Abigail Schreier joins Megyn to talk about her new book, Irreversible Damage, about the growing number of women who identify as transgender, and the impact that gender dysphoria is having on our society.
00:01:25.980It's by Abigail Schreier, and it's been causing a lot of consternation.
00:01:30.020The book is about the number of girls who are declaring themselves transgender and how that number is skyrocketing in modern-day America.
00:01:39.540Abigail also touches on some really, really interesting ways of looking at feminism, for lack of a better word, and the messaging we're sending our daughters about what they must be and whether they're the right messages.
00:01:51.960She's gotten all sorts of blowback for writing this thing.
00:01:55.080But as you know, we don't believe in third rails in discussions here in America.
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00:03:34.980Okay, so you were a writer for the Wall Street Journal.
00:03:38.360You went to Columbia, Oxford, and Yale Law School.
00:03:41.840So, you know, you're obviously a very smart person.
00:03:45.360And what got you into writing this book, Irreversible Damage, and what preceded it, which was an article in the Wall Street Journal about gender dysphoria?
00:04:43.540So, I mean, I have to tell you, just from my own perspective, living in New York and having my kids in the private schools here, there has definitely been a shift in the numbers of trans kids and the messaging from the schools on trans kids.
00:04:59.360And if you talk to any parent here, they will acknowledge that.
00:05:01.800And I know that you notice this phenomenon.
00:05:05.940The question is whether, you know, what causes it.
00:05:08.260But even in one of the schools here, there was like sort of a cluster of girls in one of the 10th grades at one of these private schools that sort of all came out as trans right at the same time.
00:05:20.160And that looks unlike what we've traditionally seen trans, transgender teens look like.
00:05:30.940Like they usually had a background where from age two or four, two to four, they knew it.
00:05:36.880In fact, I interviewed a lot of transgender adults for the book, and their experience doesn't look anything like what we're seeing.
00:05:43.280I get calls from parents from the toniest girls' schools in Manhattan, you know, to the public schools across the country, and they will tell me, you know, 30%, 20% of their daughter's 7th grade class is now decided they were transgender.
00:05:59.060And what's also crazy about them is that they're coming out with their friends within a very short period of time, often encouraged by social media gurus.
00:06:08.620So this is not what traditional gender dysphoria, the severe discomfort in one's biological sex, looks like.
00:06:16.060The problem is that they are pushing for hormones and surgeries, and they're getting them right away.
00:06:22.520But what it looks like is pure contagion.
00:07:44.320You decide you're going to write this book.
00:07:45.480And as I read it, you spoke with, I'm going to give you the folks on the list, physicians, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, world-renowned psychologists specializing in gender dysphoria, psychotherapists, transgender adolescents, transgender adults, de-sisters, people who were going down that path and then decided they weren't trans, and de-transitioners, people who actually started to, I guess, physically transition, right?
00:08:13.820And what was the number one takeaway that you came to in doing your research?
00:08:19.560Well, you know, it's based on the public health researcher Lisa Littman's work at Brown University.
00:08:24.780She was the first one to really do a scientific study of this.
00:08:28.160And what she noticed was that, you know, this looked a lot like other peer contagions.
00:08:35.300We know that teenage girls who are in pain, and these girls are in a lot of pain, they're in a lot of, they have anxiety and depression in numbers we've never before seen.
00:08:44.680We know that girls look to the culture to help them understand their pain.
00:08:48.360So in prior eras, they might've said, oh, I'm so fat.
00:08:50.900If I just lost more weight, I'd be happy.
00:08:53.920And today they're looking at their bodies and saying, I feel so, you know, unfeminine.
00:08:58.880If I only shed this female body, I know I would be happy.
00:09:02.320And it's such a difference from the way we grew up when that was just called puberty, you know, like it's, it's normal to feel uncomfortable in your body, to feel gross, to feel unattractive, to wonder if you belong, to wonder if there's another way that you could belong better.
00:09:20.460But when we were growing up, this was not, you know, for lack of a better term, an option.
00:09:40.640And it's not, you know, in prior eras, if someone came out, you know, decided they were anorexic or decided their problem was they were so fat, their doctors didn't agree with that and affirm it.
00:09:52.580Their teachers didn't celebrate it at school.
00:09:56.280They didn't go to online mentors who encouraged it.
00:09:59.540But today, and they didn't go to doctors who supplied all the medications for weight loss.
00:10:03.840But today, that's what we're seeing with gender dysphoria.
00:10:06.600These girls who are lonely, who are in a lot of pain, they come out and it's a nonstop fast track to transition.
00:10:12.860And they get so much celebration that they're afraid to let go of it.
00:10:16.560It's like in an attempt, in a good faith, laudable attempt to reduce the bullying that trans kids, trans people were genuinely facing.
00:10:27.360We like we often do overcorrected to the point now where any gender confusion is treated as a confirmed case of gender dysphoria.
00:10:36.180I mean, the rule basically is if you think you're trans, you are period.
00:10:40.020And if you try to explore it, you're a bigot.
00:10:52.140They've always considered themselves allies.
00:10:54.100But when their 12-year-old daughter comes out to them as trans because she heard it in a school assembly and thinks she heard from a school, you know, assembly where a kid came out as trans and now she thinks she might be, the parents say, OK, honey, well, hold on.
00:11:09.020You know, I don't think we should start any medical transitions.
00:11:13.700The moment the parents do that, they're considered transphobes.
00:11:16.760And in some cases, they're worried about losing custody.
00:11:19.000And what's happening is the girls and the school communities join together to work against those parents.
00:11:27.980So if the parent says, hold on, babe, you know, we've had a rough time in our family the past couple of years or you got bullied, you feel socially awkward.
00:11:36.260It's possible this isn't gender dysphoria.
00:11:38.400It's possible this is you looking to find a better social landing place, one that's actually very accepted now and actually not only accepted but celebrated in a lot of circles.
00:11:46.920It's possible that's what's happening.
00:12:26.620And they encourage gender exploration.
00:12:28.980Sometimes it's part of the curriculum.
00:12:30.360And then when the child chooses a new gender, they actively hide it from the parents.
00:12:36.080There's actually a form that they fill out.
00:12:38.280And the line that I've heard from teachers is, home is not a safe place for trans kids.
00:12:43.580That happened to people we know through friends at a New York City private school where their child came home and one day told the parents that I think it was a boy transitioning to girl, you know, identified as a boy at birth.
00:13:01.220And, you know, I'm short forming the language.
00:13:02.780I realized that to not be offensive to, you know, certain trans activists and transgender people, you have to say it like with 50 words to get to the one.
00:13:11.280So with respect, what I mean is identified as a boy at birth who identified more as a girl.
00:13:16.180So he wanted to transition to being a girl.
00:13:51.220I talked to one woman whose daughter I call Maddie in the book.
00:13:54.080Her seventh grader came home and decided she was trans based on a school assembly.
00:14:00.420And the girl had not only been identifying as a boy for a year, but she was actually able to go on an overnight trip and stay with the boys.
00:14:08.540Her mother had no idea she'd been using this male identity.
00:14:13.940And interestingly, of course, being called the boy's name for a year and using the boy's facilities tends to solidify in your mind the idea that you really aren't a girl.
00:16:11.800And I just want to say, my book is about irreversible damage.
00:16:15.400It's about the harm that kids do when they start on this gender journey.
00:16:19.040This is not about LGBTQ experimentation, which comes with no irreversible harm.
00:16:26.320And what you point out in the book is that typically this gender dysphoria, this wondering, this confusion about whether you've been born into, quote, the right body, the right biological sex body, in 70% of cases it resolves on its own?
00:16:52.720And historically, over 70% of the kids just naturally outgrew it.
00:16:57.300Today, of course, they're being affirmed all over the place, at school, by psychologists, by doctors, by their friends, by their online gurus.
00:17:06.860So today, you know, we're likely to see much less desistance and much less outgrowingness.
00:17:14.320And just to put a point on the end of the school discussion, I know that, like, the L.A. schools are saying parental rights end at the school door.
00:17:23.300You know, you drop them off here, they're ours, and we really have no obligation to inform you what they're being called, how they're identifying,
00:17:29.940or even if they're leaving school grounds during the school day to go get gender hormones.
00:17:38.160If your daughter wants to start taking testosterone, she can leave school grounds, like, during school hours, right, and go get it without them telling the parents.
00:17:48.600Yeah, that was the policy adopted by the California Teachers Association, so they approved that policy.
00:17:54.140You know, what was interesting about when I interviewed these teachers is what you just said was right.
00:17:58.240They insist that this is, that school has to be a safe space for trans kids.
00:18:42.580The materials are completely supplied by the activists.
00:18:45.600And the teachers are trained by activists.
00:18:47.900So the materials are really, really radical.
00:18:50.480And here in California, they wanted to do the materials they introduced not only, you know, teach masturbation, but they encourage things like all kinds of anal sex is discussed throughout their curriculum.
00:19:02.120But the most radical of all, in some sense, is when they try to teach kindergartners that just because you were assigned male at birth doesn't mean you're really a boy.
00:19:12.600What your true gender is, is something only you can know.
00:19:30.480Where it's this little, I mean, this happened at our school, where they show the kids this little gender-bred person and talk about how your gender is determined in your head.
00:19:40.540That's because they believe that gender is a social construct.
00:19:44.460And in our school, they were teaching our eight-year-olds that.
00:19:51.620The parents were not kept in a loop on what exactly was being shared.
00:19:55.000And ultimately, the school apologized because they went so far out on a limb with a three-week experimental program on this that the parents were like, even for New York City parents, this is a bit much.
00:20:08.640Now, at our school, you could opt out if you wanted to.
00:20:11.840And parents really weren't communicated to in an effective way at our school, which is why they apologized.
00:20:41.580And, like, think of how confusing that is for a kid who doesn't, they don't, they haven't even thought about it.
00:20:47.860Unless they are, because, you know, as you point out, transgender issues have normally traditionally struck between the ages of two and four.
00:22:19.120But you know, the trip to the hospital, the fun moments beforehand, except for our oldest child, who was born in 2009, which is now considered the Dark Ages.
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00:23:54.140This isn't a medical body doing this research.
00:23:58.560But and they say you can't trust this woman's study because what she did was she went to parents to talk about it.
00:24:05.120And their analogy was that's like going to the Klan to ask if racism is bad, that if you ask parents, they're going to say it's all bad and that our kids have been forced into this and that they didn't talk to the right people.
00:24:17.980Yeah, that's a very silly thing to say, but, you know, because, of course, with mental health health problems of adolescence and minor children, you always survey the parents.
00:24:29.580That's the only way to get an accurate mental health diagnosis for children.
00:24:32.840And, you know, these girls end up with with terrible harm.
00:24:38.540You know, once they start down this course, you know, I think of one woman, Desmond, who, you know, came out in high school as trans.
00:24:46.080She decided, you know, she must be a boy.
00:24:54.180And she started a course of testosterone and it caused uterine cramping, severe uterine cramping, necessitating a hysterectomy because it causes uterine atrophy.
00:25:04.940And she woke up at 21 realizing this whole thing had been a terrible mistake.
00:25:57.840But when these girls wake up with regret, and a lot of them do, we're already seeing very high numbers of regret because these young girls didn't have real gender dysphoria to begin with.
00:26:47.820It's parents who have raised these girls, and they know them their whole life.
00:26:50.320And they say, honey, you were always very girly.
00:26:52.960You're just going through a tough time in adolescence.
00:26:55.320There's no reason to rush to remove your breasts.
00:26:58.300That's not an unreasonable comment to make.
00:27:01.240Well, and it's like, so they call that top surgery, your book points out.
00:27:05.400And, you know, the thought is, oh, I can always have the breasts put back if this doesn't work out, which is completely underestimates the radical nature of breast surgery and how that would go if they removed all your breast tissue and then just tried to give you implants back.
00:27:18.800And a lot of people who have undergone this for medical reasons can testify to the difficulties that can pose.
00:28:12.540So the way infertility happens is if your daughter comes to you and says, I think I might be trans, and you want to postpone puberty, you want to give her the time to figure that out before puberty begins.
00:28:25.540Some parents are doing this with girls who are that young.
00:28:28.820They haven't even started puberty yet.
00:28:30.640And the danger comes when you go, what, directly from those puberty postponing drugs to cross-gender hormones like testosterone?
00:28:41.640So the infertility can happen a few ways.
00:28:43.780If you go from puberty blockers, which stop female puberty, it stops your puberty, and then goes, which is, you know, what they do with younger girls who are in just the first stages of puberty, and then go to cross-sex hormones, because you can't stay on the puberty blockers forever.
00:28:58.840So usually about two years, you're on them.
00:29:30.320As supportive as you want to be of your child's issues, if this is one of them, for God's sake, you need to make sure.
00:29:37.180You need to make sure this is going to have serious, serious health outcomes as a result.
00:29:42.840And it's not just those, which are the most serious.
00:29:45.840But if you start taking testosterone and then decide you were wrong, you were just going through a phase, and you are a girl, you're not a boy.
00:29:56.260What, I mean, can you get rid of all the testosterone side effects easily?
00:30:14.740It gives you a more rounded nose, more rounded face in a lot of cases.
00:30:17.740And it's like, God, you got to make sure.
00:30:20.700And one of the problems your book points out, this is probably the most scary part of it, is that the medical standard now, the medical standard is to affirm, affirm, affirm, affirm.
00:30:47.300It's the only area of medicine in which the doctors are told your job is to agree with the patient's self-diagnosis.
00:30:54.640And this is what's known as affirmative care.
00:30:57.140And what it means is that this area of medicine has become so politicized that the doctor just has to agree and rubber stamp whatever the patient says.
00:31:08.480I actually asked my own therapist about this, and he said 100% right, that that is what they're told.
00:31:13.820And even when they do rounds in the hospital, if they go up to a patient and they say, patient is a 45-year-old woman, presents it, he'll get interrupted by his resident saying, how do you know it's a woman?
00:31:24.480You know, and he's looking at the patient in the bed, but now we're not even allowed to presume gender or we're bigoted.
00:31:30.940And so the medical professionals from the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychiatric Association, all these, the endocrine society, on and on it goes, they all say, you need to affirm.
00:31:47.960So if a kid just comes in and says, I think I might be, they're not supposed to say, well, why?
00:31:58.320We have conversion therapy laws in 19 states, which actually say that a therapist is not allowed to so-called convert someone out of their gender identity, which means that a therapist who says to a kid, listen, you have a lot of mental health things going on.
00:32:15.780Let's not jump to this, is really at risk of losing their license.
00:32:20.500How is that converting as opposed to working on diagnosing?
00:32:25.080You know, these conversion therapy laws are actually a really Trojan horse because they say they are to ban, you know, gay conversion therapy, which traditionally involved some very grisly, very ugly practices.
00:32:37.920But they slipped gender identity language in.
00:32:40.820So you can't even talk a kid, you know, help a kid feel comfortable in their own body, which was always how this was treated historically.
00:32:50.200So parents who are looking for help with this, parents whose child comes to them and says, I'm having this issue.
00:32:55.420And those are the lucky ones, because a lot of the times the teens say nothing to the parents.
00:33:09.620I mean, you know, they, they, the answer is not go to a therapist because a lot of the therapists, you know, I talked to parents whose therapists were pushing, you know, transition on the kid and the parents had no idea.
00:33:21.800And in fact, they had promised the parents they wouldn't do that.
00:33:24.900And yet they had been affirming the child for a year, calling them, yes, Jimmy, no, you're definitely a boy going along, you know, encouraging this in the child's mind.
00:33:34.420I mean, so these parents are in a position where they've got the school community working against them.
00:33:38.600They've got the therapists who they bring in in good faith, working against them.
00:33:42.720And then they've got their daughters who don't see them as a safe space because they either presume the parents won't support or in fact have received pushback from the parents that make them believe they won't be supported.
00:33:52.840So the parents are strong armed out of all of this while potential drugs are being sought, potential surgical choices are being investigated.
00:34:02.480And you point out in the book, Irreversible Damage, one of the main culprits in all this, one of the place they're going that they do get information from is YouTube and other online sites.
00:34:16.420Teens today are spending a huge amount of time online.
00:34:19.560And what they're what they're finding there is, you know, these YouTube influencers and other social media influencers who are a little older than they are.
00:34:41.440I was able to interview some some influencers and they and unfortunately, you know, depending on the young person's age and 15 at 15 in Oregon, they're able to go out and get these drugs from themselves without even parental approval.
00:35:10.380I mean, I think that, you know, I'm sure you can get parental controls that are sophisticated enough.
00:35:15.180But people, you know, I talk to parents whose daughters went on to art sharing websites.
00:35:21.700So the ostensibly the site wasn't even about gender at all, except that lots of transgender activists tended to congregate there and would redirect people towards, you know, other trans influencers.
00:35:35.700I mean, and even parental, I mean, by the time your kid is a teenager, parental controls, I think, are largely done.
00:35:42.720I mean, they're going to find a way to get access to unfiltered Internet.
00:35:47.020Doug and I talk about this all the time because we have three kids and it's like that's coming.
00:35:54.540And the question, I think, for a lot of parents is, do you ban the kid from having any access to that stuff or do you allow it and just try to be as involved as possible in talking to them about the dangers, the dangerous corners of the Internet and how damaging it could be?
00:36:14.080I'm not going to sit back and let my 11-year-old search unfiltered and see pornography.
00:36:19.140I think that could be genuinely damaging to him.
00:36:21.360But I know from the studies, we attended this seminar at one of our schools last year, that it was something like just over the majority of 12-year-old boys have seen pornography on the Internet.
00:37:16.180Like, and I guess the answer is potentially anyone, but you start from the position that there is greater loneliness being reported by these teens, teens today, than any other generation on record.
00:37:31.460That's right, because they're going, they're spending a lot less time.
00:37:35.960Gene Twenge is the psychologist who did the research on this.
00:37:39.740They're spending a lot less time with each other in person and a lot more time online, up to an hour less in person per day than previous generations.
00:37:47.740And even when they're together, they're not spending time together.
00:38:13.680And, you know, not to blame it on the Kardashians because you either seek that kind of product out or teach your daughter that that's a good thing to look at or you don't.
00:38:21.140But that's what our culture is, the selfie culture, the filters, the false presentation of surgically altered bodies as though that's easily attainable and anything else is less than.
00:38:31.600That's what these kids have to grow up in now.
00:39:11.740Some of these young women are starting to do this where they'll show themselves pre-filter and they'll show the magic of the filter, how, you know, their normal female bellies stick out
00:41:53.920And I know you say that one of the other flags is that the, for these, a lot of these girls, their bodies are a mystery to them.
00:42:01.000They, they may never have been kissed.
00:42:02.500They may never have touched themselves sexually.
00:42:04.200So how are we supposed to, you know, cross that bridge with our kids?
00:42:09.140Because I think as open-minded as a lot of us are, it's not like I want to sit down with my daughter and say, why don't you give this a try?
00:42:19.520Well, one thing is kids should be spending more time in person with each other.
00:42:24.880I think mom, you know, this generation of parents, and I include myself in this is for various reasons, you know, watching our society in many ways fall apart.
00:42:34.960We're afraid to let them out of our sight.
00:42:36.500And the problem is, is that a certain amount of teenage experimentation helps you grow up.
00:42:43.060And, and, and I, even, even if it's not physical, even just, you know, talking through your feelings, even just a kiss, these are normal parts of adolescence that a mom, that moms are stopping from occurring today.
00:42:54.400So these girls don't know themselves at all, and they don't know themselves sexually at all.
00:42:58.920And it's like, I mean, I will say in my own case, I remember growing up, my, my mom and my dad taught me values, and we went to church on Sundays, we're Catholic, and you, you get a certain set of ethics imprinted on you at a young age.
00:43:10.980And then when I got to be a teenager, I mean, my parents are totally hands off.
00:43:14.820It was, you know, the 80s, so they were basically like, take care, see you when you're leaving the house for college.
00:43:20.020But I, I, and I rebelled a little, I did some naughty things, but they were never too awful because of the imprint.
00:43:26.820But my, my parents certainly weren't running around after me, like, you can't be in the basement with that boy, or all doors have to be open at all times, or no walks on the beach with, you know, they kind of let me do my thing.
00:43:37.620And it was fine because of the imprint.
00:43:39.920So I think, I mean, is that where we go?
00:43:42.100Like, make the imprint good, and then trust a little.
00:43:45.240And if they fall, or they make a misstep, or they do something stupid, you're there to help.
00:43:49.620But the goal is not to prevent those moments.
00:43:53.780What parents are doing today is the opposite of what your parents did.
00:43:57.080So instead of they not giving the values, they're not supplying the values, what the moms are basically thinking is, it's okay, I'll just always be there.
00:44:05.440And so they do, they micromanage every situation their children are in, and the kids actually don't have much of a guide for how they should behave.
00:44:12.880And then they look online to how they should behave, and the mentors there are really not the people you want influencing your children.
00:44:21.280I mean, it truly is, it falls in line with what we've been talking about on this show for two weeks now, which is safe spaces are not safe.
00:44:28.520They have exactly the opposite effect of the one that's intended, because the dangers will come for them.
00:44:35.940And the goal as the parent is not to prevent any of this harm from ever happening.
00:44:40.080It's to give your child the tools to deal with it, especially while they're under your roof, and you can discuss it, and you can be there to help them pick up the pieces.
00:44:49.120But why would you want the first major catastrophe or problem to come to your kid when they're no longer living with you, and you can't help them?
00:45:18.420And yet they go into school, and they get these explicit lessons in explicit sex acts, and I'm sure it's very jarring for some of them.
00:45:27.620And then they're told there's something wrong with them if they're not totally accepting of all of it and, you know, aren't snapping whenever anybody gets up to talk about how they were a girl yesterday but are a boy today.
00:45:40.900I know you talk in the book about how the messages that they're getting from Instagram, Reddit, that website you talked about with the art, that the messages coming back to them from those are basically they celebrate.
00:46:22.880And, you know, look, all concerns about suicide have to be taken seriously, but today we're so hysterical about it that it's always in a kid's head.
00:48:15.020The total removal from the parents in major life and physical decisions is just wrong under any circumstances.
00:48:21.400But the suicide rate, I mean, I think to the parents out there saying, I don't give a damn.
00:48:30.380You know, and I know there was a response to your article in the Wall Street Journal that kicked this off by somebody who was a trans parent themselves who talked about their trans child coming out to them.
00:48:39.680And I think it was a boy to girl transition.
00:48:42.480And there was a sweet line at the end that said something like that.
00:48:45.280I cried at the thought of – even I, as a trans person, cried at the thought of my child going through this because it's not easy.
00:48:51.660But I cried at the thought of saying goodbye to my son as they drove off.
00:48:57.000And what I realized was I was actually saying hello to my daughter.
00:49:01.440And I thought, oh, my God, that's a beautiful way of putting it.
00:49:05.360And I think most parents just love their kids so much, even though most would not want this for them.
00:49:11.200They'll do what it takes to keep their kid well.
00:49:16.100So to those parents who are worried about the suicide rate and those 54% numbers, what do you say?
00:49:22.040Well, first of all, it's highly coercive.
00:49:24.580This is the only area of medicine where risk of suicide means you have to agree with the patient's self-diagnosis and do everything she says she needs.
00:49:33.420That's usually been the role of a doctor to assess.
00:49:44.180And very often the risk is not accurate.
00:49:47.400There's no reason to believe that agreeing with the patient and affirming them or letting them go through transition will alleviate suicidality.
00:49:55.880And did you find any evidence that transitioning either, you know, we can put physically to the side, I guess, but just going by a male pronoun, being called a male name and starting the process of looking more like a boy, what are sort of the stats on the joy that causes or the anxiety, stress and depression that causes?
00:50:18.400So there are no good studies that show that that alleviates suicidality or creates happiness.
00:50:26.280The one study that I'm aware of that suggests that it did cause happiness, they never looked at before transition.
00:50:33.400So this is the famous Christina Olsen study, never looked at the mental health of the kids before they were affirmed.
00:50:41.520All we do know is that if you affirm a kid when they say they come, when they come out with this, they are very highly likely to go through medical transition later.
00:50:50.500Wow. I think about it a little bit the way they talk about alcoholism.
00:50:56.260And there's a there's a saying in AA, wherever you go, that's where you are.
00:51:01.920And what they mean is you can't outrun this problem.
00:51:05.060You know, you can move from New York City to Chicago.
00:51:07.000You're still going to be an alcoholic in Chicago.
00:51:10.460You're going to have parties where it's served.
00:51:12.120You can't outrun your problems in that way.
00:51:14.220And since we know teenagers in general and certainly teenage girls are fraught with worry, concerns, self-doubt, insecurity.
00:51:24.020I mean, I think it applies to all of them, all of them, all every quote normal girl has those feelings.
00:51:29.020How do you make sure they understand that's normal, that's natural and transitioning to a different gender isn't going to solve it?
00:51:39.380You know, unless the problem is being trans, you know, you're going to have all the same problems when you transition and probably a few more.
00:51:51.020So I think kids need to be taught this, but but it can't always come from mom.
00:51:55.900See, when girls reach a certain age, they actually don't want to hear from mom and they don't care what she has to say or how right she is.
00:52:02.280That's a very normal part of adolescence.
00:52:58.000And I I I personally found it a compelling thought to say, in what school would they bring an anorexic out on a stage and say and everyone can see this is a thin person and the anorexic would say, I'm fat and I know I'm fat.
00:53:14.960And people would, in response, snap the way they do and support the kids these days and say, yes, you're fat.
00:53:23.020And then the anorexic would say, and I'm going to stop eating even more.
00:53:26.800And I may even have gastric bypass surgery.
00:53:29.100And the teachers and the administrators and the students would keep snapping and make a hero out of her.
00:53:35.680Everyone would know that would lead to devastation.
00:53:38.240You know, I understand why you can analogize this to to kids who are thinking they might be trans and thinking they might have top surgery or or something more severe.
00:53:49.580But the response is, it's not an apt analogy.
00:54:02.700I mean, talk to the detransitioners if you don't think it's devastating.
00:54:05.900There's a young woman in named Kira Bell right now in England who is suing the Tavistock Gender Clinic of England, the main gender clinic of England, because she was encouraged in this.
00:54:16.600She was pushed in this when she was very in adolescence, going through a hard time.
00:54:34.340But but to get back to your point about anorexia, the thing the thing we know about anorexia is that it spreads among girls.
00:54:41.400Girls will make each other's anorexia more severe if you put them together and get them to talk about their anorexia.
00:54:47.800So psychologists who deal with them always keep them separate and they have to manage it very carefully so they don't encourage each other.
00:54:54.620The same patterns exist with trans identification.
00:55:36.080And you point out in the book, it's not just the schools, but the magazines, right?
00:55:41.260Like Cosmo, Teen Vogue, they're all they're talking about it's called chest binding, I guess, when you're trying to hide your breasts as if it's, you know, it's like commonplace.
00:55:53.340Here's a here's a great way of doing it.
00:55:54.900Yeah, sort of the pithy lie about this is that it's so easy to become a boy, just a shot or a surgery away and you can become a boy.
00:56:03.760And look, the lies are told for for in some sense for for naive reasons.
00:56:09.240You know, when you start a course of testosterone, you feel great because it reduces anxiety, which is these girls biggest problems, and it delivers euphoria.
00:56:17.760So you can't wait to tell everyone how great and liberated you feel.
00:56:22.220But then again, you're a teenager, so you're not thinking about the fertility you'll never have.
00:56:27.360You're not thinking about the permanent five o'clock shadow.
00:56:30.540You're not thinking about your very high rate of risk of heart attack.
00:56:34.600But what's the balance point between, you know, the the celebration that we're seeing and almost not even celebration, the encouragement that we're seeing in these magazines and elsewhere and where we used to be,
00:56:48.320which is to shame anybody who feels this way, to ostracize them.
00:56:54.620I mean, they would say that one of the reasons that the trans rate with girls used to be 0.01 percent is because everybody knew knew enough to hide it.
00:57:02.700They they knew they'd get killed socially if they came out this way.
00:57:06.200And it was absolutely not socially acceptable.
00:57:08.280So how do we figure that out where we haven't crossed over to celebration to encourage people to go this route when it won't make their life easier?
00:57:16.920But we don't go back into shaming, judging and creating real stress where it doesn't need to be.
00:57:23.240Right. So a tolerant and kind society is, of course, what we would want.
00:57:27.220I am not opposed to medical transition for adults at all.
00:57:31.180And, you know, it is not something I think is a problem.
00:57:34.560It is not, you know, something I would ever oppose.
00:57:37.220But there's a real difference between, you know, pushing this on on confused teenage girls who have, you know, are so unlikely to have gender dysphoria,
00:57:48.140to constantly tell them about their gender options and being kind to someone who is transgender.
00:57:53.680You don't need to teach an entire student population about their gender options or encourage a gender journey in order to insist that they be kind to every other student, no matter who they are.
00:58:05.340And do you so is it is it your contention?
00:58:07.880Is it Dr. Lipman's contention that if you have a daughter who is going to be trans, you will have seen signs of it prior to the announcement you get at age 16?
00:58:19.720Absolutely. These girls don't come out of nowhere.
00:58:22.080Where I interview transgender adults, and we have a hundred-year diagnostic history, and we know what it is.
00:58:27.160It starts in early childhood, ages two to four, and it's a severe distress in their biological sex.
00:58:34.060This is not something young children hide.
00:58:36.520So when it occurs out of nowhere in their teenage years, when they are hanging out in a group of peers who are coming out together,
00:58:44.520and when they are immersing in social media, that's not what being transgender looks like.
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01:01:03.000So today I want to bring to you one of our features, which is called the Devil May Care All-Stars.
01:01:08.460We'll get back to Abigail in one second.
01:01:09.820But first, you got to hear this story.
01:01:11.380So these are people who they're not snowflakes, basically.
01:01:15.280And the woman we're featuring today is named Brianna Hill.
01:01:18.080This woman is a recent law school graduate out of Chicago, and she was doing what all law school students must do at the end, which is take the bar exam.
01:01:26.260Well, now during COVID, back in my day, you had to go into like a big auditorium and take it while a proctor was watching you.
01:01:32.360But now during COVID, they take the bar exam at home or wherever they want.
01:01:37.500But there's an artificial intelligence proctor that can watch you on camera.
01:01:42.920And if you move outside the vision of the AI proctor, you're disqualified.
01:01:51.380Like, what if you have to use the bathroom?
01:01:52.620Even when you took the bar exam, you could pop out.
01:01:54.700Actually, I don't remember if you could.
01:01:55.920But anyway, Brianna definitely could not leave.
01:01:57.600The problem was she was pregnant and she was about to give birth.
01:02:02.420And while taking the bar exam, which was a two-day test, she thought her water was breaking.
01:02:08.580And she knew if she left that chair, she was going to be disqualified and would have to wait until February to take the makeup exam.
01:02:16.100But she'd just spent four months studying for the bar.
01:02:18.280So Brianna decided to continue writing her legal arguments and only went to the hospital after she had completed the two sections of the exam administered on that first day of the two-day exam.
01:02:30.940And then the next day, after 24 hours had passed, oh, and also the birth of her son had occurred, she went back and finished the final sections.
01:02:40.340Actually, she did it at a table attached to her hospital bed.
01:02:45.680I love the attitude, the strength, the devil-may-care attitude.
01:02:51.080And Brianna Hill, I think you're going to make a great lawyer and an even better mom with the ability to have that sort of grace under pressure and to juggle multiple big things at once.
01:03:08.860Because the book does have proposed solutions.
01:03:11.680And I think a lot of parents out there are going to be interested in, OK, I mean, I know somebody who's going through this with their daughter, and they're scared.
01:06:34.580You pointed out in the book, if somebody said to you 15 years ago, I'm going to invent this device, and it's going to completely ruin your future children's happiness and create massive dangers for them and possibly ruin their sex lives and their gendered identity could be changed.
01:06:50.000And, like, they could be bullied inside their own bedroom at night.
01:07:13.980You have to go to the schools and you have to try to convince them to stop it.
01:07:17.440And parents who have done this, who have signed pacts to keep their kids off social media and keep them off smartphones, have been successful.
01:07:24.520Well, in one of our schools, it's wait until 8th, and that's what they're trying to get us to do, at least stave it off until the kids have gotten to 8th grade.
01:07:34.640I'd love for it to be 12th, but we'll fight that battle when we get there.
01:07:39.380So what about, you say, do not support gender ideology in your child's education?
01:07:43.600Is that sort of what I was talking about, where it was brought to our children's classroom in grade 3, and it was in-depth, and it was confusing for the kids?
01:07:54.360Gender ideology, the main idea is that whether you were told you were male, female, at birth, that was just a guess someone made by looking at your body.
01:09:01.060Some of the parents are so sort of idolizing of experts.
01:09:07.180We really need to get over our reliance on these so-called experts and the idea that we have to take everything a psychologist says as if it's the Bible.
01:09:17.960You know, I can feel the ire of folks who have transitioned or who are trans saying, why would you pull your kid from an attempt to stop bullying against trans people, which is what they would see this as?
01:09:33.460An attempt to educate them on what's happening to now maybe as many as 2% of their colleagues and their classmates with whom they're going to spend the next, you know, 12 years of school.
01:09:43.760Why would you pull your kid from that?
01:09:49.260Say the kid came out as, you know, a born-again Christian in school.
01:09:54.080Would you then teach all the kids, you know, start teaching everyone the New Testament and have them recite the prayers and have them imagine what it's like to be saved?
01:11:20.300We don't ask this of kids in any other context where bullying might occur.
01:11:25.000Because, you know, this kind of exercise is very confusing to kids who are just sorting out their identities, you know, to begin with.
01:11:33.180Well, and what about, to me, there's an anti-feminism or anti-woman strain in some of it where they're telling little boys that they might be girls if they like the color pink.
01:11:46.660And they're telling little girls that they might be boys if they only like sports and not dolls.
01:11:52.020And to me, and they are saying this in some of the literature, some of the videos that were shown in this school I'm talking about were right down that line.
01:11:58.460And I object as a former tomboy myself.
01:12:22.160And when they get to puberty and mature into these sexy, you know, more rounded in the middle, childbearing, awesome, strong, but emotional beings.
01:12:33.260And somehow women are being, almost girls are being sort of counseled out of that.
01:12:37.100That you might have to rethink your entire gender if you don't conform with these traditional roles.
01:12:43.960Girls are taught that if they are good at math, if they like physics, that they are something called, if they admire Sally Ride, she was gender nonconforming.
01:12:54.820That's what they are, gender nonconforming, which means the more remarkable you are, the less you count as a woman.
01:13:00.480You talk in the book about how it's, in some ways, it's been a knock on lesbians because lesbians, according to the adolescents you interviewed, are not the cool thing to be anymore.
01:13:10.900And they diminish lesbians as just sort of confused trans people, people who are not like ready.
01:13:18.360They're masculine girls who can't admit that they're actually boys.
01:13:21.420Yeah, I interviewed a lot of lesbians for the book.
01:13:24.520And one young woman who eventually, you know, had identified as trans, Riley, in the book, she, at 16, she decided she was trans.
01:13:34.720Or actually, at 14, she decided she was trans.
01:13:37.380But later, she realized she was just a lesbian.
01:13:40.500And just because she had certain masculine tendencies or feelings didn't mean that she was not really a girl.
01:13:47.800And a lot of lesbians I talked to believe this is basically a euthanizing of young lesbians, because all these young women who would grow up to be healthy lesbian women are instead being convinced that they're really men.
01:14:00.060Or, and even non-lesbians, just being taught on your point of stop pathologizing girlhood, it's almost as if girls' and women's tendency to be emotional, which is awesome.
01:14:14.080It's one of the things that makes us beautiful.
01:14:15.840And certainly to be, as you put it in the book, full of whirlwind fury and self-doubt as teenagers, suddenly we're being told that's not normal.
01:14:25.300And parents are trying to therapize it and subdue it and make girls feel odd or wrong because of it.
01:14:34.600Instead of just loving it and embracing it and get them prepared to understand girls are different and they're different in an awesome way.
01:14:42.500In some sense, we've never lived in such a misogynistic time.
01:14:46.380You know, the idea that all things that girls naturally love are somehow denigrated, you know, taking care of children or literature or, you know, psychology.
01:15:03.540They're told that all their natural inclinations are somehow lesser.
01:15:07.700And it's really sending a very bad message that there's a very limited number of things that are respected in this culture and they're all male.
01:16:08.700I mean, there is nothing wrong with being a girl.
01:16:11.660And we need to stop telling our daughters that just because they have certain preferences, that makes them lesser.
01:16:17.980You know, girls tend to be more emotional, especially in adolescence.
01:16:23.280That doesn't mean there's something wrong with them.
01:16:25.360And it doesn't necessarily mean we need to immediately short circuit it with medication.
01:16:30.440And you talked about how, because we have gotten to this place in society where we as girls, as women are told, if you don't become a CEO, if you don't go, you know, in the steam, right, technology, if you don't become a scientist, you've settled.
01:16:46.240You've become the victim of a sexist system.
01:16:49.020And you've become a, you are a victim in general, because you could have done all these things that you rejected because you live in this sexist society.
01:16:58.840This really, this, I'd never had it phrased the way you phrase it in the book, but I felt like, oh my God, this woman's in my head.
01:17:05.480Like this is, I needed to hear this myself because you talk about how, look, we, why can't we look at CEOs who lead fairly, you say, fairly difficult lives.
01:17:22.640They don't have time to nurture relationships.
01:17:24.440They have a high rate of divorce and look at the women who choose something else, a different life as maybe being better adjusted, maybe a little wiser for preferring relationships to dollars.
01:17:36.160And honestly, Abigail, I've never heard somebody phrase it quite that way, but that really spoke to me.
01:17:44.400I think we've gone so far around the bend with Gloria Steinem's version of feminism.
01:17:48.200We have forgot to, we've forgotten to remind women, your choices are great no matter what they are.
01:17:53.640And if they're not science, if they're literature, good on you.
01:17:57.180Yeah, there's so much judgmentalism about women's choices.
01:18:00.400And a lot of it, unfortunately, is coming from women.
01:18:02.760They are told that if they want to stay home and, you know, with their families or stay home and raise children, even for a few years, they are failing to lean in.
01:21:08.740And when a woman doesn't want to do that, it's denigrated.
01:21:12.120And you're a very confident woman, but most women are probably less confident than that.
01:21:16.980And they're buying into the idea that only one set of options is respectable.
01:21:21.340You know, I was at a mom's roundtable at my daughter's school not long ago, and we were talking about our girls and our just issues that you have when you have little girls and so on.
01:21:33.060It's not like a support group, but it's an after-school chat group.
01:21:35.920And one of the moms, she always says when she's leaving the house, mommy's going to a meeting because she's now a stay-at-home mom.
01:21:42.740And she wants to telegraph to her daughter that mom's busy, mom has important things going on, and mom used to be an important executive.
01:21:49.040And she's like, I don't want her to think I'm just this Upper East Side stay-at-home mom.
01:21:52.720And she got a lot of nods of support around the circle.
01:21:56.320And I had just left NBC, which was, you know, that whole experience was so toxic, my leaving and the fallout.
01:22:03.160And I remember saying to her, what's so bad about being an Upper East Side housewife and mother?
01:22:08.800Like, why do you feel the need to create a different image?
01:22:13.160And she's like, well, you know, I want her to be strong.
01:22:28.280Why are women always apologizing for their choices as though it's weak to want to be married to a guy, take good care of him, take good care of yourself?
01:22:36.480You know, whatever you want to do, keep the house the way women used to do in the 50s.
01:22:41.100Now that we have real choices and we can do other things, that choice looks very different.
01:22:46.660It was one thing when that was all we could do.
01:22:48.320But now that we could do what we want, I wish women would stop apologizing for that.
01:22:52.300Being an Upper East Side housewife looks pretty damn good to me.
01:23:08.980They were just taking care of the children.
01:23:10.840Well, you think back to your grandmother, and I think back to my grandmothers, and these were incredibly strong, incredibly smart and savvy women.
01:23:29.980And the more I talk to my friends about our daughters who are in these great schools, very, very high, highly respected schools, the more we get honest and say, well, what's the end goal?
01:23:41.900Do we want them to go to Harvard and become investment bankers?
01:23:59.360I mean, happiness isn't really a realistic goal because normal humans only feel that sporadically.
01:24:03.020They don't have 10 out of 10 happiness for all of their life.
01:24:05.520But you want them to be well, to have adjusted lives that bring them joy, bring them troubles that they can handle, bring them a secure and stable family life.
01:24:15.420But the last thing I want is for my kids to wind up being bankers who work all the time and have huge bank accounts, but really not that much personal connection.
01:24:30.420Americans are a lot less religious today.
01:24:32.220And one of the side effects is we've lost our moral vocabulary.
01:24:36.020So when we talk about the good life, we're not talking about doing good, really.
01:24:40.100We talk about the jobs you've attained or, you know, how high you've gotten on the corporate ladder.
01:24:47.000Unfortunately, that's what parents are telling their children they need to do.
01:24:50.580And it's not necessarily, it's certainly not the life for everyone, and it's not necessarily a good or happy life.
01:24:56.320I mean, I think back to the time when I was making my decision about leaving Fox and the friends I remember are the ones who asked me about my happiness in my family life.
01:25:08.940How do you think that would change if you went to a job that got you home by noon?
01:25:12.340And those are the friends who helped make it okay for me to make the leap, putting aside whether that was the organization for me to go to.
01:25:19.820Just the change of changing my lifestyle and the way I was living was and remains a good idea.
01:25:25.820And honestly, now I look around and I'm so much happier than I've ever been.
01:25:29.200And I don't have that super powerful role anymore, and I don't have that kind of salary anymore, and I couldn't care less.
01:25:38.060I would encourage any woman feeling the way, or man feeling the way I was feeling, to take the leap.
01:25:57.840Look, can I ask you, can I ask you what's happened to you?
01:26:01.200Because good God, I mean, I can feel the articles being written now about how you're a transphobe and I'm a transphobe and everyone's a transphobe just for having this conversation.
01:26:10.040Having been through this battering ram now over and over after your interview on Joe Rogan, after your book came out, what's your perspective on that?
01:26:47.140And you could lose your job over this.
01:26:49.180And, and one thing that, that people don't realize is how completely our institutions have been co-opted by the young, woke members of their staffs.
01:26:57.820It's a very, it's a very concerning trend in America.
01:27:00.800Yeah, well, you went on Joe Rogan and that interview continues to, this isn't judgment on you, cause problems for him at Spotify.
01:27:09.960They've had young employees there say it's transphobic, that he's transphobic, that you're transphobic, that Spotify should pull the episode.
01:27:16.900And so far to its credit, although Spotify says it's had 10 or 12 meetings on this, they have not pulled the episode, which is good.
01:27:25.180That's a trend in the right direction.
01:27:26.800That's, that's what we're about in America, having tough discussions about tough subjects so people can learn.
01:27:32.020And people who are doubting or questioning can have smart discussions around these issues.
01:27:37.900But what, what did you think when you saw the backlash that he's experiencing over that episode?
01:28:21.940And, and so far, you know, Joe Rogan stood up to them is, you know, and, and so far Spotify has stood up to them and said, it's a, it's a move too far.
01:28:30.640It's been amazing to see Spotify with its spine.
01:29:05.880I fully support medical transition for, for mature adults.
01:29:10.040Um, I just wanted to be able to look into a phenomenon, a sudden spike, um, of trans identification and trans, you know, uh, medical treatments for adolescent girls.
01:29:28.080You know, the thing to know about the activists is that they're overwhelmingly biological males, and yet they're able to shut down discussion of a mental health crisis facing teenage girls.
01:29:38.060Well, they, and they also keep shutting down any discussion about whether it's fair to have trans girls, you know, people who are identified male at birth who transition to girl, compete in girl sports.
01:29:49.220And, you know, we've seen moms, mothers of color, of daughters of color, writing articles in the newspaper saying, my daughter worked her tail off to distinguish herself in track.
01:29:57.760And she was on path to get a scholarship for track in college.
01:30:01.820And then two trans girls, people who are identified male at birth, who transitioned into girls, came onto the track team, and they're crushing my daughter.
01:30:08.960And my daughter's no longer number one.
01:30:10.460And this will actually affect her chances of getting into a good school.
01:30:13.100And the response is uniformly from the activist, Ben, bigot.
01:30:17.780Look what happened to Martina Navarrola.
01:30:20.560Then this woman who was like a pioneer for, for gay rights in tennis.
01:30:24.720It's, man, did they shut her down for saying, I'm not sure we should be letting trans women play against, they're called, quote, cis women, women who are identified female at birth.
01:30:32.340And that rings true for them throughout their lives.
01:30:36.020The use of these awful pejorative terms to stifle any discussion on these tough issues, which I believe society's in good faith grappling with, is chilling and it's upsetting.
01:30:49.900I mean, girls are noticing that no one's standing up for them in the broader culture.
01:30:53.000They're noticing that boys who didn't train hard, who had no standout achievements on the boys' team, are able to take their trophies and scholarships and no one's protesting.
01:32:21.960Science writers aren't even allowed to talk about my book.
01:32:25.200Well, and Dr. Lipman, who is an OBGYN and now public health researcher on whose study you based some of this book, she received a ton of backlash.
01:32:34.600Brown University subjected it to yet another peer review.
01:32:39.900And while they had her include more explicit references to the fact that she was relying on testimonials from parents, who, again, trans kids say you can't go to them, not one of her conclusions was changed.
01:32:52.940They did not change any of her conclusions on it.
01:32:55.520But, boy, folks did their best to discredit her entirely.
01:33:33.680So closing question to the parents out there who are worried about this, who have a genuine good faith fear that if this is a social contagion, it might come into their family to a daughter who is not trans but is struggling.