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Nov. 22, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:09:02

Abigail Shrier | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 108

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	I have had calls from parents who say, I'm terrified of losing custody.
	But listen, I know my kid.
	I only spent, oh, I don't know, 100,000 hours raising her.
	I know her.
	I'm a political progressive, but this doesn't seem right.
	It came out of nowhere.
	And I'm supposed to trust the judgment of a therapist who spent one 45-minute session with her and claims to know her better than I do?
	The trend of silencing and cancellation from the left has created a reality where many institutions simply cannot be trusted to be speaking the truth.
	Last week, after a single angry tweet, Target removed Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters, from their book section.
	Beyond that, a GoFundMe raising awareness for the book was taken down by the site.
	Amazon has even gone so far as to restrict the book's advertising.
	The author, Abigail Schreier, joins us today to tell us why everyone is so afraid of what she has to say.
	Abigail's book, Irreversible Damage, focuses on the transgender epidemic that has swept the nation, a craze mostly now affecting young women.
	That wasn't the case a decade ago.
	In writing it, Abigail conducted a bevy of interviews with transgender individuals, transition surgeons, social media influencers, therapists, and parents who have had to watch their teens be caught up in this trend.
	Abigail's writing explores these findings, as well as a 2018 paper from Lisa Littman of Brown University, which we will dive into in our episode.
	Today, we also discuss the harrowing biological consequences associated with self-diagnosed gender dysphoria and the medical, scientific, and educational institutions that encourage it.
	Plus, the battle to keep Abigail's book available to readers despite attempts to bury it, as well as if conservatives and common-sense liberals can ever find unity to speak out against the transgender censorship.
	Hey, hey, and welcome to...
	Hey, hey, and welcome to...
	Hey hey and welcome to- This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Your data is your business protected at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Abigail Schreier.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Abigail, thanks so much for joining the show.
	Thanks so much for having me on.
	Okay, so why don't we just jump right into the topic at hand, which of course is the topic of your book, Transgenderism, Gender Dysphoria.
	Why don't we start with the very basics?
	What is gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder?
	Which term is correct?
	Which term is commonly used?
	And what exactly are the biological indicia of this condition?
	So gender dysphoria is sort of the preferred term now.
	It's the updated term from the new Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders.
	So gender dysphoria used to be called gender identity disorder, and it's severe discomfort in one's biological sex.
	It always began in early childhood.
	We have a hundred year diagnostic history of it and it always began in early childhood and was overwhelmingly male.
	It was little boys saying, no mommy, I'm a girl.
	I'm not a boy.
	I'm not a boy.
	I'm very insistent, persistent, consistent is the language they use.
	And most of the criteria for assessing it, especially in small children, were readily observable.
	Kids, you know, sometimes in the most extreme cases, punching their penises or Absolutely, refusing to play with boys or, you know, absolutely being attracted to everything, you know, female and wanting to wear girls clothes and whatnot.
	And today, out of nowhere in the last 10 years, the dominant demographic of those claiming to have gender dysphoria are teenage girls with no childhood history.
	So we know this isn't what typical gender dysphoria looks like.
	We know these girls are not the typical, you know, So let's start from kind of the basic idea of what causes gender dysphoria.
	book just looks at why. Why are we seeing this explosion in a population that never before claimed to have this illness?
	So let's start from kind of the basic idea of what causes gender dysphoria. Now you mentioned there is a shift in the language from DSM-IV to DSM-V, gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rationale for that other than just sort There was no additional evidence presented that said we're no longer going to call it a disorder even though it appears in the DSM.
	We're just going to retitle it dysphoria.
	I believe they changed the diagnosis itself to suggest that if you believe that you are a member of the opposite sex, that is not in fact a sign of gender dysphoria.
	It's only depression or self-harm caused by that belief.
	That is now gender dysphoria, which is a sort of weird description in and of itself.
	So what are the biological causes of the condition and how is this defined?
	How's the condition actually defined now?
	So you're right.
	The change was largely, they found it less stigmatizing to the patient to refer to it as gender dysphoria rather than to put the word disorder in it, in the name.
	What are the biological I don't know.
	I'm not sure anyone knows.
	There is some research into the neurological markers of this, although there isn't a lot.
	Honestly, it's a highly contentious area even to look into, but I really don't know the causes.
	Yeah, well, one of the things that has become so sort of fraught about all of this is that the definition of transgenderism itself seems to have changed fairly radically from a diagnosable, observable disorder to, if anybody suggests that they are a member of the opposite sex, then this is in and of itself evidence that they are actually members of the opposite sex.
	How do we distinguish I know this is getting very political very quickly, but how do we distinguish between sort of the claim that gender dysphoria requires treatment and the claim that gender dysphoria ought to be treated with an entire society saying that you are a member of the sex to which you claim you are actually a member, meaning that if you're a man who says you're a woman, the entire society should now call you by female pronouns and say that you are a woman.
	How did that become sort of the default mainstream media-driven and academic-setting-driven treatment for gender dysphoria?
	One of the key parts in all this is affirmative care, which may be the most sort of horrifying medical scandal of our time.
	And that is that every medical accrediting organization told doctors that the standard only with regard to gender dysphoria, so just this one ailment, is to affirm the patient, to agree with the patient's self-diagnosis.
	Absolutely, to hand over the judgment and the prescription pad to the patients with regard to this ailment.
	And so you have a population that is completely self-diagnosing, that is able to demand, you know, effectively the course of treatment.
	And they're getting that treatment on what's called informed consent basis, meaning you walk into a gender clinic and you sign a waiver and you walk out that day with a course of testosterone.
	And of course, even young girls are doing this, even minors.
	I mean, that's obviously very scary stuff.
	What is the rate of desistance among young people who seem to be exhibiting signs of gender dysphoria?
	I know this has also been somewhat controversial, trying to determine how many kids who say that they are members of the opposite sex just stop doing that over the course of their childhood and adolescence.
	So historically, the rate of desistance was extremely high among kids who had childhood gender dysphoria.
	The rate of desistance was over 70%.
	Some studies showed over 80% of kids would naturally outgrow this.
	We're not going to see that today because Right now, everybody is immediately telling, you know, as I said, the standard is affirmative care.
	So, psychologists are told to affirm the child.
	Pediatricians are told to affirm the child.
	Everyone's agreeing with the child.
	Yes, Jimmy, sorry, you're Jane.
	You are a girl.
	So, because these kids are now being socialized in it, I don't think we'll see the same rates of desistance.
	But what we are seeing among the young women who go through this is a tremendous amount of regret.
	Although the numbers are hard to obtain, partly because activists really shut down and interfere with all kinds of research efforts, but we're already seeing very, very large social media groups of what they call detransitioners, young women who transition and then regret it.
	I think at last count, the Reddit on this, the social media site Reddit hosts detransitioners and it was over 16,000 members and that was up from, I think I had checked it six months before and it was around 6,000 members.
	So you see this population burgeoning of people who have gone through medicalization and regret it.
	So let's talk for a second about what exactly happened here.
	So you mentioned up top that there's been this massive shift in sort of the crowd that is undergoing gender transition or suffering from gender dysphoria or claiming to do so.
	There's this huge shift from boys to girls.
	What's going on there?
	Why did that happen?
	Well, you know, teenage girls fall for every hysteria.
	I mean, it's the population most susceptible to social contagion, whether it's anorexia, bulimia, or multiple personality disorder.
	And, of course, that doesn't mean that the illness itself isn't real.
	Of course it is.
	And, you know, or that the, you know, disorder isn't real.
	If there are people who are really afflicted with gender dysphoria, absolutely.
	I've met them.
	I've talked to them.
	I've interviewed them.
	But what it does mean is that girls have, we know that teenage girls have a susceptibility to spreading and sharing their pain and to talking themselves into certain conditions.
	So we know that in hospitals, for instance, they have to be very careful when putting anorexics together because they will encourage each other in their anorexia.
	They will actually start to compete to lose more and more weight.
	And that seems to be what's going on with gender dysphoria.
	These young women are talking themselves into it.
	With social media, because there's all these social media influencers, they're convincing themselves that their problem is their gender.
	They're encouraging each other to try testosterone.
	And you're seeing whole groups of friends, gender dysphoria is clustering in friend groups of teenage girls.
	So we know that there's a strong social component.
	So in one second, I wanna get to the fact that if you mention this sort of thing, then obviously you end up on the wrong side of the social sensors, which is of course what has happened to your book.
	But actually started, as far as I am aware, at Brown University with a particular study.
	We're gonna get to that in just one second.
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	So the first I was made aware of rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is what you write about in your book, was a study from Brown.
	It was a preliminary study that was put out talking about this phenomenon that you're talking about.
	groups of young girls who were sort of, one, they were all experiencing discomfort in various ways and for various different reasons, and one girl would then suggest, well, I'm actually transgender, and then many of the girls would suddenly decide that they were transgender as well.
	And this was put out by a scholar at Brown University, and Brown immediately walked back the study and then apologized for ever having put out the study in the first place.
	What's been your experience with censorship now that you've actually talked openly about this phenomenon?
	From the moment I got a publisher, there was a campaign to have my book dropped by my publisher, to have my publisher drop me as a client, and then as an author.
	Then, of course, when my book was coming out, Amazon refused to allow my publisher to sponsor ads.
	Then, you know, journalists, all kinds of top journalists wanted to review the book because it's an interesting topic.
	There is, you know, you talk to most parents and you ask them if they have middle school students, they know that all of a sudden all their kids, you know, friends, a huge number of them are trans and they want to know why.
	And it's an interesting topic, so a lot of people wanted to review it.
	And all the major newspapers and magazines told them, absolutely not, we are not touching this book.
	And then Joe Rogan had me on, which was wonderful.
	And Spotify employees threw a fit, and they demanded that the episode be stripped from his platform.
	And he's stood up to them, and so has Spotify, which has really been a huge victory against cancel culture.
	But you see what they had to go through.
	And then most recently, Target.com stripped my book from being available for purchase.
	I mean, it is pretty incredible.
	I mean, we've seen people like Chase Strangio, who is a trans justice advisor over at the ACLU calling for your book to be banned because the American Civil Liberties Union is no longer the American Civil Liberties Union.
	It is actually just a left-wing interest group that is fully fine, apparently, with shutting down civil liberties up to and including censorship of particular tracts they don't like.
	So, the reason that a lot of these people say that they are trying to ban your book or censor your book is because of the suggestion that it somehow threatens the safety of trans people.
	And we get this in a wide variety of settings.
	We saw this with Senator Tom Cotton writing an op-ed about the use of the Insurrection Act to put down rioting and looting in major cities, and the New York Times staffers saying that this threatened their safety somehow, and the New York Times op-ed editor James Bennett being canned on that basis.
	This constant call that things I don't like threaten me has been carried pretty far, particularly with regard to trans issues.
	The idea being that if you don't use someone's preferred pronoun, you should be barred from social media because you might be dead naming them and this threatens their safety.
	What do you make of the arguments that, you know, books that question the reality of the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, not overall, but in particular cases, threaten people's safety?
	I think that the reason that this issue engenders such extremist response is because they know that if word gets out what teenagers are doing, that people, that most Americans will be so horrified that it will be shut down.
	I mean, right now, A teenager can walk into a clinic at 15 and without her parents' permission, after being goaded by her therapist, her teachers, and social media influencers, she can go into a clinic on her own, walk out that day with a course of testosterone, a schedule 3 controlled substance, and forever alter her body.
	And she doesn't even need a therapist's note.
	And so I think the hysteria is really because this isn't a right or left issue, to the extent that most of the parents who call me are politically progressive.
	But universally, Americans are horrified as soon as they learn about what's going on.
	It seems like there's obviously an attempt, not just to shut down you, but also even parents who are asking questions about their own kids' activities.
	Parents are being shamed by social media.
	Their own kids are saying that you're a bad parent if you refuse to allow me to go get a testosterone treatment.
	Or parents who say that we ought to engage in watchful waiting are labeled transphobes if you have a two-year-old and your two-year-old goes to school.
	I foresee a future here where there are going to be child protective services calls being made if your kid goes to school and says they're a member of the opposite gender.
	Then you say at home, no, you're not.
	And the kid goes to school and tells a teacher.
	I think Child Protective Services shows up sometime in the next five years, given the way the trends are moving.
	That's already happening.
	And in fact, this is probably the most egregious example of gaslighting today is what's happening to these parents.
	So so they will have their it's not this is such a horror.
	to parents because they're being lied to and backstabbed by everyone.
	So the teachers will lie to their faces about what's going on at school.
	They'll let the child rename himself and let him use the opposite sex bathrooms, never telling the teacher that they've officially changed him or her within the school.
	The therapists lie to the parents.
	The social workers interfere.
	The doctors will supply medicine without the parents' permission.
	I mean, these parents are are so attacked.
	And as you said, you know, their friends consider them transphobes and whatever.
	I mean, the, you know, sanctity and autonomy and integrity of the family is so under assault on this issue.
	And I have had calls from parents who say, I'm terrified of losing custody, but listen, I know my kid.
	I only spent, oh, I don't know, a hundred thousand hours raising her.
	I know her.
	I'm a political progressive, but this doesn't seem right.
	It came out of nowhere.
	And I'm supposed to trust the judgment of a therapist who spent one 45-minute session with her and claims to know her better than I do?
	It's really horrifying what's going on.
	I mean, do you think that there is going to be a push for legislation along this basis?
	We have seen some pushes in some of the Republican states for legislation prohibiting gender transition before the age of maturity.
	The kind of counter from folks on the political left has been that if you don't start transition early, then it may be too late to actually make the physical changes that make looking like a member of the opposite sex easier, that once you've hit a certain age and you've hit puberty, that you'll have developed bone structure and facial structure that is difficult to change.
	How do you think that debate is going to go?
	You know, I don't know, but that's such a great example of what's wrong with this.
	What you just said is exactly the claim they advance.
	We need to get involved and arrest puberty right now because later, if this person wants to live as a trans adult, she or he will regret having had to go through the other sex puberty or whatever.
	But of course, that's a claim that's made really by biological men.
	Why?
	Because once biological men go through the changes of puberty, it's very hard to look like a woman again.
	But for women, there isn't the same thing.
	Yes, they'll be a little smaller, but they're not going to have the same obstacles.
	I mean, a young woman who takes a course of testosterone at 10 to 40 times what her body would normally handle can grow a pretty impressive beard.
	I know a lot of trans men at this point.
	I've interviewed them and they pass pretty impressively, except that they're a little bit smaller.
	So the rationale is made on behalf of biological men, but they're applying it to teenage girls.
	And no one stops to say, I mean, this is where the lack of questioning come in.
	No one stops to say, hold on, I understand that rationale.
	It may apply to you, but it's not applying in the same way to teenage girls.
	They're going to need the mastectomy anyway, if they decide as adults, you know, cause you, you can only arrest puberty starting in once that's already, you know, underway Tanner stage two.
	So it's not, it's not an appropriate rationale for this other population, but we're not even allowed to ask those questions.
	So why did this become so political?
	Because it seems like we started off this conversation and most of these conversations start off with like an actual medical conversation about a condition and how best to treat the condition.
	And there's a debate between watchful waiting and as you say sort of affirmation watchful waiting in most of these areas was considered sort of the traditional way to go about these things.
	And there's been an attempt, even politically there, to treat watchful waiting as quote-unquote conversion therapy.
	That if you go to a therapist and the therapist does not immediately recommend a course of treatment, then this is now considered conversion therapy in some places like California.
	How did this become so political when it really should be about how do we best treat people who have an obvious medical condition?
	That's right.
	I think it happened in a series of lies that we allowed to, you know, that we were too polite to contradict.
	Like we started with, you know, okay, you know, this is a civil rights issue to allow them to have that medication.
	Well, You know, giving someone access to a medication that could harm them isn't really a civil rights issue when it means suspending all medical judgment.
	Hold on.
	I mean, we should still subject it to the same scrutiny because we don't want transgender people to come to great harm.
	I mean, a lot of this medical is enormously dangerous.
	We don't know the long-term side effects and implications of giving a woman 10 to 40 times her normal testosterone levels for decades.
	And that's what you would have to do if she becomes a lifetime patient.
	So we allow these little lies to be told.
	It's okay.
	She really is a man.
	She is a man.
	Let's change her birth certificate.
	And then we ended up in a place where we could no longer object.
	And that is, you know, I think a lot of the mission here is this idea that, you know, I've said publicly, obviously, that when I'm discussing somebody who is trans, I use their biological pronouns.
	I say a man who believes he is a woman if we are talking about a trans woman, or I say a trans woman, but I won't say that somebody is a woman when they're not, in fact, a biological woman.
	Now, if I'm In the middle of a conversation with somebody who is trans, I'll call them whatever they want because you don't want to be impolite when you're in the middle of dinner with somebody.
	But there is this broader conversation that's now happening on social media, for example, where if you point out that Caitlyn Jenner is in fact a biological man, should you be banned from social media?
	I mean, it's reached the stage where full-scale First Amendment conversations are being shut down in the name of niceness.
	That's right, and you know, I talk to a lot of older, what they used to call transsexuals, now referred to as transgender, but they never lie about the fact that they grew up as boys, even though they now present as women.
	They never demand that everyone pretend they were always a woman.
	This is a very new thing.
	It's part of the intolerance and extremism of this very young, woke generation of young, you know, the millennials and the Gen Z who are so coercive, who are so intolerant, who are so illiberal, and who demand you recite after them.
	And it really is more part of that than it is part of the, you know, traditional experience of transgender adults who are lovely, sober, rational, and they don't lie.
	I've interviewed a lot of them, and they're wonderful people, and these activists don't represent them at all.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about the gender ideology that seems to have infused this entire political conversation because this obviously ties into broader themes about gender that are pushed by one side of the particular political aisle.
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	So let's talk about the gender ideology that is being brought to bear on this conversation.
	So transgenderism has become this sort of weird, unlikely flashpoint, considering that until five minutes ago, The number of transgender people in American society was exorbitantly low.
	I mean, massively, massively, massively low.
	Like a fraction of a percentage point of the population.
	Now, of course, it seems like it is rising rather rapidly, and I have a huge number of young people identifying as gender-fluid, which is not a biological term.
	There's no such biological thing as gender-fluid.
	What is the gender ideology that's being brought to bear in what should be medical and biological conversations?
	I'll tell you about a call I got from a young woman in medical school about a year ago now who was really alarmed because they were being told the med students at her medical school were being told to effectively pretend that, you know, let's say a woman was a man.
	Okay, if she presented as such.
	And the problem with that, of course, is how to take care of her.
	I mean, we know that, for instance, pregnancies have been missed when doctors didn't realize that they needed to check for that because they really thought that the forms were accurate.
	But she was also being told in medical school never to do a breast exam on a trans man, meaning a biological woman who presents as man because it could be upsetting to her.
	Well, of course, when you have a double mastectomy, what they call stop surgery, for aesthetic purposes because you're a trans man, they don't remove all the breast tissue.
	They don't remove every cell the way they would if they were removing it for cancerous, you know, to avoid cancer or to eliminate cancer.
	So you still do need a breast exam.
	But there were protocols in place.
	It was so driven by political correctness.
	And that is what's happening in medical schools.
	It's really, there's a lot of political correctness.
	There's a lot of wokeism.
	And you're getting, I think, a lot less good care Certainly from the doctors I've talked to.
	There was one case I know of in Michigan where a trans man presented as a man to medical attendings and complained of stomach pain and it turns out that the trans man was in fact a woman and was heavily pregnant and delivered birth to a stillborn baby because people were not aware that this person was actually a biological female until after they had done all of the examinations.
	This stuff does have real ramifications.
	So what exactly in your research is the correlation between, for example, Gender and biological sex.
	I know this is a, again, a more broadly fraught topic, but there is this theory out there that gender is completely disconnected from sex, it's a social construct, but then also that it is deeply important and your gender orientation is biologically inborn and unchangeable.
	So, on the one hand, gender is completely made up by society.
	On the other hand, you can be a boy in a girl's body.
	Is there any logic to this, or is it basically just catch-as-catch-can?
	There really isn't.
	And Debra So does a wonderful job of explaining this.
	She's a sex researcher in her book, The End of Gender.
	There is a biological basis to gender.
	We know this.
	We know that girls naturally come out with certain tendencies.
	And, you know, behaviors and they're attracted to certain things.
	I mean, this is not a mystery.
	If you've ever raised children, you're aware that, you know, girls are different.
	They tend to be more talkative from the moment of birth.
	They tend to, you know, be neater.
	They tend to be less physically aggressive.
	I mean, this isn't socialization.
	That's part of biology.
	And so, if you were a parent, how would you be handling, what do you think is the best way for parents to be handling sort of the gauntlets that they're being forced to run right now?
	They have a little kid, the little kid starts exhibiting opposite gender tendencies.
	How should they handle that?
	Because I'd be wary of sending my kid to a public school now, given how things are going.
	That's right.
	The number of people who will interfere is really legion and it's alarming.
	I mean, I got a call from a man, um, who is an immigrant to this country, uh, two weeks ago and he did not know.
	And this is what happens by the way, parents reach out, they're desperate.
	They literally don't know who else to talk to.
	I, I'm, you know, I'm not a psychologist, which I always tell them, you know, I'm not a doctor, but they're desperate to be believed and taken seriously.
	And this man's, I've written about young women, but this man had a son who was suicidal, so they had checked him into a hospital in Seattle.
	In the state of Washington, you're entitled to mental health care without parental permission from age 13 on.
	So they had checked him into a hospital because he was suicidal, and during his stay, he was admitted, and during his stay, somehow with the psychologist, They had decided that his problem was gender and they had referred him to a gender clinic and the man called me because he was desperate to remove his child from this hospital.
	I tried to put him in touch with someone who could help, a social worker, and what they worked out was he was entitled to take his son out of the hospital as long as he agreed that the child was really a girl.
	The young, you know, the young person was really a girl.
	That was the condition for releasing the son to him.
	One of the things that there have been stories about, I know there were some studies that were done in Britain that were really disturbing about the number of young girls who are being referred for gender transitioning, particularly in autistic communities.
	So what is the crossover?
	Are you aware of any crossover between other conditions and claims of gender dysphoria?
	The claim of autism, again, was the predominant one in Britain, that there were thousands of young people in Britain who actually were autistic, but they were being referred to as gender dysphoric.
	Right, so usually this coincides with what they call high-functioning autism.
	Young women who are, you know, they're very, very smart.
	They have some trouble connecting socially and empathizing with other people.
	And they tend to be very rigid in their thinking.
	Unfortunately, I can tell you that in this country, I started researching this and in some sense I had to back away because I interviewed some autism experts and I started realizing that doctors were introducing the idea of gender to this population that tended to fixate.
	They were introducing the idea that they might be a different gender and this population was susceptible to fixating.
	So they, you know, it was like giving a drug to an addict.
	And in fact, you know, when I asked one of the autism experts about this, she agreed that's exactly what it was like.
	And so we do see, and there's research on this, very, very high rates of transgender identification among young autistic teenagers.
	One of the things that I've pointed out before is that all the talk about this stuff is not impact-free.
	The media's mainstreaming of this stuff does have some pretty significant effects, and you can see it in the statistics.
	What you would expect is that if all of this, if all gender dysphoria were simply a biological phenomenon presenting as a medical phenomenon, then you would expect a consistent number of diagnoses of this over time.
	You wouldn't expect massive spikes in diagnosis of a particularly specific phenomenon that applies to a small percentage of the population, but you are seeing huge spikes all over the place in Britain, in the United States.
	You're not seeing similar spikes in places that have not decided to sort of follow this gender ideology.
	You know, because people who are in psychological pain, and these young people are, especially young women today, we've never seen such high rates of anxiety and depression among young women as we see today.
	They look to the culture to help explain what they're feeling.
	And in previous generations, they might have said, oh, I'm so fat.
	The problem is I'm so fat.
	And today they look to the culture and say, oh my God, I'm really a boy.
	That's my problem.
	And the moment they start down that path, there are so many people prepared to agree with them and to help them transition.
	Even though the reality is, look, if this was just taking a new name and dressing differently, I wouldn't have written this book.
	But the reality is the treatments are so aggressive, they're so irreversible, and because these young women had a lot of other problems besides gender dysphoria, they are very likely to experience very high rates of regret.
	So let's talk about regret and also what are the effects of some of the treatments that are being talked about.
	So, there is this sort of blasé idea that you can easily transition to be a member of the other sex and then you look just like a member of the other sex.
	There really is no high cost.
	There's nothing to worry about.
	What are the medical costs and procedures that are done in order to achieve what would be considered a successful transition?
	There are a lot of different procedures.
	Let's start with testosterone.
	A young woman who goes on a course of testosterone, and before that you would start with puberty blockers in the earliest stages of puberty, but young women who are experiencing this spike usually go straight to testosterone.
	It leads to vaginal atrophy, uterine atrophy.
	There's a very high risk of endometrial cancer.
	That's why they usually recommend a prophylactic hysterectomy after she's been on testosterone for say five years.
	She'll grow a beard.
	Her facial features will change.
	Her private anatomy will be permanently altered.
	It also does some good things and I have to mention those and I'll tell you why.
	Because that's the reason young women can't wait to tell their friends they should go on it.
	Because it delivers euphoria and it suppresses anxiety.
	And anxieties are these women's biggest problem.
	So they feel great.
	They feel bold.
	They have a young man's sort of swagger.
	And they can't wait to tell their friends how amazing they feel.
	And it tends to confirm in their minds that the problem was they really were supposed to be a boy.
	And do those effects wear off over time?
	I mean, in terms of the anxiety and the euphoria?
	So I think the anxiety does wear off because it depends.
	I have talked to trans men who say, wow, look, the moment I went on that testosterone, it took care of my depression and anxiety.
	So I know that the anxiety, you know, It can powerfully control anxiety.
	Of course, we have other medications that are less risky that control anxiety, but testosterone does seem to do that effectively.
	The problem is we really don't know what this massive dose of testosterone does to a young woman's body when she's been on it for decades, and patients don't know that we don't know that.
	They aren't being told how risky these things are.
	Do we have any longitudinal studies about suicidality with regard to transitioning?
	I know that there's been a lot of talk about how in the immediate aftermath of transitioning, suicidality rates go down fairly dramatically, but because all of these treatments are fairly recent, as in the last 20 years mainly, do we have any longitudinal studies over time as to whether suicidality remains at lower levels and how those levels relate to baseline suicidality in the general population?
	Right.
	We don't know two things.
	We know that there are high rates of suicidality among this population.
	What we don't know is whether gender dysphoria is the cause of that, and we don't know whether transitioning will cure suicidality.
	So there are a lot of conflicting studies on this.
	You know, one out of Tavistock Clinic in England showed that the young women who were put on puberty blockers, actually their suicidality did not go down, their suicidal ideation did not go down.
	So it's not clear that medical transitioning will cure suicidality.
	It may for some number of these patients, and it certainly seems to, as you said, in the short term.
	But we just don't know long term whether it will cure it.
	And I think, you know, we're dealing with a different population today.
	Usually when they do these long term studies, they were always done on men because that's who had gender dysphoria.
	And now for the first time it's teenage girls.
	So we really don't know, you know, these teenage girls who exhibit very different kind of thing, meaning they decided this with their friends after social media influences.
	We don't know what their long-term rates of suicidality will be.
	So let's talk about the impact of social media, because you've referenced it a few times.
	Obviously, we have seen suicidality rates in all sort of cohorts of young people go up pretty dramatically in the aftermath of social media.
	What is the impact of social media on all of this?
	Well, social media tends to make young women kind of crazy.
	I mean, it exacerbates anxiety enormously.
	It makes them feel like they are constantly left out.
	It makes them feel like they are constantly less than and unable to achieve the perfect, you know, airbrushed images they see online.
	And it sort of torments them with a constant, you know, threat of being so much less than the beautiful, even classmates that are, you know, face-tuned images online.
	So I think it's a really cruel thing.
	It's sort of the debutante ball that never ends.
	It's a very cruel thing that we're putting young women through.
	It's not doing them any good.
	And unfortunately, you know, we're just inventing more and more of it.
	One of the things that's been so stunning about watching the blowback on your book is to note how many of the folks who are pushing the blowback have said that they are simply following the science in order to actually stop science from being done.
	I mean, there are studies that are literally being suppressed on this sort of stuff.
	Ignored, suppressed.
	Scientists are being dissuaded from reporting on this sort of stuff.
	And this is actually, I think people need to understand, this is actually really, really common inside the scientific community that any sort of That's right.
	sort of politically averse possible scientific result gets the study shut down from beginning and reporting on it also gets shut down.
	That's right in England for instance they are you know they are really considering banning things like puberty blockers because they are starting to doubt based on the you know the evidence they've collected that it's doing these young women any good that this transition in fact one of the authors of one of the big studies said look this is a different population I don't even think, you know, my earlier studies applied to this teenage girls and they do seem to be socially influenced.
	If you look at the evidence, it tends to lead you to caution.
	But what we're seeing is exactly right.
	These young doctors who are pushing this are activists.
	They're really not behaving like doctors.
	I mean, look, My book, for all the blowback and all the extremism around it, all my book does is show, is argue that there may be social influence involved and that we should be very cautious here.
	That's, I mean, that's something you get for, you were told about every medication, right?
	Where they list all the side effects in every ad on television.
	I mean, we promote caution when we talk about this, you know, really You know, extremely involved medications and treatments.
	But for this area, you're never supposed to exercise caution.
	In fact, caution is considered hateful somehow.
	If they were really concerned about the health and welfare of transgender people, they would want more studies done.
	Instead, the activists want less.
	So in a moment, I'm going to talk to you more about the censorship of science because that is a major issue across the board.
	We'll get to that in a second.
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	Okay, so let's talk about the censorship of science.
	So, I remember recently I was at a dinner with a person who is a very high-ranking scientist at a major global organization, and he was talking about how he was about to bring out an enormous study all about the genetic versus environmental bases of homosexuality.
	And he was really nervous about this because what the study showed is that it was both Partially biological and partly environmental, which is what pretty much everybody who's ever studied nearly any human psychiatric issue says, right?
	It's almost entirely a combination of biological and environmental and it differs circumstance to circumstance.
	He was petrified of how this study was going to be brought out.
	When it was in fact brought out, the media immediately said, homosexuality is... the study shows homosexuality is biologically driven, ignoring the fact that That the study itself suggested that a percentage of homosexual behavior is biologically driven, but some of it is environmental, which of course is true of virtually every human behavior.
	The willingness of the media to suppress science they don't like or to pressure universities into refusing to fund studies they don't like is really overwhelming on a variety of levels where it crosses swords with sort of leftist political agendas, it seems like.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I mean, when you start looking into the science and you see how politicized it is, it's really alarming.
	Quillette ran a wonderful piece by some researchers and psychologists who came out and tried to show that a lot of the studies that were really poorly done around this issue of gender dysphoria, and they were using all kinds of surveys done by activist organizations that were not well done surveys.
	I think that, you know, Well, when I talk to doctors, and I talk about them in my book, when I talk to doctors who attend conferences that discuss gender dysphoria, they say, you know, one researcher, Lisa Littman, who wrote the Brown University study you mentioned earlier, she said it was like an infomercial for early transition.
	Every other issue discussed at a medical conference, they always talk about risks.
	That's really important for doctors to be aware of.
	But around this issue, every honest doctor I've spoken to, they say it's just a celebration-only zone.
	And of course, if you're concerned about the damage that could be done to a population, you don't want to sit around celebrating the medication.
	You want to be evaluating it.
	And you know, it's interesting because we've talked about censorship of scientists and censorship of people who are writing about this journalistically.
	But the one area we haven't talked about censorship of is people who have detransitioned.
	And there's been a complete media blackout on people who detransition or who experience regret about transitioning in the first place.
	Those people are treated as unpersons by the media.
	You're not allowed to mention them under any circumstances.
	Maybe you can talk about that a little bit.
	That's right.
	You know, Reddit did something a few months ago now.
	They actually removed their, they had a large, that I mentioned, group of detransitioners, so young women who had undergone medical treatments and regretted it and talked about it.
	And they had a social media group.
	These young women live with a lot of a lot of pain. I mean, it's embarrassing to have gone through this and made a mistake and come out and said so. And frankly, I admire them. They're really wonderful. The ones I've interviewed and spoken to are a really wonderful, impressive group of young women. But they've been through a lot.
	And they had this discussion forum as a place to meet and talk to each other and share their experiences and Reddit shut it down after activists complained.
	Now they reinstituted it, but of course, like all these things, it has the effect of, you know, We're just sending you a warning, effectively, right?
	When one of these corporations shuts you down overnight, one of these dot-coms, it has the effect of chilling speech, which I'm sure it has done, and just sort of instilling just enough fear that, you know, tomorrow we can disappear you.
	It is mind-boggling to think that there are activists who are specifically dedicated to preventing people who have undergone an experience and now regret the experience from speaking out.
	I mean, it does beg the question as to what exactly is driving these activists, because most of this stuff is legal, and for adults, all of it is legal.
	What is the specific drive that we have to now make it nearly mandatory for a child at the age of four or five to be considering transition outside of the parent's permission?
	What is driving all of this?
	It's a good question.
	I think that to understand these activists, you have to look more to Antifa and other extremist leftist groups than you look to normal liberals.
	They're the most illiberal group.
	They want to completely shame, destroy and coerce.
	They are aggressively going after dissenters, very much like the people cheering on rioters in the streets or cheering on banning of books.
	They are not people you can reason with.
	Unfortunately, a lot of them anyway.
	You've mentioned institutions that are pushing this.
	When my wife was in medical school, they were propagandized to about this.
	I mean, there's just no other way of putting it.
	It was not as though it was a medical presentation.
	You were simply told what you were supposed to do without any supporting evidence whatsoever for it, which led to bizarre actual circumstances with patients where you would walk into a room with a patient of a particular sex And you had no idea what you were supposed to do with this person because the person was actually not of the sex it said on their medical form.
	But it's not just that.
	We saw in presidential town halls, Joe Biden suggesting to a mother that her son be treated as a girl at the age of eight.
	We saw Elizabeth Warren saying that she wanted to appoint her Her secretary of education would not be approved unless the secretary of education was approved of by a transgender child.
	I mean, this is insanity.
	It's crazy stuff.
	It is, and I interviewed one really top plastic surgeon who specialized in microsurgery, and he did not do gender transition surgeries because he said, look, I didn't get involved in medicine in order to do that to young children.
	I don't wanna do it.
	But because he refused to do it at his top hospital, he said the people who were doing these surgeries were in his view, completely unqualified to do the kind of.
	You know, incredibly difficult transfers of peripheral nerves and arteries and whatnot that are required for some of these procedures.
	And that's what you're seeing.
	You're seeing the best people in medicine take a step back because they don't want to be just told by activists what they have to do.
	They're real doctors.
	So they take a step back.
	They say, I don't want anything to do with this population.
	And the people rushing forward to treat them and to take the directives from the activists are often not the best doctors.
	Do you think that we're gonna reach a point here where doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists are basically forced by law to push this sort of stuff?
	Because, again, we've already seen so-called conversion therapy bills pushed in places like New Jersey and California.
	And if we were talking about electro-shocking kids who think they're gay, that'd be one thing, but that's not what these bills do.
	They literally suggest, in some cases, that you are not allowed to discuss with a child their actual biological sex, because that amounts to conversion therapy.
	And you've already seen with regard to things like abortion, an attempt to force doctors or hospitals to perform medical procedures that doctors and hospitals may not want to perform.
	Do you think that's the direction we're moving here to make this sort of stuff mandatory for doctors to provide?
	I think, I mean, yes, I do.
	But I also think what we're gonna see is, as with everyone else, everyone with integrity, who's skilled and has integrity in a particular field, bow out.
	So they'll go to a different field, or they will make up some excuse.
	Oh, I'm not qualified to do that.
	And then the people rushing forward and will say, I'll do it.
	I can make, you know, I'd love to make those that money are often, you know, not as frankly qualified or sometimes as ethical.
	And we see that across the board, right?
	You see that with, you know, any number of professions where people realize that if they are a teacher in a classroom who doesn't want to teach, you know, the 1619 Project, they don't want to, you know, propagandize to children, they actually want to teach history, they're going to be more inclined to choose another profession.
	So we've discussed a lot about how much more common this is becoming.
	Do you have any sort of statistical analysis of how much more common these sorts of gender dysphoric claims are?
	How big is this phenomenon?
	It's big.
	It's really big.
	So in England, the rise in young women presenting with gender dysphoria at clinics was up 4,400% over the previous decade.
	In America, it's harder to know the numbers because we, of course, don't have the same centralized care.
	And we don't actually require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in order to get the hormones.
	So it's much harder to track.
	But we know that as of 2018, 2% of high school students were identifying as transgender.
	And I see numbers.
	higher than that in middle school. So 2 percent of American high school kids, that's over 300,000 kids. That's very high. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of young women presenting for gender surgeries in America quadrupled. We're seeing an extremely high spike.
	And that's what I'm going to do.
	And the fact that you can't even ask why is partly what's fueling this.
	There's this code of silence around just asking basic questions.
	This also has aspects of religious freedom here, because if you are a religious person, then obviously you disagree with the basic gender ideology that's being presented by the left, and yet, as we mentioned before, there is, on a non-religious basis, the possibility that Child Protective Services shows up at your door if you disagree with this sort of stuff.
	If you're a religious person, this seems like a perfect First Amendment issue, where you say, I'm not raising my kid the way you want me to raise my kid, and they just show up with Child Protective Services and take the kid away.
	Yeah, one thing I tell parents is to oppose gender ideology in the schools.
	I mean, I think you're right about the religious issue, but I also think that gender ideology in the schools is doing so much damage, and it's part of why we're going to see a massive spike of trans identification, even bigger than we're seeing.
	Because young kids in California, kids as young as five, are being told That only they know their true gender, and they're encouraged along a path of self-discovery.
	They're told their parents don't know their gender.
	Only they get to decide it.
	This is confusing a population.
	It's not necessary to prevent bullying.
	You can absolutely insist that everyone be decent to each other without encouraging this.
	And, you know, it's really confusing a whole generation of young kids.
	So what got you into writing about this in the first place?
	Because you went to Yale Law School, you clerked, I believe it was on the D.C.
	Circuit Court of Appeals, and all of a sudden you find yourself writing books about gender dysphoria.
	So how did you end up, and you'd obviously written a lot on different subjects for the Wall Street Journal, how'd you end up in sort of this subject area?
	Sure.
	So I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on pronoun laws, you know, the laws that mandate use of certain pronouns in assigned criminal or civil penalties.
	And I just pointed out this is straightforwardly unconstitutional in America.
	The government can't make people say anything.
	They can't even make people salute a flag.
	And a reader wrote to me and she told me about this phenomenon and she said no journalist would take it up but her daughter had been caught up in this craze and she asked me to investigate it.
	So I tried to pass it on to an investigative journalist and when I couldn't take one to To get one to take it up, it really bothered me.
	Parents were crying out for journalists to take this seriously.
	Parents were crying out for some help.
	They were being gaslit everywhere.
	And journalists, whose job it is to ask these uncomfortable questions and find out what's really going on, were backing away from it.
	What's been kind of the blowback in your personal life from all of this?
	Because obviously, you know, we tend to walk... I know your husband.
	I've known him since I was a kid, actually.
	So we tend to walk in kind of similar circles.
	But, you know, you're in a major blue city where all of your viewpoints are taken as evidence of your malicious intent and evil.
	So how has all of this impacted you on a personal level, writing about this and becoming sort of a national story for being quashed?
	No, it's interesting.
	I think we're all liberals, classical liberals, and anyone who's ever said something where you're being canceled, we're all in the same position, and that is we're fighting for the possibility for Americans to say things that aren't pre-approved, that aren't Hateful or offensive.
	We're trying to stay within the bounds of normal discussion.
	We're trying to keep that open.
	I mean, when I think about, look, this is sort of an exhausting endeavor, honestly, defending the ability to talk about this issue.
	But the reason I do it is they are expanding the list of all All the categories of inquiry that they're putting in the same bucket as Richard Spencer or really hateful speech and completely off limits.
	And the more victories we hand them, the fewer topics we're allowed to question.
	And right now the medical care for young people who think they might be transgender all of a sudden is terrible.
	It's terrible.
	Doctors aren't behaving like doctors, and no one's asking the appropriate questions.
	And if we allow that to be verboten, they'll just move on to the next thing.
	Let's talk about, you know, corporate America and the entertainment industry, both of which have had a significant impact on how people view this sort of stuff.
	So obviously Hollywood has decided to present this phenomenon in only the most sort of hallmarkified fashion.
	It's all shot through yellow haze and wonder.
	The Babysitters Club, which originally was a book series designed for, you know, preteens, is now being filmed on Netflix and there's a transgender character and there's a full scene in which Parents and doctors are being lectured about how a seven-year-old child who identifies as transgender is supposed to be treated in a hospital setting.
	The doctors have to be made aware by a woke babysitter.
	You know, Hollywood has bought into this wholesale.
	When did this happen?
	I mean, it seems like it's been relatively recent.
	I'm old enough to remember when Hollywood sort of made the transition to we're going to have a lot of gay and lesbian characters in film and TV, which, you know, fine.
	And now they've decided that every series has to have a transgender character as well.
	And not only that, you're going to have to To be Oscar eligible, you have to include, you know, one of these sort of woke social justice group characters.
	When did Hollywood jump into this?
	So I think the tipping point for a lot of people was Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair.
	People who look at the culture and even transgender adults that I interview tend to look at that as a really sea change in the culture.
	But you're right and when I talk about the lies that get told around this, perhaps the most concerning lie is that transition is easy.
	And when I interview transgender adults, they are horrified that young kids are pushed to this and told, no problem, you can just switch.
	Because, look, this is not easy.
	It's not true that you just take some medication and all of a sudden you're a boy.
	Depending on what medications, what hormones you try and what course you take, there's problems.
	There's real potential for permanent sexual dysfunction and all kinds of other problems.
	This is not something to take lightly but Hollywood glamorizing it is really fueling kids thinking this is an easy cure all for whatever's troubling them.
	It is really amazing.
	I mean, if you do watch movies about this sort of stuff or TV shows, it is treated as though you one day are just a burly man and the next day you look like Laverne Cox and it's like there's no in-between and there are no surgeries required.
	It was all just magic.
	You just walk into a box and you came out the other side as a member of the opposite gender.
	No one ever in the media will ever detail the actual details of transgender surgery, particularly male-to-female transgender surgery, which is Pretty extensive and can be absolutely horrific over time.
	I mean, if you actually detail the maintenance and care of the new sort of construction, it is not a pretty picture.
	And obviously, you know, I think there's a stake for a lot of people in never describing this sort of stuff.
	And the number of surgeries.
	I mean, even young women.
	I talked to young women who had top surgeries.
	They often need, you know, repeated, you know, more surgeries in order to fix the appearance because they're unhappy with that.
	Sometimes if a young woman's breasts are removed, then it's obvious she has hips.
	So then she's concerned about that.
	The surgeries are unending.
	I mean, all you need is a doctor willing to take money for it, and there are so many who are only too happy to.
	So you have Hollywood pushing this stuff, and now you have corporate America pushing this stuff and censoring.
	So this breaks down into a couple categories.
	Here you have social media, and then you have actual corporations.
	So you mentioned Amazon refused to allow any advertising of your book.
	They'll allow I Am Jazz to be advertised up the wazoo.
	They'll make it their book of the year.
	But your book, You Can't Advertise on Amazon, Target took down your book for a brief time after, I believe, a single tweet suggesting that your book should not be put in Target stores or be made available on their website.
	Was it only a single tweet that got Target to commit to taking it down briefly?
	I mean, it seems like it.
	I saw another one.
	So I saw at most two.
	So it was either one or two that that triggered that response.
	But, you know, it was it was really unbelievable.
	And Americans today, we still don't believe we're not OK with censorship.
	I mean, it was I would never have seen this if parents who've lived through this Hadn't objected and brought it to my attention and said look what they did to your book So there are a lot of other books that could easily be quietly disappeared where you don't have this, you know large population You know so excited for someone to tell their story who are who is out there frankly You know being vigilant on your behalf because they want to get the message out you know, I
	There was a group of parents, actually, who put up billboards in Los Angeles because they saw how suppressed the book was.
	And they actually dug into their own pockets and put up a billboard to advertise the book and raised money to do more billboards.
	And other parents around the country were so excited about this.
	They started a campaign on GoFundMe and GoFundMe shut it down.
	So GovFundMe, which allows 35,000 fundraisers for young women to pay for the removal of their healthy breasts, shut down as hateful an effort by parents to get the word out that really there are a lot of risks involved and really urging caution.
	I mean, this is the scariest aspect for the broad society, is the willingness of corporations to do the work that government won't.
	So government doesn't have the ability to prevent the dissemination of your book, at least for now.
	Although, we'll see where anti-discrimination law goes, because California's getting into some dicey areas there.
	But when it comes to corporations, corporations seem to be taking the lead in this sort of stuff.
	Is it just that they're afraid of the woke blowback?
	That they're afraid of A very concerted group of people making Target famous for having allowed your book, and they believe that there aren't enough people out there to sort of counterbalance that?
	Or is it that there are woke staffers inside these various institutions who suggest that they are just not going to go to work tomorrow if your book doesn't get taken down, like they were sort of suggesting at Spotify after your podcast with Joe?
	So, a few things.
	I actually, I've thought about this.
	I think that Target knows its customers, and frankly, its customers are a lot of parents who are concerned and are interested in, you know, what are the medical risks, and why are there so many of my kids' friends suddenly trans, and are very interested in this topic.
	So why do they take it down?
	I actually think it has more to, it's not the number of people.
	I think it has more to do with the halo that they're looking for.
	They don't want to lose their halo.
	They think they're really great people.
	And the idea that they could be called bigoted is horrifying to them, especially when they think they're such swell guys.
	They'd rather get rid of a book and commit to book banning, essentially, than ever be thought of as going against civil rights.
	Of course, I fully support civil rights for transgender people.
	It's not a civil rights issue at all.
	It really is just a medical issue and a mental health issue, and it's one that's being ignored.
	My main concern right now is that I think that we are at the precipice as a society in terms of whether we're going to be allowed to have these conversations.
	And to me, the future of those conversations actually does not rely on conservatives.
	It relies on Liberals who are not leftists.
	And it seems like the culture has sort of broken down into three categories.
	There are conservatives, there are liberals who are not leftists, and then there are leftists.
	And leftists are people who actually want to shut down the debate, who are interested in their policy prescriptions above all, and who want to ensure that conversations can't actually happen.
	The sort of people who will go after you, the sort of people who will go after Joe Rogan for even talking with you, the sort of people who get very angry that You are allowed to put your book even up for sale on Amazon.com.
	And then there are a bunch of mainstream liberals who may not even agree with you, but agree with the fundamental premise, which is that we should be able to have these conversations.
	And I wonder if there are enough liberals who are going to side with a broader conversation versus their sort of policy prescriptions, because I think this is sort of the battle we're now being forced to, is that there are liberals who are gonna be able to choose to move along with people they generally agree with about policy prescriptions on the left, And that's easy.
	They just have to go along with getting rid of the individual rights to speak out about it.
	Or they can make their own life, in terms of policy, a little bit more difficult by allowing the debate, but maintain the power of the debate.
	And I wonder, in your experience, I mean, how many folks who are of the political left have expressed sympathy for your ability to get the message out there?
	So overwhelmingly the parents who call me are political, are liberal, as you say, and they describe themselves now as politically homeless.
	They are people who are uncomfortable with conservatism.
	They are really uncomfortable about, you know, pro-life, with things like pro-life positions.
	They're not, you know, very often are not religious and they're not really comfortable with religion.
	in many cases, but they do believe in American freedoms.
	Right?
	They do believe that they know their kids better than these so-called experts who have seen them for 45 minutes.
	And they do believe that even though they're supportive of gay rights, their daughter is not suddenly magically trans, right?
	They've known her her whole life.
	So I think that the liberals who, certainly the ones who have lived through this, they almost always tell me they're politically homeless now because they do not feel that the Democrats, they are horrified by a lot of things going on in the Democratic Party and a lot of support for this.
	But whether they will find common cause with conservatives on this, I just don't know.
	I know that Women's Liberation Front, which is an organization I really respect, they're a radical feminist group in America, and they have, you know, worked with conservatives even though they're not.
	They have worked with conservatives around these issues and around women's rights issues because they believe that what's happening to young women today is horrifying and they're concerned about it and they're willing to work with people who are willing to work with them.
	Constant attacks for it.
	I mean, constant.
	How could you work with a pro-life organization and whatnot?
	So I think you're right.
	Classical liberals are going to have to decide what issues they care about.
	Do they care about free speech?
	Do they care about an open society with free inquiry and where that's allowed?
	How about in the media?
	So obviously, you've worked with a lot of folks in the media, and in the media, it seems to me that we have what I've termed the happy birthday problem, which is where I have a lot of liberal friends in the media who will privately text me on my birthday, happy birthday, but will never ever tweet happy birthday, because that would assume that I'm a human being who was born, and that is not allowed on Twitter.
	I know that you know a lot of folks in the media.
	Have you experienced something similar, or are they at least openly supporting your ability to speak out freely?
	That's hilarious.
	OK, so I love that.
	And I also have the happy birthday problem, as you can imagine.
	I get a lot of private, I really love your book.
	I really agree with it.
	But don't tell anyone.
	So, you know, yeah, you do see that a lot.
	I think we just have to fight to keep the Overton window open.
	I mean, look, I think there are a lot of people in the media who are mostly horrified when liberals are censored.
	But they don't really care at all when conservatives are, because frankly, they think they deserve it.
	So I just think we have to fight to keep rational inquiry accessible and possible.
	And I think the more we just speak honestly and reasonably, The more people will feel comfortable, I think, eventually joining the side of people who are making sense.
	But yeah, there are a lot of people very afraid to openly say, Happy Birthday!
	I really like your book!
	So in a second, we're going to get to some bonus content.
	I want to ask you specifically about what you think the path forward is in terms of society's treatment of transgender people, particularly both children and adults.
	But first, if you want to hear Abigail Schreier's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com.
	Click join at the top of the page.
	You can hear the rest of our conversation there.
	Abigail Shryer, really appreciate the time, and as always, appreciate the bravery.
	It's Abigail Shryer.
	If you enjoyed this Sunday Special, check out all of our others.
	And everybody, make sure to go out and get a copy of Abigail's new book, Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters.
	Abigail Shryer, thank you so much for joining the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
	Thank you.
	Thanks for watching.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Mathis Blumberg.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Our technical director is Austin Stevens, and our assistant director is Pavel Wydowski.
	Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Editing is by Jim Nichol.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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	Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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