316. Parenting and the Narcissists of Compassion ｜ Stephanie Davies-Arai
Summary
Stephanie Davies Arai is a decorated author and the founder as well as the Director of Transgender Trend, a UK-based organization that has been perpetually under fire by leftist activists simply for advocating for evidence-based health care when it comes to gender dysphoric children. She s also the author of Communicating With Kids, a book published in 2015, based on her background, training teachers and providing parental support. Davies Ara i is also notable for being an intervener in the landmark case Bell v Tavistock, which concluded that persons under 18 cannot consent to puberty blockers. In this episode, we discuss the role of parents in their children s development, and the role they can play in providing support and guidance to children who are growing up in a world that is increasingly hostile to their needs and wants. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. - The Daily Wire Plus platform. . . . . . , , , . , and ... - & ; ? and , etc., Thank you, And, ... and so much more! in this episode is by Dr. David B. Davies-Arai on this episode on the podcast, which is dedicated to helping others find a brighter future they deserve to live in a life that s better than they ve ever had in the past, and that s going to have a chance to live up to their full potential in their own potential, and they deserve a chance of that. ...and so much so that they can be a better version of that in the rest of the world, too have a better chance of a life like that, too at all that they ve been given the chance to be that so they can live it.
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420
Hello everyone watching or listening on YouTube or Associated Podcast or on the Daily Wire Plus platform.
00:01:14.960
I have the privilege today of speaking to Stephanie Davies Arai.
00:01:19.100
She is a decorated author and the founder as well as the director of Transgender Trend, a UK-based organization that has been perpetually under fire by leftist activists simply for advocating for evidence-based health care when it comes to gender dysphoric children.
00:01:39.380
She's also the author of Communicating with kids, a book published in 2015, based on her background, training teachers and providing parental support.
00:01:49.060
Davies Arai is also notable for being an intervener in the high court during the landmark case Bell v. Tavistock, which concluded that persons under 18 cannot consent to puberty blockers.
00:02:02.880
So, Stephanie, I was reading your book today, 2015 book, Communicating with Children, and I thought maybe I could playfully put you on the spot.
00:02:13.520
In my first book, 12 Rules for Life, my first popular book, I have a chapter entitled, Don't Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them.
00:02:25.560
And so what I thought I'd ask you, given that you wrote this book detailing out different means of communicating with children, developing a philosophy of communication with children, I'm kind of wondering what you think of that rule.
00:02:40.120
How does that strike you? Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
00:02:44.460
I love that you started with that, because that's the bit in your book, which I've read, that jumped out at me, because that's what I say to parents.
00:02:55.600
You know, of course, you love your children to bits you'd die for them, but do you like them?
00:03:00.880
Because that's really important in day-to-day living.
00:03:04.100
But the other thing I say is that it's not only important that you like your own kids,
00:03:08.160
but that other parents do, and other people outside, because otherwise your kids are going to have a really hard time,
00:03:16.480
and you're not going to be doing them a favour if you bring them up to be unpopular with other kids' parents,
00:03:27.820
Okay, so let me outline a few ideas for you, and you tell me,
00:03:35.480
So, I think we know there's a large literature indicating that it's better for children to have two parents.
00:03:44.000
And I think the reason for that, this is my reasoning for it, there's a variety of reasons.
00:03:48.860
Obviously, raising children and working is very difficult,
00:03:51.980
so being able to split the labour is a way of perhaps not being entirely exhausted when you have small children.
00:03:58.740
But I think there's something else going on, too,
00:04:01.120
which is more, it's akin in some sense to the reason that there's sexual differentiation at a biological level.
00:04:09.100
So, there's sexual differentiation because it's useful to bring together two disparate creatures to produce a new variant.
00:04:17.480
But I also think it's true on the personality front.
00:04:23.020
you know, you're going to have your bits of insanity and your partner's going to have their bits of insanity.
00:04:32.220
then I believe you can produce something approximating one sane person.
00:04:38.800
And that person is sane, that joint person is sane,
00:04:42.780
not so much because they're sane psychologically,
00:04:45.600
but because they're an analogue of the broader social world.
00:04:54.440
if your children are acting in a way that both of you find displeasing,
00:05:01.140
then the probability that other people will find that displeasing is extremely high,
00:05:13.680
And so, if you accept the additional hypothesis that the primary role of a parent
00:05:21.100
is to prepare their children for, what would you say,
00:05:25.840
welcome acceptance into the broader social world,
00:05:29.440
then you have a moral obligation to guide your children,
00:05:32.200
in some sense, in accordance with your own joint feelings.
00:05:35.340
If the two of you find your child's behaviour unacceptable,
00:05:40.180
you're morally obligated to let the child know,
00:05:42.400
because that is not going to translate well to other children,
00:05:50.540
and then your child's going to have a miserable time of it.
00:05:52.820
And I think the research literature indicates that very clearly.
00:05:58.120
you're right in the sense that the children need the male and the female,
00:06:01.660
the masculine and the feminine, but that can be achieved in other ways.
00:06:07.560
So, my work is about creating the optimum situation for families,
00:06:20.840
So, I would agree, and particularly that children need strong role models
00:06:29.500
So, you know, if it's a single parent family, for example,
00:06:34.040
to find those role models that are close family members,
00:06:37.320
because, you know, all very good friends of the family,
00:06:45.640
but there are other adults who can fill that gap,
00:06:48.720
and that is something that I think is very important,
00:06:51.960
that that gap is filled if the family isn't that male-female unit
00:07:09.620
and the child gets the benefit of their joint personality, right?
00:07:13.860
The fact that they've got two people to hit against,
00:07:21.460
and the socialization rules for being masculine aren't identical.
00:07:25.360
And so that's part of the reason why it's necessary
00:07:42.840
so they can actually stand multiple caregivers,
00:07:45.140
but they don't really like a lot of change in their caregivers.
00:07:49.740
They don't like relationships once they're established
00:08:03.460
for someone who's running a single parent family
00:08:07.960
fill that diversity of personality to solve that problem,
00:08:10.680
but also to provide the contrasexual role model.
00:08:16.940
I mean, I think that consistency is really important for children
00:08:19.840
and it's fractured in so many ways now in society
00:08:55.520
to try and create that consistency for children
00:09:02.040
I think is one of the things that's very important.
01:00:35.620
and saying so this was what the situation was and
01:01:27.540
about that for a minute so let's say my wife says
01:01:51.680
emotional impulse is the appropriate marker for
01:01:56.420
reality because the alternatives would be well who
01:02:03.440
about it or on the bullying front let's say what
01:02:08.200
are you going to do about it independent of your
01:02:13.780
looking for a fight or challenged whatever I want
01:02:18.360
situation actively so it doesn't occur again and
01:02:22.040
then by walking through that let's say if you're
01:02:26.980
thinking over feeling and so then you might say
01:02:29.820
well what is thinking and the answer is thinking and
01:02:34.040
acting are what mature people replace feeling with so
01:02:39.100
the only time we need to feel something especially on
01:02:41.920
the negative emotion side is really when things don't
01:02:45.220
go the way we want them to go so you feel forget about
01:02:49.880
positive emotion for a minute you feel in consequence
01:02:54.180
inadequate adaptation that's like a rule and so to
01:02:59.800
privilege feeling means you're privileging inadequate
01:03:03.300
adaptation and you're also saying well your first impulsive
01:03:07.680
whim which is driven by these basic biological mechanisms
01:03:11.520
that are very id-like in the freudian sense they're not
01:03:14.240
sophisticated at all by making them paramount you raise
01:03:18.200
them to the point of the highest virtue the highest virtue is what
01:03:21.740
you feel and then it's even worse than that stephanie because this is so
01:03:26.520
awful it really is if you do careful linguistic analysis of
01:03:32.760
communicative content one of the things and emotions let's
01:03:37.120
say communicative content and emotion one of the things you find reliably is
01:03:42.660
all self-conscious thoughts load on neuroticism so there is literally no
01:03:51.300
difference between thinking about how you feel and being miserable they are
01:03:57.140
exactly the same thing so what you're doing with it's so interesting so sad right
01:04:01.600
but you can you can kind of understand this if you think about self-consciousness
01:04:05.460
so imagine you're on stage and you're delivering a talk and all of a sudden you get
01:04:09.820
self-conscious well you think self-consciousness is a good thing it's
01:04:13.720
like no it's not you sweat you blush you stutter you forget what you're doing
01:04:19.700
you collapse into yourself you get self-centered you don't pay attention to
01:04:23.680
the audience you're no longer able to communicate and it can be a real
01:04:27.000
catastrophe like people can get so self-conscious on stage that they develop
01:04:31.180
a phobia of public speaking and that's all pathology of self-consciousness and
01:04:36.840
so now what we do with our children at every bloody turn and they do this in
01:04:40.820
school all the time well how are you feeling how are you feeling how are you
01:04:43.500
feeling how are you feeling and the other implication there and you talk a lot
01:04:48.740
about nonverbal behavior in your in your book and how we communicate with
01:04:52.620
children we're also telling our children all the time that if you feel bad
01:04:59.420
anxiety let's say or some emotional pain that's so awful that that's all sensible
01:05:07.260
and caring adults should ever care about and so what kind of message is that for
01:05:12.900
children it's like oh my god you know you were upset at school what a cataclysm that
01:05:16.680
is we we should probably restructure the entire social apparatus so that never even
01:05:21.860
happens once it's so it's it's multi-dimensionally preposterous and it's
01:05:27.960
really hurting kids to make them self-conscious like that so i love what you
01:05:32.440
say about self-consciousness and causing depression and and i mean it's you can
01:05:38.720
see it so clearly in this idea that children or adolescents in particular now
01:05:44.400
have this new um a childhood task of exploring their gender identity because
01:05:51.020
what does that mean other than they must look at their every behavior the way they
01:05:57.200
like to dress everything that there was a book i read um which is about it's a
01:06:02.520
workbook for teenagers on exploring your gender identity and basically you're
01:06:07.560
looking at every aspect of your personality everything about you and
01:06:11.320
relating it to gender does that make me a girl or does that make me a boy and it's
01:06:14.520
of course it's inevitably based on stereotypes it can't be anything else
01:06:18.440
because because boys can't experience female things like menstruation and girls
01:06:25.100
can't experience male things like erections let's say you know it's got to be
01:06:30.680
stereotypes there's nothing else and you know one of these books that i read because
01:06:34.940
teenagers now that there's a plethora of books including workbooks to help you along
01:06:41.800
your gender journey it's sometimes called a quest uh it's this sort of adventure and and and it was
01:06:49.500
talking about bends in a river but each time you get to a bend in the river you stop and you think
01:06:54.300
and about your gender identity well gender identity is a is it's a meaningless concept anyway it's it's it's
01:07:01.760
not you know scientifically supported that we have this thing but it's it's a way to to get teenagers
01:07:10.460
to constantly be looking at themselves looking at their um motivations and analyzing their actions
01:07:18.280
which i think it's worse it's worse than that it will inevitably create mental health issues
01:07:24.660
inevitably yeah well look look look here's here's what it's analogous to okay so imagine that
01:07:31.640
there are twists and turns in the in the bends of the river of your marriage
01:07:36.800
and there are constant micro challenges and disputes that emerge in the course of the marriage
01:07:44.980
okay here's the new rule okay every time you encounter any doubt whatsoever in your life
01:07:55.900
right okay so here's what happens to a depressed person
01:08:01.760
so let's say you have a little bit of a dispute with your husband and uh it produces a little
01:08:10.360
negative emotion and you think oh my god i'm always i caused some trouble that's the first thought i
01:08:18.180
caused some trouble here's the next thought i've caused a lot of trouble in the past next thought i
01:08:24.660
caused a lot of trouble in the present and i'm likely to continue to cause a lot of trouble in the future
01:08:29.220
okay a person who causes a lot of trouble in the past present and future
01:08:34.160
they're really not a very good person they're not really fit for a marriage they're probably not
01:08:39.900
fit to live i should commit suicide okay so that's how a depressive person thinks now think about how that
01:08:48.440
works so you go from a micro challenge you have a little scrap with your with your wife and then you
01:08:55.220
take yourself apart right down to the foundation and the foundation in that case would be do you
01:09:00.940
even have the right to exist and so a depressive person has no defense against that cascade of doubt
01:09:08.840
okay so now imagine this is what we're doing to children we know that children establish the
01:09:15.420
ability to distinguish between male and female extremely early they can do that as infants they can
01:09:23.220
likely do it as newborns so that ability to distinguish between male and female is fundamental
01:09:29.200
the reason it's fundamental obviously is because if you can't distinguish between male and female
01:09:35.160
you're not going to reproduce so now we know not only is that true biologically but also conceptually
01:09:43.200
it seems the case that the distinction between masculine and feminine symbolically
01:09:47.600
is a distinction that's at the bottom of our ability to perceive as such we tend to make
01:09:54.420
gendered categories in the world almost automatically so there might be no more fundamental perceptual
01:10:01.840
category than sexual differentiation it might be more fundamental than up or down or darker light
01:10:09.160
it's at least in the same domain so this is now what we're doing to teenagers when they're confused
01:10:15.220
we're saying every time you manifest even a shred of doubt about anything the first thing you should
01:10:23.520
do is question the most fundamental element of your being and you should do that continually and then
01:10:31.000
it's even worse than that even though that's really bad because we're dooming them to something
01:10:35.320
like anxious depression by doing that it's even worse than that because well let's say i've been
01:10:41.480
reading about this uh like demi i think it's demi boy identity it's sort of well mostly mostly you're a
01:10:51.380
boy but sometimes you feel that you're a girl it's something like that or maybe i have it backwards i
01:10:56.320
don't really give a damn to tell you the truth but here's the problem with that it's like
01:11:00.340
let's say you have a non-standard gender identity okay what the hell are other people supposed to do
01:11:08.820
about that like what are the rules here right because if you're a woman i kind of know how to
01:11:14.260
treat you i'm going to do it in a stereotyped way to begin with because i don't know who the hell you
01:11:18.600
are so i'm going to use you know low resolution approximations and those are going to be stereotypes
01:11:24.360
they're no different than categories and then when i get to know you i'll particularize it but if i
01:11:29.380
don't know whether you're male or female what the hell should i do with you you don't know because
01:11:35.420
you don't know what the rules are and so the simplest thing for me to do is just not do anything
01:11:40.300
with you the simplest thing for me to do is go find someone else who's a hell of a lot less trouble
01:11:44.880
and who's willing to abide by the social norms enough so that they don't present a mass of
01:11:51.560
indeterminate confusion on immediate confrontation and then you know the riposte from the transgender
01:11:57.480
side is well if you were a little more tolerant you'd know how to give me what i want it's like
01:12:01.840
i don't have a bloody clue how to give you what i want what you want i have no idea i don't know how
01:12:07.780
to give me what i want i can barely manage it with manage it with my wife i certainly have no idea
01:12:13.100
what to give a bald man with a mustache in a red dress i have no idea what to do with you and neither
01:12:20.260
do you no one knows the rules so we tell kids question your identity specify your non-binary
01:12:28.660
reorientation but then what like what's the life path associated with that how are you going to
01:12:35.300
conduct yourself as an adult as someone who's non-binary are you going to get married how are
01:12:42.060
people going to treat you at work what are you going to do with your kids how are you going to
01:12:46.120
dress you don't know the answer to any of those and neither does anyone else those aren't identities
01:12:51.300
they're not identities they're they're masses of ideological confusion and that's all an identity
01:12:59.800
tells you tells you and other people how to perceive and how to conduct yourself
01:13:05.320
and man and woman boy girl male female are stable categories their reality and to teach children any
01:13:15.300
different to that is to t is to lie to children and to lie to teenagers and it's the most distressing
01:13:22.920
thing for me to observe this going on that it's done in the name of kindness it's done in the name
01:13:31.120
of compassion it's seen as the only legitimate way uh to help these kids and it's so cruel i mean as
01:13:39.800
i think you pointed out before you're you're what you're doing is you're affirming uh particularly
01:13:45.420
a teenage girl's self-hatred and self-rejection and absolute hatred and disgust about being female
01:13:52.060
you're affirming that and you're saying yep you're right to feel that way you know it's um
01:13:58.160
you know reject let's kill off that person and let's replace that that defective woman
01:14:05.460
or girl with a boy and we agree with you the boy is so much better this is who you really are
01:14:12.880
so the lie there is like being a girl or a boy isn't who you are it's what you are it's just fact
01:14:19.240
you know who you are is your personality is your you know personality traits what you do whatever
01:14:25.600
being a boy or girl isn't who you are but what it how it's sold to children and it's sold to
01:14:31.220
children at the earliest ages i've counted as about 40 picture books for primary years now
01:14:36.500
is that it uses the messages that are given to children now so be who you are be yourself um
01:14:44.300
and the other you know when when to a child you know who hasn't developed a self yet and it's not
01:14:52.620
you know it's a lifetime's job in my experience but then also the other really strong messages
01:14:59.400
you know who you are and nobody else has the right to question you now this is indoctrination
01:15:05.540
from the early years onwards so age three as soon as children start kindergarten these books
01:15:11.340
exist so what you're doing is you're taking away from that child or this generation of children
01:15:18.920
the stability of reality and the the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality at the
01:15:26.920
most fundamental level of who they are and we the the way in this sense that we're treat we're we're
01:15:35.060
we're now the children and they're the adults is is is part of this message that parents are given your
01:15:40.020
your child is born whole with a with a fully deformed i mean fully formed sense of self and so
01:15:47.340
yeah my four-year-old boy he knows oh she knows who she is you know it's not up to us to question that
01:15:55.480
our child our child's wisdom um and you know the child is dependent on us as parents our job and we
01:16:06.440
don't even see this as a job it's just automatic a child will say look mommy there's a dog and we'll
01:16:11.440
say yes it's a dog and we we can't or that's a dog no darling actually it's a cat we will constantly
01:16:18.680
constantly reinforce our growing child's sense of what's real and what's not and we correct them if
01:16:25.220
they make mistakes and we don't see that as a job it's just sort of automatically what we do with
01:16:30.280
kids but that's what we're doing and in but in this case alone we're saying no that's you know you
01:16:37.800
you you are literally a girl and we're approaching it as adults who are thinking i am affirming his
01:16:46.260
gender identity not to the child you're not you're telling that boy he's literally a girl
01:16:51.700
so for him he doesn't maybe understand biological sex yet but for him he's biologically female
01:16:58.260
on the child's level of understanding a trusted adult is telling him he's he's a girl so he's a girl
01:17:06.220
right and providing a reason for his confusion yes and also that's the terrible thing yeah also the fact
01:17:12.440
that he has faced disapproval you know typically from the parents from one or other or both parents and
01:17:19.360
perhaps from a wider circle for the toy choices he's making and and his friendships and so as soon
01:17:26.540
as you say to him he's a girl and we get these sort of short-term honeymoon kind of results of you know
01:17:33.920
increase always suddenly he's really happy well of course he is because now all his toy choices are
01:17:39.940
approved of by the adults and of course what he wants to do is win the approval of his parents that's
01:17:45.600
what he needs to do for his survival so you've got you've got this terrible lie being told to children
01:17:52.240
and you you you know and and i and i think exactly the same with teenagers yes they're developmentally
01:17:59.420
later on but it's exactly the same lie and it it had it it it addresses true teenagers specific
01:18:09.200
vulnerabilities of identities of identity formation so there's no difference between being self-conscious
01:18:16.140
and being miserable technically but here's something else self-consciousness among females
01:18:23.300
is much more associated with body dysmorphia now the reason there's a bunch of reasons for that
01:18:30.860
we don't know all of them but here's a couple first of all at puberty women start to experience
01:18:37.360
more negative emotion on average than men and that it's not true of boys and girls but it does seem
01:18:43.000
to it does seem to kick in at puberty and that's likely because you get size dimorphism developing and
01:18:49.680
so it's reasonable for women to be a little bit more timid about the physical environment than men
01:18:54.960
but also women are more sexually vulnerable and also they have to care for infants so being threat
01:19:01.680
sensitive makes sense okay in any case those are three possible reasons but it definitely kicks
01:19:07.400
in at puberty now it also is the case that anxiety among women tends to take the form of bodily
01:19:15.520
self-consciousness and i think the reason for that likely this is a speculation although the other
01:19:21.660
the mere observation is a fact it's likely because girls and women are judged more comprehensively on
01:19:29.780
their physical appearance than men so it makes sense that if they're going to be self-conscious
01:19:34.360
it's going to be more bodily focused and then that's particularly rough then the third contributing
01:19:39.480
factor is girls hit puberty earlier than boys so so now what you have a perfect storm there so now you
01:19:46.520
have a girl and she's feeling a lot more anxious and confused than she did before because she hit
01:19:52.240
puberty plus her body is doing 50 weird things plus she's getting all sorts of strange attention from
01:19:57.500
adults that she never got before plus she doesn't know how to fit in on the social front and she's
01:20:02.460
trying to make that transition from childhood to adulthood and so and then
01:20:07.320
you have people additionally torturing about the fact that any deviation from the norm on the
01:20:16.180
stereotypical front is actually an indication that she doesn't exist in the correct body well she
01:20:22.660
doesn't really feel like she's in the correct body to begin with so it's a perfect storm for
01:20:27.700
young girls now when canada came out with its compelled pronoun law 2016 i talked to the canadian
01:20:35.420
senate i said you idiots and your legislation you think you're going to free up kids you're going to
01:20:42.100
produce a psychogenic epidemic among young women because they're preferentially susceptible to
01:20:48.280
psychogenic epidemics which is why we had a bulimia epidemic and an anorexia epidemic all of which was
01:20:54.260
spread by social media and a cutting epidemic and then there's a history of such epidemics going back
01:21:00.760
300 years i mean freudian hysteria which was very widespread in the victorian times although disappeared
01:21:07.720
afterwards or mutated was also a psychogenic epidemic that preferentially affected young women
01:21:13.320
and so well i just wanted to lay out some of the reasons why that's the case higher levels of
01:21:18.320
negative emotion and more bodily focused self-consciousness and so then you add to that a
01:21:23.640
kind of unpopularity because maybe a given girl isn't that sophisticated at manifesting what would you
01:21:31.440
call it socially acceptable feminine traits it takes a fair bit of sophistication to be a well put
01:21:37.120
together woman and you're going to be pretty damn awkward at that if you're kind of a clunky tomboy
01:21:41.460
when you're 12 and so well now you're providing them with first of all a unidimensional reason why
01:21:47.640
they're miserable is pretty damn convenient and no wonder an adolescent wants that it's like do i have
01:21:54.240
50 problems or do i have one right and then you also entice them with the additional social status that
01:22:02.180
they're going to receive by now announcing that they're special and having every bloody teacher in
01:22:07.740
the entire world plus the world at large focus on that narcissistic grandiosity that goes along with
01:22:15.760
the insistence of a special identity and the only price you have to pay is psychos the only price
01:22:22.060
you have to pay is like enforced sterilization and surgical mutilation fine deal for our teenagers
01:22:29.260
i think there are another couple of things about teenage girls that we don't um pay as much attention to but
01:22:37.440
the very fact of physical development in teenage girls means your body is sort of ballooning you know
01:22:44.760
breasts here hips here bottom there um and you lose that sort of gender neutral um body that gave you so much
01:22:54.880
freedom in childhood and so what you how girls experience puberty is moving from being a free
01:23:02.460
kind of person into being an object because suddenly her body is public property and as you say it's
01:23:09.580
commented on everyone has a right to comment on it um she may you know she'll get comments in the
01:23:15.100
street she'll get she'll look all around her and become aware of the um objectification of women
01:23:21.740
throughout society now i think this is happening to boys much more over the past decade in in kind of
01:23:29.880
certainly objectification of the male body and in some cases kind of sexual objectification of men
01:23:36.840
um and this generation are used to seeing those really um exaggerated images of femininity so the
01:23:46.160
feminine the female heroes have huge breasts and tiny waists and big hips kim kardashian yeah and the
01:23:53.620
and the male heroes and you see have a ripped with a six-pack and they're hulks so you get that in gaming
01:24:01.040
you get it in you know it's sort of programs like love island which i don't know whether you have in
01:24:06.500
canada um it's all about how you look so it's happening more for men and and interestingly
01:24:13.780
boys experiences of things like um anorexia have increased but not as much as girls so girls are
01:24:21.360
in a real i i you know the gap is still widening well there's the also there's also the emphasis
01:24:27.940
that that that pressure also comes on women younger not only do they hit puberty younger but
01:24:34.840
also you know on average cross-culturally women prefer men who are four years older
01:24:40.900
and what that also means is that men prefer women who are four years younger and what although most
01:24:47.340
of that's driven by female choice by the way but not all of it but it also means that women come
01:24:52.580
under sexual pressure in some sense earlier than boys do partly because of earlier onset of puberty
01:24:58.660
but also because there's a tighter relationship between biological fecundity and youth in women than
01:25:05.080
there is in men and so that piles on the additional pressure for for young women so there's an
01:25:10.560
overvaluation of female sexuality in some real sense that kicks in around the age of 13 and the
01:25:17.020
advantage to that i suppose is all the attractiveness of youth and beauty but the disadvantage is well
01:25:23.440
there's a hell of a lot of competition and judgment that goes along with that particular contest and
01:25:28.680
certainly that does pile on a 12 year old girl well with overwhelming force especially when you also
01:25:35.700
add to that the fact that women are much more vulnerable on the sexual front in some real sense
01:25:40.220
because they pay a much bigger price for well for sexual misbehavior let's say than men do
01:25:45.920
given the risk of pregnancy that's a good definition of what is a woman by the way a woman is the human
01:25:52.520
being that bears disproportionate responsibility for reproduction it's a good biological definition
01:25:58.500
and you're stuck with that right you encounter that face first when you hit puberty as a woman
01:26:04.840
and it's the constant i i think dilemma for women individual women and for feminism how to put those two
01:26:13.300
things together because you're right we have the biological responsibility that many that men don't have
01:26:20.940
and along with that i think the disgust with the female body is quite is pretty much tied into that
01:26:26.940
because it kind of makes you an animal um and and you're reduced to your biology and so girls at
01:26:34.120
puberty apart from not being developmentally ready to face all of this you know sexual harassment i mean
01:26:42.580
it's in schools now there's there's an epidemic of sexual harassment in schools and not that girls should
01:26:51.420
ever be ready to face that but you know they're they're so young and they can develop breasts at
01:26:56.520
primary school age 11 and suddenly they are supposed to be a woman when they're still emotionally a child
01:27:03.660
and how how hard that is but also going back to the absolute female facts of menstruation how disgusting
01:27:11.780
is that you know that that's the real um issue here of of of developing um sexually as female you bleed
01:27:22.540
i mean it's disgusting it is horrendous for for girls you know not not all girls you know but it it's one
01:27:32.060
of the things i think that happens that puberty minimum it's a challenge it's a challenge and it can be
01:27:38.140
really embarrassing and humiliating it can create anxiety and worry it can create you know pain and
01:27:45.640
and feelings of real discomfort and and all the associated physical effects that go with it which
01:27:51.840
boys don't experience so boys will get taller and broader and it's kind of everything that they were
01:27:58.140
were before just sort of gets bigger but more but more yeah exactly whereas with girls
01:28:04.320
you change it suddenly oh i'm swelling out here and i'm swelling out here and my body's out of
01:28:10.140
control and if you've got an image of yourself as being intelligent maybe even intellectual bit
01:28:17.880
different all of those you know it can be so humiliating to feel actually no i'm just an animal i'm just
01:28:24.900
a piece of meat my body will go on doing this and i have no control over that at all that can be really
01:28:30.680
frightening and it can be so all all of this you know what is awful now is that we don't look at
01:28:37.680
girls even though there's this massive you know 75 teenage girls going being referred to gender
01:28:43.700
clinics we don't look at them as teenage girls because of course that's transphobic
01:28:47.760
and this this um lack of uh differentiation between male and female means that they're all lumped
01:28:55.780
together as trans kids and all of the issues are seen as the same and we know in medicine
01:29:00.300
that the female body and women are not you know looked at properly anyway but this has really
01:29:06.600
exacerbated that problem that we're not looking at gender dysphoria in girls even to say that girls is
01:29:13.860
transphobic but we're not looking at it within a framework of female adolescent health and all of the
01:29:21.480
other issues that helps us move into a domain that maybe we can cover just as we bring this to a close
01:29:27.960
you've written a fair bit too about what what i would characterize i don't want to put words in your
01:29:34.920
mouth as the absolutely pathological stampede of idiot medical and psychological professional
01:29:42.280
organizations to insist upon gender affirming therapy so as a therapist i'd like to point something out
01:29:49.200
which is the last thing i'm ever going to do for any of my clients to come when they come and see
01:29:56.340
me is affirm their identity that is not my job my job is to listen to my client and help them
01:30:07.840
understand their current identity and develop it in the direction that appears most appropriate as a
01:30:15.120
consequence of the course of our discussions so i presume people come to see me because they're
01:30:21.380
miserable for one reason or another i don't know why they're miserable it might be terrible
01:30:25.240
circumstances it might be something they brought upon themselves it might be some combination of both
01:30:29.800
but i certainly don't presume to know and that's in some real sense a disturbance in identity
01:30:35.780
and then what the therapeutic realm is is a place to explore the vagaries of identity now i'm not
01:30:42.280
there to affirm my client's identity nor to deny it right i'm supposed to be there as a neutral
01:30:49.740
ignorant listener it's like you're complicated i don't know who the hell you are what's wrong with
01:30:55.340
you we're going to lay out a space of honest communication and try to develop a differentiated
01:31:03.020
model of your identity and then try to optimize it now then you get this insistence now that the
01:31:08.740
professional colleges have brought in which is no matter what your client tells you when they you
01:31:15.200
first encounter them you have to agree with that or you're unprofessional to the point where your
01:31:23.180
license can be reasonably not only reasonably suspended but should be ethically suspended and i look at that
01:31:29.900
and i think oh well the whole therapeutic and most of the medical establishment is just done if i have
01:31:35.840
an anorexic girl come in to me and say i had an anorexic client once very thin girl as you might
01:31:43.400
expect she wasn't very big and uh i had her sit by me at one point i said you look at your thighs and
01:31:49.420
now you look at mine and you tell me which one's bigger she said that hers was and i said okay fair
01:31:55.440
enough so this is what we're going to do i'm going to put a piece of paper under your thigh and i'm going to
01:32:00.160
have you trace it and then i'm going to put it under my thigh and i'm going to do the same thing and i
01:32:06.020
want you to watch so you see i'm not playing any tricks okay so we did that of course my thighs were
01:32:13.300
about that much bigger on both sides than hers and i swear she looked at that piece of paper for 20
01:32:18.220
minutes now she trusted me by this point hey so she knew already that i wasn't playing tricks but
01:32:24.020
she still couldn't believe her eyes and i think the reason for that is that i don't think that
01:32:29.160
anorexic women can see their body's property they lose the ability to see the gestalt and they focus
01:32:35.160
on a detail and then they can't distinguish between what's fatty and what's bone let's say
01:32:40.300
literally they can't see it and so but i wouldn't if an anorexic girl came into my office and said
01:32:46.880
you know i feel that my thighs are too fat i wouldn't say well if you feel that you must be right and it
01:32:55.000
would be inappropriate unethical of me to suggest otherwise i would say well maybe you want to
01:33:01.400
explore that maybe you don't i don't know if you have any doubts about it i don't know if this concern
01:33:06.720
is causing you trouble i don't know if other people are reacting badly to your insistence that
01:33:12.260
you're too fat still those are things we could discuss i can't say no however you feel is right
01:33:19.200
and certainly on the sexual identity front or the gender identity front exactly the same standards
01:33:27.160
apply so those are even more fundamental categories than thin or fat so i just think it's the death of
01:33:32.680
the therapeutic enterprise altogether so and an unbelievable cowardice and lies on the part of
01:33:39.140
professional organizations and it's presented as conversion therapy to do anything other than
01:33:44.860
affirm a child self-diagnosis and self um prescription of treatment um and again it ties
01:33:53.640
into what's what's happening in parenting whereas i think it's a good thing that we listen to children
01:33:58.940
more now because children weren't you know when i was growing up children really weren't listened to
01:34:04.120
at all um and that's good but listening to a child seems to be interpreted as agreeing with the child on
01:34:12.020
everything so if you know a therapist's job is to listen there's a lot of listening in in you know
01:34:18.900
counseling or therapy but it doesn't mean agreeing and we you know so we give up our knowledge our
01:34:28.200
perspective um our knowledge of facts in order to placate or appease or in somehow uh in a misguided
01:34:39.680
way thinking that we're building the the self-esteem of the other person but we don't you know that's
01:34:45.760
never helpful certainly you know long term that's not a helpful thing to do we could also point out
01:34:52.660
and should that all therapy is conversion therapy right the whole bloody point of the therapeutic
01:35:00.160
process is transformation now you could say well you shouldn't convert the client into a clone of the
01:35:07.840
therapist's presuppositions and that's definitely true what you want to do you know when i saw my
01:35:14.980
clients the first thing i would try to find out is okay what why are you suffering what how and why are
01:35:21.660
you suffering and that's really complicated that could take hundreds of hours to figure out because
01:35:26.060
maybe it's a psychological quirk or maybe it's a catastrophe of situation and god only knows how to
01:35:32.160
differentiate those so you have to listen a bunch so the first is well
01:35:36.080
how are you suffering and why and then the next is well if you had your way and you could envision
01:35:44.860
things being better well what would better mean for you and how would you envision that practically
01:35:52.760
and so that's on the client right you don't want to interfere with that because like you can you can
01:35:58.760
offer your opinion you can say how you've seen other people solve that problem but you don't want to
01:36:02.900
muck about with that too much because each person has to come up with a somewhat particularized
01:36:08.780
solution to that problem i don't know what your life would be like if you optimized it for you
01:36:14.940
you know in your particular situation so we have talk about that a lot and then the third thing we do is
01:36:20.060
talk about strategy you know now we kind of know what the problem is we have some sense of what
01:36:25.180
might hypothetically be a solution we could delineate out potential strategies for achieving
01:36:30.720
it but all that's predicated on discussion and none of that has anything to do with affirmation
01:36:36.320
except i guess what you affirm as a therapist is you affirm the utility of honest communication
01:36:42.860
and you affirm the idea that through honest communication and inquiry positive conversion is
01:36:50.600
possible right conversion towards some more ideal state of being very difficult thing to manage but
01:36:57.020
you certainly don't do that by privileging your client's feelings above all else and then by being
01:37:05.680
terrified into silence with regards to the responses you might have to an inquiry so it's really it's really
01:37:15.580
something to behold you know and you talk about the role of compassion in that hypothetical compassion you
01:37:20.480
know one of the things i see continually poor parents say the people the claim is being made
01:37:26.600
constantly that unless you give way to your child's desire to transition they're they're going to commit
01:37:34.320
suicide and would you rather have a trans child or a dead child that's a question that's often asked
01:37:40.020
to parents okay so i want to take that apart for a minute number one even the bloody american psychological
01:37:45.820
association which has become a very pathological organization admits in their in their documents of
01:37:53.620
affirming care and they do this by pointing to prejudice there are no good long-term follow-up studies
01:37:59.840
on the life course history of trans individuals and then they say well that's because of prejudice
01:38:04.560
against trans individuals and be that as it may i don't care about that at the moment there are no
01:38:11.000
long-term studies so how the hell do you know that you're elevating or decreasing the suicide risk
01:38:17.600
and the answer is you don't know and that's a lie and second we know perfectly well that most of the kids
01:38:25.480
most people who have who manifest any form of psychopathology have a core set of symptoms
01:38:32.940
and those symptoms are basically elevated negative emotion anxiety and pain so anxiety and depression
01:38:40.440
you don't have a mental illness except for maybe mania where anxiety and pain aren't part of it
01:38:48.660
okay so then the question is if there is a risk for suicide associated with gender dysphoria
01:38:53.880
is it specific to the gender dysphoria or is it merely a consequence of the fact that all forms
01:39:01.580
of psychopathology are associated with anxiety and depression and suicidality is associated with
01:39:07.660
anxiety and depression and the answer is unless you have compelling evidence that it's specific
01:39:14.020
to gender dysphoria then the appropriate thing to do scientifically is to assume that it's a
01:39:19.280
consequence of anxiety and depression and quit riding vulnerable parents with guilt so well so for
01:39:28.220
those of you who are watching and listening and struggling with these sorts of things don't let idiot
01:39:32.340
teachers and counselors tell you that by objecting to your child's gender dysphoria you're elevating
01:39:37.960
the risk of suicide because that is a lie there is no evidence to support it but the claim made is that
01:39:45.540
your child is more likely to commit suicide if they are not affirmed and and allowed to go on to
01:39:52.820
puberty blockers that's the claim there's there's no evidence to support that at all um parents can be
01:40:00.440
supportive in lots of different ways but parents are being bullied in the cruelest way imaginable
01:40:07.700
to affirm their child and go on to this medical pathway so this you know and the kind of contain you
01:40:15.900
the thing is now that not only parents but all young people know that part of the persona part of the
01:40:22.700
rules of the tribe of being transgender are having suicidal ideation you know that's part of make what
01:40:30.160
makes you true trans so it's the most irresponsible i i cannot understand why the samaritans hasn't spoken
01:40:39.240
out about it why you know government ministers have not spoken out about it we know about the
01:40:46.460
um contagious possibilities of this of suicide we know the dangers of saying suicide is down to one
01:40:53.660
factor we we know that and yet we let this carry on in this area and this is where you know this is the
01:41:01.760
these are the kind people yeah well this is okay so let's close up with this so i've been
01:41:08.860
thinking recently that our conceptualizations of narcissism are too one-sided i think we concentrate
01:41:17.320
on grandiose narcissism sort of more masculine form of narcissism more than we concentrate on the more
01:41:25.280
feminine form of narcissism and i think the female the feminine narcissism is something like narcissism
01:41:32.040
of compassion and that's associated with this idea the freudian idea of the oedipal mother who
01:41:38.220
what would you say fosters a sense of hyper dependence the helicopter parent now males can
01:41:43.980
do that too but but um it's more likely to occur on the female side because females are more agreeable
01:41:50.680
and they are more compassionate so the reason that we're i think part of the reason that no one is
01:41:56.940
speaking out against that while you are and i have and there's a few people who are but
01:42:01.640
but the reason that you get slaughtered so badly if you do is because the narcissists of compassion
01:42:11.620
come after you and they say well it isn't like you care for children you're just mean we care for them
01:42:18.140
so much that we'll listen to them no matter what we say and then the underground message there isn't
01:42:23.540
we're doing best for children the underground message is look how much we care don't we deserve to
01:42:30.660
have our social status elevated merely on that grounds and maybe right to the highest possible
01:42:36.200
point we're so compassionate that we're mother mary herself right it's nothing but the mother of god's
01:42:41.860
voice talking here and so anybody who is who is antithetical to that broad scale and all-encompassing
01:42:48.740
compassion is instantly what deemed an agent of satan for all intents and purposes and but it's so
01:42:55.520
absolutely i saw this woman so she was a disney executive and she was testifying if i remember
01:43:03.120
correctly when florida was clamping down on disney and she said she was the head of their domestic
01:43:08.600
programming something like that she said well i have a trans child and a pansexual child and one's five
01:43:16.140
and one's seven and i thought okay let's just think about that statistically for like one-tenth of a
01:43:21.380
second the probability that you have a trans child is one in three thousand before the gender dysphoria
01:43:27.700
epidemic hit one in three thousand okay what's the chance that you have a pansexual child now i have no
01:43:33.860
idea what the hell pansexual means but i know that whatever it is it's rarer than transsexual so at
01:43:40.460
minimum you have a one in three thousand chance that you have a pansexual child so what's the probability
01:43:45.860
that you have a pansexual and a transsexual child and the answer is one in nine million
01:43:53.340
so here's the question are you a pathological narcissist of compassion well what are the odds
01:44:00.640
899,999 no no it's 8,999,999 to one that's the statistical that's the appropriate statistical
01:44:15.300
analysis for that claim so no i don't think you have a trans child and a pansexual child
01:44:20.160
i think you are a devouring narcissist and you are willing to sacrifice your own children
01:44:26.140
to your narcissistic pretension to evaluate your to to what elevate yourself in the social hierarchy
01:44:34.260
with no work merely by claiming that you're that loving that's you god it's so awful it's it's
01:44:42.620
almost indescribable and i think that's partly that there is enormous pressures on mothers to be
01:44:49.260
kind and nice and to be um ever nurturing ever compassionate ever kind and the other that is the
01:44:56.940
archetypal mother the nurturer the protector but the other side of that is is is um pushing away
01:45:04.220
um rejecting um it's you can say it's the shadow side but you know as jung said if you don't integrate
01:45:10.960
the shadow side the shadow side it'll come up and bite you and actually if you know you look at other
01:45:15.540
mammals they bite their young if they're trying to cat you know get hold of the teat and drink milk
01:45:21.740
with you know and they're and then and the mother's annoyed and irritated and pushes them away or even
01:45:26.880
bites them and we have to integrate that because it's all and and and make allowances that in
01:45:34.860
ourselves that part of our job is is nurturing and holding close but it's also pushing away or allowing
01:45:43.140
the child to move away and sometimes that needs a little push and that is fine right well well
01:45:48.920
the psychoanalyst said very wisely i think this was freud but it might have been young he said the
01:45:54.220
good mother necessarily fails right so what you have and this is very hard on women and i understand
01:46:00.460
this i really do i watched my wife go through it my wife is actually quite a disagreeable woman so she
01:46:05.220
had less trouble with this than a more compassionate woman would have had this is not a criticism of my
01:46:11.100
wife by the way so when a child's an infant so zero to six months you should be a hundred percent
01:46:18.260
compassionate because the child is immobile and completely helpless and the rule there is whatever
01:46:24.340
whatever you feel is one hundred percent correct but then as the child starts to become mobile maybe that
01:46:30.960
kicks in you know essentially around nine months the mother has to do this terribly difficult thing of
01:46:37.080
starting to separate herself from the developing infant and there is actually there's a real sacrifice in
01:46:43.240
that and there there really is the i would say the integration of the shadow side in that now the
01:46:50.200
proper way to handle that the mature way to handle that is to think something like this if you're
01:46:56.220
female to think look i did my time i i sacrificed myself for this infant that was entirely appropriate
01:47:02.600
but i should have a life of my own i should pursue my own things i should pursue my relationship with my
01:47:08.380
husband i should pursue my activities in the broader world i should facilitate my child's independence
01:47:15.820
and i should model for that child independence and that means that the appropriate thing to do now is to
01:47:23.040
move away from that extraordinarily bonded mother infant scenario to something that's more
01:47:30.440
detached and focused on autonomy and competence rather than all compassionate love and that's you know
01:47:39.720
that the freudians and the jungians were very very good at delineating out the shadow side of the
01:47:44.740
devouring mother the best book on that i think is the great mother by eric neumann which is an
01:47:49.040
absolutely terrific book details out the symbolic representations of the devouring mother and the
01:47:54.640
devouring mother interestingly isn't the woman who pushes the baby away or the the infant away let's say
01:48:01.620
and says you know go out and play the devouring mother is the one that holds the child far too tightly
01:48:07.100
in her loving embrace and will never let go so right that's the shadow side of that hyper compassion
01:48:14.640
and we're seeing that you know that we might be seeing that partly i've never said this i don't
01:48:19.260
think but it's only been 50 years since women have really been a force in the political world
01:48:26.320
and we could assume that there's going to be a feminine psychopathology that goes along with that
01:48:32.020
just like there's a masculine psychopathology on the male political side and you know the male
01:48:37.180
psychopathology might be narcissistic aggression something like that but the female psychopathology
01:48:44.060
could easily be devouring compassion easily and i do think that's we're seeing that play out in
01:48:50.440
our culture now and god only knows what the consequence of that will be i think that's what
01:48:54.940
we're seeing in the gender identity movement um that as as women gain more power in academia in
01:49:02.300
politics um etc you've got a combination of the sort of narcissistic entitled male which comes from the
01:49:10.620
generally middle-aged cross-dressers that that you find in every organization and company and political
01:49:18.640
party these you know powerful men and on the other hand you get this over emotional illogical feeling
01:49:28.480
based kind of support and uh from the women because because this movement is supported so much by young
01:49:37.220
women and so you get you you get the worst of the feminine or the negative side of the feminine and
01:49:43.440
the and the negative side of the masculine coming together because i think conspiring yeah yeah the
01:49:49.320
marriage of the two i i i kind of naively thought wouldn't it be great if the world was run by equally
01:49:55.640
men and women because that would balance the the you know the yin and the yang and i don't believe that
01:50:01.980
a world run by women would be more superior than a world run by men but together but what if what if
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the negative side of men and the negative side of women come together and i think that's what we're
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seeing and on that note yeah on that happy note okay so for everyone watching and listening i'm going
01:50:22.640
to talk to stephanie and up for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform we're going to talk a
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little bit about how her interest in parenting and then her interest in the broader social um what
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would you call ramifications of attitudes towards parenting how all of that developed and i do that
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generally with my guests something more biographical hello everyone i would encourage you to continue
01:50:44.840
listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com