of thousands of hours promoting transgender ideology as a way to fix 1.00

00:29:00.720 all of their going through the puberty years and teenage years problems.

00:29:04.840 And if you've ever met a teenager who hasn't suffered anxiety, questions about their identity,

00:29:11.100 depression, difficulty making relationships at school, then you've met someone that I haven't

00:29:16.620 because everybody that I know has suffered those issues.

00:29:19.980 And yet they're spoon-feeding them this as the answer to all of their ills if they will

00:29:24.180 just transition.

00:29:25.160 So we need to stop all that.

00:29:27.040 With our own kids, there was no social media allowed until they went to college.

00:29:31.120 They didn't even have smartphones until they could drive.

00:29:33.140 And then it was limited to texting and calling mom and dad and using the nap function.

00:29:36.940 You need to keep that out.

00:29:38.100 You need to watch the movies and the TV shows they're watching too.

00:29:41.780 I talk about in the book, this is just devastatingly sad, Blue's Clues, a show meant for three,

00:29:46.580 four, five-year-olds that 20 years ago we let our kids watch.

00:29:49.940 And last year, if you were catching a quick nap or doing the laundry while your three-year-old

00:29:54.100 was in front of Blue's Clues, they would have seen a pride parade that included LGBT floats.

00:29:59.060 And one of those was a family of beavers.

00:30:01.180 And the beaver had Band-Aids on its chest where its breast had been removed.

00:30:05.360 This is what they're teaching three-year-olds.

00:30:06.920 So first, you've got to inoculate everybody.

00:30:09.780 Second, then you've got to get educated about these issues so that you can talk about

00:30:13.120 God's plan for the human body and why it's better than the world's plan for the human body.

00:30:18.160 To know some of these scientific stats, to know the way that culture and government

00:30:21.800 are influencing people so that you can talk intelligently.

00:30:25.220 And then thirdly, you need to approach the family member, whether it's a son or daughter

00:30:30.400 or whether it's a close friend, an aunt, uncle, whoever, with compassion and empathy.

00:30:37.220 You need to let them know that you're on their side, but start to ask questions based on the

00:30:41.840 knowledge that you've learned.

00:30:43.840 So say, well, I hear what you're saying.

00:30:46.860 Are you aware that no scientific study has ever shown that there's such a thing as a boy

00:30:52.100 born in a girl's body or vice versa?

00:30:54.260 No one can prove that from science.

00:30:56.640 Are you aware about these long-term studies about people who transition that suffer these

00:31:01.700 terrible mental health effects, these terrible physical effects and increased suicide rates?

00:31:06.560 Are you aware of the detransitioners who tell very compelling stories on TV, on videos and 1.00

00:31:13.720 other places, and about the tragedy that they experienced as a result of going through a

00:31:18.420 transition?

00:31:19.160 You know, let's think about these other dysphoria that we just talked about, things like anorexia

00:31:23.320 or body dysmorphia.

00:31:25.460 Why is it that the doctors and your friends are telling you that you should align your body

00:31:30.220 with your mind when every other situation like this in the mental health field they deal

00:31:34.360 with by aligning the mind to the body?

00:31:37.040 You know, and that's the way that we truly love them, by asking questions, getting close

00:31:40.840 to them.

00:31:41.580 You know, I think Pope Francis is right to an extent when he talks about the Catholic Church

00:31:45.900 as a field hospital, and when someone comes in and they're bleeding to death, you don't

00:31:50.220 start by asking them about their cholesterol and their blood sugar.

00:31:53.180 You know, there's a certain sense where you need to hold that person close to you and

00:31:57.140 walk with them compassionately to accompany them.

00:32:00.060 You know, but once you've got that closeness, then you have to go on and you have to give

00:32:03.940 the truth through these gentle prodding questions, giving them information, showing them bishop's

00:32:08.320 documents, showing them Pope Francis' encyclicals about the importance of embracing our bodies

00:32:13.340 the way God created them.

00:32:14.960 You know, and those are the ways that we slowly build the trust and communicate the information

00:32:18.840 that'll help them to get to a better result than what we're giving them through these

00:32:23.000 gender clinics.

00:32:25.620 Hello, friends.

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00:33:07.480 One of the comebacks when people will say something like that is, well, the only thing that's making

00:33:15.680 people more depressed is actually the hatred that the rest of the community shows them 0.66

00:33:21.260 because they're gay, because they're trans. 0.97

00:33:24.140 And that's why the suicides. 0.99

00:33:26.500 That's why the depression.

00:33:27.700 What's your response?

00:33:28.340 That's a total lie.

00:33:30.100 Here in the United States, if you come out as transgender, first of all, that's one of

00:33:33.960 the best ways to be celebrated in your high school.

00:33:36.780 At many schools, that makes you a hero because now you're an oppressed minority and people 1.00

00:33:42.360 are going to embrace that.

00:33:43.740 And one of the detransitioners, well, actually several of them that I talk about in the chapter

00:33:47.980 of the book on detransitioning, and talk about how once they announced their gender identity

00:33:52.920 online and in other places, everybody wanted to be their friend and like them and wanted

00:33:57.140 to support them in that.

00:33:58.600 So that's just not true there.

00:34:00.180 But if you go back to those long-term studies from Sweden or the medical advice we're getting

00:34:04.480 from Finland and the UK, these other places that have tried this, they've been engaging

00:34:09.300 the gender dysphoria through transition for the better part of three decades now.

00:34:15.700 And so in those countries, there's very little disapprobation for someone expressing

00:34:19.900 a gender identity different than their sex.

00:34:21.980 And even when those studies account for any negativity that they may be experiencing from

00:34:27.120 family members or others, they still show worse outcomes.

00:34:30.480 So you cannot pin it on that.

00:34:33.160 I think the facts will show that it's exactly the opposite.

00:34:36.740 Wow.

00:34:38.040 John Birch, absolutely stunning.

00:34:40.140 Your book, Loving God's Children, is available at Sophia Press.

00:34:44.120 Thank you.

00:34:44.840 Thank you for that.

00:34:45.540 And God bless you.

00:34:46.660 Thank you.

00:34:47.300 And God bless the work that you do.

00:34:49.300 Praise God.

00:34:50.400 And God bless all of you.

00:34:52.460 And we'll see you next time.

00:35:01.260 Hi, everyone.

00:35:02.000 This is John Henry Weston.

00:35:03.160 We hope you enjoyed this program.

00:35:04.760 To see more like it, be sure to hit the subscribe button below to get all the latest content from

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00:35:18.360 Thanks for watching and may God bless you.

The John-Henry Westen Show - September 07, 2023

Alliance Defending Freedom vs the LGBT Agenda ｜ John Bursch

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