Abigail Shrier Interview: The Truth Behind Trans Children
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, The Federalist and author of new book Irreversible Damage. In the book she explores the "transgender craze," where in the last few years, there has been an explosion in people identifying as transgender -- especially among biological females now identifying as male. The book was recently banned from Target -- though later reinstated -- after one transgender individual complained on Twitter. Topics include the Transgenderism craze, big tech, and making women a victim class. Buy her book here: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans. Topics Discussed Transgenderism craze in society How Abigail became involved in the debate Effects of testosterone on women Social media and Transgender influencers Using Google to solve everything Helicopter parenting Why social media is poison Embracing ideology instead of religion Gender clinics What you can get without a parent's consent in most states How they are able to teach gender in school without parent's knowledge Secret identities at school Teen hysteria What is the science behind transgenderism? Doctor's roles De-transitioning Big tech The best thing a dad can do for his daughter Pride parade in schools Subscriber Portion Why this shouldn't be a political issue Postmodernism, post-truth Making women a victim class LGBTQ infighting Public lies Biological differences Feminism Abigail's book removal from Target Silence from reviewers In defense of boyhood and girlhood.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
You know what I like, Ethan?
What do you like?
Girls.
Really?
Well, your wife.
My wife, exactly.
But just in general.
You hate all other girls.
Correct.
Right.
But in general, I like that God made women.
Yeah.
Do you like that also?
Yeah, I like how he was like, okay, I'm going to make women.
And he's like, takes one rib.
He's like, okay, other than this one rib, I completely messed up on men.
We're going to start over from scratch, pretty much.
This part's okay.
We can save this.
We'll save this one little rib.
And then just everything else needs a total redo.
Total.
Yep.
But you know what's that?
Property brothers.
The total property brothers.
But yeah, so are we introducing a guest right now?
Yeah.
Okay.
Abigail Schreier's coming on, who wrote a book about how women are being seduced into this crazy transgender craze thing?
Yeah, team.
Teenage.
Teenage girls.
Yeah, they're all, it's like, hey, why don't you jump on board the trans train and cut out your uterus?
And, you know, that's really permanent.
So she's like, maybe we should just think about that a little bit.
We should write a book about it.
Talk about maybe it's not a good thing to just jump into cutting out your uterus and everything when you're like 13.
It is really an extreme of the spectrum of permanence.
Yeah, it's pretty permanent.
There's like kind of permanent and then like really permanent after taking out.
Like when we were growing up, kids wanted to like cut themselves and stuff.
Like it was always like skin deep, but you know, they might still have little scars, but they can still have kids.
So I went up to a cabin in the woods this weekend.
I locked myself in the cabin and I read this entire book that she wrote.
Wow.
That's not why I went up there.
I went up there with the kids.
Oh, you weren't all alone.
But it was the only way I can read a whole book.
My mind is so distracted, crazy, and there's no sales service.
How do you read a book within a cabin with children?
Well, my parents were there.
My grandparents.
And I just went off by myself.
But anyway, it's an excellent book.
This is a great interview.
Irreversible damage.
And Abigail was a great guest.
Yeah, we had her in person, which is always better.
So great.
So great.
So here it is.
Abigail Schreier.
Let's dive in.
All right.
Well, we're sitting here with Abigail Schreier.
How are you doing?
Thanks for coming.
Thanks so much for having me on.
Writer for the Wall Street Journal and the Russian-funded Federalist.
You didn't introduce money.
And then Ethan.
Well, thanks.
Well, we already talked before this, don't we?
Like, we do ours.
Oh, yeah.
We all know who we are.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I'm sensitive today.
Abigail wrote Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
If you want to.
Someone's got a timer.
Oh, it's my phone.
Yeah.
Can we redo that?
No, I'll keep it in.
No, it's a beautiful fix.
It just makes it the best.
Oh, I do.
Your kids set a timer on your phone?
No.
They're calling me.
I'm going to answer a phone call.
We can stop.
I'm in the middle of recording.
Yeah, they can be on.
They can be on.
I always love those bloopers in movies.
I think there was one in Rush Hour.
I might actually have to just shut it off.
They can reach my husband.
I think there was one in Rush Hour where Jackie Chan gets a call.
Sorry about that.
In Rush Hour, he gets a call.
Chris Tucker gets a call from his mom, and he's like, Oh, I'm recording.
Jackie Chan takes the phone from him, and he's like, We're recording right now.
I'm not doing an Asian accent.
All right, so let's talk about this.
I don't know, our podcast sometimes is a little light and funny, but this is a hard topic to make a lot of funny.
I'm not light too light, yeah.
So I don't know.
But yes, you talk about this transgender craze, and I actually read the book in a break from tradition.
Yeah, I guess, and then we're like pathetic.
You read the whole book.
And you talk about this transgender craze where, like, in the last few years, you probably explain it better than I can, but yeah, absolutely.
But there's a sudden explosion of girls identifying as males, identifying as transgender, so female to male.
Or just transing, especially kind of transing.
Some kind of transing, yeah, sure.
That's a technical term.
And it's among teenagers.
Yeah, what we're seeing is, you know, a social contagion.
It's young women who are in genuine pain deciding with their girlfriends that this is the problem.
And of course, in previous generations, they would say, oh, the problem is I'm so fat.
I'm so fat.
If I just lost more and more weight, I would finally be happy.
And today they're looking at the culture and they're saying, wait a second, I know what's wrong with me.
I'm in seventh grade.
I don't feel feminine.
I'm a boy.
And they go on social media and social media agrees with them.
In fact, their favorite influencers are trans and their girlfriends.
And they hear the gender ideology in the school that only they know their true gender identity and all their friends agree with them.
And then these young girls who were not popular, who socially struggled, who were precocious and a little sheltered, all of a sudden they're heroes in school.
So they're sure, oh, I was right.
This is what I had.
Yeah, and there's this, there's already a desire, or there's already a feeling that I don't fit in.
I mean, all the feelings of being a teenager, it fits so well into when you're describing that.
I'm like, that's being a teenager.
Being a teenager, you don't feel like you fit in.
You feel like odd man out.
You feel ugly.
You feel weird.
You feel, you know.
So it just makes to have this opportunity to, which you're not allowed to say that, right?
That somebody would willfully.
And that's, is that like the big crux of like what the controversy about your book is that do people say you're saying that girls are choosing to be trans when we're supposed to say if they say they're trans, they were all along.
It was a secret, kind of like the Elliott came out.
Pim.
There's an alleged controversy and then there's the truth.
And I would just say, look, if these girls were just deciding they were transgender, I wouldn't have written the book, right?
But the problem is, even minor girls are going off and very quickly deciding they want hormones and surgeries that cause irreversible changes to their bodies and they're obtaining them without parental permission, without even a therapist note, and yes, underage.
And so, you know, what is the controversy?
The real controversy is that if anybody reads the book, if anybody considers what's actually going on and reads about it, if anyone learns of the Kira Bell case in England, which was just decided in December, in which a high court, a neutral tribunal, looked at what was going on in their gender clinics and was horrified, then to be honest, they'll shut this down.
They'll say, hold on.
We're seeing a whole generation of young women in numbers that don't make any sense permanently altering their bodies in ways that they're likely to regret.
And suddenly a whole industry gets shut down.
And I'm not, look, I'm not looking to prevent anyone from medical transition.
I'm certainly not looking to prevent mature adults from it.
I just have noted that there's a complete lack of safeguards.
There's no medical, appropriate medical oversight.
There's all kinds of girls getting this on a first visit.
They're getting testosterone on a first visit.
Yes, even minors.
And the whole book is just, you know, an exploration of whether it's doing them any good.
And in many cases, it isn't.
They aren't leading good lives.
They're miserable.
They're dropping out of school.
They're cutting off their families by objective measures.
They're not flourishing.
So that's why I wrote the book.
But what's the, because what I'm trying to get at is like, what's the motivation to be that blind to go for people that support this kind of thing?
You know, to go, okay, teenagers, it seems to me that it feels like it fits in with this idea that if a person says they're trans, we have to say, and maybe it's true for some people, but when it's these numbers where girls in groups are becoming all trans, almost like they're all in the same boy band or whatever.
Right.
So it's been consistent.
Like the researcher, the public health researcher whose work, you know, my book jumped off of was Lisa Littman at Brown University.
And she looked into it and she realized the rates didn't make any sense, that there was a sudden spike.
And of course, this was an affliction.
Gender dysphoria, the severe discomfort in one's biological sex had always afflicted overwhelmingly boys and men.
Now, it starts in early childhood, ages two to four, little boys saying, no, mommy, I'm not a boy, I'm a girl, and being really, you know, insistent, consistent, persistent in it.
And there were young girls who experienced this in early childhood, very, very small numbers, but they existed.
You're talking about numbers that round to 0%.
I mean, that's small fractions of a percent.
And all of a sudden, you have teenage girls with no childhood history being the leading demographic.
And, you know, there are a lot of industries right now and a lot of doctors and a lot of medical associations that have come out and said, no, our job is to affirm.
Our job is to give the medications and don't ask any questions about this.
And there are so many people who have staked their careers on the idea that you can never, ever, ever question this that they figured out that if anybody were to question this, if we were just to use our common sense, that right away people would walk away in horror at what's been done.
We're using a lot of trigger words like common sense, boys, girls.
A lot of these are.
You're not supposed to say any of that.
Careful.
Just be careful.
I'll try.
Obviously, careful is not my cup of tea, but all right.
Well, when someone criticizes like anything transgender, the assumption is that they're, you know, I don't know, a religious bigot or they have some kind of ideology.
What got you interested in this?
What cult are you in?
What cult are you part of?
Well, you know, a reader wrote to me.
I had done, you know, primarily opinion journalism and a reader wrote to me and she said this, she wrote to me because I had written an unrelated article to Wall Street Journal.
It was on the gender pronoun laws.
And I'm a lawyer and I had written about that they're, you know, the fact that they aren't constitutional.
In America, you can't, the government can't assign criminal and civil penalties for saying something.
In fact, government can't make you say anything at all.
And it can't punish you based on what you've said.
You know, anyway, it's actually a fairly straightforward case in this argument.
And this woman wrote to me and she said, this is what happened to my daughter.
She went off to college.
She had a lot of mental health problems.
A lot of these girls do.
We're seeing rates of anxiety and depression we've never seen before in this population of teenage girls.
And she said, my daughter started a course of testosterone out of nowhere in college with her friends.
And parents across the whole country are dealing with this.
And no one will write about it.
I've written to all kinds of journalists.
And I thought, okay, let me get in touch with an investigative journalist I know.
And I kept doing that without success.
I ain't touching that.
Right.
All these brave journalists didn't want to write about it.
And at some point I thought, you know, this is crazy.
I guess if no one's going to write about this, why shouldn't I?
I mean, I'm a journalist.
I'm supposed to look into these things.
So, I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal and they let me do it.
They were really nice about it.
And trying to talk you down, like, okay, you sure you want to do this?
I mean, you know, at some point, my husband is like, Are you really going to, you know, but you know, he was very supportive, but it was a little weird.
This wasn't a personal issue to me.
Yeah.
You know, everyone assumes there's a personal issue, but I have to tell you, if you've been through this, if you have had a daughter who has gone on a course of testosterone and altered her bodies and you don't think this is right for her and you can't stop her or you haven't been able to stop her, and you couldn't write about this because I mean, certainly in the investigation I did, I don't know that you could do it because it's these parents.
There's not a parent who doesn't call me who doesn't end up sobbing.
So I couldn't have written it and had such a, you know, sort of curiosity, but not but a certain level of detachment if it had been a personal issue.
Right.
So anyway, eventually that's what I did.
The Peace in the Wall Street Journal really blew up.
It had over a thousand commenters.
And then there was a piece in the Wall Street in the New York Times responding to it.
And at the time, I was planning on writing a different book.
And my agent said to me, you know, because I was going to write this book about young women today.
And my agent said, well, that seems to be blowing up.
You sure don't want to write about that.
It's a good agent.
I figured it out.
You talk about the testosterone a lot in the book.
And that's it.
It struck me that it's like this cult and they have this fixate.
There's a fixation that develops on like testosterone will solve all my problems.
Well, testosterone delivers a euphoria and it suppresses anxiety.
And anxiety is these girls' biggest problems.
So they go on it and they feel great and they become convinced that they were right about their diagnosis.
They can't wait to tell all their friends how bold they feel, how confident they feel.
And, you know, you were talking about before, you know, being a teenage girl has always been hard.
Well, yeah, but they used to go to their girlfriends to talk about it.
But today they don't.
They go to the internet.
So they're getting advice from, you know, a lot of questionable people.
I know there's a young woman named Willow who's a detransitioner.
I don't know.
I didn't interview her for my book, but she did a series of YouTube Waffling Willow did a series of YouTube.
She was herself a detransitioner.
She had transitioned and regretted it.
And she did a series of really brilliant, you know, sort of reviews of every chapter of the book.
And one of the things she talks about is the fact that when she went on testosterone, she did, she, you know, she agreed with what I say in the book that it was true for her that you do feel like, oh my God, I feel so much better.
I get my anxiety suppressed.
I get this euphoria.
I was right.
I am trans.
But then, you know, over a period of the next year or so, very often that that subsides and you're left with the same problems you started with.
That's weird.
I never thought that I'm curious if you could take away my testosterone for a day and be like, ah, I kind of assume, like, when I hear about the way women think, which we're not allowed to have any of these conversations, they can't talk about like women think a certain way.
It's not because when I was hearing your interview, I kept going, what, you can't say that?
Like, that's stuff that's all you're not, it's not supposed to talk about it.
Anyway, well, think about you said what would happen if you took away your testosterone, but think about older men, right, who have lower testosterone.
One of the first things they do is they start to weep, right?
I mean, old men weeping, they tend to cry more easily.
I mean, that's one of them.
I cry more easily.
I'm 40 now.
I cry at dumb stuff.
So, girls go on this, and all of a sudden, a weepy seventh, eighth grader who was so emotional, who's going through her whole body's changing.
The kids at school think she's ugly.
She thinks she's ugly.
Social media tells her she's ugly.
She's crying all the time.
She starts testosterone in ninth grade, 10th grade, whatever it is, and she feels great and she doesn't have the urge to cry anymore.
It's gone.
Because that's what testosterone does.
Does a lot of bad stuff here.
She's given wedgies and stuff too.
Punch and toxic masculinity.
Dose.
Let's talk about the social media element because that's super interesting to me.
There's something, it was almost counterintuitive that you mentioned in the book that like girls are not having their first kiss, you know, as young as they used to.
And we think of it like, you know, we're good Christian guys.
We're like, that's good, you know.
But there's 30.
But there's this like, I don't know, reverse effect where now they're finding that they're exploring, you know, their sexuality or whatever online with these strangers that are like tennel feeding them this gender ideology.
And so they're not going to the mall and hanging out with their friends and making mistakes and then being like, oh, you know, kind of finding out who they are that way.
That's exactly right.
A whole generation of Gen X parents didn't want their kids to be exposed to any harms or any risk, basically.
And so they watch them like hawks.
And so a young girl of 12, 13, 14 has never had a first gift very often.
We've seen the rates.
You know, I didn't do the work on this.
Other psychologists have done.
You know, and so she doesn't know what she is.
And she doesn't know, you know, she's getting a lot of her messages from at a very young age.
A lot of them are coming from social media.
A lot of them are coming from school in which she's taught, you know, it's a really good idea.
You're a white girl.
If you want to get, you know, a certain amount of, I don't know, congratulation at school, it's really great to pick from one of these more exotic things.
So she can't choose to be a different race, but she can choose to be trans.
And very often she starts out and she says, I'm pansexual.
She's never kissed a girl.
She's never kissed a boy, but she knows she's pansexual all of a sudden.
And of course, that's not how sexuality emerges.
It doesn't, it's not something Google answers for you.
But that is how, you know, young women are developing today.
And part of the problem is internet porn, because even though they've never seen, you know, all the romantic movies that got made, they don't have 16 candles to dream about, you know, the way girls my age, you know, my generation did.
But what they do have is internet porn that they've seen at age 11 or very, very young ages.
It's extremely violent and it terrifies them.
And they think, I don't know what I want, but I don't want that.
If that's what sex is, I want something else to dream about.
Yeah.
Plus, there's the whole Me Too movement and the whole toxic masculinity thing.
I mean, I think that it makes sense because even I grew up, I was raised by a single mother and I always considered myself raised more feminine than usual guy.
I was terrified of guys, which I kind of relate to the terror, the scariness of men that women experience because I was picked on a lot and I just, I never felt like one of the guys.
And yeah, so like I relate to the I've seen my daughter.
I have a teenage daughter and she's gotten a lot of these ideas.
It feels like, I mean, okay, I'm transitioning to another topic in the middle of my question.
No, don't transition.
I'm transitioning.
No, you said no.
Because one thing I thought a lot about when I was listening to your interview, we talk about this coddling thing that was bad.
Gen X parents were helicopter parenting and stuff like that.
That's you guys.
And then somebody shouldn't do that, right?
But then the other thing that I, the messaging here is keep your kids off social media.
Keep them what don't give them phones, blah, blah, blah.
To me, those are contradictory statements.
Like, how do you both helicopter, not helicopter parent, but then also like completely ban the thing that is going to make you seem like the most strict parent?
Like, because that's the hardest thing.
And what I noticed, like when we, and I tried to be very wise about it, let my daughter go onto social media with, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm involved.
We have passwords.
We watch.
She asked to private account.
It was like a month.
Like it was instant, the change that she just became a different person.
So I would say this: I think we're uptight about the wrong things.
And by the way, I say this with a lot of humility because I didn't know any of this until I did this crazy investigation.
So I think that the phones and social media is poison.
It is poison.
When you see the rates, and Jonathan Haidt did the work on this, Gene Twangy did the work on this.
Academic psychologists have done this.
When you see the rates of cutting, anxiety, depression, suicidality of teenage girls, and I had told you about this in 2007, you would have said, No way is my kid getting one.
Are you crazy?
What?
So she can stay in touch with her friends and be suicidal?
Are you mad?
Of course I'm not going to do that.
And yet, here we are.
It's sending them to a debutante ball.
It never ends.
They are being compared.
They are finding out every party in real time that they're not invited to.
They are seeing the beautiful images that have been edited of their friends who look a million times more beautiful than they think they are.
They are seeing how many more likes their friends get.
It's cruel and it lives with them non-stop.
It is putting them, and forget about the things you don't know about that are being said about them, the jokes that are made about them.
I mean, I'm an adult and it's hard, right?
And I can't even imagine what it would have been like for me at 12 or 13.
It's so cruel to put these young girls, especially who are so worried about how they look already and so worried with their friends' thing on social media.
So I would say, let your girls have her overnight.
Who cares what movies they're watching within reasonable whatever?
You know, within a certain level, you know, I'm not saying robo cut.
Right.
Who cares how much of that they're watching?
Who cares what lyrics they're listening to within reason?
It's all part of the, you know, who cares what books they're reading within, you know, within reason.
I mean, I don't know every book that's out there, but you know what I'm saying?
Like, it's a classic.
Let them read it.
You know?
Right.
But, but the social media, you just would you take your daughter to a mixer with 30-year-old men?
Because that's who's waiting for her online.
And you wouldn't do that.
But when I interviewed D-Transitioners, I interviewed this young woman, Benji, a remarkable young woman who transitioned and regretted it.
And she told me one of the first, she was lonely.
She was 13.
Parents, really tough house she was growing up in.
And she went through a really hard time.
And first thing she did was she went online and she decided maybe I'm trans.
And she came, went on social media, started that identity.
And all of a sudden, a ton of adults couldn't wait to congratulate her and celebrate her.
And she felt loved.
And then they started asking for pictures because they're adults talking to children.
So, you know, I would say, yeah, you got to let your kids go to the corner store.
You got to let them just be, you got to let them have stupid friends who are going to suggest dumb things and whatever.
But social media, wow, that's, I don't know.
That's that, that's where I draw a line.
What was your impression of like these influencers who are just encouraging girls to transition?
Because we had an issue with, we have all boys, but where they had access to a social media site that was like approved for their school.
And then we found, we logged in one day because we checked their stuff and there's comments from people that are telling, you know, my 11-year-old boy, you know, oh, maybe you're this gender.
There you go.
It's approved by your school, probably.
Yeah, whatever the, you know, I think it's something that was run.
It was called, I don't remember now, Scratch.
It's a programming social media site done through MIT.
Right.
My, my, actually.
Do you know anything about that?
Yeah, I know that that is part of that.
Yeah.
And they just have these groups like a pro, you know, whatever.
So these kids are being encouraged by people and anybody can log into it.
So I'm telling, you know, I tell my boy, like, this guy that's talking to you and saying, maybe you're asexual, maybe you're, you know, yeah.
And I'm telling them, like, you're, you're 10 years old or 11 or whatever it was.
I'm like, everybody's asexual at that age.
Like this is a normal part.
Like everybody thinks girls are gross at 10 or 11.
Like don't, you know, I don't know.
So anyway, my question is, you talk about certain social media influencers in your book, and some of them gave you a very positive impression that they were trying to do something good.
They were trying to help.
What's the motive for like, I don't know, putting out all this information for girls to transition?
Well, I think a few things.
I did, I was really grateful for the interviews I got with social media influencers.
And I think I came away more sympathetic.
These are young people in their 20s.
I think they're trying to give a good message and trying to do good.
And they believe this helped them.
One thing you have to know is remember that a lot of the kids, you know, these aren't doctors, you know, and some of the, by the way, some of the people on social media are far worse than others, right?
Some of them are giving outright medical advice without any kind of medical license.
And, you know, they don't like to talk about the negative side effects of testosterone.
They're pretty bad.
But, you know, but I will say that remember there you go on you go on hormones and you go on testosterone.
If you're a girl with high anxiety, you feel better.
And so you can't wait to tell everyone about that.
You want to share how good you feel and you feel bold at an age when no girl feels bold or very few girls feel bold.
You're 14, you're developing and all these things and all of a sudden you can't, you're bold.
You're unafraid socially.
So I think it comes from very often a good place.
You know, you get a lot of bad advice from older teenagers in your life.
It's just that they didn't used to have, you know, they didn't used to have hundreds of thousands of people watching, subscribers.
And also, here's the funny thing: they're edited videos.
So very often some of these influencers, they disappear because of their own depression and their own mental health problems.
You don't see any of that.
You know, you see a guy in school and you look up to him and then he gets kicked out of school.
Well, you see it.
That was my generation.
So you know what happens to that kid.
But with social media, everything looks perfect.
So you think this advice is really good and he's leading a great life.
Trust me.
I just saw his last episode.
Yeah.
It struck me as like just there's this, we'll talk more about all the other elements, but you can, there's this whole like network of people that are just ready to affirm any declaration that I'm trans or I identify as this or that, you know, from the influencers to the doctors to the schools.
And I don't know.
It's interesting to me.
It almost, it struck me very cult-like.
Like there's this, like you said, like I said with the testosterone, that they're like, this is what's going to solve it.
And then this has solved my problem.
And then they go out and tell other people.
And no dissent is allowed or encouraged.
Yeah.
I mean, so kids on YouTube are just kids on YouTube, right?
Even though they are now the new Hollywood stars of this young generation, right?
But they are just kids on YouTube.
The problem is we have doctors, whole medical accrediting organizations who've decided that the role of a doctor is to affirm.
They've all adopted affirmative care, which means a doctor cannot use their individual judgment.
That's a no-no, right?
If somebody comes, 14-year-old girl comes and says she's got genders for it, she's trans, the doctor's job is to affirm, is to agree with them and hand out and effectively turn over the prescription pad.
That's the standard in no other area of medicine.
And it is because it's madness.
You don't completely eliminate the judgment of a doctor.
That's what they're there for.
That's why they went to medical school.
So they can do a differential diagnosis and say, hold on, I know you think you have rheumatoid arthritis.
This is really osteoarthritis, totally different.
They're not allowed to do that with gender dysphoria.
And I get calls from doctors all the time who don't want to lose their licenses, but what they say is going on is crazy because agreeing with the patient's self-diagnosis was never their job.
But it is now with regard to this specific condition.
Yeah, usually a doctor would have some idea of what a healthy, well-individual looks like.
I don't think you're supposed to have any idea of that of this, right?
It's just if you, if you have this feeling, then I give you what you ask for.
And at medical conferences, doctors tell me that many, at medical conferences, when transgender medicine is discussed, what they now call transgender medicine or various kinds of transition, medical transitioning, hormones and whatnot, when it's discussed, it's a celebration zone.
So in every other area of medicine, you go to a medical conference and it's a very serious discussion, very sober, very boring, of all the risks and possible side effects because we want those out in the open.
It doesn't mean we don't want anyone to ever take these medications, but everyone has to be aware of them, right?
Certainly the doctors do.
But doctors will tell me that when they go to medical conferences and these medications come up, there are no, you know, we don't want to hear side effects.
We're not here to talk about the negatives.
This is a time to celebrate.
They're acting like activists.
So weird too.
And like in a time when everything's supposed to be like organic and like nature, right?
And now it's like pumping full of chemicals.
Right.
I always say this.
You wouldn't, you don't yellow hormone, you know, raised beef in your house, but you want to give it to your daughter.
Like that seems to be the thing today.
That's so weird.
And maybe we should, I don't know, figure out what some of the side effects are first.
Yeah, like we're going, we're going meatless and we're eating this strange meat that was made in the lab that's like, who knows what that is?
And then you're pumping yourself full of like hormones and stuff.
And this is all to be in tune with our natural state.
Right.
10 to 40 times what her body is meant to handle.
Yeah.
10 to 40 times the testosterone for a lifetime because you can't go off these trucks once you start.
I mean, you do, some people do if they detransition, but the effects are permanent.
And if you want to maintain the full effect, negative.
So there's a huge rise in cardiac risk, cardiovascular risk, right?
Heart attack and whatnot, heart attack and other cardiovascular problems.
There is, it causes vaginal and uterine atrophy, which can be quite painful.
And very often they will recommend a prophylactic hysterectomy when you've been on testosterone for a certain number of years.
And usually I've heard five.
And part of the reason for that is, anyway, basically there's a very high rate of, I mean, I can go into the details, but probably boring.
But anyway, a risk of endometrial cancer.
So they're worried about that based on the growth of the uterine lining.
Anyway, and then it alters your private anatomy.
You get clitoral enlargement.
Leap that out.
Yeah.
I had a feeling.
Better acknowledge private parts for the homeschoolers out there.
We just want to let you know what that means.
I don't know what I'm allowed to say.
I know you're fine.
We're leaving all this in.
Okay.
Facial error, that can be permanent.
It'll change your facial features.
Voice, very often they permanently have a very, very masculinized voice.
So you're talking about some pretty big changes.
And of course, the biggest risk of all is that we have no idea.
We don't know what putting a woman on testosterone.
We don't have the studies yet for 40 years, 50 years would do to her body.
We don't know.
And that's the crazy thing here is it's because I always like to get back to ideology, philosophy, because it feels like we've embraced a philosophy, just gung-ho, running, you know, like in a folium, they run through that paper wall.
Like we just ran right through it.
We just have to.
And the weird thing is male and female has to have no meaning, right?
Because it's just a social construct.
But then also we need the hormones of male to, you know, we have to hold both.
But really, the main thing is we just have to hold this ideology that people just make their own truth.
I guess what we get down when it comes down to that's the precious thing, right?
Right.
I mean, look, they, you know, we got rid of religion.
We got rid of faith.
And, you know, you see the numbers.
They're, they're really shocking, especially for this young generation.
America is so much less religious than it was.
But we have faith in this.
And we have to have perfect faith in it because the second you question it, you realize it's complete mumbo jumbo.
There's no such thing as a girl's brain and a boy's body, right?
Every sex of, you know, a person's body is stamped with their, you know, chromosomes.
So it, you know, that doesn't make, it starts to make absolutely no sense.
There's no, you know, you know, anyway, so I think you have to accept it on faith and it can't be questioned.
And they're extremely intolerant of any questioning of this because the moment you question it, it starts to fall apart.
And you think that the extreme intolerance has something to do with, I mean, I find when somebody's extremely defensive about their position and extremely sensitive, it usually means they don't have a lot of good arguments for it.
I think that's right.
I mean, I interviewed a lot of transgender adults for my book who I always say were just wonderful people to get to know.
I actually didn't know transgender people before I started writing this and started looking into it.
And I met so many wonderful transgender adults who do not support the fast transitioning of teenagers.
They are as alarmed by everyone as what is going on, as everyone's sensible by what is going on.
They were lovely.
They gave me a perspective and they explained a few things to me that aren't getting told.
And one of them is that transitioning is really hard.
These girls are, these transgender adults usually went through years of therapy in order to decide that this was right for them.
And they certainly didn't do it at 15, you know, because they walked into a gender clinic one day with not even a therapist note, which you're allowed to do in Oregon.
What is a gender clinic?
Oh, gender clinic.
Good question.
So there are these clinics that are set up specifically to provide these hormones and sometimes usually not surgeries.
It's usually for testosterone.
Do they run like by activist groups?
So it's a good question.
They're all different kinds.
So they're used to it.
Over a decade ago, I think we had two in the United States.
Now we have well over 50.
And that doesn't include Planned Parenthood, Kaiser.
Planned Parenthood is one of the largest distributors in the country of testosterone to teenage girls.
So it's a big moneymaker.
And you walk in, you walk out with a prescription for testosterone the same day.
And is this a thing where a teenage girl can walk in and get it and parents don't have a say?
So depends where the age of medical consent varies by state.
In Oregon, it is 15.
You don't need a parent's permission.
By the way, these clinics usually don't require even a therapist note.
So the therapist doesn't have to agree that you have, or a psychiatrist, that you have gender dysphoria.
No one signed off on that.
No, certainly no mental health provider.
So it varies by state.
Washington in 2019 just made their age of medical consent for mental health services having to do with gender affirming care 13.
So you're entitled to that at 13 without parental approval.
And I get calls all the time.
I got a call, I guess, a little more than a month ago from a Muslim man who was an immigrant to our country.
And I don't want to give away much more than that, but I'll say that the child was underage and was brought in good faith to a mental health facility in one of the states where you can, as a minor, obtain these services.
And the child was suicidal.
So it was for mental health problems.
And the child was admitted.
And it was decided there that the real problem was gender dysphoria.
And without the parental's permission or agreement, they went ahead and were beginning a process of providing affirming therapy for that.
Now, this child was in a very distressed state, as you can imagine, and a minor and had been brought to the hospital in good faith by parents who thought that we're going to, you know, I need to help this person with their suicidality.
And it ended up, they ended up getting a very different set of treatment.
So this is like if like if like Jehovah's Witnesses became like the most popular religion in America, but they also cut out your uterus once you joined.
Where are you going with this?
Like a crazy, like a crazy cult became like mainstream, but they also had this part where they're like, we're going to inject you full of testosterone and take out your uterus.
Well, as I was saying, it's very, it's, it's very cult-like.
Well, and also, because a lot of cults don't do, you know, you might get some crazy earrings or something, but like, yeah, most cults is way more permanent.
Yeah, most cults will just tell you, like, love your family, be a good person.
You're a cult.
Don't celebrate Christmas.
Drink hot cocoa.
I don't know a lot, but I think I know I'm not supposed to respond to that.
Well, you did talk about this cult-like element in the book where, because I read the book.
You did, yeah.
Because I read the book.
You don't know what we're talking about.
I don't know what we're talking about.
But you talked about it.
Tell us the first two chapters on audiobook.
You talk about this cult-like element in the book where I don't remember if you were saying it was the influencers or, but there's a lot of people that are like cutting the, like cut your family members out.
You know, cut your parents out of your life if they're, if they're questioning.
I think you were talking about the schools and how they would, you know, I don't know who was telling these kids to do this.
Right.
So the public school systems have forms that they will fill out.
We certainly have this in California.
This exists in New York.
I've been told by parents in New Jersey.
The official policy of schools, and it's true in private schools as well, will be if a child comes out as transgender, they create a separate form.
They do not inform the parents and they create a new name with the child and they go along with this.
And in fact, in one case, a 13-year-old was identifying as a boy for a year in a school.
I talked to the mother and was even permitted to stay with the boys on the overnight trip and the mother had no idea.
Now, the thing to know is that, of course, the schools are also providing the gender ideology.
So they've been saying to the kids since they were five, in many cases, certainly in California, only you know your true gender.
Here is the buffet of options.
And so does that make kids transgender?
Of course not.
But when a young woman is in crisis in her teenage years, as she often is, and feels ugly and feels unattractive and is trying to figure out who she is, there's already, there's a sort of a teed up explanation that the school's been providing for years now.
Yeah, I mean, how young?
So they start like kindergarten and what are they teaching kids in kindergarten?
California, yeah.
So there's a gender ideology that they cannot, that parents are not allowed to opt out of.
They did something very clever.
They put it, see, sexual education, all parents are allowed to opt out of.
But the SOGI curriculum, the sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum in California is not part of sexual education.
It's part of the anti-bullying effort.
And of course, we don't want anyone to escape anti-bullying.
What do you want to opt your kids out of anti-bullying treatment?
You bully?
Right, exactly.
Now, of course, it's pretextual because bullying is terrible of any child.
Every school should try to eliminate bullying on every basis, including, you know, transgender, you know, or gender ideology, you know, gender basis.
I mean, you don't, you shouldn't allow bullying of anyone, including a transgender child, right?
But the idea was, or what they claim it is, you know, obviously, you know, and this, this strategy is worked out by the activists.
What they claim is the only way to stop bullying is to teach everyone about gender ideology.
Get everyone to believe that they could really be a boy and that only they know their true gender.
And that's the only way to stop bullying of that child.
Well, you can imagine if the child they were trying to protect from bullying was a Christian, they wouldn't then, you know, teach Christianity.
Everybody's right.
Would you like to come up and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior class?
Exactly.
You wouldn't have that in public schools.
And if you did, there would be uproar.
There would be people saying, wait a second, that's not my family's faith, right?
Don't teach that to my child.
You know, we're a different, we're a Jewish family, whatever we are.
We're a Muslim family.
But about this, you're not, you know, it's much harder to object.
So you're saying they'll have a set of pronouns?
Like there would be a form in the school that'll be like, call him he, him here.
But if we send a note home, it says she, hero.
I've seen them.
Yes.
Wow.
Absolutely.
So they have separate forms to the parents who have no idea.
And of course, what does it matter that they're getting this new identity at school?
Well, gosh, that's extra confusing, right?
If you think your problem is that you're really supposed to be a boy and everybody for a year has been calling you Chaz at school and, you know, and showing off and you feel great and suddenly you've become the popular kid with this new secret identity from your parents at a moment when most teenage girls kind of want to stick it to mom anyway, right?
Or they want to get a little bit of a break from mom, have a few secrets from mom, right?
This is the mom who reads all their social media and everything.
They want a little bit of a break.
They want a private conversation.
Well, this gives them that.
They have a whole world that moms doesn't have access to.
Well, they very easily, like, that's been another thing, which I know I did as a teenager too.
My daughter, she's turned her mother into the enemy on everything, even when her mom, you know, just she's coming up with these things.
You said this to me at this age, and it's become this thing where parents are an oppressive football person.
This is why you read to read to the end of the book.
I'll get there.
I'll get there.
I deal with that.
My wife will read it.
Destroy it.
Yeah.
Owned you straight on your own show.
That's fine.
That's sad.
Can I transition to another?
Okay, so I was thinking when you were talking about comparing it to Christianity, the seething transgender activist who's listening to this right now, like a tea kettle, is like, yeah, but that's not proven.
This is science.
Right.
Because they probably have science that they think backs them up.
So what's the science that they would say they got backing them up?
They really don't.
They don't have science is the thing.
I mean, they always say they do.
I know, but there's some doctors.
I interviewed a lot of doctors for the book.
And if you look at either, this is what they don't know.
They're not the right doctors.
Well, kind of.
I mean, here's the thing.
Some of the studies that their work is based on, and I had to rely, look, I'm a journalist.
I'm not a doctor.
And I'm certainly not a scientist.
So I had to interview a lot of the experts.
I can't say that.
So I had to interview a lot.
And they would tell me, like, look at the evidence quality.
And they would show me, take me through it and why, you know, here's what we don't have.
They often say the science shows that the child will be suicidal if we don't affirm.
Well, here's what they don't have proof of.
They don't have proof that gender dysphoria causes suicidality.
And they don't have proof that transition is a cure for it or that social or medical transition.
So agreeing with the kids, letting them change their pronouns or whatever, or medical transition.
They don't have proof of either.
All we know is that there is a population of girls who claim to have gender dysphoria also have very high rates of anxiety and depression.
We see that with trans kids, that there are very high rates of, you know, sorry, when I say trans, transgender identified teenagers, there are a lot of other mental health issues, but we don't know which way, where the causality is here or, you know, what's causing suicidality, and we don't know what the cure is.
That hasn't been proven yet.
So before you start injecting your kid with 40 times the amount of testosterone her body would normally handle, it's worth asking a few questions.
And that's all the book says.
It doesn't say never transition.
And it doesn't say transition should be banned or anything like that.
I don't believe that.
But it does say there's a lot of questions here we should be asking.
The weird thing is that there's all these girls all of a sudden identifying as transgender.
But couldn't you also say that that's because now it's like more socially accepted?
All along these all secretly were.
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
Okay.
Great question.
So I've been asked that before, and I think it's a good question.
And it's something that I had to consider as a journalist.
You have to look at that.
I didn't, you know, I didn't set out to prove something.
I set out to invest just to investigate the phenomenon.
And I think there's a really good answer to that.
And one of the best answers to that is, yes, there's more acceptance today.
But if this, if what we're seeing is just a return to a normal base rate of transgender identification in the population, then we would be seeing women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s coming out as transgender now that we're in a more accepting society.
But we're not.
We're seeing the same population that falls for every other hysteria.
Teenage girls, adolescent girls.
That's who we're seeing suddenly come out as transgender.
And it's happening in like clicks and girls.
Yes.
And that is the other thing.
Perfect.
The other thing is that because you read the first chapters, very bad.
The one fact you can't.
I listen to the audio book.
Exactly.
Yeah, I know you did great.
So did she read the audiobook?
I didn't.
No, because that's something that threw me off.
The lady sounds much older than you are.
Yeah, she does.
You know, I think she did a good job.
I saw you because I checked.
I also watched some interviews later when I was smoking a cigar.
And yeah, I was like, wait, she sounds older in the audiobook.
No.
I have never listened to the full audiobook.
I need to.
You can do your own audiobook.
Thank you.
No one asked.
Did they ask you to do it?
And you said no.
They did not ask me.
I always feel like the author should read your audiobook if possible.
Okay, but I've heard it's actually quite hard.
Meaning.
It is like, I mean, I've done mine.
I did mine.
You did.
Yeah.
But yeah, I don't know.
You know you're angry.
It's just different.
Because when a voice person reads your audiobook, they have that like, you know, like an instruction manual reader or something.
I don't know.
It's hard to explain.
It's still good.
I highly recommend it.
Read it.
Get it.
Listen to it.
Thank you.
No, but you're right.
So returning to the question.
Yeah, sorry.
No, sorry.
The other reason I don't think that it is just reverting to a normal base rate of transgender identification in the population is because, as you said, Lisa Littman is the researcher who originally looked at this, found that there were girls coming out in friend groups in a very short period of time.
The entire friend group that had not started out as transgender, very large percentage of them would suddenly identify as transgender.
So in fact, she found it was higher than 70 times what you would expect the prevalence rate to be.
So given that it was whole groups of friends coming out as transgender, and given that we weren't seeing women of any other ages coming out as transgender, it's very likely that this is what it looks like, which is a peer contagion, a social contagion.
I wanted to get into, oh, well, he's screaming like a madman over there.
Crazy.
I can't read it.
I'm like, I don't know what this question says.
So I'm a kid.
Okay, so like you talked about gender dysphoria and how girls can kind of self-diagnose that, go in.
And that's another thing that I've been like, as I'm now hitting this, you know, I'm an old guy now, I guess, my dad.
Low testosterone these days.
Sorry.
Kids these days, self-diagnosing.
It's like a salad bar.
It feels like they have like, even my, I have a sister who's like 20, 21. you know, and even her, but to my teenage stepdaughter, it's like, you know, I have anxiety.
It's never been.
Right.
I have what else?
I mean, it's just, it's like this long list.
Right.
We are our diagnosis today.
That's how we, the identification is all important.
It's like it's permanent, right?
It's like a part of my identity.
Right.
So, you know, I talk, one of the things I talk about in the book is I'm sure I would have had a million, you know, like so many people, so many diagnoses.
One of them would have been social anxiety, something I had literally never heard of because my parents told me it was being rude.
My parents were like, don't be shy when it comes to saying thank you or to ask for something.
It's rude.
You must say to people, hi, how are you?
I don't care how you feel.
And so that was my cure for social anxiety.
It wasn't easy.
I didn't like it.
I hated it.
They made me go into stores and ask for things and pay for things myself.
I would have stayed outside.
But when I talk to psychologists, they're saying that kids are saying, oh, they have psychology.
They have social anxiety because they all have therapists.
That's the other thing.
They all have therapists today who tell them they have social anxiety.
They live with this.
They think it's permanent.
And they'll go so far as they will only order.
I mean, you hear this.
My daughter only orders pizza because she never has to, it can be delivered.
And she eats pizza.
So she eats pizza every night so that it comes to the door and she never has to interact with a person.
I mean, that's because they, you know, they think that the world should change based on their social anxiety.
That's what they're taught today.
Yeah, there's a strong thing when you're a teenager of finding these labels, you know, but in my day, it was like, I'm a Star Wars fan.
Sega, Nintendo.
And now they have this, yeah, this ideology that they launch onto.
What are the detransition rates?
Are there any difficulties in finding those?
They are difficult to find.
Although, you know, we're seeing, we have indications that they're quite high for this population.
So if you look at social media sites with detransitioners, they've been exploding over the last few years, which is, but I think a lot of it's still ahead of us.
We're seeing these young women in England, this very brave young woman, Carabelle, who just had to come out.
But consider what she had to do in order to, she sued the Tavistock Clinic of England.
It was a tremendously brave thing to do.
But what she had to do is effectively announce to the world, here's what my body looks like.
Here's what I went on.
Here's what I was suffering through.
It was all a mistake.
I now have no breasts.
I have sexual dysfunction.
I have all the things that were talked about in the papers in court.
That's a very, you know, asking young women to do that is very hard.
It's very embarrassing.
But the young women I've interviewed who've been through this are just, you know, so interesting, so brilliant, so insightful because they've been through a lot and they had to, you know, they had to pull themselves out of it and say, wait a second, this was a mistake and I'm not going to stay quiet about it.
I don't want someone else to go through.
I mean, what I went through.
And it's just a tremendously brave thing to do.
But they're attacked all the time by trans activists.
The treatment of these young women, you know, who are in men who detransition is awful.
Always their social media groups are trying, you know, are constantly attacked.
They're treated like, you know, they've betrayed the cause.
They're treated quite badly.
Yeah, I guess if I ever grew up out of my high school phase and I was like, I'm not a Star Wars fan anymore.
Like that would, that would not be that hard.
But if you're like, I took all these hormones, I cut off my breasts.
Well, what if you lived online and all of your friends were celebrating your identity and now you think you might have been wrong, but a thousand of your friends are going to see that.
And what if the doctor you went on to prescribe all these hormones that you told him you were gender dysphoric, now you don't think you are?
You're too embarrassed to go back to him.
And also all these things that were covered under the affirmative, you know, sorry, the Affordable Care Act, a medical transition that were covered, suddenly you want to go back and it's not covered anymore.
It's a hard road.
Well, also you're starting to question this stuff.
So you might be a bigot.
That's a good point.
It's terrifying to think I'm a bigot.
It is.
I've seen that in my daughter.
And she's like, she's like, I don't know if I'm lesbian or whatever.
Can you tell she's scared to talk about it, like questioning it?
It's so much easier to be like, I'm so open, right?
So like my 10-year-old went the other day.
He goes, I think it was on the other day.
It was a while back, but he goes, I feel like I shouldn't say this, but it feels like everybody's turning gay.
Like he says, just everybody's school.
Just everybody's going gay.
Anyway, that was just it.
That was good.
That was a, what do you call it?
A tidbit.
Anecdote.
Anecdote.
That's the weirdest word.
Anecdote.
That wasn't a question.
Sorry.
You know, I did get a, no, I did get, I would get calls from moms.
And these were overwhelmingly progressive families who I interviewed.
And they would get called from moms.
And they would say, you know, I supported pride.
I went to pride parades when I was younger, but my daughter's pride parade at school, pride celebration at school lasted forever.
And there was an event in every calendar, every month.
It was a year long.
Right.
It was like almost a year long.
And then she would say to me, and the kids who didn't want to wear the pins or the teachers who didn't want to wear the pins were ostracized.
And that wasn't right to me.
And that's when, you know, they would, that's when they would call me.
They'd be like, look, I've supported gay rights my whole life, but my daughter's in seventh grade and she's clearly making friend doing this to make friends and to be more popular.
And I'm not sure this is authentic.
Yeah, is there a typical girl that falls for this now?
Is it progressive, middle class, upper middle class?
So it has been typically, you know, white, upper, middle, and middle class girls, very precocious girls, very tied to mom, very agreeable.
So they never really have a space for them.
They're mom's best friend.
And they, so they don't really have any space to feel like, I rebelled.
I'm a teenager.
I got my ears pierced.
They don't drive.
They don't go to the mall by themselves to get their ears pierced.
And they don't hang out with their girlfriends by themselves.
Everything involves mom.
And until this trans identity starts, they don't really feel like they're their own person.
And the problem is they hit their teenage years and they want more than anything to feel like their own person.
But the moment they say, mom, I'm trans, whoa, there's a big divide from mom.
In fact, I'm not even a girl anymore.
You tell some horror story.
I call this the best horror novel I've read this year.
I read a lot of horror novels.
But you tell stories about parents who send their kids to like Ivy League schools and they're paying 100 grand a year for their education and then like, and then they end up cutting them out of their lives.
Like that's how devastating this can be to the family unit.
I get calls still all the time that say that.
The college plans will cover them.
I know a woman I was just contacted by whose daughter got even the double mastectomy during her time at a very prestigious college.
But certainly starting a course of testosterone, sometimes the school will actually supply it.
But in any case, it's almost always covered and it's very cheap.
And one of the most surprising things I learned was that, first of all, everyone's in mental health.
I mean, is seeing a therapist today.
Every, you know, so many of these young girls are.
So they're used to seeing a therapist.
So when they go on campus, they feel lonely.
They feel anxiety about schoolwork or whatever.
And they know, I know what I'm supposed to do.
I'm going to go sign up with the care.
And the parents will even say, listen, you're feeling like you're going through a hard time.
You're stressed out.
Why not see, have a therapy session?
And there are a lot of therapists now on campus, and a lot of them have, you know, identity exploration as one of their other expertise.
So you show up thinking you have exam sites, anxiety, and it turns out that you have other problems.
And maybe the solution is transition.
So find back my way back to this question that's been in my head.
Oh, yeah.
So, okay.
So a little more context on my situation earlier on.
You know, kind of tore into me.
I deserved it.
You know, letting my daughter go on social media.
Contextually, we are.
Ethan tries to get free therapy out of her.
Yeah, I try to get.
Yeah.
But no, so, okay, so we have a, she lives in two homes.
The other home she lives in, she gets free reign of all social media, anything, just whatever she wants to do, as much time, whatever.
And I think there's probably a lot of families that are in this situation.
There's two parents, one is less careful.
So we're like, she's going to be on it.
And the reality for a lot of people is they're going to be on it, even if you're, even if they're at their friend's house or wherever they go, like it's going to be, they're going to be on it.
So with that context, because it's not, that's, that's one of our most frustrating things is for me and my wife is like we, so much of the advice we get in stuff like this is like, is about the rules you set.
Right.
And we're in a situation where none of our rules matter because we have, you know, and so what are the other options or what is just the messaging?
How do we communicate to girls in this, even though they're in the midst of it?
Okay.
So a few things.
One is you're right that it's very easy to say don't let anyone kid on social media, but it's much harder.
I mean, it's everywhere.
It's an everyday fight.
Absolutely.
And I don't say this as a from a place of judgment.
I'm just saying, what's the ideal?
Like, what advice would I give?
Keep them off that.
That's advice.
Like, that's, you know, I'm not going to waffle.
And I don't believe in, here's the, I don't like the approach of here's 800 ground rules I'm giving you now.
Okay.
I had one, I heard one woman say to me, you know, and she's a very smart person.
I really admire, but she said to me, I always tell my kid, always imagine, my 13-year-old, always imagine your future employer might see this.
And I just think, wow, imagine the pressure.
You go ahead on social media, but imagine your future employer may see this.
I couldn't do that at 13.
I can't even imagine, right?
I can't think a week ahead.
Right?
But you see what I'm saying?
In other words, in a certain sense, it's, you know, there have been parents who banded together and kept their kids off social media.
Was it perfect?
Probably not.
Did it do something?
I bet it did.
You know, making it sort of, you know, making it known that this is really bad for kids and there is no reason they need to be on it is just to me a really good place to start.
That's one of the hard things.
There needs to be anti-social media messaging, but the only place you can get that message out is on social media.
Right?
Because I've been thinking, I was talking, like, we need videos where like you talk to these, like, talk to the girl and say, look, this whole thing you're in right now, it's making you hate yourself.
It's making you question everything.
Please like and share.
Please like and share.
Please subscribe.
Well, I think you're right.
I mean, that's part of the problem.
We go door to door.
We're all on it all the time, right?
I mean, that's part of the problem is all the parents are addicted.
I mean, I have the same problem.
Look, you know, I'm a journalist.
I'm on Twitter all the time.
Is that good for me or for my family?
Probably not.
And I do think there needs to be a response.
And I don't think we can leave it to big tech to decide what's appropriate for our kids because frankly, they're going to come up with solutions that aren't so great for our kids.
Maybe under all the videos where like there's like a 19-year-old trans activist that's like telling your daughter to go get the hysterectomy or whatever, there can be a thing.
This claim is widely disputed underneath those beds.
I don't think they'll go for that.
They want to do that.
And like that would stop a young girl anyway.
It's almost have the opposite effect because I'm like, oh, it must be true.
It's so funny because there's so many claims that are disputed.
I'll tell you the best thing a dad can do for his daughter, in my view.
The best thing a dad can do for his daughter is to make her feel beautiful and loved just as she is.
That she can be a little heavy or a little imperfect looking in her most awkward period that she will ever go through physically.
And that she's still lovable and wonderful just as she is.
And that doesn't make her any less of a woman.
And that all the fake images she's seeing online are not more attractive.
And I think that a father, whatever she says and however much she denies it, a father's opinion of her is, I mean, that's the man who matters most.
And on some level, I think that's a big deal.
I really do.
That doesn't mean I haven't seen fathers who are wonderful fathers who didn't lose their daughters to this for a time.
But I would say just a father, very often I've seen fathers who, the moment their daughters go down this path, they take a big step back because it makes them uncomfortable.
And I would just say to fathers, don't withdraw.
It'll just make her feel more awkward.
Don't make her feel that now she's kind of gross or weird or something to you.
Because you're the man that matters most.
You're going to cry on us with the lower testosterone now, Ethan?
No.
I'm just kidding.
That was good.
I got so many more questions, but we're ready for subscriber portions.
We want to talk about your book getting banned from Target for a brief period.
That was insane.
I'm interested in more.
I don't know where you're coming from.
What's your story to know more about you and all this?
So let's do it.
Let's do it.
Book, irreversible damage to the business.
Irreversible damage.
That's not a hole in the book.
That's a part of the picture.
That's not damaged.
Not faulty.
That would be awesome if the book was irreversibly damaged.
We should do that.
Second print.
Second print.
The looks copy.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
Well, your book got banned from Target.
That was something that should really upset a lot of Americans, you know, that that happens today.
Brown University stripped her the praise for her work from its website because of an activist campaign.
This is university.
Let's talk about lesbians.
You're the ones who add books to the five.
I guess it's true.
Wondering what they'll say next?
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Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.