The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 159. Irreversible Damage？

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00:00:51.060 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:00:58.280 This is episode 11, season 4, with Abigail Schreier.

00:01:02.180 Abigail and Dad discuss identity, gender dysphoria, the increased rate of gender transitioning procedures among young female adolescents,

00:01:10.980 details of these procedures, detransitioning, her personal experiences while writing her book Irreversible Damage, and more.

00:01:18.520 Abigail Schreier is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and author of Irreversible Damage,

00:01:24.940 the transgender craze seducing our daughters.

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00:02:36.160 Enjoy this episode.

00:02:37.000 Today, I'm speaking with Ms. Abigail Schreier, who is a writer for the Wall Street Journal

00:02:44.840 and the author of a recent book, which was named by The Economist as one of the notable books of 2020,

00:02:53.360 Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters.

00:03:00.020 Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today.

00:03:05.660 Thank you so much for having me on.

00:03:07.780 So, why did you write the book?

00:03:14.180 I wrote the book because a woman wrote to me.

00:03:17.340 I had written a piece for the Wall Street Journal on transgender pronoun laws that we have in New York and California now

00:03:25.520 that assign criminal and civil penalties for failing to use someone's preferred pronoun.

00:03:32.040 And I pointed out that these laws are straightforwardly unconstitutional in the United States.

00:03:37.520 And a reader wrote to me.

00:03:38.600 She read this and she said, maybe you'll take up my issue, but I'm a mom.

00:03:42.800 My daughter had no symptoms of gender dysphoria throughout her growing up.

00:03:49.200 But gender dysphoria being the severe discomfort in one's biological sex.

00:03:52.940 But she went off to college.

00:03:54.100 She had a lot of mental health problems.

00:03:55.900 And she went off to college.

00:03:57.080 And with a group of girlfriends, they all decided they were transgender.

00:03:59.700 And she started a course of testosterone.

00:04:02.360 And, you know, I've had this problem.

00:04:05.040 There are now an epidemic of these young girls who are in a lot of very real pain,

00:04:09.520 deciding that gender must be their problem and very quickly obtaining hormones and surgeries.

00:04:15.460 And she told me that no journalist would take it up.

00:04:18.080 She had written to many journalists.

00:04:19.900 And I tried to find her an investigative journalist who would write about this or at least investigate it.

00:04:25.540 And when I was unable to find one, I finally, three months later, I got back in touch with her.

00:04:30.740 I said, all right, I'll look into it.

00:04:33.560 Okay.

00:04:34.100 So, well, I can tell you that I have had some trepidation about even conducting this interview.

00:04:39.300 Yeah, well, it's because this is such a—it's exactly the sort of issue that you can get pilloried for.

00:04:48.040 And I've had a fair bit of that over the last number of years.

00:04:51.140 I mean, I was very unhappy with the Canadian government's language law provision, Bill C-16.

00:04:57.980 And my comments about that caused a whole sequence of chain reactions, I suppose, that changed my life completely.

00:05:06.900 I was concerned at that time that the movement, let's say, the political movement or the political ideology

00:05:15.620 that I saw as driving the language legislation, Bill C-16, would manifest itself in psychological trouble for many people.

00:05:26.880 And so I'd read this book called The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri Alenberger,

00:05:34.540 and he talked about psychological contagions and documented them going back hundreds of years, as a matter of fact.

00:05:42.600 And I was aware that such things occurred, and it struck me as highly likely that confusion about gender identity

00:05:50.400 on the ideological and categorical front would translate itself into confusion about gender among adolescents in particular

00:06:02.500 who were just starting to catalyze their gender identity.

00:06:06.160 And so you claim in the book that this is an epidemic.

00:06:11.440 And one of the things I'm wondering about is, what relevant stats do you have at your disposal?

00:06:18.260 And why language like that?

00:06:22.440 Well, I actually asked a bunch of, you know, I interviewed, I conducted nearly 200 interviews for the book,

00:06:27.120 and I actually asked a lot of scientists once I had some numbers, what do you call this?

00:06:32.040 What is it when you have, we have a hundred year diagnostic history of gender dysphoria,

00:06:36.560 and it always afflicted boys and men, okay?

00:06:40.200 And now for the very first time in the last decade, there has been a giant surge in a different population

00:06:47.680 claiming to be gender dysphoric.

00:06:49.100 It has shifted from onset in young boys and to teenage girls with no childhood history,

00:06:56.380 and it's shifted from men to women.

00:06:58.580 So I asked them, when you have a demographic jump, and all of a sudden they are, as these teenage girls now,

00:07:06.540 the leading demographic.

00:07:07.900 So these are girls who, as a population, experienced virtually no gender dysphoria throughout history,

00:07:13.780 suddenly being the leading demographic.

00:07:15.400 I would ask them, what do you call that?

00:07:16.720 Is there a scientific term for this?

00:07:18.220 And they would always say, yes, epidemic.

00:07:21.960 I see, I see.

00:07:23.220 Okay.

00:07:23.660 So in your Wikipedia page, which, well, I read it this morning,

00:07:28.700 and it struck me as a place where a battleground was likely taking place, occurring.

00:07:32.640 In the book, it says, in the book, Schreier accuses social media of playing a driving role in girls' decisions

00:07:40.500 to identify as transgender, excuse me, based on the unproven and contentious hypothesis

00:07:46.160 of rapid-onset gender dysphoria.

00:07:49.040 She advocates for withholding gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth,

00:07:53.780 a fringe position not currently supported by most reputable medical organizations.

00:07:58.240 And one of the things you do document in the book is the rapid move by organizations

00:08:06.280 like the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association

00:08:10.040 to change the wording that they've used surrounding the discussion on gender identity.

00:08:18.340 Correct?

00:08:18.860 Yes, that's right.

00:08:21.020 I mean, they have changed the wording, but the bigger change, of course,

00:08:24.400 is that they've gone to an affirmative care standard,

00:08:27.500 which means that they no longer apply any medical judgment.

00:08:30.540 They simply surrender all judgment and agree with or affirm the patient's self-diagnosis.

00:08:36.920 Right.

00:08:37.520 And along with that goes the, and this is part of what made me nervous about talking to you,

00:08:42.720 and I still probably am, is that as a medical practitioner or as a psychotherapist,

00:08:50.340 psychotherapists are now bound, as far as I've been able to determine by examining the law,

00:08:55.320 to adopt precisely this gender-affirming position.

00:08:58.720 And I believe that that's the case in Ontario.

00:09:00.540 So I don't do adolescent therapy.

00:09:03.700 But if I had a young adult, say 18 or older, come to me who was expressing confusion

00:09:13.000 about their gender identity, let's say, or was gingerly testing the waters

00:09:18.580 to determine if perhaps they were transgender,

00:09:21.740 I believe that I'm required by law to adopt a position that would affirm that fundamentally.

00:09:31.180 That's right. Yes, a sort of Damocles hangs over professionals' heads now.

00:09:36.400 And what it says is you must agree with the patient's self-diagnosis.

00:09:39.960 Put another way, it must, it suggests that you should begin with the conclusion.

00:09:44.820 Your conclusion must be that this person has gender dysphoria.

00:09:48.180 And then you can, you know, go along from there and start prescribing treatments.

00:09:52.300 That's not how medicine or any other area of therapy is practiced.

00:09:56.720 You don't begin with the conclusion. You investigate it.

00:10:00.000 Now, you brought up my Wikipedia entry. Oh, sorry.

00:10:02.800 No, go ahead.

00:10:04.580 I mean, obviously, the number of lies that have been put into that,

00:10:08.000 I didn't start the Wikipedia entry. Others did.

00:10:10.000 And there's been, you know, back and forth fights with activists and so forth to rewrite it.

00:10:14.900 But, of course, I don't, you know, advocate any, I mean, it's not true.

00:10:20.800 I mean, so much of what has been said is not true.

00:10:23.200 First of all, the affirmative care standard, that's the problem.

00:10:28.000 And I don't advocate a particular method of treating transgender people.

00:10:32.960 I don't even advocate a method of treating transgender teenagers.

00:10:36.540 All I'm pointing out in the book is that there seems to be a sudden rise in these teenage girls

00:10:42.080 who are subject to peer influence and social media influence deciding they're transgender.

00:10:47.040 And there are no medical safeguards for these girls.

00:10:50.580 There's no means right now and no one determining whether they actually have the correct diagnosis

00:10:55.900 before proceeding to treatment. That's it.

00:10:58.720 Right. And so I guess the catch 22 here is that if the statement most reputable medical organizations affirm

00:11:07.980 or put forward an affirmative care requirement, then any position that questions that or objects to it

00:11:18.160 is in some sense by definition fringe.

00:11:22.940 Well, it's a good question.

00:11:24.680 I'm not stating at all that your position is a fringe position.

00:11:27.200 It's a matter. I don't see how that can be avoided under the current circumstances

00:11:31.740 because the laws and guidelines are written as if this is a fait accompli, right?

00:11:36.680 That we understand transgenderism completely and gender dysphoria and that, you know,

00:11:44.380 all the answers are already in.

00:11:46.480 And I don't think that's true for any psychiatric diagnosis.

00:11:50.460 Yes, I would just say that it is fringe in so far, or it appears fringe

00:11:54.960 because all the doctors who disagree, and there are many, and they're speaking up all the time,

00:11:59.540 are silenced. They are told that they could lose their license if they don't immediately affirm

00:12:04.960 the adolescent, no matter what her other mental health problems are,

00:12:08.720 and immediately go along with facilitating her transition.

00:12:11.980 Right. You talk about the former, about the occurrences at the Mental Health Institute

00:12:20.040 at CAMH in Toronto.

00:12:24.260 Yes, that's right. I mean, you had, you know, Ken Zucker, you know, the truly a giant

00:12:29.220 and in the field of gender dysphoria, who actually oversaw the authoring of the definition

00:12:35.340 of gender dysphoria. He was fired.

00:12:37.340 Right.

00:12:37.620 He was fired, you know.

00:12:38.800 Let's talk about Ken Zucker for a moment or two.

00:12:41.640 So, as you said, he occupied a very prestigious position in the world of transgender treatment,

00:12:48.420 and I think was universally regarded as the most outstanding and most objective scientist

00:12:53.640 working in this field. I've spoken to him about it on some occasions, not publicly ever,

00:13:00.220 and he struck me as a dedicated clinician and researcher, and he advocates, advocated for,

00:13:07.380 and still advocates for, as far as I know, a wait-and-see treatment method based on the

00:13:12.680 presupposition that most children with gender dysphoria, who are, who events an interest in

00:13:19.600 transforming their body to that of the other sex should be encouraged to wait, because if a

00:13:25.800 waiting technique, it's not a technique even, I suppose, if waiting is, with sufficient patience,

00:13:35.620 most of the children who manifest these concerns desist. I think it's 70 to 80 percent of them.

00:13:42.840 A certain percentage, fairly high, come to the conclusion that they're gay, and it's perhaps

00:13:50.220 the case that that's driving some of their early gender dysphoria, confusion about their identity.

00:13:56.320 And Zucker was fired from CAMH and also pilloried in a variety of newspapers and other publications

00:14:02.100 as a consequence of what was essentially his mainstream stance. Now, I believe, and I haven't

00:14:09.540 followed this up recently, but I believe that he was engaged in a number of court battles with the

00:14:14.620 publications that had gone after him, and I believe that he won his legal cases.

00:14:21.280 He did. They had to apologize, and they settled with him. I mean, they really wronged him.

00:14:26.680 I mean, that's what happens when professionals speak out on this issue. And of course, when I say

00:14:34.120 speak out, all they're expressing is concern that there is an over-diagnosis here. You're seeing

00:14:40.480 young teenage girls who do not seem to have typical gender dysphoria, nonetheless, be immediately fast

00:14:46.740 tracked towards transition. So I'd asked you a little bit earlier about numbers. Do you have any

00:14:52.640 sense of how prevalent this is? And also, I'm interested in, and I'm sure the listeners watchers

00:14:58.820 would be as well, rate of increase? Sure. So in America, it's a little harder to look at,

00:15:06.820 to come up with these numbers, although I'll tell you the numbers that I do know, okay? It's harder

00:15:11.280 because we don't have centralized medical care like they do in Britain. In Britain, where they have

00:15:15.140 centralized medical care, they can tell you that the number of young women being referred for gender

00:15:20.760 treatment has exploded over 4,000% in the last decade, okay? In America, we don't have centralized

00:15:28.720 medical care, and you don't even need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to start treatment. You can

00:15:35.580 start a course of testosterone without ever having received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. So

00:15:40.440 they're a little harder to come by, but here's what I can tell you. In 2018, 2% of high school

00:15:47.460 students said they were transgender. So that's two in a hundred kids. That's an enormous increase over

00:15:53.820 the, what was historically the rate of gender dysphoria in the population, which was 0.01%. So

00:16:00.600 one in 10,000 people went from one in 10,000 people to two in a hundred high school students. We also know

00:16:07.960 that between 2016 and 2017, the number of females requesting gendered surgery in the United States

00:16:15.940 quadrupled. So we know these are the exploding rates. And then of course, you know, I've interviewed

00:16:21.280 many therapists and Lisa Littman of Brown University did her survey. And when you talk to therapists,

00:16:26.920 when you talk to parents, you get the same thing over and over. And that is that the leading demographic

00:16:32.020 asking for gender transition is teenage girls, teenage girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria.

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00:19:22.700 Now, here's a contentious issue. So, generally speaking,

00:19:33.580 for the story of long-term gender dysphoria to be coherent, a girl would have to claim that she'd

00:19:42.780 always known that she was in the wrong body, that she was a boy, and that that had been the case ever

00:19:48.780 since early childhood. So, maybe she'd be speaking as a teenager. Now, you make the claim in your book

00:19:54.060 that girls who go online, who are searching for information about transgender identity,

00:20:00.620 often encounter coaches who tell them to falsify their personal narrative and to claim that they've

00:20:07.740 always been gender dysphoric, despite the fact that that's not the case. Is that a reasonable summary

00:20:15.580 of what you found? Yes, yes. So, you can see that it's a complete diagnostic mess from a therapist's

00:20:23.100 perspective, because, and even from a conceptual perspective, because the people who are on the

00:20:29.660 other side of the argument than you, let's say, are going to claim that the reason that these rates

00:20:35.740 have skyrocketed to the point where they're at now is because there were always that many people who had

00:20:44.100 gender dysphoria or who were transgender, but the weight of public opinion was held so strongly

00:20:50.340 against them that they had to stay in the closet, essentially, and were unable to adopt their true

00:20:56.180 identity. And the claim is going to be made as well that you're radically exaggerating the proportion of

00:21:06.900 people who are putting themselves forward for transgender transition procedures, let's say, who have been coached.

00:21:17.940 Right. OK, so let me respond to a few of those things. First of all, I don't think that's right. I think that I mean,

00:21:23.220 I agree with you that that's what they would say. But here's I thought about that claim because and here's here's what I

00:21:28.900 say in response. If this were just, as they say, a natural reversion, now that there's greater societal acceptance of

00:21:38.580 transgender people that they would say, oh, you would expect to see a natural reversion to what we're seeing now, which they

00:21:45.300 might claim is a normal base rate of transgender identification in the population. The problem with that is, number one, we're only

00:21:52.900 seeing this sudden spike among teenage girls. Where are the women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s who were

00:22:00.980 denied the opportunity to come out as transgender? They should be coming out, too, but they're not.

00:22:05.940 It's the same population. Can you also point out, I guess the other thing that you might conclude is that

00:22:11.380 if the people, if the bulk of the proportion of people who were claiming a transgender identity in the past were male,

00:22:19.860 then release of the social strictures on identification should have produced an explosion in males.

00:22:26.980 It's not easy to figure out why there is an explosion in females.

00:22:30.660 Okay, so that leads us to another extremely troublesome topic, which is why the explosion in teenage females?

00:22:38.180 Now, you do attempt to explain that in your book, and so maybe you could outline for the listeners exactly what

00:22:44.820 what your conclusions were. Sure. Teenagers, teenage girls are famous for this, for falling for every

00:22:52.100 hysteria, right? We know that the way young women, and there are psychologists who've done wonderful

00:22:57.460 work in this area, Amanda Rose is one of the University of Missouri, who I interviewed. Teenage

00:23:04.980 girls tend to spread these psychic epidemics because their modes of friendship involve co-rumination,

00:23:12.820 taking on their friend's pain. They like to rehash their own pain, and they like to take on their

00:23:18.500 friend's pain, and they are even willing to suspend reality in order to sort of get on the team of

00:23:25.220 their friend, okay? So I'm being a real son of a bitch in this interview to some degree because

00:23:33.540 I've been trying to think up all the objections I possibly could to your perspective because it's so

00:23:38.340 contentious, and so I'm going to put forward things that I'm thinking about that are critiques, and

00:23:45.060 it's not that I'm believing them, but they need to be brought forward. So a skeptic might say that

00:23:54.340 you are relying on stereotypes of feminine behavior in adolescence to justify your claim that it's girls

00:24:02.980 that are susceptible to a kind of hysteria, and that that's an outdated and sexist, I suppose,

00:24:11.700 hypothesis. No, I'm not relying on stereotypes at all. I'm relying on evidence. If you look at the

00:24:19.300 anorexia, it afflicts one population. If you look at bulimia, it afflicts one population, and it grows and

00:24:25.460 it spreads among friend groups just as this does. It's young women encouraging each other in self-harm.

00:24:32.580 This is, and if you look at cutting, same thing. And we know, clinicians have known for years that you

00:24:38.020 cannot house anorexics together in a hospital ward without being very careful because they will

00:24:42.980 encourage each other to learn, lose more and more weight. We know that women do this.

00:24:47.300 And you see that online with regards to anorexia, right? With the pro-anocytes and the pro-bulimia sites.

00:24:53.380 Right. It wasn't men who came up with inspiration to lose more and more weight. It was young women.

00:25:01.220 Now, of course, men get involved in all kinds of bad behavior and encourage each other in all

00:25:07.300 kinds of bad behavior. But this kind of socially spread self-harm has proven over and over to be

00:25:15.380 endemic to young women. Well, you can't group antisocial males together when they're teenagers

00:25:20.820 because they get worse. So that's well known. And in fact, if you take antisocial boys and you

00:25:27.620 put them with pro-social boys, the pro-social boys become more antisocial. The antisocial boys don't get

00:25:33.220 better. And that was discovered back in the 1930s in the Somerville study, the detrimental consequences of

00:25:40.420 of grouping antisocial boys together. It was the very large scale study that was designed to,

00:25:48.180 in principle, to reduce the risk of children, boys at risk for developing criminal behavior and

00:25:53.300 alcoholism and so forth. It was one of the first longitudinal studies. It was a complete failure

00:25:59.300 in that the treatment group, who were subject to all sorts of benevolent, at least in principle,

00:26:05.620 benevolent interventions, did much worse than the control group. And after much painstaking analysis

00:26:11.300 and heart-rending doubt, the study's authors concluded that housing the children together

00:26:18.340 in the summer camps they had put out for them to get them out of the inner city was actually the cause of

00:26:24.180 their increased pathology in adulthood. So it does happen among males. Now, Tumblr is also something

00:26:31.700 that you discuss as a new mode of perhaps a new medium of social contagion. And as far as I'm,

00:26:39.460 as far as I know, that's also a social media forum that's essentially female dominated. Is that correct?

00:26:47.540 I believe it is still, but though I have not, you know, up to date on the latest, you know,

00:26:53.300 of who looks at Tumblr, but it always has been, yes, predominantly female.

00:26:57.220 Right. So, all right, here's another question.

00:27:04.020 What made you convinced that you were qualified to do this? Because if I was a critic, again,

00:27:10.740 I guess that's the next place that I would attack, right? Because you're not a mental health

00:27:14.420 professional. And so it might be asked, well, what right do you have to investigate this?

00:27:22.260 Even that might be one question, but then also to draw conclusions.

00:27:28.340 Well, as you'll, as I'm sure you saw, if you, you know, when you read my book, I didn't draw any

00:27:34.260 medical conclusions. That is, I relied entirely on experts. And I do believe it is a journalist's job

00:27:40.340 to look into medical, you know, phenomena, including epidemics and so forth, and investigate

00:27:48.420 them and rely on the medical judgment of experts. And that is precisely what I have done. This isn't

00:27:53.940 my, you know, all I did was investigate a phenomenon with neither a particular hypothesis

00:28:00.660 in mind, but just being willing to listen to a lot of experts. And it was their testimony and their

00:28:07.540 explanation that I put into the book.

00:28:09.700 Do you think that it's, do you think that you were even handed in your selection of experts?

00:28:15.700 I mean, because one of the ways that you can bias an outcome, obviously, if you have a political

00:28:20.500 agenda, you can bias an outcome by selecting experts that testify in one direction. And of course, that

00:28:28.100 the transgender activists and, and perhaps the medical and psychological and psych, medical and

00:28:34.500 psychological associations themselves might regard people like Ken Zucker as experts who,

00:28:41.140 you know, would appeal to someone of more conservative sensibilities, perhaps?

00:28:48.580 Well, sorry, I'm not, I think what you're saying is, did I bias it by only looking at certain kind

00:28:54.340 of experts? And yes, well, I say, no, I didn't. If you read the book, I interviewed experts of all

00:28:59.940 persuasions. But, but, but more importantly, there are literally thousands, I believe, certainly

00:29:07.300 hundreds of books celebrating immediate medical transition for teenagers. There is precisely one

00:29:14.180 book that did an investigation of the risks and benefits and concerns that, that the, that might be

00:29:21.300 had around the medicalization of teenage girls. That's it. One, one book. And, and the question is,

00:29:28.020 so, so do all these experts have a voice? Of course. Um, I don't claim to have done and

00:29:34.020 conducted my own scientific study. All I did was show a willingness to speak to the experts who are

00:29:40.740 very, very concerned about what's going on here. Okay. So, so let's, let's dig even a layer deeper,

00:29:46.340 I suppose, is, um, why the claim that you just made, for example, that there is a very large literature

00:29:55.700 supporting the idea of medical transition and a very small literature criticizing it

00:30:02.980 is striking. I don't understand it. What's going on? Like, what's driving this?

00:30:12.180 Why is it that the medical associations and the psychological associations have rushed so

00:30:17.940 precipitously into gender identity affirmation when the cost of it, when it's taken to its logical

00:30:28.420 conclusion is extraordinarily invasive surgical modification, which carries substantive risk,

00:30:36.580 and which I think it's, of which I think it's fair to say has disputable benefits.

00:30:43.060 What, why is this happening? Well, there are a number of reasons it's happening, but if you're

00:30:51.860 asking why, um, more medical, you know, more doctors and therapists aren't speaking out, I think the

00:30:59.220 answer is because if even Jordan Peterson is a, is concerned about having this interview with me

00:31:05.700 and with, with, with all of your courage and all the stances you've taken, imagine what far less

00:31:12.020 courageous doctors are willing to say. It still strikes me. It's, it still strikes me as, as

00:31:20.180 remarkable that this change has occurred over such a short period of time. I mean, one of the things you

00:31:26.260 do in the book, and maybe you can, you can talk about this, um, is document the, the, the nature of the

00:31:34.500 treatment, the, the medical treatment for gender dysphoria when the treatment is gender transition.

00:31:41.620 So you, you talk about the use of testosterone and its subsidy on, on university campuses,

00:31:49.220 and then you talk about the more invasive surgical transformations, double mastectomies,

00:31:56.660 phalloplasty, and, and which is the creation of a new penis, um, if you use that word loosely,

00:32:04.180 um, these are very, these are not minor procedures, including the use of testosterone.

00:32:13.780 And it's remarkable to me, given that, how fast these guidelines for treatment have changed.

00:32:22.580 Well, I, I think you're right. The medical, the, the activists have been very aggressive and very

00:32:29.460 effective here in the medical accrediting institutions. But I think that all of, at root

00:32:33.940 of all of these changes is a series of polite lies that we were, um, that we swallowed, unfortunately,

00:32:40.900 in the public sphere. So in the last week, for instance, the California insurance commissioner

00:32:46.100 has, has, has said that for the purposes of insurance in California, that, um, breast surgery,

00:32:54.180 top surgery, double mastectomy on healthy breasts for even teenage girls needs to be regard, regarded

00:33:00.260 no longer as cosmetic, but something that corrects abnormal structures. Because if you've accepted the

00:33:07.940 lie that a young woman who says she's a boy truly is a boy, then healthy breasts become abnormal

00:33:14.740 structures. This is the corruption of language. So you must remove them regardless of her age.

00:33:21.300 Mm. Yeah. Well, language tends to be associated with action. And it was the corruption of language

00:33:26.820 that I objected to, you know, four years ago, because it has consequences. Now, you know, you made the

00:33:32.820 strongest statement so far, I would say that you made in our interview, which is the lie that an

00:33:38.820 adolescent girl who thinks she is a boy truly is a boy. And I suppose it's language like that, that gets

00:33:44.420 you in trouble to the degree that you get into trouble, because that's a pretty strong statement.

00:33:50.660 The gender theorists who are driving this movement, I would say, put forth the proposition that,

00:34:02.020 first of all, that an individual always knows what gender they are, even if that changes from day to

00:34:10.980 day. There isn't an authority outside the individual themselves that can

00:34:16.500 opine on gender identity. That's part of the philosophy that drives the gender affirmation

00:34:24.740 movement, I would say. Correct?

00:34:29.860 Right. That's part of the philosophy. But unfortunately, there's no biological or empirical

00:34:35.060 or means of verifying that. We have no means of establishing that a girl who believes she is a

00:34:41.620 boy is truly a boy. Well, it's more of a definition than anything else, right? It's a place to start.

00:34:47.620 It's an axiom. The axiom is that the only person who can offer an informed opinion about their gender

00:34:57.300 is the person themselves. No medical professionals, no parents, no loved ones, no one else, only the

00:35:02.820 individual. And that's even the case if it changes from day to day or hour to hour.

00:35:09.540 Right. Exactly. They begin with a conclusion.

00:35:12.260 Okay. And then the other claim, and this is the one that I have difficulty with logically, is that

00:35:20.100 a girl who thinks she is a boy is in fact a boy trapped in a girl's body, which seems to me,

00:35:32.500 and that that's been the case ever since birth. And it seems to me that this is a form of the

00:35:37.860 biological essentialism that the gender theorists typically decry, proposing as they typically do,

00:35:46.660 that gender is a social construct. Now, it isn't obvious to me how gender can be a social construct

00:35:53.620 and be something immutable from birth that's only known to an individual themselves, which sounds a

00:36:01.940 lot more like a biological explanation to me. Right. Right. I mean, I interviewed affirmative

00:36:10.740 therapists, and I would say to them, and they would say, well, some kids are gender fluid. And I would

00:36:14.980 say to them, well, then how can you recommend revert, you know, top surgery on a young woman who's,

00:36:21.380 who may be turn out to be gender fluid, meaning she decides at some point she isn't, she was wrong.

00:36:26.580 She isn't a boy, she's a girl. And, and, you know, this response was essentially, well, only she can

00:36:32.500 know her truth. I mean, we are, we are, we're, this is not medicine any longer. It's closer to witchcraft.

00:36:41.140 So,

00:36:44.980 let me, let me, let me start at the beginning and outline the hypothesis of the book. So

00:36:56.900 over the last five years, there's been a tremendous transformation in the language and

00:37:01.860 the conceptualization that's been applied by medical associations in relationship to gender.

00:37:07.460 gender. And gender is being defined as something that's a personal choice, essentially. And

00:37:17.140 that personal choice has been extended to the, to, to the domain of physiological transformation.

00:37:29.940 And medical professionals have been required, are now required to accede to any requests for

00:37:37.300 physiological transformation on the part of their clients or patients as a consequence of the mandates

00:37:44.100 of their professional organizations. And the consequence of that has been a shift in the

00:37:50.900 transgender phenomenon from a tiny percentage of primarily males to a one in 50 percentage of

00:38:00.900 primarily adolescent females, many of whom are undergoing the full physiological or

00:38:10.660 many of whom are undergoing at least part of the physiological transformation process.

00:38:15.940 That sums it up essentially, I believe.

00:38:20.740 I'm not sure I totally followed that, but I think so.

00:38:22.980 Okay.

00:38:23.540 Well, I probably should have asked you this at the beginning of the interview, but the basic,

00:38:29.860 I was trying to outline the basic argument that you were making.

00:38:33.380 Right. The basic argument that I'm making is that girls are, is that a lot, a large population

00:38:38.900 of teenage girls who probably do not have gender dysphoria, they certainly have an atypical form

00:38:44.820 of gender dysphoria are able to, um, quickly obtain hormones and surgeries. They are, they are very much,

00:38:52.260 you know, they're, um, acting under so, you know, social media influence and peer influence. We have

00:38:57.460 numbers on that. Um, certainly not my studies, but others have done studies on this. Um, and they're

00:39:03.620 acting under the influence of peer influence and social media influence. They are quickly obtaining

00:39:08.500 hormones and surgeries, and there is virtually no over medical oversight of this process.

00:39:14.100 That's the thesis of the book.

00:39:15.860 Right. And so, so the alternating hypotheses are either that there's been an explosion in, um,

00:39:23.060 transgender identifying individuals because the social structures have been taken off the diagnosis,

00:39:28.900 or that this is a form of psychological contagion.

00:39:33.700 Right. I, I don't, I don't think it's the former. Uh, I, I started to explain why. I mean,

00:39:38.420 one of the reasons I said is you would expect, you know, a large, you know, rise in,

00:39:43.540 in transgender identification across populations. It wouldn't just be teenage girls. You would see

00:39:48.100 women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. You would see more men, you know, coming out as

00:39:52.020 transgender, um, in, in comparable rates, but, but not only that you're seeing among this population,

00:39:57.860 we, we know that rates of suicide and depression are rising as social acceptance, um, of, of gender

00:40:04.740 dysphoria is going or transgender identification is going up, but, but we would have predicted that

00:40:11.620 those things going down with social acceptance. Instead, it seems to be, you know, coincident and

00:40:18.100 comorbid with teenage girls, mental health crisis in which we're seeing very, very high rates of,

00:40:24.340 um, anxiety and depression.

00:40:31.620 I have to think about, I have to think for a minute here and

00:40:37.300 I want to go back to why this is happening. So there's been a political, arguably,

00:40:45.860 no, I won't, I won't state, say that there's been a transformation in the way that

00:40:50.660 transgender identity is conceptualized and treated in the last five years.

00:40:57.780 What's,

00:41:02.100 what's motivating the people who are, who have been behind this transformation?

00:41:07.940 What's in it for them?

00:41:08.900 Well, I think that there are, you know, people who are, there, there are a number of things,

00:41:16.020 there is a strong ideological and, and, um, financial commitments and incentives for certain

00:41:24.500 people to insist that, that, that transition on demand, regardless of age context or other mental

00:41:32.500 health problems, be always immediately facilitated. Right. Well, it seems like that's, it's nest,

00:41:38.500 that becomes necessary to prove something. It seems to me. And that's what I'm, I know,

00:41:44.100 that's what I'm trying to get at is that it's necessary to set up the medical systems so that

00:41:50.580 gender dysphoric transgender identifying teenagers have access to the full arsenal of medical

00:42:00.180 transformation. And that helps demonstrate that some other axiom is true. What, what is that?

00:42:09.300 Is that, is it the, is the axiom that gender is in fact socially constructed? Do you see what I

00:42:17.060 mean? Is that there's an, you said there's an ideological reason. What I'm trying to do is to

00:42:22.500 specify that reason. I'd like to understand that reason. I don't know that there is a larger

00:42:28.980 sociological or ideological goal. I think they are ideologically motivated. So in other words,

00:42:35.460 they have these commitments, but I don't think that they're trying to prove something, um, you know,

00:42:40.580 except in, in the way that I suppose that they're, that they are saviors of some kind. Um, you know,

00:42:47.060 look. Well, that would be, that would certainly be something to, that would be motivating to prove.

00:42:53.220 I mean, if you notice the doctors who are pushing this very often that we, we, we, we're certainly

00:42:58.020 seeing in the United States is a young generation of doctors and, and therapists who are activists

00:43:04.500 first and doctors or therapists second. We're seeing this across society, um, in, in all kinds of,

00:43:11.460 you know, professions, their, their ideological commitments precede their, their, um, professional

00:43:18.020 investigation. They begin with their conclusions. Yeah. Well, the ideological commitment is that I,

00:43:23.780 this is what I, I can't, I can't wrap my head around it because the ideological commitment,

00:43:28.500 if it's that gender is socially malleable or a social construct, which seems to be,

00:43:35.460 that seems to be a fundamental axiom that drives this kind of ideology. I can't see how that can live

00:43:40.660 side beside, side by side, the proposition that the girl who's trapped in a boy's body has an

00:43:47.780 immutably male identity. Well, I think a lot of them, yeah, a lot of them just insist on the immutability.

00:43:54.020 The problem is we know that's not true. Well, except that they also insist on gender fluidity.

00:43:59.700 Right. But they also insist on gender fluidity. I mean, I could, I could, I could answer your

00:44:03.780 question this way. What is non-binary? Because right now in the, in the United States and throughout

00:44:08.660 the West, certainly true in Canada, you can get your breasts removed. Not if you say you're

00:44:13.060 transgender, you don't even have to say you're transgender, but if a young woman 16 or up says she

00:44:18.820 is non-binary, um, that's enough to allow her without a therapist note to get her breasts removed.

00:44:24.740 Now we, how do we know that a non-binary person has no breasts? I know that a man has no woman's

00:44:30.820 breasts. How do we know that a non-binary person has no breasts? Well, that's, that's, that's a,

00:44:36.340 that's a very good illustration. I would say of the mystery that I'm trying to nail down is that

00:44:42.340 your claim is that breasts or no breasts, it's all the same to the non-binary identity,

00:44:50.980 but that isn't the way it plays out. The way it plays out is that there's the breast removal

00:44:57.620 proceeds forthwith. And so that's not, I don't, I don't understand that.

00:45:04.500 Well, there are no diagnostic markers at all, or evidence of a non-binary identity,

00:45:11.540 except the say-so of the patient. Well, part of, part of it's a matter of definition. Now,

00:45:15.620 one of the things that you do in your book, I thought this was quite interesting, is make the

00:45:22.020 claim that when gender theory is taught in schools, the classic binary genders are presented in a very

00:45:30.900 stereotyped manner, very stereotyped, very uni-dimensional, uni-dimensional stereotype

00:45:37.700 manner. And then any personal deviation from that stereotype is regarded as evidence for a

00:45:45.380 non-binary identity. And so, so that's a matter of definition in some sense, right? Because you could

00:45:51.380 say that the only genuine genders, and this would be the redefinition of the word gender in some sense,

00:45:58.580 the only binary genders are the stereotypes. And if you are deviant from those stereotypes on any

00:46:06.100 of the multiple dimensions along which they're defined, then you are in fact another gender.

00:46:11.060 You can, you can, you can, you can set up a definitional structure in that way and have it be coherent.

00:46:18.500 The question is, what are the consequences of that?

00:46:21.940 So the consequences is, is a lot of confusion for young people trying to sort these things at

00:46:30.020 who they are out at a time when that's typically done in adolescence. I mean,

00:46:34.740 Right. And do you think, can you distinguish that from freedom?

00:46:40.020 You know, because if I was going to take the perspective that was opposite to that, I would say,

00:46:44.020 no, no, what you're doing by deconstructing the concept of gender itself is allowing adolescents

00:46:52.100 much more freedom and exploration of their identities during a critical period than would

00:46:56.420 otherwise be the case. Now, I would temperamentally tend to side with the confusion hypothesis.

00:47:02.500 I think it's a catastrophe to confuse adolescents with regards to their gender identity,

00:47:10.420 just when they're attempting to catalyze that identity, right? At the same time that

00:47:14.340 hormonal transformations are at their peak and they're undergoing a profound transformation in self,

00:47:22.900 to offer them a plethora, an infinite plethora of ways to be, none of which have been tested

00:47:31.060 in some sense in the world, seems to me a recipe for disaster. But...

00:47:35.220 Does it look like freedom? No, it doesn't look like freedom. And I'll tell you why,

00:47:42.020 because these girls are miserable. Just look at the number of young women on YouTube who regret

00:47:46.980 their transitions already. They adopt behaviors after deciding online on some social media site that

00:47:55.380 their true identity is non-binary. Oh, no, wait, it's two-spirit. Now I'm a two-spirit. Oh,

00:48:01.220 no, wait, I'm agender. Once they go through these, they lead lives. I mean, if you, you know, if you

00:48:07.300 talk to them, talk to their parents, they are, when I, I wouldn't, if these young women were

00:48:12.260 flourishing, I wouldn't have written the book. That's, that's not a sad story. They're flourishing,

00:48:17.540 but instead they're cutting off their parents. They're dropping out of school. They have no

00:48:20.980 meaningful employment. They all, all their friends are only transgender. They hate all cis people.

00:48:26.020 You see patterns that are desperately unhealthy. Well, it seems to me, you know, and maybe this

00:48:32.260 is a consequence of not taking the idea of a social role with sufficient seriousness, is that

00:48:40.900 there's a lot more to identity than your personal feeling. Identity is something that's negotiated in

00:48:49.780 the social community. And an identity is actually a tool that you use to adapt. So that if you have

00:48:56.980 an identity that functions, we could say, you manage to find a long-term stable mate. You manage to have

00:49:03.940 children at some point in your life. You manage to have gainful employment so that you can support

00:49:09.540 yourself and maybe in a meaningful and productive manner. You are able to use your own time outside of

00:49:16.260 work and social obligations in a manner that's meaningful to you. You regulate your use of

00:49:21.540 drugs and alcohol so that you don't fall by the wayside in, in that manner. So what it means is

00:49:28.100 that an identity is partly who you think you are, but it's also partly the manner in which you interact

00:49:34.020 with other people. And if that identity is going to be useful, let's say, if that identity is going to be

00:49:42.260 valid, it has to provide you with a mode of being in the world. And part of the problem with this

00:49:48.020 multiplication of gender identities is that it's not obvious how you can manifest them in the world

00:49:53.700 without transforming the entire world, which isn't going to happen in your lifetime. And so that's,

00:50:02.020 see that, and maybe that touches on, to some degree, touches on what it is that's driving this,

00:50:07.940 is that it's some deep desire for a radical social transformation so that anything goes.

00:50:13.780 And some, what would you call, it's, it's pushing, look, everybody feels to some degree,

00:50:20.260 the restrictive nature of social roles. You know, I just said that you have to adopt an identity so

00:50:26.260 that you can get by in the world, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a fair bit of your individuality

00:50:31.620 that's squashed and crushed as you adopt that identity and, and become in some way like everybody

00:50:37.700 else. And maybe this is a rebellion, at least in part against that notion of having to become

00:50:44.340 like everyone else. The unfortunate reality is that if you don't, there's no place for you.

00:50:52.820 That, I think that's right. I mean, the young women who do, you know, these are overwhelmingly,

00:50:57.140 and you look at Lisa Littman's study and, you know, the, the number of women were, and I've seen,

00:51:03.140 you know, my own interviews, the, the, these women are overwhelmingly white, middle and upper

00:51:08.100 middle, upper middle class. And they, they have no victim status. They have no easy victim status,

00:51:15.620 and they need one. They need one to get by socially. They aren't a minority in any sense,

00:51:21.380 but this is the one status they can choose. See, they can't always choose to be gay,

00:51:26.020 you know, but they can choose to be trans. No one, no one knows better than they do who their gender

00:51:32.580 is, is, is, is the saying goes. So, so no one can question them the moment they say they're two

00:51:37.300 spirit or trans. Well, then another theme I would say that emerges from your book is the

00:51:44.500 increasing social inacceptability among adolescents of what would have been more normative gender identities.

00:51:56.740 these, these girls that, that, that, the, um, the generation that you're describing,

00:52:04.580 it was also, is also characterized according to the research that you did in your book and

00:52:09.460 research that's been put forward elsewhere by a dearth of intimate relationships.

00:52:16.020 And so it also seems to be right. One of the things you pointed out was, I think it was,

00:52:20.740 I don't remember if you talked about 16 year old girls or 18 year old girls, but

00:52:25.540 in the year and a half proceeding being asked the question, half of them hadn't had anything that

00:52:31.620 resembled, uh, any aspect of an intimate couples relationship. That seems to be a radical

00:52:38.660 transformation. So is it also partly that the more traditional gender roles aren't working?

00:52:45.860 No, I, I don't, I don't know that they aren't working. I don't know that they've ever explored

00:52:52.180 them. Look, these are young, very sheltered young girls. These are the generation that grew up with

00:52:57.380 helicopter parents and they have had barely ever had a kiss. They've never held hands. They spent

00:53:03.380 all their time on their phone. They don't know their own bodies and their own desires. And they

00:53:07.860 don't know, and they haven't experienced romantic relationships with each other. So they don't know

00:53:13.140 who they are and they don't know what they want. And instead they turn to the internet to answer all

00:53:16.900 their questions.

00:53:18.100 What do you suppose has happened? I mean, I, I thought that the statistic that you put forward

00:53:23.940 about the lack of intimate relationship, because you, those were population-based statistics,

00:53:31.540 if I remember correctly, right? You weren't looking at a small minority of teenage girls who,

00:53:36.900 who were on the road to transition. This was that generation.

00:53:40.820 Like, why aren't these teenagers dating and, and, and interacting with members of the opposite sex,

00:53:49.620 like they were only 15 years ago or 20 years ago? What's failed? Like, do you see this as a,

00:53:56.020 as a consequence of technological transformation?

00:53:59.380 There are many, many, many things at play. One, they're with mom all the time. These kids report

00:54:05.060 being at mom, with mom, they don't, they get a driver's license until much later. They don't spend

00:54:10.240 time with each other. They're with mom all the time. Um, even they, they talk to her all day.

00:54:14.960 They text her all, you know, in a constant basis. Um, so they don't have freedom to be alone with

00:54:20.480 each other. And then when they are alone with each other, rather than being intimate and sharing

00:54:23.840 things and exploring each other and, you know, even just in a, in a verbal way or in any way,

00:54:29.120 um, they're on their phones. Um, so there, that's at play. There's also pornography. I mean,

00:54:34.600 we've seen, you know, there've been studies that show, or there's statistics that show that young men

00:54:38.540 are experiencing erectile dysfunction, young men, men under 30 at rates we've never seen before

00:54:44.160 because of online porn. So basically the one thing that biology evolved, that men were evolved to be

00:54:51.880 able to do social media or online porn content has made it hard for them to do, you know, difficult

00:54:58.340 for them to achieve. And we've never seen, you know, these kinds of, um, rewiring of, of human

00:55:04.300 sexuality that's going on because people aren't spending time with each other in person. There's

00:55:08.800 these young people are spending time online alone. Yeah. Okay. So, so part of you, you do see at

00:55:14.980 least part of this transformation as being driven by, by the phone, by the, by the constant, by the

00:55:21.000 constant, constant electronic tethering, let's say. And part of that tethering is to the parent and part

00:55:27.260 of that tethering is to friends, but it's mediated by electronic communication. It's not direct

00:55:32.060 one-on-one interaction. And maybe that's the case with the boys.

00:55:37.280 Yeah. Yes. But the images that girls see online are just as frightening because they're seeing

00:55:42.180 violent porn at very, very young ages, women being choked within an inch of their life. This is what

00:55:47.820 young girls think sex looks like with the opposite, you know, with, with, with the man. And they're

00:55:52.480 terrified of it. Um, it doesn't look anything to look forward to. Instead, it looks like something to

00:55:57.760 run away from. Well, it's never presented with, with, with, with regards to pornography. Sexuality

00:56:03.560 is never, um, represented as part of an intimate relationship, right? It's its own thing, sex. It's

00:56:11.460 not an integrated part of a loving relationship, which is what it should be under optimal circumstances.

00:56:19.140 You don't, you don't see that. That doesn't attract widespread impulsive, um, viewing.

00:56:28.820 Right. But it's also violent and that's the, that in some, you're, you're right. There's always been

00:56:33.340 this porn that exists in playboy and whatever, um, divorced from intimate relationships. Fine. But

00:56:39.200 what young girls at age 11 younger are seeing are, are, is violent, violent porn. That's what they know

00:56:46.160 of sex and they're seeing it at a very young age. And it's terrifying. Okay. So let me ask you about

00:56:50.900 that. I mean, um, how confident are you in that proposition? I mean, uh, you're, we're, we're trying

00:57:03.200 to determine why it is that there's a generation of young women who are much less likely to engage in

00:57:09.900 dating intimate relationships of, of, of the classic teenage style. And it's not like anybody

00:57:17.640 knows the answer to this because it's such a new phenomenon. And so are these tentative hypotheses

00:57:23.900 that you're putting forward, or do you have some, um, how, how, how solid are you in your belief

00:57:32.480 that these are the fact that you've correctly identified the factors that are driving this?

00:57:36.480 Well, the, the core, you know, thing I look at in the book is, you know, what's going on with,

00:57:43.740 why is there this epidemic, the sudden explosion and what are the risks and benefits and what,

00:57:49.860 why, you know, are these girls thriving? Are they doing well? And should we be concerned and why?

00:57:54.500 Okay. Now the, the part of this observation was to look at the culture and what was going on in the

00:57:59.700 culture and observe the fact that young women are having sex and intimate relationships at much

00:58:05.020 lower rates. That is not my research that was done, you know, by, uh, by there, there are a number of

00:58:10.760 people who've been doing this. Um, Kate Julian had a wonderful article on the Atlantic in which he

00:58:14.280 interviewed many psychologists about this, but it's, it's, it's been, you know, something that many

00:58:18.660 psychologists have observed and studied. And very unexpected, very unexpected development.

00:58:24.120 Right. Right. It's not exactly, it's not what you'd predict at all. When all the social

00:58:30.000 constraints or many of the social constraints have been removed from every possible form of sexual

00:58:35.260 behavior, the consequence of that has been a precipitous decline in sexual behavior among

00:58:40.300 adolescents. And I guess we didn't talk at all about what the role of the boys might be in this,

00:58:46.060 like our girls not, um, dating, let's say, and engaging in intimate relationships when they're

00:58:52.100 teenagers because of something that's changed with them or, or have the boys stopped asking?

00:58:57.120 Um, you know, it, that's, that's a good question about whether, so I didn't, what I was trying to

00:59:03.500 say is I didn't look into specifically or investigate why there's this, you know, sudden

00:59:08.880 drop in sexual activity or even intimate relationship activity among teenagers. Um,

00:59:14.860 so there are things I can surmise from looking at the culture and writing about the culture as I do,

00:59:19.440 but do I have studies on this? No, I don't know. I don't have, you know, a real answer that I've,

00:59:25.000 I've come across yet. Well, the pornography question's an open one, right? Because right

00:59:29.780 that that's a form of easily accessible gratification with endless novelty. That's never

00:59:38.600 been, you know, it's possible for a young man to see more beautiful nude women in one afternoon than

00:59:45.020 any human being that ever lived before 1950 would have seen in his entire life.

00:59:49.600 Right. And, and, and, and, and of such variety, I mean, that's right. Well, novelty is a huge driver

00:59:56.900 of sexual arousal and, and pleasure. And so the, the, and I mean, I also think that's part of the

01:00:03.360 reason why I don't just think that there's evidence for this, but it's one of the drivers for the,

01:00:09.060 the proliferation of multiple forms of pornography is that novelty is a driver of sexual arousal.

01:00:15.180 And so there's an arms race online that consists of a combination of sexual imagery and novelty,

01:00:23.840 and that would drive the production of violent videos, for example, or anything that's different,

01:00:32.880 right, is, is going to add an edge, a novelty edge, especially to a hardened pornography user.

01:00:39.560 Hardened is probably the wrong word there, by the way.

01:00:41.740 Right. And the problem with this, of course, is not that there's so much pornography, I mean,

01:00:47.360 online, but of course that, that we're also seeing men be less inclined to engage in intimate

01:00:53.200 relationships, less and able to even perform. I mean, these, you know, because of it, I mean,

01:00:59.080 it's the rewiring of young people so that they're so incompatible for each other. That's the real

01:01:05.220 sort of disturbing part. If these young people, and this applies to this young, you know, group of,

01:01:11.400 of, of women who suddenly decide they're transgender, if they were forming families and living good

01:01:17.040 lives, um, that's a success story, but that's not the story. That's not the story that I found in my

01:01:22.700 book. Right. Unless you define success as being allowed to pursue whatever fragmentary identity

01:01:29.280 occupies their consciousness at any given time. And you can define it that way. Right. I mean,

01:01:34.880 you're using, and I would use as well, I would say more conservative criteria for what constitutes a

01:01:42.660 good life. You know, as a clinician, I listed as a clinician, it struck me that you can assess

01:01:50.120 someone's mental health with some degree of accuracy by looking at the success of their embeddedness

01:01:56.360 within their social community. And that's why I outline markers of a good life, like gainful and

01:02:03.820 meaningful employment and education to the, to the, to the extent of your intelligence and the ability

01:02:11.060 to form an intimate long-term relationship and children and all these things that seem to make

01:02:16.540 up the bedrock of life. But again, to some degree, that's a matter of definition, right? You could object

01:02:23.540 to all of that and say, well, no, that's a very 1950s or 1970s way of looking at the world. And

01:02:29.120 that's long gone. And, and now what we're trying to do is facilitate people's, the broadest possible

01:02:37.760 range of choices among people so that we have a world that's much more diverse in its, in its expression

01:02:44.100 of identity. It's a very difficult argument to contend with. I think it's deeply wrong. I think it's too

01:02:51.780 confusing for people, but. I mean, except that they, a lot of these young women, their mental health

01:02:57.520 after the trans identification deteriorated. So they're not able to function. Look, I have no, I,

01:03:03.620 I have interviewed many transgender adults who are flourishing. They're leading good lives. They're in,

01:03:08.840 they're gainfully employed. They are happy. They're socially connected. That is, that is not a problem

01:03:14.400 story. The reason that this young girls are, are, are the subject of my book is because they're not

01:03:21.360 flourishing. They're not doing well. They're not connected to friends and family. They're not

01:03:25.740 staying in school. Do you, do you think, and I don't know the literature on this, and I guess it's

01:03:30.920 partly because it's so soon after the phenomenon emerged itself. Um, do you know the literature

01:03:39.220 on the relationship between mental health and movement through the transitioning process? It's

01:03:47.760 tricky, eh? Because you point out in your book that if you're an anxious teenage girl, or maybe

01:03:54.300 even an anxious teenage guy, and you're given testosterone, at least in the short term, that can

01:03:59.980 do wonders for your anxiety. And so whether or not mental health improves might depend very much on

01:04:06.680 when you measure it. So if you're anxious and your identity is chaotic and you take testosterone,

01:04:14.620 the immediate consequence of that is that you're going to be much less anxious at least. And why

01:04:19.560 wouldn't you think immediately that that's evidence that there was something astray with your identity

01:04:25.540 that this magic hormone fixed? You know, timeframe is a killer problem when you're trying to assess

01:04:30.920 mental health. So, so what studies are, or what data are you looking at when you generate the

01:04:38.020 proposition that going down the medical transition road isn't producing the positive outcome that

01:04:44.160 it's hypothetically designed to produce? Well, first of all, I only say that it's not producing

01:04:49.840 that outcome for these teenage girls who I believe are misdiagnosing. Okay. So I don't make a claim

01:04:56.360 about transgender adults who went through therapy, arrived at this decision as mature adults and,

01:05:02.280 and are living, you know, a life as a transgender person. I never make a claim that that wasn't a

01:05:08.300 good or the right move for them. Right. Well, I don't, and I don't know, I don't think that there is

01:05:13.400 a reliable literature on the long-term outcome of gender transition surgery, even in those cases.

01:05:20.220 I think you're, yeah. So, so, so, and the phenomena we're discussing is much newer than that. So

01:05:26.440 the data aren't in, it's very difficult for the data to be in yet. So I'm wondering again,

01:05:33.320 why you concluded that it's not working? Well, there are a number of reasons. First of all,

01:05:40.140 you know, obviously I used Lisa Lippman's study, which was the jumping off point for my book,

01:05:45.220 Brown university, public health researcher who looked into this. You're also seeing clinicians

01:05:50.820 report the same across the Western world, that they're seeing a sudden spike of, of gender

01:05:56.560 dysphoria that seems to be peer motivated or claimed gender dysphoria that seems to be peer motivated

01:06:02.700 and social media motivated. Okay. It's not an organic problem and it doesn't look like traditional

01:06:09.040 gender dysphoria. Um, you're, you're also seeing numbers of detransitioners explode on YouTube.

01:06:16.000 So if you go to YouTube week to week, the number of detransitioners, and you're right about the

01:06:21.100 timeline, by the way, of course, that's always going to be relevant. So, um, testosterone does

01:06:25.740 deliver a high, as you said, and it does suppress anxiety. So some women who self-medicated with it feel

01:06:31.580 great after they've started a course of testosterone. But very often, if you listen to these

01:06:36.080 detransitioner accounts, I've listened to many, many of them, um, um, they will report that then,

01:06:41.160 and then after that, you know, spike their anxiety and depression came right back. And, um, there's a

01:06:47.360 woman I recently listened to called a waffling willow. She goes by on YouTube who did a 12 part

01:06:53.280 series on my book. I never met her. I didn't know about her until she did this, but she's a

01:06:58.460 detransitioner did a 12 part session on my book in which she said, yes, this was totally her experience

01:07:04.600 as a teenager. She transitioned very quickly. And at first she felt great on the testosterone

01:07:09.400 and then she realized that, and then she had basically a crash in which all of the other

01:07:15.180 mental health issues that she had returned. Yeah. Well, that, well, that's a good example

01:07:24.120 of the difficulty in doing longitudinal mental health outcome studies, especially in an uncontrolled

01:07:30.520 environment. They're clinical studies are notoriously difficult to conduct and the timeframe

01:07:36.400 problem devils, bedevils them. And this is, this is a particularly nasty situation given that

01:07:44.220 testosterone produces that initial high. So you can cherry pick your data to some degree. If you look

01:07:50.320 early in the transition process, you might well see an improvement. And then you, you can argue about

01:07:55.580 what, what, what's contributing to that, you know, whether it's just the pharmacological effect of

01:07:59.940 the testosterone, or if it is actually proof that the gender identity confusion in question was real.

01:08:07.460 There's also, of course, the Tavistock report out of the gender clinic, the largest gender clinic in

01:08:12.280 the United Kingdom, which showed that there was no mental health improvement, no improvement in

01:08:18.800 suicidal ideation for young women who have been started on, you know, puberty blockers and then

01:08:24.720 cross-sex hormones. So, you know, there, we aren't seeing the improvement that was supposedly,

01:08:33.260 you know, claimed as the, the, the rationale for starting young people on these treatments.

01:08:39.940 Yeah. I wonder, I'm going to go back to something that we talked about earlier when

01:08:43.220 we were trying to pin down what the motivation for this ideology might be. Like the, the notion

01:08:49.780 that your identity is yours alone to determine strikes me as it's a profound, it's profoundly

01:08:57.520 narcissistic. It seems to me to be predicated on the idea that you have the right to be master of

01:09:04.600 your own, master of your own domain, master of your own, uh, uh, your outcome, regardless of

01:09:14.940 people around you. You're the only person that has to be taken into account. So that would go along

01:09:20.580 with the, um, the express claim that you're the only person that can determine what your identity is.

01:09:28.680 It seems to me to be a very infantile and narcissistic wish that that might be the case.

01:09:34.600 You know, that you could decide who you were and that the world would be forced to bend around

01:09:40.540 your will. And I can understand that again, as I said, because everybody fights a battle against

01:09:47.400 society, molding them and destroying their individuality while they're socialized.

01:09:52.700 It's a, it's a, there's something there that's valid to rebel against, but generally speaking,

01:09:57.940 as you mature, you start to understand that you have to negotiate your way through the world with

01:10:03.660 other people and that the benefits of being acceptable to other people outweigh the costs

01:10:09.500 to your own narcissistic self-determination. And it's, it's the desire to not have to contend with that

01:10:18.640 compromise that drives, I believe that drives the insistence that you are the only person that

01:10:27.220 can determine your identity.

01:10:29.980 That's right. I think that the activists in this movement have a lot more in common with say the Black Lives Matter

01:10:36.020 movement and others such, um, uh, you know, so-called woke movements than they do with adult transgender

01:10:42.940 people. When I talk to interview, you know, a gender adults, they don't insist that they were always girls or

01:10:49.520 always boys. They don't ask you to suspend reality. They say, look, I had gender dysphoria from the time

01:10:55.240 I was a child. You know, I struggled with it for many years as an adult. I went through therapy and I

01:11:00.320 realized this was the way to, you know, calm my gender dysphoria. And this is how I'm most comfortable

01:11:06.480 presenting. That's not imposing anything on the world really, but the group of insistent activists,

01:11:12.880 many of whom are not transgender themselves, but insist that we suspend reality that medical

01:11:18.760 professionals agree with them. Yes. You were always a girl or you were always a boy, this kind of

01:11:24.520 stuff. This is an aggressive ideological movement that really has nothing to do with, um, gender

01:11:30.520 dysphoria per se. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm, I've been trying to put my finger on while I was reading your

01:11:35.540 book as well, what it is that's the driving factor. And, you know, if you look at there's broad

01:11:42.380 philosophical streams, like those that emerge from the writings of Rousseau that claim that

01:11:47.220 human beings as individuals are essentially good and pristine in their fundamental nature and that

01:11:52.620 culture, it's culture that corrupts them. You know, and it's a very one-sided view. You can take the

01:11:57.900 Hobbesian perspective, which is exactly the opposite and say that, well, people are self-interested,

01:12:03.120 narcissistic and malevolent, and it's only society that makes them good. And I would say a balanced

01:12:08.460 viewpoint emerges if you integrate both of those views, even though they're paradoxical to some

01:12:14.520 degree, you pay for your socialization and you benefit and you sacrifice something of value,

01:12:19.760 but you also gain. And that's what you decide if you're mature. If you, if you stay locked in the

01:12:27.640 notion that social pressure in and of itself is the perverting force that destroys your soul and

01:12:35.200 your psyche, then you're going to be motivated to push as hard as you can to justify your claims

01:12:40.420 that your identity is something that you yourself determine and that no one has any right to interfere

01:12:46.320 with that whatsoever. And maybe if you have to sacrifice people in order to justify that claim,

01:12:53.300 that's okay, because the claim is important enough to you so that those sacrifices are warranted.

01:12:59.500 You know, I got a sense of horror in some sense from reading your book, especially when you started

01:13:05.800 to describe the surgery. And so maybe we could walk through that a little bit. Let's say that you do

01:13:10.700 decide to walk down the gender transition road as an adolescent female. You can look forward to a high

01:13:17.360 that's generated by testosterone, and maybe that's something short-term and positive, but what else can you

01:13:23.100 look forward to? Well, I suppose the next, what can you look forward to? I mean, you get the high

01:13:32.020 facetious, gotcha. Yes. Well, the, the, so the testosterone delivers that, but it also comes with

01:13:39.240 risks. I don't know if you want me to talk about those. Yes. And, and also the experience you talk

01:13:45.200 about voice deepening and hair development and all of, walk through it, walk, walk through what happens

01:13:50.960 to a person if they, if they go down this road. For the, in the first few months on testosterone at 10

01:13:57.600 to 40 times, what a young woman's body would normally experience, her voice will change and

01:14:02.280 masculinize. That does not seem to go away. You know, her, she will make, she will, her facial features

01:14:09.180 will change. They will round, her shoulders will broaden and it will redistribute fat. So if she's

01:14:14.340 concerned about her fat, all of a sudden in the places women develop fat, belly and thighs, all of a sudden,

01:14:19.740 wow, she's lost weight and she can develop more muscle. Um, the problem is, is that a lot of these

01:14:24.860 changes are permanent. Um, the masculinization, um, of, of the facial features and whatnot. And

01:14:30.720 also that comes with very big risk of cardiac arrest and cardiac risk, um, seems to be, you know,

01:14:38.060 much, much higher than a woman would normally experience, even more than a man would normally

01:14:42.400 experience it seems. Um, and you also discuss the effects on, um, fertility and, and, um, sexual

01:14:50.220 pressure. That's right. Right. So, um, there are vaginal atrophy and uterine atrophy occur. There can,

01:14:56.360 it can be quite painful. And, um, so in some cases making intercourse impossible, if there's enough

01:15:02.860 atrophy, um, it's quite painful. And because of the increased risk of endometrial cancer, um,

01:15:09.400 doctors typically recommend at five years on testosterone and prophylactic hysterectomy.

01:15:16.060 Um, so even assuming that the testosterone doesn't impact her fertility, which it may,

01:15:21.260 the hysterectomy certainly will make that impossible. Um, so, you know, those, those are

01:15:26.160 some of the risks of testosterone, but the biggest risk of all, of course, is that we have no idea

01:15:31.120 all the long-term effects of what testosterone at 10 to 40 times, what her body would normally happen

01:15:37.320 will do to her. Right. And that's a long-term course of treatment, right? Because she can't

01:15:42.580 go off it because if she goes off it at any point, she will go back. Some of her changes

01:15:47.700 will revert. She'll go back to an in-between male and female look. So once you start, you become a

01:15:53.960 permanent medical patient and we just don't know, you know, we don't have enough evidence of what

01:15:59.180 this, what will happen, you know, to these patient population, all the problems they will incur

01:16:03.900 in the long-term. Um, then of course there's, there's double mastectomy, which is the only

01:16:10.860 cosmetic surgery or considered cosmetic surgery I'm aware of that you show up without a mental

01:16:16.540 health professional's note. Um, even as a minor, you can have your breasts removed. Um, it destroys

01:16:22.740 biological function. Obviously it destroys all capacity for breastfeeding as well as erotic

01:16:27.720 function very often. And, um, and, and yet, you know, it's, and you outline some of the,

01:16:33.540 the potential side effects of that as well. Um, the, the, I believe monthly engorgement of breast

01:16:41.040 tissue and leaks and that sort of thing as a consequence of only partial removal of the breast

01:16:45.780 tissue. I got that right. Right. And whether the testosterone is enough. I mean, you know, if you go

01:16:51.360 off testosterone, your breasts may refill with, with milk, even after they've been removed, you may have

01:16:56.220 some drainage problems. I mean, drainage is a, is another side effect that often happens. Very often

01:17:01.620 women are unhappy with the look. They want a second surgery to repair the look of it. And why are they

01:17:06.440 unhappy with the look? Because they're, they're, they're chasing an asymptote. They're running after

01:17:12.660 a horizon. Um, the, the final look of being a man, which they never, which is always a little bit out

01:17:19.220 of reach. I mean, I, I, some of the people I interviewed for the book were forensic anthropologists

01:17:24.020 because I wanted to know about skeletons. What, you know, are there skeletal differences between men

01:17:29.240 and women? And it turns out there are, even the sloping of the forehead won't be quite, quite right.

01:17:34.980 They'll be smaller. They'll have smaller hands. They'll have differently shaped pelvises. No matter

01:17:39.320 what other, you know, surgeries they get, they're, they're, they're actually, their femurs will

01:17:44.160 attach differently for a woman than they do for a man. Right. And that accounts for the difference in

01:17:49.160 gait. And there's a difference in, in angle of the forearm connection to the, to the upper arm as

01:17:54.740 well, because of the difference in hip, hip to waist ratio, all these subtle differences between

01:18:01.040 men and women. It's hard enough for a man to be an ideal man, much less a woman to be transformed into

01:18:06.220 an ideal man. And if you're an individual who has some questions about the acceptability of your

01:18:13.700 physical appearance, then you can imagine that it's quite likely that that's going to be maintained

01:18:19.240 as you make the transition to another gender. Right. And, and there's something else I asked

01:18:24.260 one of the doctors about, cause I started looking at many pictures of the young women who had received

01:18:28.660 a double mastectomy. And I, I noticed something I said, wait a second, look at their hips. They have

01:18:33.720 women's hips, which become even more obvious once they've had their breasts removed. So, um, you know,

01:18:39.380 the doctor said to me, that's right. There's a surgery. There's another surgery they can get if they,

01:18:43.220 if they're concerned that their hips are protruding too much. So you see that they're, this is not an

01:18:48.200 easy fix and yet it's, it's being doled out, you know, quite, quite casually.

01:18:53.840 Right. And, and by casually, you mean that there's no screening in place essentially to stop

01:19:01.220 women from beginning this transformation process. And that also, you point out that so many, um, medical,

01:19:09.040 uh, health insurance schemes, uh, health insurance schemes like those provided by universities now cover the

01:19:15.620 testosterone certainly, but also the medical procedures themselves to reduce their cost to a point where

01:19:22.800 they're much more accessible than they would be otherwise.

01:19:24.980 That's right. I talked to a woman, uh, a week or two ago who, whose daughter suddenly decided she

01:19:31.180 was trans at university. She was at a very top American university and at university, she not

01:19:36.400 only started a course of testosterone, but she was able to get her breasts removed.

01:19:42.200 Yes. Well, that would be rather shocking news for any parent to contend with.

01:19:46.460 So let me shift gears for a minute. If you wouldn't mind,

01:19:49.680 what has been the personal consequence for you of writing this book? I mean, I can't imagine hitting a

01:19:56.600 more, um, active hornet's nest. So is it okay that you wrote it? Do you regret writing it? And,

01:20:06.020 and what's happened personally to you because you've written it?

01:20:11.240 You know, it's, it's been something of a journey. Um, you know, when I started this project,

01:20:17.020 it was so, you know, once I started, I was just in a sort of a constant state of shock and revelation

01:20:23.720 and I couldn't really believe this was happening. And it would struck me the more I investigated it,

01:20:29.580 it struck me as so, so such obvious madness that there would be no, um, you know, oversight and no,

01:20:36.300 you know, guardians or, or, or gatekeepers in place that I just kept thinking at the end of this,

01:20:42.960 everyone's going to be shocked. And, you know, this will become a safer procedure or,

01:20:48.300 you know, everyone will have to agree. I didn't write the book for religious people. I didn't

01:20:52.300 write the book for conservatives. I just wrote it for common sense people who were interested in

01:20:57.220 the number of, of teenage girls suddenly coming out as transgender. And I was, I couldn't, I mean,

01:21:04.580 the number, I can't even tell you how many parents have called me since the book came out,

01:21:08.180 while the book was coming out, um, telling me that 20, 30, 40% of their, you know, whatever,

01:21:13.480 very high, 15, 20, 30% of their daughter's seventh grade class suddenly decided they were transgender.

01:21:19.720 Sometimes at girls' schools, their boys weren't even relevant. It was at a girls' school or at

01:21:24.120 least they weren't around. Um, so on the one hand I, and then the, and then of course in the,

01:21:29.840 in England, the high court came out and it came out with a decision that effectively,

01:21:34.460 um, verified everything I had to say in the book. Um, they, they said, right. That was the case of

01:21:41.640 the detransitioning girl. I mean, I thought, I thought five years ago, I thought more, more,

01:21:47.860 I thought this will all come to an end when these adolescents hit adulthood and start to bring the

01:21:56.900 lawyers into play for everything that was done for them. Let's say when they were teenagers.

01:22:05.160 And that, that high, high court case, do you want to just outline that briefly for people?

01:22:09.980 Sure. A young woman named Kira Bell brought a case against the, she brought a claim against the,

01:22:14.580 uh, Tavistock gender clinic in England, in which she said, I was started on these treatments,

01:22:20.100 hormone treatments. I was sure I was transgender. I had, I started, um, I, you know, I, I had never

01:22:25.700 had a childhood history of gender dysphoria, but as a teenager, I was very uncomfortable in my body.

01:22:29.960 And I decided I was transgender. And at 16, I was started on a course of puberty blockers and then

01:22:36.440 cross-sex hormones. She eventually went on to have her breasts removed. And she realized as an,

01:22:41.960 as a young woman in her twenties, um, that she was, she had gone down the wrong path,

01:22:46.860 that none of this had made her any happier and that she wasn't supposed to be transgender.

01:22:51.320 She was a lesbian and that was all. And she had no, and she was very upset that nobody had stopped

01:22:59.060 her. Nobody had exercised any judgment. It had been a celebration only zone from the moment,

01:23:04.960 even from medical professionals and therapists from the moment she decided she was transgender.

01:23:09.400 And the court looked at this population of teenage girls and was horrified. And if you read the

01:23:14.340 decision, you know, as I have, um, and written about it, it's, it's, it just came out in, in,

01:23:20.080 in December. Right. Right. No, this is new. They said that it's basically, you know, young people

01:23:26.520 under 16 should not be allowed to be giving informed consent. They can't give meaningful consent to doing

01:23:32.860 away with their future fertility, their children. And there's in no sense, is this informed consent for

01:23:40.120 a possibility of a sexual life? Because in many cases, they may, this may lead to sexual dysfunction.

01:23:46.520 They can't foreclose sexual life, a healthy adult sexual life and, and fertility as, as, as minor.

01:23:53.140 Well, even, you know, um, how many 19 year old women who claim to not want children have children in

01:24:03.020 the upcoming decade? I mean, I don't know the statistics, but I do know that a very large number of

01:24:10.100 19 year old women that I knew when I was 19 had decided that they weren't going to have children.

01:24:15.220 And all of the ones that I knew either eventually had children or were very unhappy that they didn't,

01:24:22.080 you know, by the time they had hit their mid thirties. And so that that's right. I mean,

01:24:28.620 we don't know that much about our future selves. And the question is under what circumstances we should

01:24:33.400 be allowed to sacrifice them. No. So that that's right. And, and that's the problem. It's not that

01:24:40.840 these girls are having these feelings, but that our adults are immediately supplying the irreversible

01:24:46.420 treatments without any medical judgment or differential. Well, you also, this is part of

01:24:51.980 what's horrifying about your book. And we didn't talk about some of the other surgical complications,

01:24:58.600 for example, with regards to phalloplasty, which we might want to dive into just briefly,

01:25:03.720 because I wasn't aware of the mechanics of that particular operation, let's say, and

01:25:08.340 it's enough to give you pause, I would say. In any case, well, let's do that now. Why don't,

01:25:17.500 why don't you talk about phalloplasty and describe that? Sure. It begins with the desleeving of the

01:25:22.800 forearm. They have to remove the fat and muscle from around the forearm. That's what's used as the shaft,

01:25:28.600 of the neophallus. How much is removed? Oh gosh. Um, uh, many inches. If you see young women

01:25:34.440 videos, you can go online and see views of women who've had their forearms desleeved. It's a long

01:25:40.540 stretch of the forearm in order to get enough skin to form the neophallus. Um, then they have to

01:25:46.940 transfer a peripheral artery, um, and, um, and nerves to that area. They have to graft it. Obviously it's

01:25:55.760 extremely difficult work. Future surgeries are needed if you need it to be able to, um, first,

01:26:01.660 first of all, just making it able to, um, you know, have a urine stream, um, without infection

01:26:10.200 is extraordinarily difficult. Often that, you know, complications include urine that sprays rather

01:26:15.600 than streams. Um, it's extremely difficult to, to achieve. And, and, and then of course, having it

01:26:21.540 harden, um, at all is difficult. It requires a further surgery and it, and what does the surgery

01:26:27.580 entail for that? Is that inflatables? Yes, that's right. There's some sort of inflatable,

01:26:32.540 um, thing put into what would be like the sort of the testicle. I mean, the, uh, scrotum, um,

01:26:40.120 the manufactured scrotum. Um, so that, that, to make it inflatable, but it's very hard to get it

01:26:45.100 hard. It's very difficult to get it hard enough to penetrate for sex. And if you do get penetration,

01:26:52.020 what's the pleasure? That, oh, are they able to get the same amount of sexual or the, you know,

01:26:59.280 achieve orgasm? Actually that it depends on, um, I don't know how often they're able to achieve any

01:27:07.080 kind of sexual orgasm, but I do know that, um, you know, if they start out, if their, their puberty

01:27:13.740 is blocked by, um, by, you know, early on, and then they go to cross sex hormones and then they

01:27:20.300 have these operations, um, sexual dysfunction and inability to ever achieve orgasm is, becomes much

01:27:26.360 more likely, um, because they never finished their, you know, all the Tanner stages involved in,

01:27:32.000 you know, um, making a young person be able to eventually achieve orgasm. So, um, there are a

01:27:38.420 lot of problems and, and, but the biggest problem with this surgery, I'm told, you know, I've interviewed

01:27:42.620 a lot of surgeons and I'm told that, that, that surgeons who do this very well and are very skilled

01:27:47.920 at this and very highly trained in this can do a pretty impressive phalloplasty. Um, but the,

01:27:53.860 the problem of course, is these are big money makers and for hospitals, there's a lot of pressure to do

01:27:58.400 this surgery. And I keep hearing from surgeons that the people who are doing these surgeries are

01:28:03.100 very often not qualified. They're not qualified to transfer peripheral nerves. Each of these

01:28:08.180 micro surgeries involves a different separate fellowship and they haven't done those because

01:28:13.380 the hospitals are so desperate to make this extra money that they're not putting the safe,

01:28:18.160 they're not applying the traditional safeguards that they normally would. Well, it doesn't take much

01:28:22.880 imagination for someone who's undergone surgery or have, have witnessed someone under who

01:28:28.080 undergone, who underwent surgery to imagine just exactly how complicated and difficult this is,

01:28:33.620 especially to bring about anything approximating success. So we didn't finish our discussion of

01:28:41.540 the impact on you personally. So you said that you were continually shocked. So it was, I imagine,

01:28:47.540 somewhat demanding psychologically to do the research that was necessary to write the book.

01:28:51.740 But then there's also the consequence of publishing it and, and, uh, the, uh, notoriety or unpopularity that

01:29:01.260 that that might have produced. Right. So I suppose, you know, I, I suppose I would fall into disagreeable

01:29:10.840 as my, uh, personality, you know, um, category that I learned from you, um, in the sense that,

01:29:19.580 you know, I'm not someone who I, you know, things lies really bother me. They just bother me on a

01:29:25.440 moral, intuitional level. Um, so I really sort of wrote this, not looking to make friends, but just

01:29:31.960 because gosh, the truth seemed obvious and it was fairly horrifying and it didn't affect me personally

01:29:38.280 or my family personally. So if it had, I think I would have had trouble writing it. Um, I don't think

01:29:44.560 I would have been able to women who's, who's in fathers, mothers and fathers who've watched their

01:29:49.140 daughters go through this are, are absolutely devastated. And it's not something I would have

01:29:54.760 been able to do if this had been a personal issue, but I wrote the book. I thought it was a very fair

01:29:59.260 treatment. Um, makes you wonder too, when, when you're doing analysis of the outcomes of surgery,

01:30:04.860 if you take into account the effects of that on the immediate family members, if that's a valid

01:30:11.600 scientific question, you know, you know what I mean? Like you could say, look, the only person

01:30:18.040 who's ever affected by a surgery is the person upon whom the surgery is performed. And perhaps

01:30:23.400 that's the case. And perhaps that's a reasonable perspective, but we are embedded in familial

01:30:28.480 structures. And if, if a surgical procedure makes person a temporarily happy, or even maybe happy over

01:30:36.920 the long run, but devastates five other people, it seems to me that it's at least worth asking the

01:30:43.860 question of whether that should be taken into account, especially when you're talking about

01:30:47.980 teenagers. Right. I don't think it's that it devastates the parents because they, they can't

01:30:53.480 stand the thought of having a transgender son or daughter. In fact, they were overwhelmingly

01:30:58.800 politically progressive and supported and they were big, they considered themselves allies, uh,

01:31:04.200 long before gay rights was, was, was possible, you know, sorry, gay marriage was possible in America.

01:31:09.160 So legal in America. So, um, the, it wasn't that it's, they were so miserable and so devastated

01:31:16.400 because they thought their daughters were so miserable and likely to, and regretting this

01:31:20.500 already or likely to regret it because they saw the lives their daughters were leading. So I think while

01:31:25.400 I was writing the book, I just thought this is so obviously true. You know, everything there's,

01:31:30.060 everything in the book is true. I, nobody has pointed to a single factual error and the book has

01:31:35.740 been under a tremendous amount of fire now for six months. So, you know, how have you withstood that?

01:31:43.180 So I think that the hardest thing about the fire in, in a certain sense is all the, to be honest,

01:31:52.380 I, you know, it's all the polite people out there who, who won't even, you know, who are willing to,

01:32:01.020 to, to say, oh, you know, you're, you're effectively provide, well, you wrote that provocative book

01:32:06.540 as if, as if they don't, they almost don't seem not to know that it's a journalist job to go out and

01:32:12.540 investigate phenomena, especially cultural ones that seem to be real. Um, I, I didn't go looking for

01:32:20.140 trouble. Trouble is all around us in America today. I mean, you know, I mentioned the, you know,

01:32:26.060 states are lowering the age of medical consent across the country so that, so that kids can get

01:32:32.440 all kinds of surgeries. I mean, in Oregon, the age of medical consent is 15. So a 15 year old in Oregon

01:32:37.920 can get her breasts removed without her parents' permission. Now you don't need to be a religious

01:32:42.300 person to find that disturbing or alarming. You don't need to be conservative for sure,

01:32:47.540 but just a thinking person who says, gosh, that seems really young. I know I had a lot of crazy

01:32:54.100 ideas at 15. You know, I'm glad no one would have given me that option. Who do you want to read your

01:33:01.300 book? Oh, I, you know, I mean, and the book's for, for anyone to read, but I suppose parents,

01:33:10.960 parents, um, have been very helped by it. Um, or they felt, you know, they felt it was very useful.

01:33:16.400 Clinicians have told me it's very useful, um, in, in, in just helping them sort of develop a,

01:33:21.940 you know, sense that they're not completely insane when they think this is a whole lot of

01:33:26.480 kids suddenly deciding they're transgender out of the blue. This can't be right. There's no oversight,

01:33:31.620 you know, feeling that they're not alone. Um, but you know, I'm, I'm happy for people who are

01:33:36.940 affirmative therapists to read the book. I mean, I'm happy for anyone to read the book. Um, you know,

01:33:41.980 I, unlike those who have called for my book to be banned and burned, um, I, I, you know,

01:33:47.280 I'm not in favor of those things or, you know, I, I would happy to be happy for anyone to read it.

01:33:52.360 And of course I would never want another book banned or burned.

01:33:56.260 And so you're, you remain pleased with your decision to write it.

01:34:03.780 The truth is I'm not sure I could have done anything else. I mean, once I was aware of what

01:34:08.100 was going on, I wrote an article about it for the wall street journal and it's got a huge amount

01:34:13.400 of traction. I mean, people were writing to me across the country, even across the West to say,

01:34:18.240 yes, this is going on in their daughter's school. Yes. Let me tell you my story. I mean, I'm sure

01:34:22.980 there are people who could have walked away from that, but I I'm not one of them. I thought, gosh,

01:34:27.980 there's something worth investigating here. And how could I just walk away from that and not look into it?

01:34:33.120 Well, you know, I think that's probably

01:34:38.120 a reasonable place for us to end. What do you think? Do you have anything else that you'd like

01:34:45.040 to say? Oh, um, no, I, I just, uh, thank you very much for having me on and, uh, and, um,

01:34:54.340 you know, I'm a big admirer of yours and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about. Well, um,

01:34:59.020 I'm, I'm, I'm pleased that you were willing to discuss your book and, uh, it's, I'm hoping

01:35:06.900 that many people will read it and think about what it, and think about it. Um, there's lots

01:35:16.620 to think about, uh, the transgender surgery being part of that, but by no means the, necessarily

01:35:24.180 the larger, the largest part. So thank you very much. Can I just say one more thing?

01:35:32.200 Yes. Just say one last thing. Look, the lies have to stop somewhere. I could have walked away

01:35:39.160 from this. I'm not saying it's been fun and I'm not saying it's been easy since the book

01:35:43.200 came out. There've been plenty of times when I thought I really don't know if I, if I chose

01:35:47.900 the right path here, but I have to tell you something, the lies have to stop somewhere.

01:35:53.180 Don't they? I mean, they're just, we're right now, we're living through a blizzard of them.

01:35:58.220 And at some point, someone has to say, you know, a few of us who are just, you know, willing

01:36:03.240 to need to say enough. We, we, we have to subject this to the same medical scrutiny and the same

01:36:10.400 skepticism that we would subject anything else to any other medical phenomenon.

01:36:15.160 Yes. Well, terrible as objecting to the lies might be. I suspect that it's not as terrible

01:36:21.920 as the consequences of letting them flourish unchallenged. I mean, that's right. I mean,

01:36:28.560 a lot of young women are getting badly hurt and at some point somebody has to be willing

01:36:33.760 to say something. Yeah. Well, I, I hope, I hope that your book helps. That would be, that

01:36:43.460 would be what anyone who is thinking clearly would hope. Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 21, 2021

159. Irreversible Damage？｜ Abigail Shrier

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