The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 342. Regrets of a Trans-Care Specialist

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody. I'm here talking today with Sarah Stockton.

00:01:12.640 Sarah is a therapist, and she was interviewed for Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman?

00:01:19.060 And she's been involved, well, in those sorts of issues for quite a long time.

00:01:25.960 I watched the documentary and was struck by her testimony, and she also reached out to me, wrote me a letter about how things had unfolded for her in her therapeutic practice over the last five, ten years.

00:01:38.840 And we've decided jointly that a further conversation might be useful publicly and also, well, useful to people who are family members of adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria,

00:01:55.860 but also useful for therapists who are torn ethically about how to proceed properly in this fraught, gender-affirming therapy environment.

00:02:11.000 And so thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

00:02:14.300 I'm sure that your decision to make your concerns public has been very hard on you.

00:02:21.300 So I have some real sympathy for that.

00:02:26.260 Why don't you start by telling everybody how it is that you came to be involved, well, in this entire quagmire,

00:02:35.880 but also why you decided to participate in the Matt Walsh documentary, which I'm also sure took a fair bit of soul-searching.

00:02:43.560 So why don't you lay out the story?

00:02:45.560 Yes, and I think we'll talk a little bit more about my experience, but I started in 2008.

00:02:51.300 Working in a special transgender team, and that's where I started my expertise and specialty in that.

00:03:01.680 I had participated and co-authored the transgender assessment that mental health professionals use to assess transgender youth readiness to begin hormone treatment or medical treatment.

00:03:17.040 I published that, and I had worked a great deal of my first part of my career traveling, teaching doctors, teaching schools how to change their practice to be more gender-affirming care.

00:03:33.580 That is a terminology that is more recent.

00:03:36.580 That was not what I was using back then.

00:03:39.200 Then I sort of came across in my practice a lot of concerns around this, being 15 years in and treating a lot of sexual issues.

00:03:52.320 I had some concerns with how it was developmentally being presented to our children.

00:03:57.500 And so I kind of just stopped doing that specialty, and I went on to just doing sex.

00:04:05.340 And then as life would have it, I have children who are in grade school and coming across these issues and children coming into my practice with questions that I can only understand that they would have because of this presentation being even allowed to be taught to them at such a young age.

00:04:28.340 And so what actually happened was a client sent me a clip of Matt Walsh on Dr. Phil.

00:04:34.940 I had never heard of Matt Walsh prior to that.

00:04:38.740 And I just happened to message Matt Walsh and told him, hey, I was a part of writing the assessment, and I have some concerns.

00:04:47.540 And he contacted me right away, and I had flown out within a week and did the documentary and spoke with him.

00:04:53.720 All right.

00:04:54.160 So we'll talk a little bit about how that's impacted your life.

00:04:57.860 Let's go back.

00:04:59.320 What's your educational background?

00:05:01.100 Like, how did you train as a therapist?

00:05:02.820 Yes.

00:05:03.100 So I have a bachelor's degree in psychology, and then I went to Syracuse University where I received my master's degree in marriage and family therapy.

00:05:14.040 Okay.

00:05:14.560 And then how did you get involved?

00:05:17.020 This was back in 2008.

00:05:18.700 You published a paper that was devoted towards assessment.

00:05:22.660 Was it specifically assessment of gender dysphoria?

00:05:25.820 What exactly was the paper, and how did you get involved in that particular issue?

00:05:30.600 Why did that attract your attention?

00:05:32.180 Okay.

00:05:32.520 It's a very good question.

00:05:33.620 So in my school, where we were going, we were the top place for actually developing the hormone assessment to start adults on hormone replacement therapy.

00:05:49.660 So the professors there were very much in charge of being the first ones to ever be giving these letters, making these letters.

00:06:02.440 So we were introduced to what you had an opportunity to get on what they would call a transgender team, and you would have to interview to be on this team.

00:06:12.880 And I will be honest with you, I'm a young 22-year-old, and my interest is in sex.

00:06:20.120 And that was obviously an introduction into a complex thing that people were dealing with.

00:06:28.920 So you would get onto this transgender team, and we would have special training about body dysphoria, gender dysphoria, what are the sexual implications.

00:06:39.920 And then we were required to see these patients at our clinic and get supervision weekly.

00:06:48.380 What at this time they were really recognizing was, would there be a better outcome for these individuals if there was early intervention medically?

00:07:00.400 Therefore, we, the responsibility of my group was to take the original assessment that was used for adults and turn it into a comprehensive assessment to evaluate child's readiness along with their family, because this was a systemic program, to see if they understood the implications of starting hormone blockers or hormone replacement surgery.

00:07:27.280 Okay, so let me see if I've got this straight.

00:07:30.880 So when you were about 22, you were pursuing your bachelor's degree, you had an interest in the broader domain of sexual behavior, and that was part of what was driving you towards a clinical path.

00:07:43.300 You started working with adults who were transsexual or transgender, and how old would have they been on average?

00:07:51.140 Oh, it was all ages, but I would say you're typically dealing with 30s, 40s, and 50s.

00:07:58.640 Okay, okay, so these are people in early middle age, let's say, and so they're being assessed for suitability for medical transition, which would begin with hormonal transformation.

00:08:11.820 And then the idea emerges, well, you know, they're 30 or 40 or 50, it's pretty late in life to begin such a transformation, would it have been better for them, let's say, had they discovered this route earlier?

00:08:26.820 And if it was better, what would better look like, and how might that be brought down the age chain so that it's made available for people who are very young?

00:08:41.040 Of course, then that raises the specter of how young, and also the problem of differential diagnosis.

00:08:47.440 Now, let's make a slight foray here into a different area.

00:08:52.720 So, from what I understand of the clinical literature with regards to gender identity dysphoria, there are two essential manifestations of what becomes something approximating transvetism or transsexual orientation.

00:09:12.660 And one of those is relatively late onset, and people like, what's his name, Zucker, Ken Zucker, his hypothesis was there are the autogynophilic late onset transsexual types who tend to be men, who tend to dress up in women's clothing, generally for essentially sexual purposes.

00:09:37.900 And they're dealing with issues, well, that are difficult to understand, but might have to do, if you're thinking about it from a psychoanalytic perspective, might have to do with the difficulty of integrating cross-sexual personality elements into their personality.

00:09:52.700 That takes a sexual route among the autogynophilic types, and they're a separate group from children who develop body dysmorphia or gender identity trouble very early, and they tend to be, let's say, feminine boys, feminine by temperament, or masculine girls, masculine by temperament,

00:10:16.480 which is maybe also why a very large number of autistic girls seem to be caught up in this, and they're a diagnostically distinct group, and conflating them isn't helpful.

00:10:29.720 That's an additional complication.

00:10:31.140 These people that you were seeing in their early middle age, do you think that they, what proportion of them do you think were temperamentally ill-fitted, let's say, to their biological sex, masculine girls or feminine boys, and how many of them do you think at that time, this is back in 2008, fit more into the autogynophilic category?

00:10:57.620 Or did you make that distinction at that time?

00:11:00.000 So I'm, and this is one of the reasons, Dr. Peterson, why I'm having this conversation with you.

00:11:05.680 I have to be honest, being taught under this terminology, it wasn't until I was in my practice on my own for many years that I was even introduced to the terminology autogynophilia.

00:11:19.640 So I can promise you that in schools right now, they are not being taught that, they are not understood that, and it took.

00:11:28.140 So, I mean, I think one of the really unique things about my life was that I had the opportunity to work with cross-dressers, which really showed me the difference between what we're calling body dysphoria and gender dysphoria, and the erotic nature of it.

00:11:49.920 And not only that, I was introduced to a client who, in his late 70s, actually had his penis amputeed.

00:12:05.180 And it was a really unique case because he would have what we would understand as body integrity disorder.

00:12:11.740 He grew up on a farm in Arkansas and really hated getting up early and having to do all the work as a male would have to do.

00:12:20.260 His cousin ends up getting her arm amputeed off and, therefore, does not have to do a lot of work on the farm.

00:12:29.160 This really impacts him throughout his life.

00:12:31.560 He becomes an engineer, has children, whatnot.

00:12:34.580 But he has an extreme displeasure with the fact that he doesn't have something wrong with him that would stop him.

00:12:44.540 And he decided that that needs to be his penis.

00:12:47.980 And he went to Philadelphia and asked to have the surgery.

00:12:52.860 And they said, you're not trans.

00:12:55.780 And he was like, okay, but I dislike this body part of mine.

00:12:59.880 And he took a pen and put it up his penis and let it go to gangrene.

00:13:07.760 He was under no influence of alcohol or drugs.

00:13:09.980 And ends up at the hospital and does get his penis amputeed.

00:13:16.440 And I was called in because there was no homicidal, no suicidal ideation, no under the influence.

00:13:26.260 This was a case where he was like, I just do not like this body part.

00:13:30.900 Now, I did a lot of assessments around being trans.

00:13:35.120 This wasn't a gender thing.

00:13:36.400 So that really showed me of like, whoa, there is a lot of things going on for people.

00:13:42.660 And the outcome of I don't feel as a child is very complex.

00:13:50.840 And that we weren't, I was not taught.

00:13:53.120 Yeah, well, that's that.

00:13:54.320 Well, okay, okay.

00:13:55.360 Well, that, okay.

00:13:56.040 So that's very much worth delving into.

00:13:58.660 I mean, there's a very cardinal temptation for people who are wading into extremely complex

00:14:08.480 territory to assume that the territory is a lot simpler than they think, to assume the

00:14:13.920 problem is unidimensional, and then worse, to assume that the treatment is simple and unidimensional.

00:14:21.580 And certainly, if you're wandering into the territory of paraphilic sexual attraction, let's

00:14:28.840 say, to say you're in a minefield is to say almost nothing, because the limitlessness of

00:14:34.940 human sexual pathology is enough to produce post-traumatic stress disorder in anyone who

00:14:41.300 studies it in any depth.

00:14:42.640 And so, and you said that when you were educated, that all of this was collapsed into something

00:14:49.340 that's like a hyper oversimplification, right?

00:14:52.280 And then there's a moralistic element to it, too.

00:14:54.600 I mean, Zucker's a really good example, because Ken Zucker was probably the world's foremost

00:15:00.600 leading authority on gender dysphoria and autogynephilia, which he separated very carefully

00:15:08.480 clinically.

00:15:09.360 He ran the gender dysphoria clinic in Toronto and was eventually hounded out of his life

00:15:14.400 by gender-affirming activists.

00:15:17.200 And what Zucker showed were, well, apart from the distinction between the autogynephilic types

00:15:24.740 and then the kids who had cross-sex temperament, he showed that if you left kids who had body

00:15:33.820 dysmorphia issues alone, 90% of them would settle into their biological identity by the

00:15:41.360 time they were 18 or 19.

00:15:43.280 But he also showed quite clearly that the early onset gender dysphoria kids were much more

00:15:50.040 likely to be gay.

00:15:51.500 About 80% of them adopted a homosexual or manifested a homosexual orientation.

00:15:57.440 And one of the terrible specters that that entices upward out of the crypt is the fact that the

00:16:05.560 gender surgical enterprise, hormone therapy, puberty blockers, all of that, overwhelmingly

00:16:12.740 targets the gay population.

00:16:15.160 And that's a very interesting issue on the political front, because in principle there's

00:16:19.160 an LGBT alliance and community, except that the interests of the transsexual types, especially

00:16:25.640 the radicals, couldn't be more diametrically opposed to the interest of the gay community,

00:16:31.200 assuming such things exist, if it was designed to be antithetical.

00:16:35.780 Okay, so now you were placed in a situation where, as a therapist, you were trained in a

00:16:40.820 unidimensional analysis of the gender dysphoria problem.

00:16:44.160 And then you started to develop the assessment guidelines.

00:16:47.500 Correct.

00:16:47.660 And did you do that as a bachelor's student or as a master's student?

00:16:51.600 No, it was with master's and PhD students.

00:16:55.720 Okay, okay.

00:16:56.720 And so walk me through the development of the assessment process and tell me what you were

00:17:01.800 thinking then about assessment and what you think about it now.

00:17:07.020 And I'm also interested, too, in why it was that it was through your interest in sex that

00:17:13.700 you became interested in being a therapist.

00:17:15.680 Yes, I mean, I think I have a little bit of...

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00:18:57.080 I, you know, comfort with discomfort or the things that people don't want to talk about.

00:19:07.320 So I think that really hit for me.

00:19:10.480 And one of the things I reflect on, because I kind of am embarrassed that I used to present

00:19:16.780 on this topic, but I have a medical condition.

00:19:20.640 I have a blood clotting disorder.

00:19:21.760 And from the outside, many people can't see that.

00:19:26.000 And I, when I would present with physicians around how to get their practice to be more

00:19:31.160 gender affirming, I would share that, that, you know, you don't know what it's like to

00:19:36.640 have an illness that perhaps people don't know from the outside.

00:19:39.480 And that really helped me relate to these children, I think, of like, you're presenting with something

00:19:45.040 that maybe from the outside, no one understands, but from the inside that it's there.

00:19:51.020 But now, understanding my diagnosis can medically have evidence, right?

00:19:57.820 It's, there's chemicals that can be diagnostically looked at, and that's not the case for the

00:20:05.380 children.

00:20:05.880 So I will say when we started doing this, it wasn't a lot of children.

00:20:11.300 There wasn't, like, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, like, there are now that need

00:20:15.480 to be seen.

00:20:16.060 These were children, like you said, that were presented pretty young, presenting pretty young

00:20:20.820 with aversions to their body, right?

00:20:24.180 And these are, at this time, too, we don't have internet.

00:20:27.360 We don't have internet in the same capacity, TikTok, right?

00:20:31.380 Yeah.

00:20:31.800 They don't know what they're talking about.

00:20:33.840 So they're not telling us, I'm transgender.

00:20:36.000 These were parents bringing kids to us, saying something's going on.

00:20:39.520 This kid is saying this, you know, my penis shouldn't be here, and they're three.

00:20:45.300 They are, you know, have consistently shown a certain way.

00:20:50.300 So this is what, this is the cases that we were presented with and working with.

00:20:54.980 And we, this assessment was supposed to be probably about a year to a two-year assessment,

00:21:01.060 right?

00:21:01.280 To fully assess the six domains of early childhood we would look at.

00:21:06.760 So how was their gender presented in early childhood?

00:21:09.940 Does the way they present and discuss it connect with their, with their family?

00:21:14.700 So that was a big part of double-checking, was, wasn't just what the children said.

00:21:19.440 It was what the family were presenting as well, of what they witnessed going on with their

00:21:23.680 child.

00:21:24.800 Physical history, sexual context, school context.

00:21:29.880 And one of the biggest areas and domains that are no longer discussed, and I, and this is

00:21:36.660 where developmentally I was really concerned, is future expectations.

00:21:42.420 I mean, when I was doing it back then, these children understood they were never going to

00:21:48.800 be that gender.

00:21:50.880 So if they were, they were, they were going to be a trans male.

00:21:53.320 And I think that distinction was significant, whereas now it is magical.

00:21:58.780 Like, no, I'll be a male because I said it.

00:22:02.240 And one of the things that I can't assess as easily is, do they know the implications to

00:22:10.320 what they're doing?

00:22:12.160 Back then, I guess, well, even as adults, we rarely know the implications of what we're

00:22:16.560 doing.

00:22:16.960 So it's very, very difficult for especially hyper-confused kids.

00:22:20.900 When you were developing these assessments, okay, so first of all, you said, we've kind

00:22:25.640 of talked about why the idea of early assessment had emerged on the landscape, right?

00:22:32.940 You're dealing with older people, and the question arose, perhaps they should have been

00:22:36.960 dealt with more efficiently when they were young, and so you could see a trail opening

00:22:41.140 up in that direction.

00:22:42.700 Now you're talking to kids who have body dysmorphia that their parents are bringing to the attention

00:22:48.300 of therapists.

00:22:48.900 And of course, that's a snake pit, too, because there's endless numbers of reasons why children

00:22:55.720 might develop body dysmorphia.

00:22:58.600 Some of them would have to do with temperament body mismatch, but there's all sorts of other

00:23:04.580 possibilities, too, that they're responding to unconscious prompts on the part of their

00:23:10.800 parents.

00:23:11.420 That would be particularly true if they have narcissistic or psychopathic parents.

00:23:15.500 And that's increasingly the case for the kids who manifest extremely early signs of so-called

00:23:21.520 gender dysphoria now because their mothers often are making a display of their compassion

00:23:28.360 by using their children's illness and their compassionate response to it as a, what would you call it, as a goad

00:23:37.480 to their narcissistic display.

00:23:39.680 Yes.

00:23:40.260 You can see that sort of thing emerging everywhere, and so that's a bloody catastrophe.

00:23:43.980 And then you have autistic kids who don't fit in very well, especially on the female side, and they do think in some ways

00:23:50.580 more like males do because they're more thing-oriented.

00:23:53.640 And you have the possibility of the early development of psychosis, and then you have the difficulty

00:23:58.560 of distinguishing the children's fantasy play from genuine concerns about their identity.

00:24:05.460 Like, it requires unbelievably careful, multiply-dimensioned diagnostic analysis.

00:24:14.380 And you said, you know, your vision, at least to begin with, was that there was no fast route, let's say, to

00:24:21.660 puberty blockers or hormone treatment.

00:24:24.360 You were looking at at least a one- to two-year assessment.

00:24:27.680 And I would think, given my clinical experience, that one year of weekly meetings with someone competent

00:24:36.000 would be minimally necessary to sort any of that out.

00:24:41.060 And so, and that was your vision.

00:24:42.900 And now it's three.

00:24:43.780 In 2008.

00:24:44.800 It's three sessions.

00:24:47.520 It's three sessions now.

00:24:49.220 That's the standard.

00:24:50.040 Okay, so tell us why you believe that to be the case.

00:24:53.880 What have you observed?

00:24:55.100 Well, I mean-

00:24:55.740 And tell us about Planned Parenthood, too.

00:24:58.120 Yeah, I think a lot of things, I mean, one of the things I will say, it was obvious that

00:25:02.820 this assessment was to get them on hormone blockers, to either, you know, pause to see

00:25:09.700 if this was what they want.

00:25:12.080 And that was the goal of our assessment.

00:25:16.200 And one of the things that is-

00:25:19.460 Well, to get them on hormone blockers or to determine if that was the appropriate path?

00:25:30.520 I want to say the first one, but I will tell you, as soon as there was guidelines, people knew what they wanted.

00:25:38.720 So they came in and just knew that I was step one to get where they want.

00:25:43.760 So I've already-

00:25:44.740 Right, okay, okay.

00:25:45.800 Well, that's very interesting, eh?

00:25:47.280 Because, see, you run into a therapeutic problem there right away.

00:25:52.200 It's because people, especially if they're deeply confused, will clutch at straws.

00:25:59.320 And if they feel that they've now got the answer to all of their problems, then the next thing they're going to think is,

00:26:06.100 well, let's get this show on the road, right?

00:26:08.500 Now, the unfortunate truth of the matter is, is that if you're caught in an extremely complex psychological situation,

00:26:16.860 it might take a year of painful analysis and introspection just to figure out what the hell is going on.

00:26:25.020 And it's not like that's calming.

00:26:27.160 In fact, at least temporarily, it can make things worse as you start to assess all the familial pathology,

00:26:35.120 sometimes multi-generational familial pathology that's driving this kind of behavior forward.

00:26:41.560 But your observation, it was interesting to watch you pause there because your observation was,

00:26:46.800 well, as soon as this pathway became open, now there's pressure.

00:26:51.540 You can imagine there's pressure from the clients to get the show on the road.

00:26:54.820 But then there's also pressure on the diagnostic and cost side.

00:26:59.180 It's like, well, if really what we're doing is facilitating transition,

00:27:02.380 why don't we do that as efficiently as possible?

00:27:05.480 And then you see the collapse of your one- to two-year assessment into three sessions.

00:27:11.940 Now, I interviewed Chloe Cole, who is suing.

00:27:15.580 She's a detransitioner who's initiated legal action in the United States.

00:27:19.580 And when I interviewed her, I did something like a modified clinical interview,

00:27:24.120 partly because I wanted to see if anyone ever even walked her through the basics of what was wrong with her.

00:27:31.640 And the answer was 100% no.

00:27:34.300 So I told Chloe, for example, she hit puberty pretty young.

00:27:38.880 And I told her, well, girls reliably experience an increase in negative emotion at puberty.

00:27:44.520 And that looks like it's pharmacological.

00:27:47.440 Because the big difference in neuroticism between men and women doesn't emerge until puberty.

00:27:52.940 And it probably emerges in women because they become sexually vulnerable.

00:27:56.780 Because the change in body size occurs at puberty.

00:28:01.140 So women are now at a physical disadvantage.

00:28:03.600 They're sexually vulnerable.

00:28:05.400 Plus, they're going to have to take care of infants in all likelihood at some point in their life.

00:28:10.000 And so it makes sense for them to be more sensitive to threat.

00:28:13.480 That produces a spike in negative emotion.

00:28:15.760 And with women in particular, because women are evaluated for their physical appearance to a degree that isn't the case for men,

00:28:23.740 although men are also evaluated on that dimension,

00:28:26.840 the probability that negative emotion will take the form of concern about body image is extraordinarily high in women.

00:28:33.980 And so I told Chloe, especially if you hit puberty early, I said, look, the fact that you were unhappy and concerned about your body when you were nine because you were undergoing puberty is entirely developmentally normal.

00:28:47.840 And then she said something extremely interesting to me.

00:28:50.400 She said she had had fantasies when she was nine or ten and starting to hit puberty that she would end up,

00:28:58.880 if she was fortunate, to be a woman who looked something like Kim Kardashian with that hyper-feminine form.

00:29:05.000 And, of course, that's been enhanced in Kardashian's case and also celebrated madly in the requisite social media.

00:29:11.620 And Cole realized that she was going to have a rather boyish figure.

00:29:17.260 And instead of someone sitting down with her explaining to her that that was perfectly fine

00:29:23.460 and that there's an incredibly wide range of male appreciation for variations in the feminine form, which is definitely the case,

00:29:33.040 she developed the belief that if she couldn't be, you know, Kim Kardashian,

00:29:38.340 she'd never be an acceptable woman or certainly not an ideal woman.

00:29:42.900 She's also a bit autistic and had a hard time getting along with girls and found it easier to get along with boys.

00:29:49.120 And so she started to develop this fantasy that, like your gentleman who decided that he'd be better off without his penis,

00:29:56.360 she started to fantasize about the fact that life would probably be better for her if she was just a boy.

00:30:02.240 And then she was put on the gender transformation path really without a moment's hesitation.

00:30:09.680 And she ended up with a double mastectomy when she was, I believe it was when she was 15.

00:30:14.420 And the wounds from that surgery never properly healed.

00:30:17.740 So that's her life, low voice, quite masculinized, possibly sterile, although that isn't necessarily the case.

00:30:26.100 Definitely, while her breasts are destroyed beyond repair, you know, she, well, it's a complete bloody catastrophe.

00:30:34.400 And it's partly because she was never assessed even remotely competently, not in the least.

00:30:40.980 And so, okay, so now we see the collapse of your one to two year assessment, you know, which had as one of its implicit motivations,

00:30:50.000 the bringing forward of the possibility of puberty blockers and gender and then hormone transformation.

00:30:56.900 You see that starting to be rushed as a consequence of client demand, but also as a consequence of institutional demand, let's say.

00:31:04.960 Absolutely.

00:31:05.380 So you start to see that unfold.

00:31:08.680 Yes, and I see it unfold as if there's step one, two, three, four in order to be the next gender, right?

00:31:17.140 So hormone blockers, surgeries, electrolysis, you know, that will be, that's all the focus was on.

00:31:26.440 Not even just treating the gender dysphoria.

00:31:30.200 I mean, I think one of the things that we might talk about later is when you talk about butchers and I think about all the children's bodies that I've seen butchered.

00:31:43.400 And also knowing about trauma-informed care, it's just really alarming to me that we're having therapists working with people who are chopping off their body parts and we're not even doing any trauma-informed care around any sort of trauma that goes on to your body.

00:32:04.160 And there's no connection to those body parts, those emphasis on what you did.

00:32:10.620 It's a very dissociative, detached way of going forward.

00:32:16.120 And I've seen a lot of concerns.

00:32:18.680 One of the things that really surprised me in life was when I met my first detransitioner.

00:32:24.040 And one of the things that was really surprising about that was when they were my client originally, they had no gender dysphoria, they had no body dysphoria.

00:32:34.520 They moved away to California and they were gay and they transitioned.

00:32:41.100 And fully facial reconstruction, I came back and I didn't recognize them and they said they made a mistake and I was like, how did this happen?

00:32:49.920 And I worked with you three years, I never heard you discuss body and it's an option, like you said, about modern-day conversion therapy, that it would be probably just easier if I was female instead of being gay.

00:33:06.840 And they transitioned and they made a mistake and that was my first like, wow, this is happening to people who didn't even have body dysphoria as a child.

00:33:17.040 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, right, right, yeah, well, it's a moral quagmire, you know, the capital, the world's capital for sex transformation surgery is Tehran.

00:33:32.940 And the reason for that is the mullahs there have decided that gay is not acceptable, but maybe you're not gay, you're a girl.

00:33:41.980 If you're a male homosexual, say, no, you're not gay, you're a girl.

00:33:45.060 And then if you go through with the surgical transformation, then that's ethically acceptable.

00:33:50.880 And the consequence of that, as I said, is that Tehran is now the world's capital for gender transformation surgery.

00:33:56.660 And that should really make us think, like long and hard, right?

00:34:00.400 And so, and the notion that it's also very interesting to speculate about why the delusion that puberty blockers, hormone treatment, and then surgery is going to be an easier route forward.

00:34:15.780 The idea that people take that for granted is also an indication of stunning diagnostic and assessment insufficiency.

00:34:25.980 Because, like I talked to Abigail Schreier about, in detail, about the horrendous complexity of, well, full surgical transformation, which, first of all, isn't possible, except in the most, in the shallowest possible manner.

00:34:43.780 I mean, you can build a man a vagina that will function badly for sexual purposes, but it has none of the other functions of the actual parts.

00:34:54.300 And it's as if we've reduced, this is something I find particularly reprehensible, it's as if we've reduced the concept of woman to whole usable for sexual activity.

00:35:07.440 Because nothing else is transformed in the surgical procedure.

00:35:12.340 And that's a pretty damn shallow definition of what constitutes a woman.

00:35:16.420 And to brandish that in front of desperate young people who are confused beyond comprehension as a solution to their psychological problems.

00:35:24.680 Well, that's why I wrote that essay, Butchers and Liars.

00:35:27.980 It's so, it's so perverse that it's almost incomprehensible.

00:35:32.160 And it's a miracle of a negative sort that we've actually got ourselves in a situation where this is not only the standard of care, but it's the mandated standard of care.

00:35:42.980 Because across jurisdictions, across jurisdictions across the Western world, increasingly, if you're a therapist and you don't affirm someone's identity, which could certainly mean within the first three sessions, then you're actually on the hook for professional malpractice.

00:36:01.340 And so that's just a jaw-dropping transformation in standards of therapeutic care.

00:36:07.520 And it's interesting to see how that came about, too, because it came up, at least in part, as a consequence of legislation that was hypothetically designed to stop so-called conversion therapy.

00:36:19.160 Which was the therapeutic practice that a tiny, tiny minority of people used many decades ago to try to convince gay people that their orientation should and could be transformed.

00:36:34.700 But virtually no therapists, certainly no therapist I ever met in my life practiced that.

00:36:41.520 It certainly wasn't part of the standard training protocol for any reasonably well-educated clinical psychologists.

00:36:48.300 And so the idea that that was an issue was just a complete bloody lie.

00:36:53.360 But nonetheless, jurisdictions all around the world rushed in to show their, what would you call, ethical superiority on the woke front and mandated therapists adopt this gender-affirming stance.

00:37:04.880 And so, now, you were interested when you were younger in helping people who had gender dysphoria deal with it, you know.

00:37:12.460 And so, you were tilted to some degree in the gender-affirmation direction.

00:37:16.680 But what did you see, how did you see that grow and morph across time?

00:37:22.080 Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of different ways.

00:37:26.380 I mean, one of the ways of just, again, how people speak about it.

00:37:30.760 And I don't want to, I hope no one hears disrespect towards the LGBT community.

00:37:36.960 I work a great deal with them.

00:37:39.380 But I want to go back to our professional standards.

00:37:41.800 Just this year, in my profession, they released a LGTB plus guidelines.

00:37:52.140 And I don't mean to be funny, but that plus really makes me nervous.

00:37:58.500 I don't know what that means.

00:38:00.200 And I don't know what the protective class of that means.

00:38:05.020 I will tell you that I have kids identifying as animals, right?

00:38:09.460 Those things are happening.

00:38:11.020 It was a joke when we started.

00:38:12.580 Oh, now you're going to have someone identifying as a lamp, right?

00:38:15.680 And I'm telling you, people are coming in with the trans-ageism is right there.

00:38:23.840 I mean, if you can feel like a boy, if you can feel like a boy, you can feel like a child.

00:38:29.720 And one of the things that concerns me, I'll just give you an example, the definition, dead name.

00:38:36.320 I mean.

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00:39:46.160 Since I started, the terminologies continued to change.

00:39:51.000 We never called it dead name before.

00:39:53.540 It was, you know, birth name.

00:39:55.840 And that is very alarming to me.

00:39:58.440 We are normalizing suicide.

00:40:00.480 I, there is, you know, we are killing a part of ourselves.

00:40:05.560 And by calling it stuff like that, it is very dangerous.

00:40:12.720 Yeah, well, we're also, we're also valorizing the idea that you can alter the past.

00:40:19.340 You can do it by force and you can punish other people who won't do it with you.

00:40:23.900 You know, one of the reasons I got banned from Twitter, and I think it was the primary reason it's very difficult to tell these things, was because, hypothetically, I dead named Elliot Page, Ellen Page, which I'm now doing again, by the way.

00:40:40.980 And I, this whole notion of dead name just came out of the void as far as I was concerned.

00:40:47.240 It's like, well, who the hell came up with that idea?

00:40:50.800 Why did it all of a sudden become a cardinal ethical sin?

00:40:55.480 And what the hell do you mean that I can't refer to someone by who they were?

00:41:00.700 And that that's now a crime.

00:41:02.360 I just don't understand any of this at all.

00:41:04.480 It's so utterly preposterous that it's almost beyond comprehension.

00:41:08.880 But, but we're, we're primed for this.

00:41:12.300 And there's an underlying set of ideas that have to do with the notion, I guess we could get into this to some degree as well.

00:41:20.620 So, psychotherapists have adopted this shallow idea.

00:41:27.260 And I think the whole field of clinical endeavor is, what would you say, guilty on this front, that the only valid marker of identity is subjective whim.

00:41:39.440 And this is actually technically wrong.

00:41:42.780 And good psychologists should have known this because identity is a multidimensional phenomenon.

00:41:48.280 And so, and the left insists on this.

00:41:51.540 The left insists, for example, that your identity is partly a consequence of your group affiliation.

00:41:56.860 But we could walk through that.

00:41:58.540 Your identity is the manner in which you're situated in social space.

00:42:03.060 Now, it's also something internal and psychological.

00:42:05.920 It is who you experience yourself as being.

00:42:09.080 But that's not all of it.

00:42:11.060 You exist in relationship to your intimate partner.

00:42:13.880 You exist in relationship to your family.

00:42:16.220 You exist in relationship to your neighborhood and your community and your town and your state and your country.

00:42:22.220 And your transcendent ideals of one form or another.

00:42:27.240 And every single one of those aspects is part of identity.

00:42:30.160 And the idea that that can be reduced, well, and then there's the biological and physical elements of identity as well.

00:42:36.580 The fact that you have two eyes and not six, for example.

00:42:40.920 And that you have a biological sex whether you like it or not.

00:42:44.440 And the idea that that can all be reduced to something internal and subjective is a consequence of the derailment of a kind of liberal Protestant ethos of self-actualization.

00:42:58.260 You know, it's the ultimate extension of the idea that the only person who can say what I am is me.

00:43:06.240 And the problem with that is that it's simply not true.

00:43:09.140 I mean, when you and I are sitting here talking, we have to modify our mutual identities in accordance with our desire to have the conversation.

00:43:18.160 And so identity is always negotiated.

00:43:21.020 And the idea that it can now just be established by subjective fiat and that that establishment has the weight of the law behind it is an inversion of absolutely incomprehensible magnitude.

00:43:34.080 And it's terrible for people who are confused because they're going to define themselves subjectively in a manner that is not going to be good for the more sustainable in a social community or sustainable in the long run.

00:43:45.900 And I'm absolutely jaw dropped in my amazement with regards to the cowardice of people on the therapeutic front who should know better than this and who do, who are saying absolutely nothing about it and just going along with the catastrophic flood.

00:44:02.980 Now, for some reason, like this really hit home for you.

00:44:06.840 You said in the letter that you wrote me that you read that article I wrote on butchers and liars and that really bothered you.

00:44:13.940 But you were already bothered by what you'd seen.

00:44:17.200 Why has this bothered you so much that you've risked?

00:44:21.340 Well, first of all, you know, you're doing an ideological inversion in some sense, right?

00:44:26.720 Because you're moving away from your initial set of presuppositions.

00:44:30.580 And then you're exposing yourself to tremendous professional risk by going on Walsh's documentary and certainly by talking to me.

00:44:41.180 Like, why the hell are you doing this?

00:44:42.980 Why has this become such an irritant to your conscience that you feel compelled to take this risk?

00:44:52.260 Because like you said, I wasn't taught correctly.

00:44:57.620 And I was taught very well, in my opinion, to be informed and to give ethical treatment and do no harm.

00:45:06.280 It wasn't until I was about 10 years in that a parent came and handed me a piece of paper and said,

00:45:13.860 the medication that you want to give your children, my child is not FDA approved.

00:45:19.680 Explain to me why I should give my child a non-FDA approved drug.

00:45:24.560 These hormone blockers for children are still not FDA approved.

00:45:27.880 And I didn't know that, Jordan.

00:45:31.660 I should have known that.

00:45:33.720 Oh, wow.

00:45:35.080 Yeah.

00:45:35.620 And things like that really alarm me.

00:45:41.020 And I will tell you, having children and going through so many things,

00:45:44.880 one of the things they like to say that just drives me crazy is,

00:45:48.460 you are assigned at birth.

00:45:50.920 That is not true.

00:45:52.060 I have done IVF.

00:45:53.540 I know the sex of my child five days after that sperm and egg meat.

00:46:00.180 It is observed at birth, if anything.

00:46:03.920 It is not assigned.

00:46:05.780 So children and teachers and psychologists are thinking that kids come out very ambiguous.

00:46:14.120 And it's not ambiguous.

00:46:16.180 That is a very rare thing.

00:46:18.400 One of the things I come across in my child, he's 10.

00:46:23.100 And he came home and he was explaining to me about his friend who transitioned and is now a female.

00:46:30.820 And first of all, he had a lot of questions for me because he was going to school with that child for many years.

00:46:39.680 So his first question, of course, was, did this child grow a vagina over the summer?

00:46:45.940 And that showed me a lot, that this isn't even being presented as, no, this is a mental health problem that this person is going with,

00:46:53.860 or that this is gender dysphoria and this is what we're presenting at.

00:46:57.340 This is now a female.

00:46:59.400 So his friends are confused.

00:47:02.140 Now, does that make me gay that I like them?

00:47:04.280 What do you mean?

00:47:05.500 Can I grow a vagina over the summer?

00:47:07.420 How do I know I'm not next?

00:47:09.960 And my son asked me, well, how do I know if I'm a boy?

00:47:12.800 And I was just like, this is scary.

00:47:15.860 And it is disorienting our children and disorienting.

00:47:19.900 You couldn't possibly disorient children more.

00:47:23.900 There isn't anything you could possibly do to children.

00:47:27.180 I don't think that confusing them about the difference between up and down would be more disorienting than confusing them about the difference between male and female.

00:47:34.640 And I say that partly because the difference between male and female emerged biologically hundreds and hundreds of millions of years ago.

00:47:44.740 There's almost no more fundamental perceptual category or, what would you call it, conceptual structure of orientation than the difference between male and female.

00:47:56.540 Partly because if you're not capable of perceiving it, you won't reproduce.

00:48:02.460 And that's the end of that.

00:48:04.180 And so the notion that this is somehow a social construct is so delusional that it's almost, it's surreal.

00:48:11.700 It's beyond surreal.

00:48:12.860 It's surreal to the point of incomprehensibility.

00:48:16.200 And there is an arrogance about it that is Luciferian in its magnitude.

00:48:21.940 The idea that we can subvert the entire natural order to the subjective whim of children is absolutely preposterous.

00:48:31.420 And it must have been.

00:48:32.680 So how did you feel when your son came home and started asking you these questions?

00:48:36.540 What effect did that have on you?

00:48:38.700 It had a great effect.

00:48:39.600 And not to mention what he was saying, there was lots of things going on.

00:48:44.140 He asked me if he could be this person's friend.

00:48:47.400 But one of the things he brought up was that they were in gym class and they were getting split up by girls and boys.

00:48:52.420 So this child was now with the girls.

00:48:55.440 And his friend was making a lot of comments about that.

00:48:59.380 And that concerned me about bullying.

00:49:01.660 So I went ahead and I read their bullying handbook and it did not say anything about misgendering.

00:49:06.460 And I went and called the school psychologist.

00:49:08.640 Now, I called the school psychologist without trying to give my son's name because I didn't think that was relevant to what was going on.

00:49:15.480 But I needed to understand if misgendering would be considered bullying because we have kids being – these are 10-year-olds, okay?

00:49:24.280 So they're not on any sort of hormone blockers.

00:49:27.240 This is just affirming by name.

00:49:31.660 And I asked her if it would be considered bullying.

00:49:35.040 And she gave me quite a bit of pushback.

00:49:38.960 And she was accusing me of saying that this was a social contagion, which, you know, I –

00:49:48.080 Which it is.

00:49:48.580 Which it is, right.

00:49:50.200 One hundred percent.

00:49:51.300 And she demanded that I tell her who I was speaking of.

00:49:55.180 And I said, with all due respect, are you telling me that you – how many male-to-female 10-year-olds are at your school?

00:50:03.360 And she said, define a lot.

00:50:05.460 And that was the end of the conversation to me.

00:50:08.920 How many kids are doing this?

00:50:10.760 And I said to her, so let me ask you a question.

00:50:13.320 In fifth grade, we split up the children.

00:50:16.060 And we put them in a class according to their assigned sex.

00:50:21.480 And they learn about the period or what happens to the male.

00:50:25.680 Are you going to be allowing this child to go into the females with that?

00:50:29.620 And she said, yes.

00:50:30.760 And I said, you have no idea that dysphoria, you will cause that child when they are sitting in that room and learning about the periods.

00:50:39.680 And they are never going to have the period.

00:50:42.040 And we are telling them, but, hey, you're a female.

00:50:44.600 That is so scary.

00:50:48.260 And so things like that is just –

00:50:52.400 How did she respond?

00:50:53.640 A female psychologist you were talking to?

00:50:55.900 How did she respond to that?

00:50:57.560 Very aggressively.

00:50:58.380 And she told me at the end, I said, you might want to get a policy.

00:51:02.620 She said, it would be considered bullying according to intent.

00:51:07.300 And I said, with all due respect.

00:51:09.000 Right, intent, yeah.

00:51:10.080 How is it a 10-year-old went to school with this kid since kindergarten as a boy, and now you're telling them it's a girl.

00:51:18.180 It's like a toilet and a shelf.

00:51:20.080 Just because you poop on the shelf does not make a toilet.

00:51:23.460 And they do not understand.

00:51:24.820 And you're not even presenting to them the concept of being transgender.

00:51:28.600 My son did not know what that was until then.

00:51:31.120 And I had to explain that to them because we have kids thinking they can wake up and feel a different way.

00:51:37.920 Feelings are very sensual.

00:51:40.060 And this is not very good to keep going on is feelings.

00:51:44.280 Yeah, well, you know, let's talk about the American Psychological Association guidelines for standard of care.

00:51:52.520 So one of the great advantages to the practice of clinical psychology was its grounding in the research domain.

00:52:01.800 And so if you were trained as a clinical psychologist under the Boulder model, you were required to be trained as a clinician but also as a researcher.

00:52:10.100 And that meant that you learned how to analyze the scientific literature, which, by the way, is not the case for physicians and is generally not the case for clinicians who aren't trained under the Boulder model.

00:52:20.840 But if you learn to think scientifically, there's certain conclusions that you're obliged to draw as a consequence of that training.

00:52:30.460 And one of the conclusions, and this is conclusions that are well instantiated on the ethical front, is that multiple techniques of measurement are required before you can formalize a diagnosis.

00:52:41.360 And so if you're trying to understand someone's problem, to diagnose them, let's say, one of the sources of information that you use is self-report.

00:52:52.320 And self-report is essentially, it's not entirely reducible to feelings, but that's where you would put feelings.

00:53:00.100 You'd put feelings and thoughts, all subjective identification.

00:53:03.300 You know, I feel, so for example, if you're diagnosing someone who's anorexic, they're going to tell you that they feel fat.

00:53:13.000 Now, if you used only their feelings as the diagnostic marker, you'd have to conclude that they're fat.

00:53:18.740 But of course, if you have any sense as a clinician, you'd note that if they're severely anorexic, not only are they not fat, but they're probably going to die of starvation.

00:53:28.220 And so, but the point I'm making here is that we're already bound as clinicians who are research trained under the APA protocols to use multiple methods of measurement.

00:53:40.480 And so, for example, if you wanted to clarify the nature of someone's so-called identity, you'd use self-report, but you'd use objective diagnostic markers.

00:53:50.160 And sometimes that's questionnaires, and there's other ways of going about it.

00:53:53.260 There's behavioral logging, for example.

00:53:55.480 You can track people's behavior.

00:53:56.980 You do that if you were diagnosing people for depression.

00:53:59.700 You might have them fill out a mood inventory every hour, every day for two or three weeks and look at the variation in their patterns.

00:54:06.980 You'd use well-validated objective questionnaires, and there's a whole method for deriving those.

00:54:13.300 And then you might also gather information from family or friends or, let's say, significantly involved professionals.

00:54:24.240 So, for example, if you're assessing childhood behavior in the classroom, trying to diagnose children for attention deficit disorder or conduct disorder, you might get the child's self-report.

00:54:36.320 You might get reports from their friends.

00:54:38.380 You might get reports from their teachers.

00:54:40.260 You might get reports from their parents.

00:54:42.100 And then what you look for is convergence across measures.

00:54:45.720 And if you have convergence across multiple measures, then you assume something like diagnostic accuracy.

00:54:51.620 Now, just as a sidebar for everyone watching and listening, this is how you orient yourself in the world.

00:54:58.860 Okay, you have five senses.

00:55:01.280 They're qualitatively different.

00:55:03.680 So hearing and seeing are not the same.

00:55:06.500 And hearing and seeing are quite different from tasting.

00:55:09.680 They're completely separate biological systems.

00:55:12.140 And they use different sampling approaches.

00:55:14.780 And what's happened evolutionarily is that we've converged on a five-dimensional solution.

00:55:21.800 We essentially believe that if something is reported to you by five different measurement techniques, that's your five senses, that that phenomenon is real.

00:55:33.000 Now, that isn't even good enough because it's so difficult to specify what's real that we also not only use our senses to evaluate the world, but then we go talk to other people and see if they see, hear, taste, and touch the same things.

00:55:53.860 Right? Because even with those five senses, we can get locked into an erroneous subjectivity.

00:56:00.600 And we need consensus and then empirical testing to ensure that we're not deluding ourselves.

00:56:06.840 And that's when we're trying to strive for the truth.

00:56:09.720 If we're trying to delude ourselves for underground psychological purposes, let's say, things become even more complex.

00:56:16.720 So, the reason I'm going down this pathway is to lay out for those who are listening the fact that it's already been established by properly ethically oriented and well-trained clinicians that you have a primary ethical responsibility to use the reliable and valid means of diagnosis that are at your disposal.

00:56:39.240 And that means that you are ethically bound not to rely on subjective self-evaluation.

00:56:45.280 It's one input, but it does not override the others.

00:56:49.040 And the fact that we've about faced on that, partly because of legislative pressure, but also because of ideological idiocy, is absolutely 100% by the standards of the profession itself, an ethical transgression.

00:57:02.560 And so, okay, so now we're letting kids know we're mandated to encourage children to assume that they're only what they are as a consequence of their day-to-day subjective self-evaluation, right?

00:57:18.520 And there's nothing stable about that either, because the additional claim is not only are you only who you say you are or feel you are, whatever the hell feel means, but that can switch at your choice at any moment.

00:57:34.280 And no one has anything to say about that as well, under threat of punishment of law.

00:57:39.540 And then we think, well, are we confusing children?

00:57:42.060 It's like, well, not only are they being confused as a consequence of that, we're setting out to confuse them as deeply as we possibly could.

00:57:50.220 And I think one of the big things I want to talk about, too, is there was a push, like, as I was doing this, that even diagnosing them with gender dysphoria or body dysphoria wasn't accurate or the best terminology, because this is a choice.

00:58:09.580 I mean, that's one of my concerns around this, is that we really have gotten away from, hey, we are treating people who have severe mental illness.

00:58:18.260 Like, someone who's going through this has severe pathology happening.

00:58:22.460 Now it's just if you choose.

00:58:25.320 And that, I mean, when I started, they was not a thing.

00:58:30.220 And a lot of people that I do know that are trans actually think that that discredits their belief.

00:58:37.320 And supervising interns that come in and have children that say, on Monday and Tuesday, I feel like a boy.

00:58:44.660 And then on Wednesday and Friday, I feel like a girl.

00:58:48.760 I don't know what that means and what we're talking about anymore.

00:58:54.380 And just, you know.

00:58:56.520 Well, we might want to delve into that for a minute, too.

00:58:59.340 It's like, you know, people will say something like, I feel, let's say, I feel like I'm in the wrong body.

00:59:06.600 Or I feel like I'm a boy, but I feel like a girl.

00:59:10.160 And then you think, well, what do you exactly mean by that?

00:59:12.940 Well, on the, I don't feel like I'm in the wrong body front, that needs detailed analysis.

00:59:18.700 It's like, well, exactly what it is about your current physiology that causes you distress.

00:59:24.460 Like, precisely what is it?

00:59:26.700 So in Chloe Cole's case, for example, it turned out that her fundamental problem was that she wasn't going to have the kind of curvy figure that she had viewed as ideal for a woman.

00:59:37.680 Now, that's a lot different than I feel like a boy.

00:59:41.060 Correct.

00:59:41.480 Right?

00:59:41.740 But if you don't delve into that carefully, you're never going to get to the bottom of it.

00:59:46.000 And then on the subjective feeling front, it's like, well, what the hell do you mean that you feel like you're a boy if you're a girl?

00:59:55.120 First of all, how do you know that?

00:59:57.280 Because you don't have privileged access to what it constitutes to feel like a boy, whatever that means.

01:00:04.700 It's not even technically possible for you, except in the realm of fantasy, you know?

01:00:09.420 Like, I could imagine what it might be like to be a girl.

01:00:13.500 Now, let's delve into that a little bit.

01:00:15.160 So when my son was a kid, he was about two, and his sister was three and a half, and she had a little coterie of friends, you know?

01:00:23.980 And they used to get together and dress up, and they often, for a period of time, dressed my son Julian up in these little girl costumes, you know?

01:00:34.080 Like, really feminine costumes, fairy wings and like a little tutu.

01:00:37.720 And they had quite the time playing out this game.

01:00:42.460 And he would come upstairs and, you know, zip about, and they'd chase him and so forth.

01:00:46.220 And I was watching that, thinking, okay, what the hell's going on here?

01:00:49.360 Because there was part of me that I had some discomfort about that.

01:00:52.740 And so I thought, okay, what's happening here?

01:00:55.580 A, why is he doing it?

01:00:57.760 B, why are the girls doing it?

01:00:59.240 C, why am I uncomfortable with it?

01:01:02.520 Okay, so I started with my own discomfort.

01:01:04.860 Because I thought, well, you know, is something going on here that you should intervene in or not?

01:01:09.520 Or is it about you?

01:01:10.660 And I talked to my wife about that.

01:01:12.160 And as we laid it out, I realized that a young boy has to play out being a girl in fantasy.

01:01:23.060 And a young girl has to play out being a boy.

01:01:25.180 Because unless you play it out, build a fictional representation, you can't understand the opposite sex.

01:01:32.640 And so then I thought, oh, I see what's going on.

01:01:34.700 He's just playing at being a girl.

01:01:37.200 And the girls are playing with the idea of sex.

01:01:41.320 And they're trying to calibrate what it's like to be the opposite sex and what it's like to be them.

01:01:47.040 And that's perfectly within the bounds of acceptable pretend play.

01:01:51.180 Now, one of the concerns I have at the moment is that our kids are so involved with screens

01:01:56.960 that a lot of that early pretend play where sexual identity is truly established is actually being completely interfered with.

01:02:06.480 And I think a lot of what we're seeing on the adolescent front is the reemergence of that fantasy play that was always suppressed.

01:02:13.940 But in any case...

01:02:15.080 Yeah, I have a similar story, Jordan, with my son.

01:02:17.460 He, you know, was playing with...

01:02:19.420 He wanted to play with dolls and Barbies.

01:02:21.280 And I was obviously okay with that.

01:02:25.200 And I remember asking him, like, why don't we buy Eric, like the prince for Ariel?

01:02:32.260 And he said to me, oh, I don't want to play with boys.

01:02:36.740 Boys are mean.

01:02:38.000 And I was like, oh, okay.

01:02:40.440 So this is how he was understanding the world.

01:02:44.220 And, you know, he's a little older now.

01:02:46.540 He doesn't really play at Barbies anymore.

01:02:47.720 But I was like, okay, this is how they're playing out and how he is representing how he understands women and himself.

01:02:55.380 And I see a lot of parents.

01:02:58.660 I mean, I'm not going to lie to you.

01:03:00.460 The moment my kid played with Barbies, I had to have the thought as a parent, would I be okay if my son was a girl?

01:03:07.300 And where did that come from?

01:03:09.320 And I don't think our parents didn't worry about that.

01:03:14.100 I see my friends have to, like, okay, I would accept if my child is this other gender.

01:03:21.760 And that is in itself bizarre that we're going down that path.

01:03:26.540 Well, we can elaborate on that a little bit, too.

01:03:30.520 So one of the biggest lies on the butchery and liar front is the following.

01:03:36.860 Would you rather have a trans child or a dead child?

01:03:42.180 And that really, really, to say it annoys me is to say almost nothing.

01:03:46.060 And here's the technical reason.

01:03:48.020 So in the APA guidelines for gender-affirming care, there are two contradictory claims being put forward.

01:03:55.560 It's very interesting to read the document because the first claim is that because of prejudice amongst researchers against the transgender community,

01:04:07.160 there are no valid long-term follow-up studies of the mental health of transitioning people across the lifespan.

01:04:18.540 Okay, so that's quite the claim because, first of all, this is such a new phenomenon that it's no wonder that there are no long-term studies.

01:04:25.300 And the fact that there are no long-term studies might be tangentially related in some small degree to prejudice among the research community,

01:04:34.360 which is about the least prejudiced community that's ever existed on the planet, by the way.

01:04:39.380 But it's preposterous to assume that the dearth of long-term follow-up studies is a consequence of mere prejudice.

01:04:47.020 It's just, well, it's a new phenomenon.

01:04:49.100 That's the basic explanation.

01:04:50.540 But the admission is there are no well-documented, reliable, invalid, long-term follow-up studies.

01:04:58.620 Okay, then three pages later, the claim is, well, unless you allow people or facilitate people to transform early,

01:05:07.160 their mental health will be impaired to the point where their suicide risk is elevated.

01:05:11.400 And I thought, okay, wait a second here.

01:05:13.040 One of those claims can be true, even though neither of them are, but both of them cannot be true simultaneously.

01:05:21.560 There are either valid long-term studies documenting the mental health consequences of transitioning, or they're not, or there aren't.

01:05:31.420 And the evidence is either pro-transition or anti.

01:05:34.860 Now, the truth of the matter is that the research that would be necessary to establish the truth of the proposition that early transition has mental health benefits has by no means been done.

01:05:49.080 And it's also complicated by the fact, and this is a true complication, that testosterone itself has pharmacological antidepressant properties.

01:05:58.540 So if you give dysphoric young women testosterone, or dysphoric young men, for that matter, then they do feel better.

01:06:07.240 But it's not because they're transitioning, it's because of the biochemical consequences of testosterone.

01:06:12.680 So it's a bloody mess.

01:06:14.700 But the idea that we actually know that early transitioning for kids with so-called gender dysphoria is beneficial to their mental health, that is an utter lie.

01:06:25.320 There is not one shred of it.

01:06:27.560 Now, it's worse than that, because, and this is, clinicians who are properly trained should have known this.

01:06:36.220 So this is something else I want to delve into.

01:06:38.240 So the broadest category of psychopathology, the vaguest and most inclusive category, is probably something like the nexus between depression and anxiety, right?

01:06:51.760 It's intense negative emotion.

01:06:54.040 Virtually no one comes into the therapeutic milieu who isn't suffering from intense negative emotion.

01:06:59.720 Okay.

01:06:59.980 And there are a multitude of reasons why you would suffer from intense negative emotion.

01:07:04.660 And some of those are biological, circadian rhythm disruptions, physical illness, onset of puberty, trait neuroticism, which is a huge contributor, which is also elevated among women compared to men,

01:07:17.600 which is why women have five times the rate of depressive and anxiety disorders cross-culturally.

01:07:23.240 There's lots of reasons to be miserable.

01:07:25.600 Now, if you're miserable, that's amorphous.

01:07:29.600 Because you're miserable and you're confused.

01:07:32.880 And so, in some sense, you don't know how to be miserable.

01:07:36.100 And that's where the cultural issue starts to become paramount.

01:07:39.020 So, if you go back to Freud's time, for example, there was a subset of women in Europe who were miserable hysterically.

01:07:46.920 Hysteria, by the way, meant wandering uterus.

01:07:49.400 That's the derivation of the term.

01:07:51.180 And sometimes removal of the uterus was a cure for hysteria.

01:07:56.120 It's very much analogous to what's going on now.

01:07:58.840 And hysteria took on a very narrowly culturally defined pathway.

01:08:04.560 So, hysterical women were very dramatic.

01:08:07.840 And the Victorian culture was very theatrical, especially in the upper class echelons where hysteria was more probable.

01:08:15.040 Just like anorexia was more common among upper middle class girls in particular.

01:08:21.180 And so, it was very theatrical.

01:08:23.340 It involved a lot of shortness of breath.

01:08:25.480 It involved physical weakness.

01:08:27.200 And it involved fainting, sort of dramatic fainting.

01:08:30.260 And that became a psychological epidemic, hysteria.

01:08:34.960 And then there's waves of psychological epidemics.

01:08:37.760 They happen very frequently, probably about one a generation, as it turns out.

01:08:41.940 And there's a literature tracing the outbreak of psychogenic epidemics going back 300 years.

01:08:49.560 The master document on that front is a book called The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri Ellenbergé, which is an absolutely brilliant book.

01:09:00.200 An analysis of 350 years of clinical endeavor.

01:09:04.340 A brilliant book.

01:09:05.140 Anyways, when the pronoun controversy first emerged, I told the Canadian Senate that if we mucked about with these fundamental categories, we were going to produce a psychological epidemic because I knew this literature.

01:09:18.280 When you were being trained back in your 20s, did anybody ever talk to you about the existence of psychological epidemics?

01:09:29.000 Not once.

01:09:29.680 And not hysteria, not contagion, nothing.

01:09:32.680 Not, okay.

01:09:34.980 So we could list them out as they've manifested themselves over the last five decades.

01:09:40.320 So cutting was a psychological epidemic.

01:09:43.820 Anorexia was a psychological epidemic.

01:09:46.160 Bulimia was a psychological epidemic.

01:09:49.000 There was a satanic daycare abuse scandal epidemic in the 1980s.

01:09:56.640 And that's, well, that covers about the last 60 years.

01:09:59.280 So that's a lot of psychological epidemics.

01:10:01.680 And it turns out to be the case that the people most prone to psychogenic epidemics are pubertal girls.

01:10:11.040 Now, why that is, I don't know.

01:10:13.500 You know, I think maybe it's because girls hit puberty earlier than boys.

01:10:18.180 And so they're not as prepared, let's say, neurologically to deal with the rapid demand for maturation that puberty imposes upon them.

01:10:28.900 But also that with puberty, with girls, you get an increase in negative emotion and body sensitivity.

01:10:35.140 So maybe that's what tilts girls in that direction.

01:10:38.460 But we don't know.

01:10:39.420 But boys are less prone to that contagion for whatever reason.

01:10:44.540 And so it's certainly the case that the most accurate diagnostic decision with relationship to the massive explosion of so-called gender dysphoria in the last five years is that it's another example of social contagion.

01:11:00.220 But you said when you were trained that none of that literature was even, you weren't even exposed to it.

01:11:06.480 So you didn't know that that was even a possibility.

01:11:08.420 Not at all.

01:11:09.020 And nor, you know, again, way before social media takes off.

01:11:14.620 You know, that's not there either where the guidelines were out there.

01:11:21.680 So, no.

01:11:22.280 So, okay, so have you developed any expertise in the intervening years about psychological epidemics, psychogenic epidemics?

01:11:32.340 Oh, absolutely.

01:11:33.160 And I think that's a big piece of why I sort of stepped away.

01:11:37.540 And one of the things I did notice when I was doing the training in adults, I would say my, so I did do both adults and children in my practice, right?

01:11:48.380 I would say primarily I went with children because that's the fastest growing career at that time.

01:11:56.460 But when I was doing it, yeah, when I was doing adults, the percentage of male to female, I would say it was 80% male to female in adults, whereas it's the opposite with kids.

01:12:10.960 So when I treated, and that's, I think, why one of your letters was even more profound, it was 80% of the kids I treated were born female.

01:12:22.540 And one of the things that, again, that's difficult about this is that we can't have conversations around this.

01:12:30.860 And why wouldn't I see such an increase happening in adults if this was happening, if this is accepted and the literature is out there?

01:12:38.980 I would expect that I would see a great increase of adults identifying as this, and I did not see that.

01:12:46.400 So one of the counter, one of the counterclaims that's been put forward with some degree of insistence in recent years is that we're not seeing a psychogenic epidemic.

01:12:57.240 What we're seeing instead is the fact that there was a lot more variability in sexual identity than the oppressive patriarchal culture had allowed to make manifest.

01:13:10.080 And now that we've taken off the restrictions, people are just reverting or they're now allowed or encouraged to express their true identity.

01:13:18.520 And so that's actually accessible, because imagine now that we have a lot more people who are claiming attraction to both sexes on the sexual front.

01:13:30.240 Now, what you should see as a consequence of that is that the rates of cross-sex sexual contact would increase, right?

01:13:39.600 But what's happening instead, as far as I've been able to tell, is that although up to 20% of young people now claim an identity somewhere on the LGBT spectrum, LGBT+, and definitely the plus is the crucial issue there, they claim identity on the LGBT plus spectrum.

01:13:59.740 But if you look at their actual sexual behavior, that hasn't changed a bit.

01:14:03.380 So, for example, most girls who claim to be bisexual, for example, have only sexual experience to the degree that they have any with boys.

01:14:13.960 That hasn't moved at all.

01:14:15.660 And so that's very interesting to me.

01:14:17.100 It's actually quite surprising, because I would have thought that the psychological pressure would have been sufficient to not only move identity claims, but actually to move behavior to some degree.

01:14:30.220 You know, at least to increase experimentation.

01:14:32.140 But that actually doesn't seem to be the case, which is more evidence that that initial orientation, gender orientation and sexual orientation is, you know, much more solidly set than the social constructionists certainly claim.

01:14:46.600 And I think one of my things that I want to point out is, I really felt that I was signing off on agreeing for a medical intervention, not an identity.

01:14:57.460 And that's what we're signing off on now.

01:14:59.340 And I do think it's very unique that this is the only medical thing I sign off on for children in my field.

01:15:07.000 There is not one other medical diagnosis that I can give to a child that would give them medical treatment.

01:15:15.380 And we aren't trained for that, let alone what they are coming back with, you know, in terms of cancer and sexual issues.

01:15:23.580 And they are not going to receive orgasm.

01:15:27.400 And most therapists aren't ready to talk about that with the typical client, let alone someone who now takes 25 minutes to drop urine in the bathroom now after post-surgery.

01:15:41.000 So I just don't even think we understand what we're doing.

01:15:45.320 Right, absolutely.

01:15:46.560 It's one of the things that shocked me when I first interviewed Abigail Schreier, because I'm a reasonably well-educated clinician, but I am not a physician.

01:15:56.600 And so I didn't really understand the full ramifications or even the full extent of what's being referred to euphemistically in this pathological manner as bottom and top surgery.

01:16:08.700 I didn't realize, for example, that in order to construct a penis that will never work properly, by the way, either as an organ of excretion or an organ of sexual pleasure or reproduction, that the victim's arm is going to be stripped of its musculature, essentially right down to the bone, leaving nothing for about a five-inch piece except bone covered with skin,

01:16:36.460 so that the muscles can be harvested, so that a dysfunctional penis equivalent can be fabricated.

01:16:45.800 And that's just one of the cataclysmic consequences of the full surgical nightmare.

01:16:51.400 Nor do they understand that, and nor do they understand.

01:16:55.140 I've had to teach people who are going to be presenting as male who want to have sex with males, and I have to explain to them, you know, you have a cervical spine, and sex will be different.

01:17:10.000 They don't understand that.

01:17:11.800 These kids that are doing it, they have no idea that they won't have functional reproductive organs anymore.

01:17:19.500 Well, and with Chloe Cole, for example, we delved into the issue of breast reconstruction.

01:17:26.800 So she had a double mastectomy when she was 15.

01:17:29.880 Now, the double mastectomies, first of all, I do believe they're a cardinal act of unforgivable butchery.

01:17:36.500 I think that people who have done that to minors should be put in prison.

01:17:40.220 That's my belief.

01:17:41.640 Now, here's partly why.

01:17:43.840 I mean, first of all, you don't remove healthy body parts from minors.

01:17:47.420 That's like, let's make that rule number one.

01:17:50.360 But the other issue there is the sheer destructiveness of it.

01:17:55.120 Not only will those women, now they don't have breasts, they'll never be able to breastfeed, which is a real cataclysm for their children because breastfeeding is actually necessary for children.

01:18:05.640 Let's make that perfectly clear.

01:18:07.380 They develop much better if they're breastfed.

01:18:09.560 They're much more intelligent, and they're more bonded with their mother.

01:18:13.200 And that's a crucial part of early development.

01:18:15.120 So it's not something that can be replaceable with formula.

01:18:19.940 But in addition to that, not only are the breasts removed and then hypothetically reconstructed, but the nipples are removed and then replaced.

01:18:31.040 Now, first of all, that might work and it might not.

01:18:33.740 And in Cole's case, it didn't work very well because she never healed properly.

01:18:37.760 But it also means that all the erotic potential of that area has now been permanently sacrificed.

01:18:44.460 And that's a major loss.

01:18:45.820 I mean, there aren't that many primary sources of pleasure in life.

01:18:48.620 And to eradicate someone's capability for erotic pleasure in that manner, in this high-handed way, at the age of 15 is absolutely, well, I think it's absolutely unforgivable.

01:19:01.820 I think it's criminally unforgivable, especially given that it's been rushed.

01:19:06.440 You know, and I'd also like to point out for everyone who's listening, just to make sure that this is as dark as it can possibly be, because it should be, is that, you know, different professions attract different kinds of people.

01:19:18.180 And so, in media, entertainment, and politics, a disproportionate number of narcissists are attracted.

01:19:27.620 Now, that doesn't mean that everybody in those domains is narcissistic, although that's a risk.

01:19:33.960 What it does mean is that if you are narcissistic, you're going to gravitate towards professions where there's a lot of public attention.

01:19:44.140 Okay, so let's think about surgery for a moment.

01:19:48.480 Now, the upside of surgery is that you get to be a surgeon and that you can help people.

01:19:53.120 But the downside of surgery is you get to cut people up.

01:19:58.800 Now, if you're particularly empathic, the probability that you're going to be a surgeon is pretty damn low, because if you're particularly empathic, the barrier to having to make the hard decisions and actually make incisions and that sort of thing, that's very, that's a very high barrier on the empathy side.

01:20:15.840 So, generally speaking, you're going to get surgeons who are lower in empathy, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

01:20:22.300 But the ultimate extreme of that is that, and this happens in nursing as well, and it happens in childcare, and it happens in the care of old people, is that there is a non-trivial percentage of people in those occupations who have a sadistic bent.

01:20:37.660 And if you don't think that's true, then, well, then you don't know.

01:20:40.740 You certainly don't know enough to be a therapist, and you certainly don't know enough to formulate policy properly.

01:20:46.240 And I'm certainly not saying that all surgeons are sadistic, but I am saying if you are sadistic and you have a medical bent, then surgery is a perfectly lovely place to end up.

01:20:56.960 And I can't help but wonder in my darker moments just how much underground pleasure the butchers are taking in precisely their butchery.

01:21:04.700 And so, you know, people might think, well, do we really have to go there?

01:21:08.780 And the answer is, well, when you're starting to strip the forearm musculature off 15-year-olds to build them a penis that will never work,

01:21:16.720 and you're charging them $500,000 to do that over their lifetime, and you're putting them on the medical mill,

01:21:23.400 and you're funding your goddamn hospital not in least as a consequence of these surgical procedures, then, yes, we have to go there.

01:21:31.440 That Rachel Levine, who's, you know, the poster child for the trans movement in the Biden White House,

01:21:38.340 has his emails documenting his rumination and concern about how to make the medical transition process maximally profitable

01:21:51.300 have been well-documented on, well, in the public now.

01:21:55.420 And so, if you don't think greed is driving this, this kind of narrow greed allied with a kind of sadism,

01:22:01.600 then you're not thinking.

01:22:03.900 The other thing that's happening, too, and you can comment on this maybe as a clinician,

01:22:07.860 is that, you know, when you make a cataclysmic decision in your life,

01:22:13.480 like you're male and you think, I'm female,

01:22:16.060 and then you go and do what's necessary to transform yourself into an ersatz female,

01:22:21.920 there's going to be a big part of you that has some major doubts,

01:22:25.240 and that's never going to go away.

01:22:27.440 And you could deal with those doubts honestly and accept it as a cost of your decision,

01:22:31.940 or you could do this.

01:22:34.560 You could decide to go out and beat the drum about just how right you were,

01:22:39.760 and you could push that all the way to the point where you're now convincing children

01:22:44.060 that it would be in their best interest to do exactly what you did,

01:22:47.780 instead of facing up to the fact that, you know,

01:22:50.120 maybe you have some qualms about your radical decision.

01:22:53.760 And so that's rationalization and justification,

01:22:57.780 externalization also, all of that, mostly rationalization,

01:23:02.600 and that can become unbelievably pathological.

01:23:04.920 And I certainly see that in the so-called trans community.

01:23:07.840 It's like, well, not only are we like this,

01:23:10.780 but everyone should be like this, including children.

01:23:15.600 And I see that, also see that kind of insanely narcissistic psychopathology

01:23:21.780 emerging on the drag queen story hour front.

01:23:26.200 Because what I see when I look at that with a clinician's eye

01:23:29.940 is that you have narcissistic mothers in particular

01:23:33.440 who are dramatically portraying their creative openness and their compassion

01:23:41.680 by exposing their children to adult males who are autogynophilic,

01:23:48.860 who are dressed up in lingerie,

01:23:50.720 who are dancing seductively in front of them

01:23:53.680 as a display of the mother's moral virtue.

01:23:58.020 And that's Munchausen by proxy for all intents and purposes.

01:24:02.140 And, of course, I would also be curious,

01:24:05.060 when you were trained as a therapist to begin with,

01:24:09.920 did your instructors ever talk to you about Munchausen syndrome

01:24:13.940 or Munchausen by proxy?

01:24:16.340 No.

01:24:17.260 And I had to come across that later in my practice,

01:24:20.780 which is really what that was kind of the final case

01:24:24.480 where I saw in front of me a mother really present this for her child

01:24:30.560 in a way that, you know, I think if you spoke to...

01:24:34.680 Can you talk about that a bit?

01:24:36.580 So I know you can't, you know...

01:24:38.480 Yeah.

01:24:39.560 ...dispense with confidentiality, but what did you see?

01:24:43.300 Yeah.

01:24:43.760 I mean, so, first of all,

01:24:47.000 a parent presenting the case was a very unique situation

01:24:52.080 of this is how it's happened,

01:24:53.900 this is how my kid presented,

01:24:56.000 and the kid not being able to articulate the same story,

01:25:01.920 but going along with it.

01:25:03.780 And I will tell you, I mean,

01:25:05.940 for anybody who is struggling with mental health,

01:25:09.660 a lot of times when you get a diagnosis,

01:25:11.840 there's a freedom in that.

01:25:13.240 There's a, oh, at least I know what's going on.

01:25:16.500 So I don't think we get at that.

01:25:19.320 When we give them an answer,

01:25:21.240 that makes them feel good.

01:25:23.420 At least I know what's happening.

01:25:25.400 So for a kid, I saw him, like,

01:25:29.960 being taught what was happening to him

01:25:32.380 instead of it was already happening to him.

01:25:36.180 And this was a very wild case

01:25:39.040 and where I suggested to hold back

01:25:42.780 and wait on giving them hormones.

01:25:46.340 And the courts overrode what I said.

01:25:50.840 And the doctors went ahead,

01:25:53.360 even though I suggested to hold.

01:25:56.080 And that father lost his rights

01:25:57.960 and ultimately did take his life.

01:26:02.840 Yeah, well, look, you can imagine.

01:26:04.440 So here's the terrible Oedipal situation.

01:26:07.680 So imagine that you have a mother

01:26:09.380 who's very immature and narcissistic, right?

01:26:11.620 Then she has a child

01:26:13.280 who manifests some forms of misbehavior

01:26:17.840 as all children do,

01:26:18.940 but maybe a little bit more extreme, you know?

01:26:21.380 And then the woman is casting about

01:26:24.000 for reasons why her relationship

01:26:27.860 with her child is disturbed,

01:26:29.480 which is causing her suffering.

01:26:32.280 Well, especially if she's narcissistic

01:26:34.860 and immature,

01:26:35.900 the easy route out of that

01:26:37.200 is to assume that there's something

01:26:39.240 fundamentally wrong with the child.

01:26:42.240 Okay, now then you ally that

01:26:44.220 with the narcissistic desire

01:26:45.920 for unwarranted status.

01:26:48.840 And the mother learns very rapidly

01:26:50.520 that if her child is trans,

01:26:52.960 that's pretty damn trendy and cool.

01:26:54.840 And she can get a reputation

01:26:56.480 among her local community

01:26:58.440 for being incredibly progressive

01:27:00.500 and compassionate and caring.

01:27:02.400 And she can shine in her virtue.

01:27:05.120 So I'll give you an example of this.

01:27:06.620 When Ron DeSantis went after Disney,

01:27:11.240 one of the Disney executives,

01:27:13.280 there was a video that was released

01:27:15.740 where a number of Disney executives

01:27:17.940 were talking about their efforts

01:27:21.960 to push the LGBT plus agenda

01:27:26.180 using the Disney entertainment apparatus.

01:27:29.180 And this woman who,

01:27:30.700 if I remember correctly,

01:27:32.200 was in charge of domestic programming

01:27:34.260 for Disney,

01:27:35.100 very well situated

01:27:36.640 in the corporate

01:27:38.300 C-suite office.

01:27:43.440 And she said in the video

01:27:45.940 that she had a five-year-old

01:27:48.560 and a seven-year-old

01:27:49.500 and one of them was trans

01:27:52.100 and the other was pansexual.

01:27:55.940 Okay, and so then I did a quick

01:27:57.280 statistical calculation.

01:28:00.360 Okay, so the probability

01:28:01.520 that as a given mother

01:28:03.960 that you would have a trans child,

01:28:06.260 truly trans,

01:28:07.520 by the definitions of 20 years ago,

01:28:10.020 is one in 3,000 approximately.

01:28:12.740 And the probability

01:28:13.800 that you'd have a pansexual child,

01:28:16.260 whatever the hell that is,

01:28:17.820 because that only emerged

01:28:19.080 like three years ago,

01:28:20.180 is obviously less than one in 3,000.

01:28:23.360 But let's call it one in 3,000.

01:28:25.580 Okay, the joint probability

01:28:27.980 that you would have a trans child

01:28:29.860 and a pansexual child

01:28:31.440 is one in nine million.

01:28:34.560 And so what that means,

01:28:36.140 diagnostically,

01:28:37.020 is if you were evaluating

01:28:38.780 that woman and her children,

01:28:41.180 you would have a 2,999,999 to one

01:28:46.940 probability that you were accurate

01:28:49.240 if you diagnosed her as narcissistic.

01:28:52.520 Right.

01:28:53.180 So what is it?

01:28:54.980 Nine million.

01:28:56.100 It's, sorry, it's 8,999,999.

01:28:59.860 It's one chance in nine million

01:29:01.640 that she's not a narcissist.

01:29:05.920 Right.

01:29:06.380 Now, narcissism in the general population,

01:29:09.900 like at clinical levels,

01:29:11.700 probably afflicts about 4% of people.

01:29:15.000 So 4% of mothers, let's say,

01:29:17.480 have that tilt towards narcissism.

01:29:20.000 And there's going to be

01:29:21.400 a substantial proportion of them,

01:29:24.460 one-tenth maybe,

01:29:25.740 God only knows what it is,

01:29:27.220 who are perfectly willing

01:29:28.480 to sacrifice their children

01:29:30.060 to their narcissistic delusions.

01:29:31.740 And now that's not only

01:29:33.240 being enabled by therapists,

01:29:35.180 it's being demanded by lawmakers

01:29:37.740 that therapists enable that.

01:29:40.160 And so that's the,

01:29:42.040 so you add,

01:29:43.400 would you rather have a trans child

01:29:44.760 or a dead child?

01:29:46.320 And Chloe Cole's parents

01:29:47.600 got caught in that trap.

01:29:49.080 And that's terrifying for parents,

01:29:51.020 you know,

01:29:51.240 if they're facing severe distress

01:29:52.700 on the part of their children

01:29:53.900 and a medical professional says,

01:29:55.760 well, you know,

01:29:56.500 you're pretty prejudiced

01:29:57.640 and if you just drop the prejudice,

01:29:59.160 your child won't cut their throat.

01:30:01.540 And so you have a trans child

01:30:02.960 and that'll be a problem,

01:30:04.060 but better than them being dead.

01:30:06.140 So they're terrified

01:30:06.940 out of their skull on that front.

01:30:09.000 And then you add

01:30:09.680 the narcissism problem to that.

01:30:11.880 And then you add the fact

01:30:13.080 that now therapists

01:30:14.040 are mandated by law

01:30:15.200 to do gender affirmation care.

01:30:17.140 And you add the sadism and greed

01:30:19.140 of the people on the medical side.

01:30:21.140 Well, you have a perfect storm

01:30:22.440 in relationship to producing

01:30:23.660 a psychological epidemic.

01:30:25.500 And so that's exactly

01:30:26.520 what we have on our hands.

01:30:27.800 And I do want to say this,

01:30:29.000 and I hope it doesn't

01:30:30.240 get me in trouble.

01:30:31.260 And I'm sure that people will come

01:30:34.800 and have the opposite to say.

01:30:37.720 One thing I will say

01:30:39.440 with this obsession with identity,

01:30:43.300 if this was really going on,

01:30:45.200 I would see this increase across races.

01:30:48.920 I didn't.

01:30:50.780 The majority of this is happening

01:30:52.540 to white Caucasians.

01:30:55.860 And I can't...

01:30:56.420 Yeah, well, you know,

01:30:57.040 that's a strange thing,

01:30:58.440 because the same was true

01:30:59.780 for anorexia and bulimia.

01:31:01.580 Yeah.

01:31:01.860 You know, and it was not only...

01:31:03.940 And it's an interesting thing

01:31:05.480 to speculate about, you know,

01:31:06.820 because it's not obvious

01:31:07.700 why that is.

01:31:09.920 We know that more liberal

01:31:12.240 white girls

01:31:13.740 are much more likely

01:31:15.200 to be depressed and anxious.

01:31:17.520 Correct.

01:31:17.760 And I think, so maybe the link

01:31:20.240 with dysphoria is that

01:31:22.420 radically unconstrained freedom

01:31:26.320 is destabilized.

01:31:27.740 Yes.

01:31:28.320 Right?

01:31:28.800 You know, so here's an example.

01:31:30.400 If you have a three-year-old kid

01:31:31.580 and maybe they have

01:31:32.380 30 outfits in their closet

01:31:34.960 and you open the door

01:31:36.260 and you say,

01:31:36.660 you can pick whatever you want,

01:31:38.460 the child will also often

01:31:39.880 be confused by that.

01:31:41.520 And so, and if you say,

01:31:43.040 look, you have to wear this,

01:31:44.860 then they'll be annoyed.

01:31:45.940 Yes.

01:31:46.300 But if you lay like three outfits

01:31:48.800 on the table, on the bed

01:31:50.080 and you say,

01:31:50.600 which of those do you like?

01:31:52.140 The child will pick one

01:31:53.140 and be perfectly happy.

01:31:54.520 Now there's a consumer choice

01:31:55.920 literature like that too.

01:31:57.300 So you might imagine,

01:31:58.160 imagine you go to the pharmacy

01:31:59.500 and you have only one shampoo to buy.

01:32:03.280 Well, you're not very happy about that

01:32:04.840 because there's one damn shampoo.

01:32:06.400 I mean, who cares really?

01:32:07.560 But you get the point.

01:32:08.880 Now imagine instead

01:32:09.840 that there were 200.

01:32:11.740 You think, well, that's great.

01:32:12.800 Look at all the choice.

01:32:13.880 But what you find is,

01:32:14.900 well, if there's 200 shampoos,

01:32:17.280 the probability that you pick

01:32:18.880 the best shampoo is zero.

01:32:21.540 Because like,

01:32:21.960 what the hell do you know

01:32:22.780 about shampoo?

01:32:23.880 And so it turns out

01:32:24.820 that there's this nexus

01:32:26.220 where there's the proper

01:32:27.760 amount of choice.

01:32:29.180 And it's a choice

01:32:30.140 between a couple of alternatives.

01:32:31.900 This is what you do

01:32:32.560 when you play a game.

01:32:33.540 You know, when you play chess,

01:32:34.640 you can't use a basketball.

01:32:36.680 But there's some things

01:32:37.540 you can do

01:32:38.080 in just the right amount.

01:32:39.080 And the problem

01:32:40.520 with the radical,

01:32:42.040 liberal, subjective whim

01:32:43.560 identity theory

01:32:44.540 is that people drown

01:32:46.140 in possibility.

01:32:47.500 It's like,

01:32:48.180 well, who are you?

01:32:49.580 You're telling your kid.

01:32:50.760 You can be anything you want.

01:32:53.200 What do you mean?

01:32:53.920 Do you mean anything?

01:32:55.460 You mean anything?

01:32:56.500 Do you mean I can be a girl?

01:32:58.440 Do you mean I can be a boy?

01:32:59.520 Can I be both?

01:33:00.820 Can I be neither?

01:33:02.040 Can I change that moment to moment?

01:33:04.060 Yes, dear.

01:33:05.040 You can be anything.

01:33:06.200 Can I be a pussycat?

01:33:07.820 Now, you talked about furries.

01:33:09.960 Let's talk about that for a minute.

01:33:11.440 What have you seen on that front?

01:33:13.060 Yes, and I actually got

01:33:14.160 a lot of pushback

01:33:15.020 off of this small piece

01:33:16.680 in the documentary.

01:33:18.840 Yeah, I have kids

01:33:20.620 coming to schools

01:33:22.800 and teachers saying

01:33:24.200 we're not doing anything

01:33:25.560 because they're saying

01:33:26.400 it's a queer identity.

01:33:27.860 Now, again,

01:33:28.960 I hear from the queer individuals

01:33:32.700 that they do not own the furries.

01:33:34.540 So I want to make that

01:33:35.520 very clear right now.

01:33:37.000 But they are coming to school

01:33:40.200 with tails and meowing

01:33:42.320 and there is a subgroup

01:33:44.820 and I don't think people

01:33:45.580 really understand

01:33:46.660 the dangerous slope

01:33:47.920 of these chat rooms

01:33:50.740 and these rooms.

01:33:53.660 And you talked about it

01:33:54.560 a little bit earlier.

01:33:55.340 One of the scarier

01:33:56.900 new trends I'm seeing

01:33:58.580 is human sacrifice

01:34:00.060 coming up

01:34:01.180 and talking about it.

01:34:02.060 Kids are playing

01:34:03.060 human sacrifice

01:34:04.520 out with dolls

01:34:05.680 and, you know,

01:34:07.260 I've seen exorcisms

01:34:08.340 and stuff,

01:34:09.040 but where are they

01:34:10.100 learning this?

01:34:10.740 And it's actually

01:34:11.620 being taught

01:34:12.500 through rituals

01:34:14.600 in the LGBT community

01:34:16.480 and through

01:34:17.880 these chat rooms.

01:34:19.800 So these cosplay

01:34:21.940 personas that they're

01:34:23.340 taking on,

01:34:24.800 again,

01:34:25.580 this focus on identity.

01:34:27.240 Who are you?

01:34:28.220 And they are saying...

01:34:31.120 Well, a lot of that

01:34:31.840 does look like,

01:34:32.680 again,

01:34:33.040 that looks like

01:34:33.780 pathologically suppressed

01:34:35.540 pretend play.

01:34:37.200 You know,

01:34:38.640 Yach Panksepp noted

01:34:39.920 when he was studying

01:34:40.940 the development of play

01:34:42.200 in rats

01:34:43.520 that if you deprived

01:34:45.340 juvenile males

01:34:46.700 in particular

01:34:47.320 of the opportunity

01:34:49.500 to engage

01:34:50.920 in rough and tumble play,

01:34:52.180 that number one,

01:34:52.880 their prefrontal cortexes

01:34:54.100 wouldn't mature.

01:34:55.420 Number two,

01:34:56.020 they were hyperactive.

01:34:57.640 And number three,

01:34:58.560 that if you then

01:34:59.340 allowed them to play,

01:35:00.380 they would play

01:35:00.900 extremely intensely

01:35:02.640 and aggressively

01:35:03.440 in an attempt

01:35:05.000 to catch up.

01:35:05.740 So imagine

01:35:06.260 in these situations

01:35:07.220 what you're getting

01:35:07.920 is rebound

01:35:09.160 pretend play,

01:35:10.660 is that kids

01:35:11.320 have been deprived

01:35:12.120 of pretend play early.

01:35:13.820 And so when they find

01:35:15.120 these virtual forums

01:35:16.740 where they can engage

01:35:17.780 in fantasy,

01:35:19.660 you know,

01:35:20.580 too much later

01:35:21.800 than should have occurred

01:35:22.600 from a developmental perspective,

01:35:23.880 that that can just

01:35:25.060 go completely astray.

01:35:26.920 You know,

01:35:27.120 I think the autogynephilia

01:35:28.540 that characterizes

01:35:29.940 these 40-year-old men

01:35:31.360 is a form of repressed

01:35:33.260 pretend play.

01:35:34.560 Now,

01:35:34.880 by that time,

01:35:35.720 it becomes sexualized.

01:35:37.100 You know,

01:35:37.460 when kids are three and four,

01:35:39.220 there's not a lot

01:35:39.920 of sexual impetus

01:35:41.320 in their pretend play.

01:35:42.500 There's some,

01:35:43.140 but not much.

01:35:44.320 But if it's suppressed

01:35:45.760 until adolescence

01:35:46.860 or later,

01:35:47.580 then,

01:35:48.160 well,

01:35:48.320 the sexual element

01:35:49.080 is also going to,

01:35:50.320 what do you say,

01:35:52.200 make itself manifest.

01:35:54.400 And these are also things

01:35:55.580 that we understand

01:35:56.420 virtually not at all.

01:35:57.780 Let me close

01:35:58.480 with another question,

01:35:59.860 okay?

01:36:00.720 And,

01:36:01.000 well,

01:36:02.560 look,

01:36:03.060 you went into

01:36:04.880 the therapy

01:36:05.960 business

01:36:07.260 as an empathic person

01:36:09.260 with some interest

01:36:10.240 in the domain

01:36:12.440 of sexual behavior.

01:36:13.920 And you strived

01:36:15.820 to work

01:36:17.480 as a compassionate person

01:36:18.920 and to do

01:36:20.480 what you could

01:36:21.180 to act

01:36:22.440 in the best interests

01:36:23.320 of people

01:36:23.840 who,

01:36:24.340 let's say,

01:36:24.700 were marginalized.

01:36:25.940 And that went astray.

01:36:29.500 Why?

01:36:31.020 And what do you think,

01:36:32.380 what do you want

01:36:33.200 to tell

01:36:33.740 want-to-be therapists

01:36:35.820 and currently

01:36:36.660 practicing therapists

01:36:37.880 about what you've learned

01:36:39.520 and about how they should

01:36:40.860 adjust their attitudes

01:36:42.460 and behavior accordingly?

01:36:43.740 Oh,

01:36:47.120 a lot.

01:36:48.940 I guess I would say

01:36:50.640 to therapists

01:36:52.020 is to

01:36:53.080 really give informed

01:36:55.660 consent

01:36:56.900 and think about

01:36:58.080 that element

01:36:58.840 of practice

01:37:00.080 and what does it mean

01:37:01.340 to inform someone

01:37:03.120 about their

01:37:04.360 sexual reproduction,

01:37:06.360 their mental,

01:37:07.020 emotional health.

01:37:07.600 I mean,

01:37:08.720 not to mention

01:37:09.800 95% of these

01:37:12.360 patients will be

01:37:13.700 on antidepressants

01:37:14.780 for the rest

01:37:15.360 of their lives

01:37:16.100 and the training

01:37:18.560 of that.

01:37:20.400 That we've

01:37:21.280 talked to each other,

01:37:22.520 I think the scariest

01:37:23.680 thing is

01:37:24.380 is that

01:37:24.980 this isn't safe

01:37:26.440 to talk about

01:37:27.340 and now we are

01:37:28.700 signing off

01:37:29.520 on someone's identity

01:37:30.900 for the rest

01:37:32.240 of their life

01:37:32.920 and just

01:37:35.020 being able

01:37:36.280 to have

01:37:36.920 a dialogue

01:37:40.580 where

01:37:41.260 we have to

01:37:43.880 now discuss

01:37:45.040 detransitioners.

01:37:47.100 I don't think

01:37:47.560 we even understand

01:37:48.860 the implications

01:37:49.600 for most of these

01:37:50.960 people are going

01:37:51.500 to have cancer

01:37:52.020 within 15 years.

01:37:53.220 I mean,

01:37:53.380 when you

01:37:53.740 engage in hormones,

01:37:55.840 that is the risk

01:37:56.820 and that is what

01:37:57.400 we're telling people.

01:37:58.980 So we are telling

01:38:00.240 people that

01:38:01.280 the way to be

01:38:02.540 validated,

01:38:03.160 which by the way

01:38:03.740 will only be

01:38:04.540 outside life,

01:38:05.400 is

01:38:06.180 to get

01:38:09.000 affirmation.

01:38:10.720 To teach kids,

01:38:12.240 one of the things

01:38:12.980 I've heard more

01:38:13.600 recently is

01:38:14.560 people that are

01:38:15.380 transitioning are

01:38:16.180 not being honest

01:38:17.040 to physicians

01:38:17.640 about their real

01:38:18.760 assigned sex,

01:38:20.220 so they are going

01:38:21.180 into procedures

01:38:22.560 not telling

01:38:24.040 doctors

01:38:24.620 their gender,

01:38:26.120 so they are

01:38:26.760 getting prescribed

01:38:27.640 potentially harmful

01:38:29.020 medications

01:38:29.620 and really

01:38:31.040 neglecting their

01:38:32.440 health.

01:38:32.840 so just

01:38:34.520 advising people.

01:38:36.720 So Sarah,

01:38:37.720 one other question,

01:38:39.300 Sarah.

01:38:39.600 So now,

01:38:40.260 you participated

01:38:41.120 in this documentary,

01:38:42.620 in Matt Walter's

01:38:43.480 documentary,

01:38:44.120 and now you're

01:38:44.700 also talking to me

01:38:45.740 and this is going

01:38:46.640 to cause you

01:38:47.180 a substantial

01:38:47.760 amount of grief

01:38:48.760 and so

01:38:49.260 why

01:38:50.260 have you

01:38:52.820 done it?

01:38:53.780 What has it

01:38:54.620 done for you

01:38:55.700 to decide

01:38:56.980 that you were

01:38:57.780 willing to speak

01:38:58.680 out about this?

01:38:59.420 I mean,

01:38:59.720 because there's

01:39:00.100 huge risk

01:39:00.720 associated with it.

01:39:01.880 First of all,

01:39:02.360 you have to admit

01:39:03.080 that in many ways

01:39:04.040 you were misinformed

01:39:05.100 to begin with

01:39:06.340 and that that had

01:39:07.180 some pretty

01:39:07.660 devastating consequences

01:39:09.780 for you personally

01:39:11.100 but for other people

01:39:12.020 and that's a bitter

01:39:12.740 pill to swallow

01:39:13.520 but you're also

01:39:14.520 exposing yourself

01:39:15.520 to all sorts of

01:39:16.760 critical commentary

01:39:17.860 and allegations

01:39:18.620 of betrayal

01:39:19.740 and transphobia

01:39:21.240 and hatred.

01:39:23.040 Like,

01:39:23.780 why are you

01:39:24.780 doing this

01:39:25.620 and what has

01:39:26.480 doing this

01:39:27.300 done for you?

01:39:28.520 I'm doing it

01:39:31.720 for our children.

01:39:32.880 I think

01:39:33.540 they deserve

01:39:35.760 the truth

01:39:36.280 and they deserve

01:39:36.980 the best

01:39:37.620 outcomes possible.

01:39:39.080 I think even

01:39:39.700 if you speak

01:39:40.240 to people

01:39:40.840 who are trans

01:39:42.240 they would tell

01:39:43.640 you that

01:39:44.240 intervening

01:39:45.320 at a young age

01:39:46.100 is not the best

01:39:47.060 and we should

01:39:47.980 maybe really

01:39:48.820 reconsider this.

01:39:53.620 I have,

01:39:54.920 I'm not going

01:39:55.520 to lie,

01:39:56.520 personally

01:39:57.960 felt

01:39:58.660 very bad

01:40:00.860 that I was

01:40:02.180 a part

01:40:02.620 of this

01:40:03.260 and a part

01:40:04.540 of realizing

01:40:05.320 how quickly

01:40:07.100 it became

01:40:07.960 of how I

01:40:09.380 was put

01:40:10.840 in a position

01:40:11.640 to affirm

01:40:13.660 medical procedures

01:40:15.220 that would impact

01:40:16.560 them for the rest

01:40:17.220 of their life.

01:40:18.040 They are not

01:40:18.800 allowed to get

01:40:19.340 those medical

01:40:19.900 procedures

01:40:20.400 without a therapist

01:40:21.700 letter.

01:40:22.600 So there was

01:40:23.000 no choice.

01:40:25.620 Um,

01:40:27.960 I would have

01:40:31.300 I would have

01:40:31.860 parents

01:40:32.580 I would tell

01:40:33.440 parents to

01:40:34.420 get a second

01:40:36.600 opinion

01:40:37.060 with this

01:40:38.400 with what they're

01:40:39.200 doing to their

01:40:39.760 children

01:40:40.140 and to

01:40:41.580 continue to get

01:40:42.800 help

01:40:43.140 and just

01:40:44.760 that I feel

01:40:45.820 like I'm going

01:40:46.240 to spend

01:40:46.600 the rest of

01:40:47.060 my life

01:40:47.580 fighting for

01:40:48.700 children not

01:40:50.060 to be butchered

01:40:51.500 anymore.

01:40:52.020 You're at

01:40:54.320 a university

01:40:54.940 at the moment

01:40:55.520 which university?

01:40:57.480 I am

01:40:57.760 I work

01:40:58.420 out of

01:40:58.860 two

01:40:59.580 primarily

01:41:00.180 Syracuse University

01:41:01.340 and the

01:41:02.340 SUNY Empire State

01:41:03.180 College.

01:41:04.760 Okay and what's

01:41:05.380 your position

01:41:05.920 at those

01:41:06.440 at those

01:41:07.180 institutions?

01:41:08.280 Uh,

01:41:08.540 faculty at one

01:41:09.580 and then I

01:41:10.340 intern

01:41:10.900 I

01:41:11.280 supervise interns

01:41:12.980 at the other.

01:41:15.220 Okay and

01:41:15.920 what's your

01:41:16.540 faculty position?

01:41:17.920 What

01:41:18.080 what's your

01:41:18.820 what's your

01:41:19.280 title?

01:41:20.120 Uh,

01:41:21.520 lecture.

01:41:22.660 In human

01:41:23.460 development.

01:41:23.980 Okay and

01:41:24.340 okay so are

01:41:25.500 you an

01:41:26.020 adjunct?

01:41:26.620 Are you in

01:41:26.940 the tenure

01:41:27.300 stream?

01:41:28.540 I am

01:41:29.660 an adjunct

01:41:30.380 but I've

01:41:30.660 been there

01:41:30.900 15 years.

01:41:32.480 Okay do

01:41:33.000 you have

01:41:33.360 any tenure

01:41:34.040 protection at

01:41:34.820 all?

01:41:35.340 No.

01:41:36.580 No well

01:41:37.020 that's one

01:41:37.420 of the

01:41:37.700 convenient

01:41:38.080 things for

01:41:38.820 administrators

01:41:39.480 about adjunct

01:41:40.420 faculty and

01:41:41.160 that's something

01:41:41.660 we could just

01:41:42.220 delve into

01:41:42.860 slightly so

01:41:44.140 for everyone

01:41:44.760 watching and

01:41:45.400 listening over

01:41:46.560 the last few

01:41:47.320 decades the

01:41:48.560 proportion of

01:41:49.680 faculty members

01:41:50.960 at

01:41:51.280 university

01:41:51.960 who are

01:41:52.820 true faculty

01:41:53.900 members and

01:41:54.900 by that I mean

01:41:55.660 permanent full-time

01:41:56.860 employees with

01:41:58.020 some status

01:41:59.360 administrative

01:42:00.000 power decision

01:42:01.700 making capacity

01:42:02.720 decent salary

01:42:04.220 and protections

01:42:05.600 like tenure

01:42:06.460 protection for

01:42:07.360 example which

01:42:08.020 increases the

01:42:09.560 probability of

01:42:10.320 some degree of

01:42:10.940 free speech

01:42:11.540 that's all been

01:42:12.480 radically eradicated

01:42:13.680 so at least

01:42:14.360 40 percent of

01:42:15.980 so-called faculty

01:42:17.740 members at most

01:42:18.820 universities even

01:42:19.780 even the high-end

01:42:20.340 universities are

01:42:21.460 part-time

01:42:22.020 lectures who get

01:42:23.120 paid absolutely

01:42:24.140 nothing who

01:42:25.420 serve at the

01:42:26.220 whims of

01:42:27.020 tyrannical

01:42:28.380 bureaucratic

01:42:29.400 administrators who

01:42:30.600 like to have it

01:42:31.600 exactly that way

01:42:32.620 that's occurred

01:42:33.500 because the

01:42:34.080 faculty itself

01:42:35.560 has become

01:42:36.480 venal and

01:42:37.140 cowardly and is

01:42:37.920 perfectly willing

01:42:38.580 to let the

01:42:39.180 administration

01:42:39.840 exploit adjunct

01:42:42.240 lectures so that

01:42:43.140 they don't have to

01:42:43.960 do the full-time

01:42:45.020 faculty too much

01:42:45.980 teaching so it's

01:42:47.200 a pretty appalling

01:42:48.180 business I've heard

01:42:49.360 from adjunct

01:42:50.100 faculty members

01:42:50.880 who are paid so

01:42:51.800 little for their

01:42:52.740 efforts that they

01:42:53.400 have to sleep in

01:42:54.340 their car and so

01:42:56.120 all right so you

01:42:57.240 can express some

01:42:58.280 concerns about being

01:42:59.200 fired and I you

01:43:00.860 know the truth of

01:43:01.880 the matter is that

01:43:02.620 in your situation is

01:43:03.760 you they basically

01:43:04.700 have no protection

01:43:05.420 at all for your

01:43:06.140 position at the

01:43:06.840 university so what

01:43:08.480 do you think is

01:43:09.060 going to happen to

01:43:09.800 you as a consequence

01:43:10.680 of being of talking

01:43:12.820 to me for example

01:43:13.820 which is certainly a

01:43:14.760 reprehensible thing

01:43:15.620 to do and how

01:43:16.860 why are you

01:43:17.840 prepared to deal

01:43:18.740 with those

01:43:19.200 consequences yes I

01:43:21.360 mean I have my

01:43:23.260 primary focus is

01:43:24.560 clinical so I can

01:43:26.400 in some sense be

01:43:28.620 prepared for that if

01:43:29.640 I want to I

01:43:30.460 definitely enjoy

01:43:32.340 teaching but because

01:43:34.880 Syracuse University

01:43:35.840 is where I I

01:43:37.200 employ their

01:43:37.920 graduate interns by

01:43:40.220 doing this interview

01:43:40.920 I'm more or less

01:43:41.840 probably stating I

01:43:42.880 don't agree with

01:43:44.060 your ideology

01:43:45.200 strategy and they

01:43:46.940 might have concerns

01:43:47.660 with that people

01:43:48.860 who do know me

01:43:49.820 would know that I

01:43:51.600 still will give an

01:43:53.700 informed consent

01:43:54.780 assessment if someone

01:43:56.040 would like if they

01:43:56.700 call I let them know

01:43:58.140 it might be one to

01:43:58.880 two years they

01:44:00.120 usually do not

01:44:01.440 yeah continue so my

01:44:05.020 concern will be is

01:44:06.300 that they're thinking

01:44:08.120 that I'm against what

01:44:09.560 they are for and I'm

01:44:12.300 not I just want

01:44:13.360 conversations but I

01:44:16.040 have I have talked

01:44:16.940 to people about like

01:44:19.200 you and there's there

01:44:22.080 seems to be no in

01:44:23.680 between I am making a

01:44:25.060 declaration of something

01:44:27.460 by going on to this

01:44:28.960 show with you so

01:44:31.080 so what what what are

01:44:34.080 going to be the

01:44:34.580 consequences for you

01:44:35.940 personally do you think

01:44:37.360 like you you've thought

01:44:38.420 about this obviously this

01:44:39.500 is a non-trivial

01:44:40.340 decision I mean lots of

01:44:41.820 people won't even talk

01:44:42.680 to me you know I'll give

01:44:43.760 you an example so there's

01:44:46.060 a cabinet minister in

01:44:47.280 Canada his name is

01:44:48.280 Morneau and he just

01:44:50.580 wrote a book critical of

01:44:51.940 Trudeau Trudeau is an

01:44:53.080 extraordinarily woke

01:44:54.080 politician our prime

01:44:55.100 minister and I reached

01:44:56.440 out to Bill Morneau to

01:44:58.260 see if he would talk to

01:44:59.460 me on my podcast about

01:45:00.560 his book now most

01:45:01.680 authors will many

01:45:02.960 authors will jump at

01:45:03.960 that chance because if

01:45:05.340 they do a podcast with

01:45:06.400 me the probability that

01:45:07.600 their book is going to

01:45:08.600 sell more copies is

01:45:10.180 extremely high but

01:45:11.840 Morneau refused and

01:45:13.680 so did another former

01:45:15.540 Trudeau cabinet member

01:45:16.780 Jody Wilson-Raybould

01:45:18.680 who was an indigenous

01:45:21.320 woman who was basically

01:45:22.500 drummed unceremoniously

01:45:24.240 out of the Trudeau

01:45:25.040 cabinet and you know

01:45:26.560 I'm on the liberal

01:45:27.880 reprehensible list so

01:45:29.300 thoroughly that I can't

01:45:30.380 get people on the left

01:45:31.260 to talk to me and I get

01:45:32.680 criticized for that it's

01:45:33.800 like why don't you talk

01:45:34.580 to people on the left

01:45:35.480 and the answer is well

01:45:36.320 I've been inviting them

01:45:37.620 for five years this is

01:45:39.140 particularly true of

01:45:40.020 Democrats in the US like

01:45:41.880 multiple times and they

01:45:44.420 just refused to talk to

01:45:45.660 me which is by the way a

01:45:46.740 pathology that's very

01:45:47.860 unique to the left you

01:45:49.580 know like I think I've

01:45:50.800 been pretty even-handed in

01:45:51.960 my treatment of people

01:45:53.000 across the political

01:45:53.840 spectrum but one of the

01:45:55.700 things I really have

01:45:56.540 noticed is that and this

01:45:58.320 is going back 15 years is

01:45:59.960 that my liberal friends

01:46:01.560 will refuse to talk to

01:46:03.840 people they'll I had

01:46:05.580 friends in Canada I had

01:46:07.880 this group called the

01:46:08.780 metapsychological club and

01:46:10.500 I invited a man from

01:46:12.680 western Canada Preston

01:46:14.780 Manning who built a whole

01:46:15.980 political party he was

01:46:17.320 conservative and fairly

01:46:18.820 socially conservative but

01:46:20.100 he built a whole political

01:46:21.100 party and then became leader

01:46:22.360 of the opposition in Canada

01:46:23.580 which is a big deal and I

01:46:25.780 invited him to our group

01:46:27.160 just to talk about how he

01:46:29.240 built the political party

01:46:30.400 because that's a really hard

01:46:31.260 thing to do and very

01:46:32.560 interesting psychologically and

01:46:34.260 three of my friends refused

01:46:36.180 to come to the meeting and

01:46:38.440 like that's that's like

01:46:39.840 refusing to meet you know

01:46:41.660 I mean I don't care what

01:46:43.000 your political orientation is

01:46:46.200 but to refuse to meet the

01:46:48.360 person who was next in line

01:46:50.240 to let's say the prime

01:46:51.380 ministership of the country

01:46:52.600 that's stunning and I've

01:46:54.160 seen the lefty types refuse

01:46:56.480 to engage in dialogue

01:46:57.680 constantly I never see that

01:46:59.680 literally I've never seen it

01:47:01.660 from someone on the right

01:47:03.120 they'll talk to anyone

01:47:04.460 now that isn't doesn't mean

01:47:05.800 they'll agree with them but

01:47:07.120 it's very interesting to me

01:47:08.800 to see that emerging so

01:47:10.080 comprehensively on the left

01:47:11.480 well now you're facing that

01:47:13.040 cancel culture and so now

01:47:14.820 you have a clinical practice

01:47:16.020 that you can fall back on

01:47:17.360 correct and I have a group

01:47:19.420 who was very supportive in

01:47:21.340 who I am and who I what I

01:47:22.960 speak about oh okay and and

01:47:25.440 are those family members and

01:47:26.820 friends are they professionals

01:47:28.060 no they're my professionals the

01:47:30.000 people that are my group

01:47:30.760 practice that I pick yeah you

01:47:33.420 know oh oh that's good so you

01:47:35.140 have a group of people and why

01:47:36.600 do they why do they agree with

01:47:38.280 you I think they know me and

01:47:40.920 that my heart is in it I I will

01:47:42.960 tell you my biggest fear with

01:47:44.800 going on it and was thinking

01:47:47.820 about some of my clients and

01:47:50.980 some of my clients who wrote

01:47:52.300 books and dedicated them to me

01:47:54.340 the trans clients feeling that

01:47:56.920 what I say would disorient who

01:47:59.320 they are and that was my

01:48:02.260 biggest fear and I think that's

01:48:04.600 where I just want to come to is

01:48:05.660 that I was never telling someone

01:48:09.100 who they were I was just agreeing

01:48:11.100 that we assess these domains

01:48:12.700 okay so let's delve into that a

01:48:16.520 little bit as as clinicians okay so

01:48:19.380 we're now required by statute to

01:48:21.800 affirm identity and this really

01:48:24.220 really disturbs me because my

01:48:26.520 sense of therapy and this is I

01:48:28.860 shouldn't say that if you're a

01:48:31.120 properly educated therapist and I

01:48:33.920 don't care at what level you're

01:48:35.260 practicing you neither affirm nor

01:48:38.360 deny identity now the contract I

01:48:41.980 made with my clients was that I

01:48:45.080 never liked Carl Rogers formulation

01:48:46.840 of unconditional positive regard and

01:48:49.360 Rogers was called on that by a

01:48:51.380 number of critics now I'm a great

01:48:52.740 admirer of Carl Rogers by the way but

01:48:54.460 I don't believe that what you offer

01:48:56.240 in therapy is unconditional positive

01:48:58.360 regard what you offer is something

01:49:00.300 more like you swear to have the best

01:49:03.580 in you serve the best in your

01:49:05.280 clients and so I would let my clients

01:49:07.380 know is that I'm on the side of you

01:49:09.540 that's trying to move towards health

01:49:12.500 and well-being I'm on that side and

01:49:15.440 I'll be an advocate for that now it's

01:49:17.620 not up to me to define what that is

01:49:19.680 for you partly because I don't know and

01:49:23.300 the reason I don't know is because

01:49:24.840 people are quite idiosyncratic right we

01:49:28.240 vary on five temperamental dimensions

01:49:30.680 and that's a lot of variation and so for

01:49:33.480 one client radically improving their

01:49:36.840 social connectedness might have been

01:49:38.980 extraordinarily helpful particularly if

01:49:41.620 they were extroverted but unpopular but

01:49:44.080 for another client increasing the amount of

01:49:46.460 time that they spent alone or in dyadic

01:49:49.960 relationship would have been the

01:49:51.640 positive thing to do because they were

01:49:53.040 introverted and so you have to this is

01:49:55.920 just like having kids is your kids are

01:49:58.040 different and there isn't a one-size

01:50:00.540 solution fits all and so what you have to

01:50:03.220 do as a therapist is neither affirm nor

01:50:07.000 deny you have to inquire and you said

01:50:10.440 you said that your sense was that proper

01:50:14.940 inquiry in relationship to sexual and

01:50:17.880 gender identity was a one to two year

01:50:20.160 process yes okay why did you come to that

01:50:23.740 conclusion now we have to understand you

01:50:25.720 came to that conclusion despite the fact

01:50:27.820 that you were tilted towards supporting

01:50:30.680 people who might regard it as necessary to

01:50:34.340 undergo a radical transformation absolutely

01:50:36.720 and we were and and during this time we were

01:50:39.420 denying people too and that was an important

01:50:42.660 distinction that I saw was people that were

01:50:44.900 held off you know that and we didn't get to

01:50:48.480 talk about it before but Planned Parenthood came

01:50:51.260 in the to to the picture and you know I think

01:50:55.360 2015 and was under the affordable care we're

01:51:01.220 giving hormones for free and there is no

01:51:03.740 psychological assessment and no baseline I

01:51:06.700 mean one of the things at least when you

01:51:09.260 refer them to an endocrinologist they were

01:51:11.200 taking these kids baselines that's not

01:51:14.380 happening at Planned Parenthood and you know

01:51:17.640 you can get all the estrogen and estrogen off

01:51:21.100 the streets for very cheap if not for free

01:51:23.920 and so that's a really scary aspect

01:51:28.720 Planned Parenthood had a Planned Parenthood had a

01:51:32.580 gender euphoria special where you could sign up

01:51:37.380 online I believe for $30 a month so you know for

01:51:40.880 five months that's $150 and in the medical

01:51:43.780 world that's no money at all and be fast

01:51:46.260 tracked towards puberty blockers hormone

01:51:49.160 replacement and then surgery because that's a

01:51:51.560 pretty rapid pipeline once it gets going with

01:51:54.160 literally not only with literally no clinical

01:51:57.640 analysis whatsoever but with every bit of

01:52:00.540 evidence that your decision to be radically

01:52:04.000 transformed with these incredibly powerful

01:52:06.800 pharmacological agents that would be

01:52:09.600 facilitated as rapidly as possible at the

01:52:12.500 lowest possible cost and so and they called

01:52:15.100 that I couldn't believe it gender use euphoria

01:52:18.120 so in presenting this to kids as if it was

01:52:21.320 going to be a pleasant you know top surgery

01:52:25.240 adventure and I can hardly imagine doing

01:52:28.440 something more pathological than that on the

01:52:30.600 clinical front it's it's appalling almost beyond

01:52:33.940 comprehension so okay so you figured let's let's

01:52:38.240 delve into that a little bit more because one of

01:52:39.980 the things I've really started to think about is

01:52:41.980 you know I have a friend who I like a lot liberal

01:52:45.180 guy very very smart and he has a relative who's he

01:52:50.620 thinks genuinely transgender now and I've met a

01:52:54.680 number of people who've undergone full transition

01:52:57.180 and lived as a member of the opposite sex and

01:53:00.580 before all this psychological epidemic nonsense got

01:53:05.220 started you could peg that frequency at about one in

01:53:08.140 three thousand this is pretty damn rare now I've been

01:53:12.340 wrestling in my own mind about the reality of that

01:53:16.580 claim because it's gone completely out of hand

01:53:19.660 and so you've got to go back to first principles you have to

01:53:23.000 ask yourself well are there situations where the best

01:53:26.720 route forwards for someone is genuine surgical transformation

01:53:31.720 or is that a pandora's box we should have never opened in the

01:53:35.440 first place and should close now and so what do you think about that

01:53:39.360 one of the really uh life-changing relationships I had

01:53:44.160 in my later life is a colleague of mine who's she's intersex

01:53:50.960 she was born intersex true intersex but she was actually a unique case

01:53:54.920 because basically based on her presentation

01:53:57.840 their family decided to have her grow up being male she did not find out she

01:54:04.920 was actually intersex until she tried to join the military

01:54:07.800 and her birth certificate said I now she

01:54:13.020 is now referred to as she because she transitioned in her 70s

01:54:18.000 I had a lot of conversations with her wow wow yes I've had a lot of conversations with her

01:54:22.840 about you know is her chromosomal structure xx yes yeah okay okay and so the intersex condition was

01:54:32.500 was what external genitalia was it internal internal both internal okay so she was genuinely intersex

01:54:41.400 yes yes and genuinely didn't know but but reported growing up feeling off right

01:54:49.280 and you know maybe understanding herself as gay and and even going into the military

01:54:55.320 was perhaps a way to reinforce the male identity that she thought now they never let her know that she

01:55:02.480 was intersex so finding that out was very confusing she how old was she when she found it out

01:55:08.320 when she tried to join the military at 17 and and so did they do a blood test or what happened

01:55:14.500 the birth certificate said I

01:55:16.460 oh I see okay and they never let so that must have been a hell of a shock

01:55:22.740 correct yes um but talking to her and and she's a really great advocate in the trans community because

01:55:30.460 she doesn't buy into hormones make you this or this you know surgery will make you a certain gender

01:55:36.960 she you know talked to me a lot about brain scans one of the things that I was taught early on

01:55:43.100 that is now I realize was a lie they when we were training they told us that there was a study done

01:55:49.780 that they did brain scans of kids that were trans and they said that a trans male's brain activity

01:55:58.140 would look very familiar very similar to uh born male that study is non-existent

01:56:06.280 well let's let's delve into that a little bit too so you know

01:56:11.040 there is a difference between biological sex

01:56:16.480 and temperament now I don't believe in gender identity I think that's a very ill-defined term but

01:56:23.060 and to the degree that there's anything to it at all it's a derivation or a consequence of temperament

01:56:29.320 now it is the case that there are a non-trivial number of girls who have what on average would

01:56:37.980 be a male temperament masculine temperament and there's a number of boys who have a feminine

01:56:42.160 temperament and the hallmarks of that would be women are slightly more enthusiastic than men

01:56:48.740 that's part of extroversion and slightly less assertive they're higher in withdrawal and

01:56:53.880 volatility those are negative emotion dimensions and that's one of the big differences between

01:56:58.320 masculine and feminine women are higher in politeness and compassion they're more empathic

01:57:04.220 they're less competitive and that's true cross-culturally and those differences are bigger

01:57:09.940 in gender equal societies they're on the openness front women are more interested in aesthetics and

01:57:16.500 fiction and men are more interested in ideas and non-fiction now that's not a huge difference

01:57:21.320 but it's it's there on the conscientiousness front women are slightly more orderly than men

01:57:27.440 and men are slightly more industrious than women but amalgamated into conscientiousness there's very

01:57:33.420 little difference between the sexes and so those are the basic temperamental differences and then

01:57:38.580 on the interest front women are reliably more interested in people and men are reliably more interested in

01:57:46.180 things and that's actually the biggest difference we know and that's maximized in uh in gender

01:57:52.280 equal countries like scandinavia so it's not cultural it's biological now even with those

01:57:59.920 differences if you sum across them and say you used a questionnaire to assess all these differences and

01:58:06.000 you had to guess whether a given man a given person was a man or a woman you could guess with about

01:58:10.800 80 percent accuracy maybe 85 if you really pushed it and that's pretty accurate but it does leave one

01:58:17.160 person in six miscategorized and that's not no one and so the idea that there is a difference between

01:58:25.940 temperament and biological sex is true now you can add to that the another observation which is some

01:58:34.700 people are creative they're high in openness now i did an early study with a colleague of mine jill

01:58:40.880 hooley at the at harvard where we looked at piercing and tattooing when that first became a cultural fad

01:58:51.520 so before that it was limited to some cultures say it was circus performers and criminals essentially

01:58:57.560 and people in the navy some cultures use tattooing and piercing but then it burst onto the public scene

01:59:03.640 and we were curious at that point whether that was a marker for pathology or if it was a an expression

01:59:10.160 of natural temperamental variability and what we found was the early piercers and tattooers or tattooed people

01:59:18.580 and they'd be the same people with colored hair let's say the big difference was in trait openness

01:59:24.360 not no psychopathology and so imagine you have a feminine temperament as a boy and you're high in creativity

01:59:32.860 as well your your identity is going to be somewhat fluid because that's characteristic of creative

01:59:38.840 people and so the idea that this temperamental variability exists is true now the question is

01:59:44.920 are there people for whom that temperamental variability is so extreme they're so mismatched

01:59:50.440 that they would be comfortable with a different body and like originally that would have been no more

01:59:56.140 than one in three thousand people but then it's a mental health conundrum right because you don't

02:00:02.000 know if what you should do as a counselor is assume that the person should settle into their biological

02:00:08.780 identity despite the mismatch or whether they should undergo this radical transformation now i would say

02:00:15.680 the basic rule of thumb is don't do radical things without radical evidence and so that's my maybe why you need a

02:00:23.840 two-year assessment period and maybe you maybe what what do you do do you is it possible to turn that

02:00:29.900 decision as much as possible over to the person who's directly concerned like would your role as a

02:00:35.920 therapist only be exploration yes what do what do you think yeah i mean i do think it's should be

02:00:44.600 exploration like and there was something that you said earlier that i just want to go back to i think

02:00:51.640 there is a difference and i don't know how to research it between men and women too that i've found

02:00:59.800 that significant when a man considers being a woman they have more of a creative imaginative play around

02:01:09.880 being um taken and i mean that sexually so whereas when you're female can you mean to a to assume a

02:01:20.300 submissive role is that is that it correct and are you talking about the sexual fantasies that are part

02:01:26.120 and parcel of that yes so a part of being a female is being almost take you know submissive yes

02:01:35.640 whereas that is not what is going on typically in the minds of male to female there isn't this sense of

02:01:44.720 i am now going to become maybe an aggressor or per se right right right right so what do you think

02:01:53.120 is happening on the on the female to male side that's different well i think it's powerful and

02:01:57.980 that's why i think some of this and i hate to say it like when we talk about when things maybe should

02:02:04.040 be considered is that the male to female transition seems to me to fit a lot more consistent onset of

02:02:17.840 when it happens that it's been distressing you know before puberty during no connection to their

02:02:25.500 body parts and what they can do no initial um desire to reproduce that is not the case for females to male

02:02:36.460 as much and i have wondered if we don't do enough scans of what is going on in these i mean because even

02:02:44.800 typically it has been male to female that we have saw this happen to right right so your point is we

02:02:53.200 shouldn't assume an automatic symmetry in motivation yeah i think that's i well i think to the degree

02:03:00.200 that there are differences between men and women that are biological and deep we should never assume

02:03:05.080 a pure symmetry of motivation now it is the case that on average on every trait men and women are more

02:03:14.100 similar than different but that doesn't make the differences irrelevant especially in aggregate

02:03:19.480 you know and so it's certainly for example the the difference between men and women

02:03:24.300 in orientation towards people and things is enough to produce consistently about a 10 to 1

02:03:31.800 surplus of males to females on the engineering side and about a 10 to 1 surplus of females to males on the

02:03:39.040 nursing side right and so that's you also see that in criminality so males are on average more physically

02:03:46.360 aggressive than females it's not a huge effect so if you randomly select people a pair from the

02:03:53.000 population male and female and you had to guess which one was more aggressive if you guessed it was

02:03:57.940 the male you'd be right 60 of the time but you'd be wrong 40 and that's quite a bit of error but if you

02:04:04.700 took the one in a hundred most violent person they'd be overwhelmingly male so the most aggressive

02:04:12.860 people are male and that's why the prisons are full of males and not females now i mean it's not

02:04:17.400 like women don't have aggression they manifest it in a different way but you can have small differences

02:04:22.840 at the center that have immense effects at the periphery and a lot of selection is actually done

02:04:27.740 at the periphery so so you shouldn't assume equivalence of motivation no and one of the very

02:04:33.800 scary things that we are denying now and this is where i feel like we have said that a gender identity

02:04:40.500 is a choice is because this is one of the tells if i ask for example i have a 17 year old that comes in

02:04:48.880 and says that they think they're another gender how long have you been feeling this way two years

02:04:54.520 wrong that's not typically what we're seeing you know and what i was taught and again my assumption is

02:05:04.460 that people would tell me that my training is outdated from 2008 that this should be something

02:05:10.840 that was presenting for many years and that is what is scary the amount of people that are transitioning

02:05:17.340 at 16 and have only been contemplating this for five months whereas the people that i were doing were

02:05:24.700 for years they were contemplating this for years right so your intuition is that if the if the fantasy

02:05:32.600 of transition is of short duration and emerges during puberty that that's a pretty good diagnostic

02:05:38.400 indicator that they're caught up in something approximating a psychological epidemic and we're

02:05:43.360 and i think that's in accordance with the right well i think that's in accordance with the solid

02:05:48.240 psychological literature this ken zucker that we talked about briefly on the youtube channel um

02:05:53.720 you know he did very credible work on the gender dysphoria investigation front and his conclusions are very

02:06:01.620 similar to the ones that you just drew i mean his first conclusion was the default treatment should

02:06:09.300 be leave people the hell alone right you don't move forward with puberty blockers or hormone treatment

02:06:14.880 and certainly not surgery except in an exceptional minority of cases if ever with extreme caution and you

02:06:23.700 certainly don't do do that with without exhaustive inquiry which is exactly the clinical assessment

02:06:29.860 because you want to find out like you know when someone comes to you when they're upset

02:06:34.540 there is an indefinite number of reasons why they might be upset and some of them can be pure

02:06:41.500 situation like they're in a place and and doing things that would make anyone upset and some of it might be

02:06:48.940 physiological they're actually ill in some manner that's destabilizing them and some of it might be

02:06:53.820 psychological and you know i jumped to the last conclusion with resistance i always assume

02:06:59.920 situational first and then physical second and then if i can't specify the problem with a situational

02:07:08.180 or a physical analysis then i think well you know maybe you're bringing something to bear in the

02:07:13.700 situation that's actually unique to you that's pathological but you shouldn't make that assumption to

02:07:18.620 begin with and so i think that clinicians who don't understand that a year to diagnose is not

02:07:30.900 unreasonable when you're looking at something radical they're absolutely they're absolutely

02:07:38.240 failing up to live they're failing to live up to the professional standards that are appropriate for

02:07:42.660 their profession to say the least and to rush people into this is is i think it's an unforgivable

02:07:49.080 clinical crime and why aren't we questioning it and it's like i think about it in hindsight and i said

02:07:55.040 this to you in the letter i was taught to talk to 10 year olds about dildos and clitorises and

02:08:02.280 and again i haven't seen any pictures of my naked uh bodies of any of my other clients

02:08:12.180 right and it was and it was taught under the umbrella it's lgbt it's okay and why didn't i

02:08:21.320 question that in hindsight i i you know i consider myself to be intelligent and i am critical thinker

02:08:28.880 but i didn't even question that so i see these new clinicians so why do you think you didn't

02:08:35.600 what okay so i mean look you had reason to in in principle trust the people who were educated

02:08:41.680 absolutely so let's leave that off the table right but but but you said you know you you have a

02:08:47.760 certain capacity for critical thought but you didn't question it why didn't you question it do

02:08:52.920 you think apart from the fact that you know your default assumption was that you could trust the

02:08:56.780 people that were training you did you have in retrospect do you do you have you identified blind

02:09:03.700 spots that you had like what the hell set you up to accept this do you think i think it's just

02:09:08.860 education like there wasn't so you had to try out to get on the trans team i mean there was definitely

02:09:14.980 a sense of interviewing if you weren't an agreement of it you know we would have people and i still do i

02:09:23.880 supervise people from other countries this is they don't have they in china that's not a thing that

02:09:30.440 they're talking about so certain clinicians were not allowed to be on that team if you couldn't

02:09:36.420 really understand it so i think i right so there was there was an ideological exclusion right off

02:09:42.920 the bat so why were you willing to put yourself in the camp of people who were agreeing to begin

02:09:50.660 with i mean i understand you didn't know what that would imply but why do you think what was it about

02:09:55.740 you that made you more likely to be included in that camp to begin with i don't know i think i

02:10:01.260 because i know of cross-dressing and transvestites that it must be a thing and why of course i would

02:10:09.960 want to give the care to kids the most informed way possible so i really thought i was providing

02:10:17.860 help for people that would end up killing themselves early

02:10:21.760 right right okay so so you bought that initial presumption that so the presumption was there is

02:10:30.580 a real danger here to life and limb it would be better to remediate that early rather than late if

02:10:36.520 possible and that was enough to tilt you enough so that you started to become educated down that road

02:10:43.200 and then everything else essentially followed yeah well you know people people end up in hell one step at a

02:10:48.820 time and whenever you look into historical atrocities what you find is that people don't

02:10:55.220 leap from normal to committing atrocities in one step there's like 10 000 steps and each of them is

02:11:02.100 accompanied by something approximating a moral justification and then by the end when things

02:11:07.460 are starting to get pretty dismal people are so caught up in the in the net that they don't even

02:11:13.380 know how to escape i mean in your situation you told me at the beginning of this interview that

02:11:17.280 you know your job's on the line now you have a clinical practice and you have people around you

02:11:23.060 who are supporting you so you can tolerate that but for lots of people by the time they put themselves

02:11:28.960 in a position where their career is on the line and they have a family they're in so damn deep there's

02:11:33.460 no way they can extricate themselves i never signed a document that i was unsure of and i my fear is that

02:11:40.840 there has to be counselors out there and that's the thing anyone can do this now i was just reading in

02:11:46.220 seattle you're gonna have associates level to write this letter of recommendation where you would say

02:11:52.320 i strongly suggest this kid starts medical treatment i just want them to know yeah yeah that's terrible

02:12:01.500 well the thing about therapy is that i don't know i think the room for therapeutic malpractice is larger

02:12:09.400 than the room for surgical malpractice and that's really saying something being an informed therapist

02:12:14.880 and doing a good job is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do you have to be really trained and i

02:12:20.200 would say 90 of people practicing are trained so insufficiently that they do more harm than good

02:12:29.080 and so that's a warning to all of those of you out there who are contemplating counseling it's like

02:12:33.560 you bloody well better be careful who it is that you invite into the intimate domains of your life

02:12:39.340 you better not teach people they're not well trained yep you bet you bet people are not born wrong

02:12:45.880 and in getting over that i have not met one person that can get over being born wrong and if we agree

02:12:52.680 with that that the consequences to that is well yeah well we're seeing them unfold and we're not done

02:12:59.980 with it yet you know we are seeing some reversion to something approximating sanity in europe hey because

02:13:07.660 england closed down the tavistock clinic and they were probably the prime offenders in the world

02:13:13.040 and finland has rolled back and sweden has rolled back and holland has rolled back and

02:13:19.140 and we do have these emerging lawsuits in north america there's one in canada now and so

02:13:24.880 you know it's possible that the tide is going to turn but there's going to be a lot more kids

02:13:29.120 mutilated and sterilized before we're done with this pack of idiocy

02:13:32.660 most hospitals whole financial budgets are required are on this and i think that's a piece

02:13:38.800 of it i became needed you know i became a specialist and i have personally get you know

02:13:46.300 taught endocrinologists how to have a career that just rely so many surgeons and doctors that i know

02:13:54.840 don't have a career unless kids are sick with this so jesus yeah that's something we didn't delve into

02:14:02.380 at all right so you have a whole bureaucratic apparatus that's predicating its financial

02:14:06.880 viability on a endless stream of victimized children yeah my god you know it's no wonder

02:14:13.180 kids are playing out human sacrifice games on the web because we're certainly playing that out in our

02:14:17.840 society so yeah all right sarah thank you very much for talking to me today keep in touch let me know

02:14:25.340 let me know how your university reacts because one of the things we could contemplate is that

02:14:31.600 we could document what happens to you over the next while and so i wish you luck in that i'm glad

02:14:38.320 to hear that you have the support of people around you that's extremely important i do i hope that you're

02:14:43.420 able to keep your spine stiff and say what you need to say and also a piece of advice from someone who's

02:14:51.640 been through this many times don't assume that being attacked is a disadvantage

02:14:59.240 okay it's not pleasant and it's going to be rough but that doesn't a it doesn't mean you're wrong and

02:15:08.140 b if you don't apologize and you don't retreat it doesn't mean that the tide won't turn heavily in

02:15:14.000 your favor at some point now that intervening period that's like that two-year assessment you know that

02:15:21.100 you should do before doing something radical that intervening period is not going to be pleasant

02:15:25.620 but don't automatically assume that just because the adversarial process is aimed at you that the net

02:15:32.760 consequence for you is going to be negative you might come out of this a hell of a lot sharper and

02:15:37.380 more informed than you were to begin with and that might turn out to be worth it absolutely

02:15:42.000 thank you dr all right you bet yes thank you very much we'll talk soon you bet you bet good luck with

02:15:51.280 your with your travails in relationship to the university yes thank you okay well thank you to

02:15:57.780 everybody watching and listening on the daily wire plus platform and uh your time and attention is

02:16:02.520 always much appreciated to the film crew here in regina thank you for your help and uh away we go

02:16:08.100 thanks again sir bye bye

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 23, 2023

342. Regrets of a Trans-Care Specialist ｜ Sara Stockton

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