00:00:00.000Parents need to understand that while we certainly hope that our schools, our teachers, our principals, guidance counselors are all wonderful people who only want the best for their students, we have to live in reality and recognize that while some of them do have an agenda and that may not be healthy for our children.
00:00:21.760Dr. Miriam Grossman, child and adolescent psychiatrist, also one of the stars of our film, What is a Woman? She now has a new book out, excellent, important book, called Lost in Trans Nation, A Child Psychiatrist's Guide Out of Madness. Dr. Grossman, thanks for taking the time.
00:00:36.720Thank you so much for having me and thank you for all you do, Matt, in this space. I was just this morning enjoying some of the, you know, some of your posts on X and some of the other things you've done and I really appreciate it. You're one of the leaders.
00:00:54.140Well, I appreciate that and I appreciate you as well. You know, you have a real important, insightful perspective on all the gender madness. I'm curious about one thing. What did you think was kind of, or what do you think is missing from the conversation around this issue or what point is not being emphasized enough or well enough understood that prompted you to, for example, to write the book?
00:01:22.740Well, you know, I want to start with some good news because I'm always presenting very disturbing information and I will certainly answer your question, but I want to tell you, Matt, you may not be aware that our favorite pediatrician, Dr. Michelle Forcier is being sued.
00:01:44.020And if there's any of your audience who are not aware who she is, she is the infamous blue haired pediatrician who posed that question to you. Do chickens commit suicide in your documentary? What is a woman? Dr. Forcier is being sued finally by one of her patients who detransitioned.
00:02:09.220And apparently this young woman was extremely mentally ill and had all sorts of psychiatric issues. And I have to say, the lawyers are jumping on these cases and I'm so happy to see it after all these years.
00:02:24.720Yeah, that's the chicken lady, as we have come to call her. You're exactly right. And do you think that this is the beginning of kind of the floodgates opening? We've all been sort of waiting for this, that this was always the next step in the fight for team sanity was that we start holding these doctors accountable.
00:02:44.780So do you think that there's evidence that this is like the beginning of, this is just the tip of the iceberg?
00:02:50.780Yes, absolutely. And it's not only the individual doctors that are being sued. The American Academy of Pediatrics is also named as a defendant.
00:03:04.480So this is fantastic. Because the American Academy of Pediatrics that claims that they represent 67,000 pediatricians has been for many, many years completely captured by this ideology.
00:03:21.520And the way that it happened is that a small group of activists from within that organization simply took over this particular subject and started writing policy statements and articles and guidance for other doctors and for parents.
00:03:42.380And none of it is evidence-based. They claim that it's evidence-based. It is not. It is a belief system. It's a belief system that's based on the irrational, unscientific idea that we are not, that our identities are completely separate from our bodies.
00:04:06.880That we are not. We are not, pubic Braๆ, unification that we carry on its own minds, that we call this idea to know our identity.
00:04:08.000That we can be born in the wrong body, and that that is not an emotional problem. That's a physical problem and you need to modify the body to fit the feelings.
00:04:19.520These are irrational ideas. These would not fly in any other field of medicine.
00:04:27.320So yes, this is very big. I think the tide is definitely turning. There's been a lot of successful legislation.
00:04:35.920And now these lawsuits are beginning, like I said, not only against the pediatricians and the therapists and the endocrinologists and the surgeons, but also against the medical organizations.
00:04:54.680And I know you're not a lawyer, of course, but do you, and I always err on the side of being somewhat cynical about these things.
00:05:01.440So my worry is that obviously the victims that are following these lawsuits should win easily and they should win many millions of dollars.
00:05:11.900But you worry about the courts just being ideologically stacked against them.
00:05:16.080So do you feel good about the chances of this particular lawsuit of having success, given that problem?
00:05:22.560Well, you know, you're correct to bring up, you know, who's going to, who's the judge, who are the attorneys, you know, if there's a jury, who's on the jury.
00:05:35.420But then my experience testifying in court has been very positive, actually.
00:05:41.280And when you get a judge who is, you know, middle of the road, open, wants to learn, someone who wants to learn and to hear both sides, then definitely, you know, there can be a success at the end of it.
00:06:03.040But you're right, it does, it is going to depend a lot on the judges.
00:06:07.660But I'm still hopeful because it's certainly better than nothing.
00:06:11.420And, you know, we'll get the media coverage and we'll get more and more young people who went through affirming care will have the courage and the motivation to stand up and talk.
00:06:25.700I'm curious about your general assessment of, I guess we've already kind of got into this, but your general assessment of the battle as it stands right now.
00:06:37.160Are you, you know, we talked about the lawsuits, the success with legislation, but culturally speaking, do you feel like we're making a lot of progress there?
00:06:50.040I actually do. I feel like, you know, even aside from legislation and now we've got what's going on with litigation, which is really important.
00:06:56.120But it seems to me that culturally is where we can really see the victory even more because it seems as though people are willing to speak out against this much more than they were back when we first started filming the movie back in 2021, for example.
00:07:14.320Yeah, I do agree with you. The thing is, look, this is a battle that the truth is going to win.
00:07:23.560The question is how many, you know, what's the body count going to be?
00:07:29.400And the body count from where I'm sitting is very high because it's not just the kids who end up, you know,
00:07:38.500medicalized and forever disfigured and some of them are going to be sterile and not capable of having biological children.
00:07:49.560But you see the families, the families are also victims, the parents and the siblings and the extended family.
00:07:57.320Because, you know, this battle that that is created inside the home, when a child announces a a a new identity, an impossible identity, it can tear a family apart.
00:08:14.720It can end marriages. Sometimes the child is so indoctrinated that they believe anyone that is hesitant or has questions or wants to be cautious is the enemy and that their homes are toxic.
00:08:31.860They run away. There are websites. I talk about this in my book.
00:08:36.180There are websites run by activists who are advising kids on how to run away, where to run to.
00:08:45.860They provide them with financial help.
00:08:49.860They tell them, you know, call this number or text this number and we'll come pick you up and take you to a friendly home, a home where they will affirm you.
00:09:02.060So there's a lot of terrible things going on, a lot of families in which these kids become estranged, terrible pain and mourning that parents go through.
00:09:22.000But at the same time, there's a lot of victims and there's a body count.
00:09:26.220Absolutely. You mentioned you talked about families and kids that get that fall into this through no fault of the parents.
00:09:33.860So I want to ask you about that on a kind of on a more personal and practical level, because I hear from parents all the time who either have kids who fall victim to this or they're worried that their kids will potentially fall victim to it.
00:09:45.580You, of course, have talked to many more parents than me on this issue.
00:09:48.040So I want to take both of those cases individually.
00:09:50.740So, first of all, would you say are some basic steps a parent can take proactively, especially if their kids are in public school or something, and they want to make sure they want to inoculate their kids as best they can against falling into this?
00:10:11.340I mean, as soon as your kid is talking and kind of understands boy, girl, you know, that identity, it's not too early to say things like, you know, you've been a boy since the very first moment that you existed.
00:10:29.380When you first started growing in your mother's tummy or however you want to say it inside your mommy, your your mother, you were a boy that it doesn't depend on some random midwife or doctor who's in the delivery room.
00:10:46.240I want kids when they first hear that phrase sex assigned at birth.
00:10:53.060I want kids, even little kids to to stop and say, no, no, that's not right.
00:11:02.060It might be recognized at birth, although now we recognize it way earlier.
00:11:07.960It's established and it's established permanently at conception.
00:11:14.060So you can begin early on with kids and you can say to them things like, you know, you were always a boy or a girl and that's great.
00:11:23.160And there isn't only one way to be a boy or a girl.
00:11:26.440There are many infinite ways of being boys, girls, men and women and anyone that might come along and say, oh, you're a girl and, you know, you're not into fashion, makeup.
00:11:39.800You know, you're into playing soccer and, you know, you're I mean, all these regressive stereotypes.
00:12:03.840I also tell parents it's important that they themselves accept that their daughter may not be stereotypically feminine and their son may not be stereotypically masculine.
00:12:16.940It may not be the kid that you expected.
00:12:21.960Try very hard to accept that your kid and not only I mean, you have six kids, you know, all about raising kids.
00:12:30.840They don't always end up the way that we were expecting.
00:12:35.620But certainly when it comes to masculinity and femininity, you want to accept who they are and what their interests are and not necessarily, you know, push them in the direction that you think, well, boys, you know, have to be X, Y and Z.
00:13:07.960But there's so many ideas that activists are just waiting outside your door or inside the computer, inside the chat rooms.
00:13:18.380And parents must get in control of their of their kids, Internet use.
00:13:24.500One of the appendices in my book, I have seven appendices.
00:13:28.480One of them is written by an IT expert and it instructs parents on all the different ways you need to get in control of your of your kids, Internet use.
00:13:38.720If you're not in control of it and your kid is just wandering around on the Internet, trust me, there are plenty of groomers out there that are just eagerly waiting to influence your child.
00:13:52.700And I've had one family after the next come to me and their child has been groomed into these beliefs of being the opposite sex on the Internet.
00:14:03.100So that's one of the appendices. Another thing a family can do early on is put the school on notice.
00:14:12.540And I have a entire chapter about schools.
00:14:16.540Parents need to understand that while we certainly hope that our schools, our teachers, our principals, guidance counselors are all wonderful people who only want the best for their students.
00:14:28.940We have to live in reality and recognize that while some of them do have an agenda and some of them do want to influence our kids and influence them in ways that we wouldn't necessarily agree with and that may not be healthy for our children.
00:14:47.180So you want to put the school on notice.
00:14:50.640And the way that you do that is you download a form.
00:15:17.020That form is saying to the school, our family does not go along, does not agree with gender ideology.
00:15:26.280We do not give permission for our child to be exposed to any of those ideas, whether it's in the classroom, whether it's in a special assembly or meeting or a field trip to Planned Parenthood or a guest who's going to come and speak to the class.
00:15:47.020An after school club, like a GSA club, one of those, we are prohibiting that.
00:16:56.120If you agree with the child that their name is wrong and that their pronouns are wrong and that they need to live their lives as the opposite sex and use the opposite sex bathrooms, et cetera,
00:17:10.980and everyone in their lives, all the adults, all the authorities are agreeing, then of course, it's going to solidify the child's belief.
00:17:23.300And so I caution very strongly against any kind of social transition.
00:17:29.700Profiling, surveillance, and data harvesting are a few things not to like about tech giants.
00:17:34.380But what can you actually do about it when you rely on so many of their products?
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00:18:00.780That's why I use ExpressVPN on all of my devices to make it much more difficult for them to exploit my data.
00:18:05.720The best part is how easy it is to use the ExpressVPN app.
00:18:08.880I just tap one button on my phone or computer, and I turn it on, and it's that simple.
00:18:26.640We only have a couple minutes left, but there's something obviously related to this that I've been wanting to ask you, and I don't even know if this is exactly true or not, but the way, you know, but it's an interesting pattern that I think I've noticed, which is at the kind of different age ranges, which sex between male and female is more susceptible to this.
00:18:50.700So we all kind of understand that among adolescent kids, girls are falling into this much more often than boys are.
00:18:57.540It seems to me that younger than that, though, young kids, five, six, seven, most of the time when you hear about a young kid that age who's being, as you say, socially transitioned, usually it's a boy.
00:19:11.660And then you go into adulthood and you look at the people who, as adults, start suddenly identifying as trans.
00:19:18.900It seems like almost always, with rare exception, it's a man.
00:19:27.940What do you make of, like, does the age range and the sex of the person make them more or less susceptible?
00:19:34.580It's a very important distinction, and I go through all of this in my book.
00:19:39.940Look, we've always known about the little kids, the Jazz Jennings, the little boys, who from an early age insist that they either are or have to become a girl.
00:19:52.080And we've always known about the middle-aged men like Admiral Dr. Levine, who in their 40s or later decide that, you know, these are men who are heterosexual.
00:20:08.260They have enjoyed cross-dressing and going into women's spaces.
00:20:18.300They also sometimes will decide to go through so-called sex reassignment.
00:20:24.640But now there's an entirely new population of kids who are suddenly out of the blue without a history from childhood of wanting or being uncomfortable with their sex.
00:20:39.620And these are a majority, although there's still a lot of boys.
00:20:44.260I mean, my practice has essentially been 50 percent boys and girls.
00:20:50.100In the research, we do see mostly girls.
00:20:53.840Now, that that type of gender dysphoria is a social contagion.
00:20:59.700It's very, very different than the little kids, the Jazz Jennings.
00:21:06.040Jazz Jennings did not hear about the possibility that he was a girl from going online.
00:21:13.860He didn't hear about it from his friends at school or from a guidance counselor.
00:21:18.980OK, it was something internally going on in him that caused it.
00:21:23.220We don't know exactly what, but if he had had the chance to go through normal puberty and he had not been medicalized at the age of 11, there was a very good chance that Jazz could have outgrown his dysphoria.
00:21:40.240But yes, Matt, you're bringing up something very, very important.
00:21:44.420What we're looking at now and everyone you see, it's being denied by the proponents of this.
00:21:51.300But those of us who are on the side of hard science and hard evidence, those of us that are seeing these kids in our office know that it is a social contagion and it is fueled by the Internet, by social media, by friend groups.
00:22:14.540It's when ideas and behaviors and beliefs are spread within a friend group and it can be something benign like a haircut or, you know, a way of dressing.
00:22:29.360Or it can be something that can be something that can be dangerous, like self-harming behaviors, eating disorders and gender dysphoria, which places kids on a path toward harm.
00:22:43.440And look, I've had kids tell me I had a young woman in my office who told me that she never had any dysphoria, any unhappiness about her hips until one of her friends who's transgender identified started complaining about her hips.
00:23:03.720I hate my hips, I hate my hips, they're so wide, they're so feminine, why can't I have narrow hips like a boy?
00:23:11.180All of a sudden, my patient starts having dysphoria about her hips.
00:23:16.720It is a social, and this is also why, Matt, a lot of kids who go into a psychiatric inpatient unit, they enter that unit not being trans.
00:23:34.100They leave the unit a few weeks later, identifying as the opposite sex or non-binary or some other such nonsense term.
00:23:44.680Because while in the hospital, in that psychiatric unit, so many of the kids, probably more than 50, 60% of kids now who are in inpatient psychiatric units for adolescents do have some sort of gender issue.
00:24:02.480And so this is a big, I write a chapter in the book about the dilemma that a parent is in when they must place their child in one of these units because they are suicidal or they have some other acute emotional problem, but they don't want to do it.
00:24:20.160Because not only are most of the kids suffering from gender dysphoria on that unit, and it will spread, but the staff on the unit, more often than not, they are proponents.
00:24:38.160They have been told by their professional organizations and by their hospital administration that the first thing you do when you meet a kid is you ask their name and pronouns, and you give them your name and pronouns.
00:24:53.060I had a psychiatric nurse write to me, and she said, Dr. Grossman, I work with these kids on an inpatient psychiatric unit, and I just can't, I can't believe what we're doing.
00:25:07.400We start off asking them their pronouns.
00:25:28.400Yeah, that's, I guess, I'm not surprised to hear that, but on another level it is shocking that they would start with that level of indoctrination when a kid is that, could not possibly be more vulnerable.
00:25:41.460Obviously, there's a lot more to talk about.
00:25:42.900I wish we had more time to talk about it, but the good news is that your book, Lost in Transnation, Child Psychiatrist's Guide Out of Madness, can be purchased right now.
00:25:51.980Anyone in, where all these ideas are fleshed out in even greater detail.
00:25:57.840I want to mention also that I did the audio version.
00:26:01.460I actually narrated the entire book, took 40 hours.
00:26:11.840So for people who don't want to sit down and read, and they're commuting, or they're busy in the house, or they're jogging, whatever, you can listen to it on audio.
00:26:22.000Every family needs the information in my book.
00:26:27.560And the fact that you've narrated your own audio book, I actually, as an audio book snob myself, I always prefer for the author to read their own work.
00:26:34.360So I'm glad that you did that, and that's also a great way to access this information as well.
00:26:40.860Dr. Grossman, thanks so much for talking to us again.