In this 189th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode we discuss twitter, free speech, and why zero is a special number. Bret sings a little, and invokes Ray Bradbury. Then we discuss a surgeon who is proud to do “non-binary” surgeries, and another doctor who describes how enforcement of Covid policies helped silence doctors who were critical of trans ide...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, livestream number 190?
189.
189, like I said.
- 190? - 189. - 189, like I said.
Like I now have said. - Some people have begun to tire of the fact that we never know what number it is.
Yes.
Or you never know what number it is.
It's funny how something about the run-up to the live stream never puts figuring out what number it is at the top of the priority list.
For you.
For me, yes.
That is the sad fact.
I mean, there are bigger defects to have, but I acknowledge it's a defect.
And for those of you who are suffering from my defect, I apologize.
So here we are.
Yes, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Indeed.
We are here, more than three years we've been doing this, and we're going to keep doing it, bringing you some of what seems to be going on in the world today, viewed through an evolutionary lens.
Indeed.
Here at Dark Horse.
We're in Rumbledown, and we're also on Locals, and the Watch Party is happening on Locals right now.
We strongly encourage you to join the live conversation that is happening there, and we've got lots of stuff going on at Locals now.
We did our private Q&A there this last Sunday.
We're releasing guest episodes early there, all for paying members on Locals, so we strongly encourage you to join the Dark Horse community on Locals.
All right.
We're going to talk about free speech today.
A little, some Orwellian stuff going on.
You know, a little, a smidge, a pinch.
A sprinkle of Orwell here, a dash of Huxley there.
And the developing brain, and gonadotropin-releasing hormone, and agonists thereof, and various other things.
Who could possibly be an agonist of developmental hormones?
You mean antagonist.
Antagonist, right.
Oh, an agonist.
Oh, sure.
No, you're right.
We should all be agonists of the category in general.
Yes.
So, yeah, we'll get there.
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Uh, by definition.
Is it number 189?
Yes.
Oh, you're asking me now.
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Shellfish should be included in animal products, shouldn't it be?
Oh, phylogenetically speaking, this is a slam dunk.
Also corals.
I suspect this is free of coral.
Yeah, I think they just... I don't know, it's a major class of allergen, though.
That's probably why it's on the list.
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Oh, that's good.
Yeah, that creates sort of a loping.
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I think it actually leaves you equally unprepared for everything.
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The segue from the shoes was really poor there.
That's my doing.
What segue?
Yeah.
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That's all A's except for the I-M-A-C-A-D-A-M-I-A-S.
And I just want to clarify that when it says that it is concordant with a keto diet, that can be with either spelling.
Concordant?
Either spelling?
No, no.
Like harmonics?
As far as I know, there's only one spelling of concordant that is tolerable, and even that one is a bit iffy.
But keto.
K-E-T-O, right?
Yeah.
And Q, is there a U in... Ah, the capital city of Ecuador.
Right, exactly.
Is there a U in Quito?
Yeah.
There is a U. I thought there was, and then I worried.
There's some word where there's no U. You should worry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I probably should worry more.
Qatar.
Q-A-T-A-R.
Qatar.
That's it!
Yeah.
Nice!
Yeah.
Qatar.
Yeah.
It shouldn't be pronounced that way.
Or it shouldn't be spelled that way.
I don't know which.
Either one.
Something's gotta, something's gotta change.
I think it is pronounced that way and shouldn't be spelled that way.
But, you know, it is what it is.
It does appear to be.
I don't know.
I haven't been.
Yes.
It might not be what it is.
I have to concede that not very good, but difficult to counter point of yours.
Totally sober.
It's still morning.
Right.
Yeah.
It's still morning.
For us.
Yes.
All right.
And for those of you in Hawaii, and for everyone not listening live, not everyone, some of you not listening live.
It's morning in America, and I leave you to choose how you spell that all to yourself.
Morning.
Or America.
Morning.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
No, America, that's again unambiguous on the spelling front.
OK.
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Alright.
We're back.
Thank you.
I think the implication of the long pause after well done suggests that that was not the expectation.
The concept of well done was entirely your doing.
Oh, okay.
Not as well done as you had thought.
Yes.
So we've got two fairly different things to bring to you today.
Would you like to start or would you like me to start?
Uh, jeez.
Um, you know, I guess I could start.
I could start.
Um, yeah.
Uh, I need you, uh, to do a little beatboxing.
You just go a-boom-boom-da-boom-da-boom.
Nope.
You're not gonna do that?
Nope.
Ooh.
All right.
Uh, well, that leaves me, uh... Not without, uh, warning.
Nope.
Not without... Not without warning.
Well, all right.
We know what kind of stick-in-the-mud you are.
Oh, do we?
Not really.
But, uh, all right.
So, uh... Um...
Let's talk about X, baby.
Orwell and Bradbury.
Let's talk about all the good things that have come from being free.
Let's talk about X. Let's talk about X. Yes.
All right.
So my hope is that my embarrassing myself in that way will bring Elon Musk to that clip.
And hopefully, Elon, if you're watching, let me just ask, please, brother, unblock me.
I get it.
I confess to the crime, but the punishment is disproportionate.
I will keep the DMs to a bare minimum.
But something about Twitter is just not the same when you can't see your tweets because they're redacted.
So there we are.
All right.
That is the intro.
What was Bradbury doing there?
Was it just a rhyme?
No.
Heavens no.
In fact, if it had just been a rhyme, I would have used Huxley, but Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.
Fahrenheit 451.
Right.
So that's more relevant than Huxley in this particular case.
That's good, man.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's me showing my Gen X colors.
I think.
Okay.
I would have to look up when that song, it's Salt-N-Pepa, but you know, given that you spell Peppa Peppa, I'm pretty sure that's a Gen X thing.
Probably.
Yeah.
Okay, so the point of this diversion... You're embarrassing your son.
Well, then I know I'm doing my job as a dad, because that's kind of how it works.
All right, so What I wanted to deal with was a juxtaposition of two things that crossed my Twitter feed in quick succession this week that I thought made a rather interesting point.
So, Zach, do you want to show that tweet?
Which one?
The one citing the Washington Post article.
Now there's something interesting going on here which I don't quite understand.
I'm going to show you a tweet which is going to show you a headline and then we're going to show you the article in question.
All right, so here's the tweet that caught my attention.
And it is from the Washington Post.
It says, Elon Musk stopped policing political misinformation the tech industry followed.
And that, I thought, was a fascinating admission to be coming from the Washington Post.
The article now reads, show the live version of the article, Zach.
Alright, Zack is bringing up the live version of the article in which the title appears different.
Now, I don't know if this is because there are multiple pages associated with this, or if they actually changed the title so that it now reads, Following Elon Musk's lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation.
Okay.
So the headline in the tweet was something about no longer policing misinformation, and now we are surrendering to disinformation.
Yes.
Now, I am sure that there is some reason for the two distinct headlines, but I fail to see how one is more protective of the powers that be than the other.
Frankly, they both strike me as a huge admission.
Yeah, I mean, they both are a huge omission, although in the language, you know, post-George Floyd, and we are now more than three years post-George Floyd, but the widespread accepted hatred of the police.
And resistance being something that you were sort of obligated to do.
It feels to me like policing is always going to have a negative, well, it will will tend to have a negative valence in an outlet like the Washington Post.
And and I don't know, I can't quite make it fit with surrender.
I don't know.
You know, you're not supposed to surrender to illegitimate tyranny, obviously, ever.
Yeah.
On the other hand, I mean, again, I don't know that they changed the headline.
All I did was notice that the original thing that had caught my attention has a different headline than the live article, which could indicate a change, or it could indicate that the two things were sourced differently and they show up with different headlines.
But if it is a change in the headline, it could be to avoid the negative connotations of the word policing.
On the other hand, changing headlines puts blood in the water, and it's a subtle change.
Yeah, so, Stopped Policing.
Oh, good!
Stopped Policing!
Like, oh no, no, we don't want you to encourage the stopping of the policing.
Right, right.
So, but in any case, look, I think they could have improved the title quite a bit.
The title could have been something like, uh, we at the CIA through our, um, thinly veiled journalistic outlet admit that Brett Weinstein was right and that zero is indeed a special number and therefore, and then the subheading could have been, That Elon Musk's embrace of free speech has resulted in a change cascading through the tech industry.
That would have been… I think there's a reason you've never been hired as a headline writer.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I think there are probably a lot of reasons, but some very good ones, including that you don't seem to… To have the knack?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe stick to rapping.
Well, stick to rapping and predicting the near future.
Because that's what has happened here.
So actually, I want to read a couple paragraphs into this thing, because I think it just does reflect the fact that the model that we presented here, zero is a special number, is apparently true.
And you can even read about it in the Washington Post.
So scroll down a little bit.
Oh, jeez.
Can you make that bigger?
All right, do you want to read it?
Sure, you want me to be just the first couple paragraphs?
First couple paragraphs.
Social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation, abandoning their most aggressive efforts to police online falsehoods in a trend expected to profoundly affect the 2024 presidential election.
An array of circumstances is fueling the retreat.
Mass layoffs at Meta and other major tech companies have gutted teams dedicated to promoting accurate information online.
Right?
Is that what they were doing?
An aggressive legal battle over claims that the Biden administration pressured social media platforms to silence certain speech has blocked a key path to detecting election interference.
All right.
And then it goes on.
And ex-CEO Elon Musk has reset industry standards.
It says in a linked fashion, rolling back strict rules against misinformation on the site formerly known as Twitter.
So, anyway.
Yeah, these people.
To write it, these are presumably, I mean maybe they've offshored the writing of this stuff, but these people are presumably Americans who are embracing the destruction of the First Amendment here in one of the premier or formerly premier newspapers in the world.
Sure.
This is madness, but it is a, even though they have gone through incredible contortions to create a Russell conjugation that makes good things like free speech sound dangerous and terrible, they are nonetheless admitting the point, which is that the game theory means that even a single economic competitor that embraces free speech forces that change on everything else, which tells us how to fight.
It has told us from the beginning how to fight.
That is an amazing acknowledgement.
It is a rapid discovery that the pattern unfolds so quickly that they can't even separate them in time.
The rest of the industry does not want to be left behind by a platform on which people are still able to speak freely.
So, good show, Elon.
Well done.
Except for the following thing.
Here on Twitter, well, the social platform.
Twitter.
Yeah, and incidentally, I don't understand how we're supposed to change our lexicon given that X doesn't naturally, you know, you did tweet on X, didn't you?
So it seems like Twitter is still alive.
Okay, so I'm sticking with Twitter.
But here we are on Twitter this week.
We find the following thing from the safety folks.
The safety team at Twitter.
Safety team at Twitter.
It says, X has a responsibility to put the right systems in place to ensure our communities have access to open, accurate, and safe political discourse.
That's why we're hiring more people, updating our policies, and evolving our product.
Now, that I don't want to leap to conclusions.
Did you read the thing it linked to?
The blog post, yes, and it reflects exactly what the tweet says, but there's a question about what is going on inside of Twitter.
On the one hand, Elon was very clear about his belief in free speech.
He did say some stuff that was troubling.
In fact, the formulation that he used, that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach, While it could have a benign interpretation, in the sense that no one has an obligation to amplify speech that they find negative, in the context of a social media platform, that creates cover for de-boosting.
And the fact is, de-boosting is a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment.
The fact is, we're supposed to be able to say whatever it is we think with very minimal limits.
The number of things that you legally cannot do under that umbrella are tiny.
So we are supposed to be able to express any idea.
And to the extent that that idea catches on naturally, because people decide to listen to it, decide to contemplate it, decide to discuss it, repeat it, whatever they do, that's a natural process.
And to the extent that something like Twitter decides to interfere with that and say, well, yeah, you can say whatever you want, you know, in a soundproof room, that's not freedom of speech.
The fact that you can utter the words means nothing.
The fact that you can utter the words on Twitter means nothing.
If Twitter is going to cryptically interrupt the The spread of the thing.
So anyway, we're left with a puzzle.
We have somebody who embraces free speech.
That's good.
And he said some very clear things about He's called himself a free speech absolutist, which is a fairly extreme version of this belief, but he's also said some things that have an ambiguous meaning and then under his on his watch we were watching a The announcement.
I mean, can we go back to that tweet again?
How many crazy euphemistic terms are being used in this one announcement?
It says, X has a responsibility, that's a red flag, to put the right systems, another red flag, in place to ensure, red flag, communities have access, red flag, to open, red flag?
Why is open a red flag?
Open seems like the only the only thing here that feels right.
Well, for the fall, I guess the reason it's a red flag is have access to open.
No, I think that's the piece of this phrase.
I would draw my red flag on two open.
Accurate red flag.
How do they know?
And safe red flag.
Political red flag discourse.
What was political?
This is not, that's not right.
No, that's a red flag because why would you create a category here?
The point is free speech means But the fuck out of what we're talking about.
And the fact that you define it as political or not political is irrelevant.
We are free to speak about what we think is important.
Well, OK.
So I think political is maybe a red flag here only because of the fact that the election is happening.
We've got the Republican debate.
We know that this is not cryptically maybe this is about politics.
They're saying this is about politics.
I get it.
On the other hand... No, I'm agreeing with you.
Oh, then I definitely agree with your agreement.
So, there are obviously a slew of terms in this rather brief assertion that are clearly about some process that is opaque and dangerous.
That said, let us steel man the position.
I don't think this could possibly be defended as a tweet, but...
It is true that Musk and the leadership at Twitter has to navigate difficult waters in the sense that what Elon Musk has said is that within the confines of the law, Twitter will not interfere with speech, which is a very defensible position.
The problem is the laws vary between jurisdictions.
Germany has been extremely aggressive in enforcing intolerable limits on what Germans can read Yes.
that have cascaded through Twitter because people who do not know that they are not attempting to speak to Germans in particular are saying things that Germany then exerts forces on Twitter that cause Twitter to not function like a place where ideas can be freely exchanged.
Yes.
Really?
Yes.
Yes.
This is Merkel's government.
Oh yeah.
Yes.
And so there's a European context, there's a German, a specifically German context, and all of, and you know, let's, let's give the man his due.
He has a difficult job figuring out how to navigate a world in which lots of people are experimenting with intolerable limits on speech.
And Germany has always been this way.
Germany has always, since World War II, had limits on things like the depictions of Nazi symbols.
And you can understand why Germany would have leaned that way.
But it also does things like creates a problem, you know, when Roger Waters depicts Nazis and dresses up like a Nazi as he's doing a concert in which the wall is being presented.
The fact that he's been doing that on stage for decades and that he's not embracing Nazism is irrelevant because he's doing things that, according to the Germans, formally violate their policies.
So, anyway, yeah, Musk has a difficult problem.
And there's a question.
Musk is simultaneously running a business.
He cannot, well, I won't say cannot, he could subordinate the business's financial well-being to its importance as a platform.
And he could just simply say, here are the rules.
Here's how free speech applies on the platform and what other countries can ban Twitter.
And then they will have to deal with their own populations who will be angry that suddenly Twitter is not available.
Are you arguing that you think this is a response to things like German law?
I'm not.
I'm steelmanning.
The best possible explanation for that absolutely Orwellian tweet is that they are trying to juggle a difficult set of constraints that are impossible to properly I mean, someone with a different mindset might also read that tweet, if you would put it up again, Zach.
I've never seen it until just now.
The second part of it says that they're going to be hiring more people, and it has certainly been widely discussed that the mass layoffs that happened when Musk took over Twitter was about firing precisely people who were doing this sort of job.
Right, who were putting ghosts in the machine, who were shadow banning people, who were effectively censoring content and restricting reach of people who engaged in wrong think and wrong speak.
And what is this?
Who are these people who are going to be hired if not one-to-one replacements for exactly those people who were fired?
Right.
I mean, another way to put it would be, how many people does it take not to censor speech?
My thinking is you could do that with very few people.
So, you know, that's where we are.
Again, I want to leave room.
Look, my advice to you, Elon, if you're going to engage in some sort of needle threading with respect to other jurisdictions that have onerous restrictions on speech, You need to give us a wink so that we know that you are not backing off the commitment that you very clearly expressed to free speech as understood in an American context.
Right?
This is an American company and we understood you to be very clear that you were creating a public square in which Other than the restrictions that come from actually illegal content, we were going to be free to exchange ideas.
There's obviously a question about things that aren't ideas, things like boxing.
There's a question about things like pornography.
With respect to ideas, there ought be nothing that we cannot talk about on this platform, and to the extent that that's not going to be the nature of the place going forward, we need such a place.
And why do we need such a place?
You can read it in the Washington Post of all locations this week.
You can discover that what you did actually had exactly the impact that you claimed you wanted.
And for you to back off it now would be a terrible misstep, in my opinion.
So, please Elon, send us a sign, let us know that you're still committed to this, and help us understand what the constraints are that you have to deal with internationally, if that's in fact what's driving it.
Because otherwise, what it seems like is that hiring Iaccarino was an indication of where Twitter is headed, and that's not a good sign.
I guess, given this is new to me right now, and I have not read the article that you showed, the Washington Post article, I wonder to what degree you're compelled by its argument.
It says, excuse me, We had such a lovely rainstorm for two days, and all the smoke is gone, but I feel like there's residual pollen stuck places.
Yes, I've retained a bit of the smoke.
I'm getting rid of it slowly.
The little that you showed us of that article suggested that Facebook—again, I'm going to continue to call it Facebook.
Meta, at least, is a name, unlike X, but still.
Facebook and YouTube, it argues, have basically followed suit, have waited for, you know, the fact that zero is a special number to the zero-ness of it all to change.
Twitter led the way.
Twitter is now the one.
And now Facebook and YouTube, that article would appear to argue, are similarly backing off of their mistis and malinformation policies.
I'm not familiar with Facebook's really at all, but certainly we We have been the direct targets of YouTube's policies.
And I don't, I would just, I guess I wonder if it's true.
And I'm not saying, I don't, I don't, I don't even have, I don't think a guess as to whether or not it might be.
Because it seems like, yeah, zero is a special number.
It might well have followed.
Twitter may have basically opened the gates for this.
But also, 2020 didn't go so well for any of them, right?
Yeah.
And, you know, no matter what they did, they got grief from both sides.
And, you know, basically saying, you know what, okay, no policy then.
And yes, we're going to get grief from the people who want us to, you know, want us to do things, but at least if we don't have our fingerprints on it at all, you can't tell us we were managing it wrong because we have said we refuse to manage.
So I think you're opening a very interesting set of questions.
It's possible that that article has a purpose and that it's not an admission because what it is is an attempt to induce the other platforms to double down on restrictions rather than follow Musk.
In other words, it functions as an accusation that they are following suit, which might cause them to protest and provide evidence that that's not true.
It's also the case that we have legal precedent where the executive branch was caught red-handed dictating and the courts have now said this is intolerable, so there is a formal restriction on what can happen.
How that all plays out, I don't know.
But I do think whether it is... Well, what can happen from the executive branch?
I mean, just as has happened in actual politics.
So, you know, there will be end runs created, you know, there'll be lobbyists and PACs and, you know, whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
There will be an arms race about how many removes is...
It's far enough that it becomes legal.
And I will say that there is legal precedent arguing that it would have to be incredibly remote.
So there are at least two important precedents in which private entities have been declared effectively public.
And, you know, so courts have said, look, you have to abide by the First Amendment because you're functioning in a governmental fashion.
So anyway, the It's an interesting set of questions, but I don't think, I almost don't think it matters because what is contained in the article, whether it is designed to push people in a direction or it is an acknowledgement that they have been pushed in that direction, still the underlying thing that is true is the game theory below, which means that A, people like Musk have to be very careful what they do because the cascade, I think Musk understands this very well,
The cascading implications of what they do are much larger than the platforms that they actually control.
Which means they have to be careful in both directions.
Because this is a one-way, the game theory works in one direction.
The lagging partner destroys their own business.
The leading partner, with respect to something like speech, gets the advantage of being there first.
So, if you're pulling in the direction of restrictive speech, then you're only going to have fools on your platform, because who wants to have their own speech restricted?
What you're going to have is people moving towards the platform where they're free to say the most things that they're interested in saying.
So it is very important that Musk not blink because he's in the lead and the fact is he could lose the advantage, the competitive advantage that comes from being first in this direction if he takes his foot off the gas and Meta catches up and they're both restrictive zones but Meta is seen as slightly more free for example.
That would be a disaster for Not only would it be a disaster for free speech, but it would be a disaster for Twitter and Musk because it would mean that his utilization of an actually free platform in order to recover his investment would be stifled by his competitors catching up.
So, I'm way out of my depth here, but that argument seems to work only for equivalently megalithic companies.
So, we're talking about Twitter, YouTube, Facebook.
Obviously, there is an actual free speech platform that is a direct competitor for at least one of those, right?
So, we are on Rumble now.
on YouTube, but YouTube has treated us extraordinarily badly, and it is understood at this point to have been, you know, actively censoring and shadow banning and demonetizing not just us, but many other people as well throughout COVID and before.
We were the direct hit of it in, you know, beginning in 2021, and nothing has changed.
But, you know, Rumble and Locals, which are now a unit, is actively, specifically, explicitly a free speech platform, and is vying to be, you know, a competitor worthy of sharing the same stage with YouTube.
And it's an excellent product, but it just doesn't have the market share yet.
So, so it's, so what what you were talking about only works, like you were talking about like different weight classes.
Yeah, and it is a weight class issue, and the reason that that weight class issue applies here has to do with network effects.
The fact is, YouTube has behaved abominably.
And that's not a secret.
And the number of us who have recognized it, who have suffered from it, is huge.
So that raises the question, why don't we just simply YouTube somewhere else?
And many people are doing that.
But the problem is that the audience who is not towing the line of what is, or towing the line is the wrong term, but is not up against the boundary of what YouTube tolerates, Just because it's not what they talk about.
Right.
Right.
Because for whatever reason, their audience isn't large enough or their interests aren't controversial or whatever it is.
That audience is still benefiting from the legacy of YouTube being the only player on the block.
And so, for example, let's say... It's still got orders of magnitude more influence because it has the people.
Right, and in some sense, let's take an example of something that isn't controversial that YouTube has done brilliantly that causes it to be very hard to turn off the lights at the fucking place, which is what we should do.
The catalog of how-to videos on YouTube is staggeringly deep.
If you want to figure out how to wire a light circuit with control from two points, I guarantee you that you'll find 25 videos there explaining how to do it.
You'll find somebody who speaks in a way that you can absolutely understand it, and you can talk yourself through doing it, even if you've never done anything like that before.
That's a very powerful thing.
There is no reason that couldn't live on Rumble.
It could live on Rumble.
But the problem is, how do you get what already exists in that library to move?
And this is the same thing that's protecting Wikipedia.
No, and I haven't ever looked for that.
But when you go looking for, like, I just need to figure out, you know, why do I do X in this piece of software?
And, you know, sometimes you may just go to Google and look for the message boards.
But sometimes you're looking for videos and you benefit from a depth of the library.
Excuse me.
You're not going to go to the platform that only has two videos if you go to the one that has 30 and you can choose among them.
Yeah.
So, what that explains is why there's a two-tiered system.
Why Rumble isn't immediately in a position to do to YouTube what Musk is trying to do to it.
And that is because it starts with a disadvantage that is not its own, from size.
And so, there's a very powerful argument, why should you be on Rumble and not YouTube?
Because Rumble will protect your speech rights, and that matters more than anything.
That's a great argument.
And then there is the inertia argument that has us still visiting YouTube grudgingly to figure out how to do X, Y, and Z, still has us going to Wikipedia to find out, you know, how deep, you know, Lake Victoria is.
Right.
So those, that legacy that keeps those platforms afloat also sets the boundaries of who is in a position to drive the game theory.
Now, Rumble is doing a very good job of marshalling its primary competitive advantage into actually putting itself in a position to dethrone YouTube.
And YouTube ought to be paying really close attention because it could end up becoming Myspace.
Which, you know, would delight many of us.
So, um, these things are coming and the next year is going to be fascinating because the battle over speech matters a great deal in the run-up to the next U.S.
presidential election.
Indeed.
All right, um, that's it for there?
Yep.
For then?
Do you have a musical intro and do I need to beatbox in order to... I'd like you, do you have a violin?
I have a very small violin which I break out on occasions when people have... Do you need to rosin?
Yes, I believe the bow has been recently rosined, but I would have to check carefully.
Of course you would.
Chris Ruffo, Christopher Ruffo, has published a couple of pieces, a number of pieces in City Journal, and I want to share some from his most recent one and from an earlier one, and then talk a bit about some of the implications therein.
There's something in this air that is not- That is not air?
That is not, that I'm not happy with.
Okay, here we go.
This is the piece, and you can put this up, that Rufo published this week, August 24th, 2023, in City Journal, a piece called Barbarism in the Name of Equality.
An Austin-based doctor performs non-binary genital surgeries.
I'm just going to share a bit of the piece.
In 2015, Crane, a doctor, an MD, received a flurry of publicity as an innovator and I don't even know how to pronounce that word.
Vaginoplasty, I guess?
Vaginoplasty?
Don't know.
Yes, the creation of a so-called artificial vagina.
In 2015, Crane received a flurry of publicity as an innovator of vaginoplasty, which involves castrating and creating an artificial vagina for male-to-female patients, and phalloplasty, which involves creating and installing an artificial penis for female-to-male patients.
He boasted of a 1-2 year waitlist and claimed to have one of the highest volumes of transgender surgeries in the United States.
Since then, business has boomed.
Crane operates clinics in San Francisco, California and Austin, Texas.
San Francisco and Austin.
Wow.
Employs a team of five doctors and conducts procedures on more than 1,000 patients per year.
As part of this caseload, his practice has veered into the disturbing new territory of non-binary surgery, which includes castration, eunuch, and nullification procedures, which Crane describes as the process of, quote, removing all external genitalia to create a smooth transition from the abdomen to the groin.
End quote.
Crane is also designed to perform hundreds of non-binary surgeries in which he fashions together both male and female genitalia for a single individual.
That is, he creates an artificial penis for a woman while retaining her vagina, or creates an artificial vagina for a man while retaining his penis.
Crane recounted the story of performing his first non-binary genital surgery in a question-and-answer session for potential patients.
Quote, In the beginning of my practice, within the first year, I'd say, I had a trans man come to me and he wanted a phalloplasty, but he wanted to keep his vagina.
His vagina.
Crane recalled, After a process of soul-searching, he concluded that, if gender was not binary, his surgeries did not need to conform to a typical male-female pattern.
Quote, The patient wanted to keep his vagina because he got sexual gratification out of having a vagina.
And I thought it's kind of a salt to make a patient remove an organ that they're enjoying.
Let's keep it.
I have written fairly extensively about all of this, but insofar as we but insofar as we have been...
Very patient with and even including of what we have called in the past true trans people.
A category I am increasingly suspicious of, but let's put that aside.
It has always been abundantly clear to me that non-binary is an affectation and a delusion and a fantasy and has no relationship to reality.
And this guy, so he's making both people with supposedly both sets of genitals, and of course he's not, because you can't actually make a penis out of the skin from the forearm or a vagina by inverting tissue.
You just, you can't, right?
But he's also doing this other thing.
He's turning them into Barbies and Kens, right?
He's making, what does it say?
Removing all external genitalia to create a smooth transition from the abdomen to the groin.
How does this doctor have a license?
What will it take for everyone to start seeing the atrocities that are happening?
And in the name of what?
So this isn't Nazi doctors pretending to do this in the name of science and medicine.
This is This is pretending that this is good for people because it's kind of an assault to make a patient remove an organ that they're enjoying and we're just going to add whatever they feel like.
Yeah.
It's, it's a couple of different things.
I would call it evidence-free medicine.
That's good.
That's really good.
Thank you.
Evidence-free medicine, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, yes.
- And by that-- - Yes you would, and no will I from now on. - What I mean is these tricks that the sophists are using to get people to back off of actual logic are so powerful that there is essentially no argument that they cannot protect.
Our inability to agree on anything at all anymore, that we can't agree, that 2 plus 2 equals 4, that men can't become women, that pedophilia is bad, all the things that every reasonable person used to agree on.
The fact that we can't agree on those things is evidence that the power contained in these threatening arguments is so great that what you would expect to happen, if some doctor made this argument in any era in which anything functioned, then you would if some doctor made this argument in any era in which anything functioned, then you would find the medical societies, the journals would come down on that
And the clear burden would be on the doctor to prove that what they were doing was tolerable enough that it should not cause them to be thrown out of the profession.
And into prison.
And into prison.
Right.
The fact that that's not even happening here, and they're just like, oh, well, that's nice.
He's making non-binary surgeries.
He's pruning genitalia off of perfectly healthy people.
I guess that's how, I guess that's the conclusion medicine's come to.
No, it hasn't.
What's happened is the threat of being accused of transphobia is so great that a doctor who wishes to innovate new, previously unthought modes of mutilation, that that doctor can simply do it because what are you going to do?
Say, that doesn't make any sense, you're mutilating people?
That would make you a transphobe, which is, of course, the worst thing a person can be.
That's where we are.
So it is these surgeries are postmodern in the most obvious sense.
They are utopian.
And I mean that in the sense that patients are being misled into, oh, yes, we can do that for you.
No, you can't.
You can do something.
But the idea that you are actually Giving a person the equipment that they weren't born with, you simply are not, nor is it conceivable that you could.
And the evidence that that's true is obvious, and even the medical societies and medical schools can't manage to muster enough courage to point this out, because the threat of this argument in public is so great that nothing can withstand facing it down.
So we're getting there.
So there's a couple of quotes in the future here that directly relate to that, so I'm not going to respond to that until we get there.
Just one more short excerpt from this piece from Rufo this week about this doctor who is creating Barbie and Ken dolls, and People with two sets of genitalia as well, supposedly.
Crane, the doctor, proposed two solutions.
First, the social utopian solution to re-educate all of society to accept that biological sex is not binary.
Quote, XX is not always female and XY not always male.
And, quote, humanize this predicament with the end goal of acceptance of anti-normative sexual identity.
Second, the technical constructivist solution to remove, alter, fabricate, and reorganize human genitalia so that transgender patients can, quote, become the people they were always meant to be.
Yeah, so maybe I should just go right to the previous piece where Rufo was interviewing an excellent doctor who sees this for what it is.
But maybe before I do, I will say, A, many of the people who are arguing in favor of the mutilation of children have caught on to the fact that many of their straw men positions are laughable.
And apparently this guy hasn't.
You know, it's not about the chromosomes.
It's never been about the chromosomes.
In mammals, we have what is called genetic sex determination, which really means chromosomal sex determination, which means that In almost every single case, in almost every single mammal, with a couple of species exceptions at the base of the mammal tree, that is the echidnas and the duck-billed platypus.
We have two sex chromosomes, Xs and Ys, and females are XX and males are XY.
But those things are what determine what sex you are.
They aren't what sex you are.
Uh, what sex you are is about what gametes you produce.
And, um, the sophists have all sorts of ludicrous responses here about, well, okay, so I've got a developmental, uh, disability, which says, uh, you know, a disorder that says that even though I produce eggs, I should have been producing sperm.
Therefore, I'm actually male.
Um, so, you know, these people aren't serious.
Um, they think they're serious, but they're not, and they should really, you know, get outside and do something real and stop destroying children.
Um, but It's not about the chromosomes, but the idea that, in the words of this doctor, transgender patients need to be able to remove, alter, fabricate, and reorganize human gentilia so that they can become the people they were always meant to be.
This is, and I am not by any means the first person to point this out, but increasingly I think this is one of the main arguments we should be making.
What you are doing is telling people that they are broken, and that they are not anything like what they should be.
They should not accept themselves as they are.
You should not accept them as they are either.
You should celebrate the fact that they cannot accept themselves as they are.
They should certainly not strive within themselves to make themselves better.
What they need is, you know, techno-utopian intervention that will surely destroy them and make them and guarantee their misery for the rest of their lives while holding them in sway to the pharmaceutical companies, which doesn't sound like a wonderful future to me.
No, and it raises – this is a point you and I have each made.
If we accept that the mind and the body of these people is in conflict, it is in no way obvious, and it is certainly not in keeping with any ancient version of trans, that the right approach should be to modify the body.
For one thing, the body is a complex system about which we know very little and have even less power.
The ability to create biologically is minimal.
So the best we could do is simulate, whereas we could change your mind.
And in fact, the mind is built to repair itself.
And most people with dysphoria find that if, you know, in childhood, if they have dysphoria and nothing is done, they grow out of it.
Right.
So the point is the mind is a marvelous healing organ.
And also some amount of the dysphoria isn't dysphoria.
It's imaginative play.
Yep.
It's considering what other possibilities there are.
And you know what, when you're told as a child that you actually can't become a steam train or a rhinoceros, maybe you're devastated, but for fuck's sake, get over it.
And if you're told you can't become a girl or a boy because you were born the other thing, again, this is part of what being a human is and growing up and engaging in your imaginative play.
Cool.
Don't bring the doctors into it.
Definitely don't bring the endocrinologists and the surgeons into it.
Yes, and don't blame society for restricting what you can do, because the fact is you live in a society that has never, there has never been its equal with respect to how free you are to, you know, to subscribe to whatever gender roles you prefer.
Right.
Right?
Nobody is telling you you have to live one way or the other, you have to go back to 1950 or anything like this.
So the fact is, the getting over it, What animal would you like to be?
Mmm, an otter.
Okay?
You can't be.
Damn.
Mmm, that does suck.
But learning that it sucks, and there's nothing I can do about it, and so I guess I'm gonna have to, you know, live as a close relative of chimps.
Well, that's weird.
Every day.
I swear it is.
But, uh, I am over it.
I'm an adult and it does not... It's not the most beautiful claim.
No, it's a terrible choice.
Even Gibbons would have been a much better one.
But yeah, but no.
We had to go.
We had to be the chimps.
That's God's little joke on us, I guess.
But anyway, the point is, okay, so we're chimp relatives.
That is a strange sort of... it's an interesting hybrid between advantages and disadvantages, but nonetheless, wisdom is understanding that that's what you're stuck with and going with it.
And we lost our opposable toes.
I mean, come on.
I know where they are, they're just... Well, I mean, we got bipedality, but I don't know.
Selection opposed them, and now they're...
Their opposed toes is what they are.
Something.
Something.
All right.
That's a pointless detour.
But the point is, the getting over it is a developmental process.
And these people are all about... As we called our episode last week, deal with it.
Accept the heads you're dealt.
Play the cards you've been dealt.
So the idea that proper development involves reconciling yourself to those cards, and believe me, there are a lot worse cards than wishing you had been the other sex.
There's profound disabilities that people are born with that they then strive and overcome.
This is just one of the ways in which a adult mind has to reconcile itself to the realities of the physics that we are constrained by, the biology, the era that you're born into, all of those things, and that I think there's something interesting in the idea that these people both want to block physical puberty and block mental maturation.
And it really is a matter of, you know, a tantrum about things that you might want but aren't supposed to be on the table.
Well, I don't know.
I, I'm not sure I agree with that last thing because I don't, it's not that the children, um, and it is, you know, the children who decide they want this thing, um, may be being allowed to have a tantrum, but it's only on the menu because of the adults.
This, like the idea that you could engage in endocrinological and surgical malfeasance against children, uh, was not the children's idea.
Oh, they're not the ones I'm accusing of having a tantrum.
It's the movement that has decided that society has to be turned upside down over this issue, and that the correct intervention is surgical and hormonal, and that anybody who disagrees with those claims is in fact morally defective.
Okay, so Rufo wrote in June of this year, reported on a dialogue with a physician who he says works in a major children's hospital in a blue city.
He's anonymous here.
The piece is called Thrown to the Wolves.
And I, of course, link these in the show notes.
Rufo begins by asking, please begin by setting the scene.
What is it like in a major children's hospital in the United States regarding transgender interventions for children?
Physician, I think the best way to answer that question is to talk about the cultural shift that happened in 2020, because transgender ideology and COVID are inextricably linked.
Normally, doctors operate by the authority of the professional societies that govern our specific practice.
That worked because the individuals in those institutions were reliable, intelligent, and thoughtful.
But with COVID in 2020, we started getting medical decrees without peer review or evidence.
You saw this with masks, social distancing, and emergency use authorizations.
These decrees were expressed as something that everyone had to do, without justification based on sound science.
The other thing was censorship.
If you were to ask questions or express doubt about these medical decrees, you would be ostracized within your department and you stood a good chance of being publicly humiliated, severely reprimanded, or fired.
That's when transgender ideology really took off.
Within these academic institutions, so-called experts in the field of transgender medicine would simply declare that puberty blockers and other interventions were the gold standard of care.
The evidence to support this is completely fraudulent, but no dissent was permitted.
Everyone within the medical community knew that if he questioned transgender ideology, he would suffer the same type of repercussions that had happened during COVID.
The best way to describe the environment would be as an authoritarian, censorious culture that discourages any meaningful debate and encourages the demonization of anyone who asks questions.
I think this is incredibly apt.
I would not have put the rise in transgender ideology as concomitant with COVID because we, of course, were seeing it before then, but it may well be that it took off and that we don't know.
And, you know, this is a doctor inside the system.
um that it took off and became uh precisely that doctors were even less likely doctors and nurses and all the other health care professionals were even less likely to raise a finger and say well you are we sure like are we sure even just the are we sure even just the like can I tap the brakes a little bit on this
may well have more or less disappeared as we saw the incredible social pressure that indeed went way past, you know, shaming people into firing people into, you know, into totally diabolical treatment with regard to the COVID, the mainstream take on COVID, most of which was completely batshit crazy.
And the mainstream, at least according to the WaPo and the New York Times and NPR and such, take on trans at this point, which is, again, completely batshit crazy.
So I absolutely agree.
I would not have put these two things in parallel, but having heard that description, it has the ring of truth and it actually maps onto something which I've been trying to get others to To embrace the formulation, and so far people, I think they get it, but they haven't seen how significant it is, which is the coup of public health against medicine.
Most people don't see these things as distinct, but public health is population-level medicine.
And there's an argument for it, because if you optimize for individual health, you may end up with a suboptimal outcome for the population, which is the ostensible justification for thinking at a population level.
On the other hand, the problem is that the way medicine is supposed to function... Remember, doctors are supposed to be scientists.
You have a scientific degree and a history in which doctors discovered what worked, pooled their information, and a understanding, you know, it was a therapeutic science, but it was a science nonetheless.
What happens when, and you would imagine, if pharma was driving It doesn't very well, if it wants to sell you stuff that's high profit and dubious efficacy and dubious safety, it doesn't very well want doctors around the water cooler to say, you know what?
I tried that drug.
It didn't work anywhere near as well as the one that we already had.
And what's more, I saw the following effects, and somebody else might say, yeah, I've seen that too, and what's more, etc., etc.
Doctors pooling their information from a ground-up, decentralized, emergent knowledge base.
That's medicine.
Public health is an excuse for imposing from the top down an interpretation and then using coercion to prevent people from departing from it, which is what happened.
Well, two things.
I think trans ideology and SARS-CoV-2 are fundamentally different, obviously, with regard to their potential to have implications broadly across the population.
Now, trans ideology, in fact, is, but it's one individual at a time, right?
And there's social contagion and all of this is true, but if what we're being told about SARS-CoV-2 and both its high case fatality rate and its high
transmissibility were true, then the public health apparatus that was arguing for interventions that were functional, not the interventions that they actually put into place, which were not functional, but Interventions that actually stop the spread of a highly infectious and highly deadly disease are the purview of public health.
That is what public health is supposed to be doing, right?
And trans is contagious at the social level, but it's not contagious in the same way.
So you can't make an argument in the same way that you could potentially for a virus if all of these other things were true, which it turns out they weren't.
But it's also, you know, I think pharma is in a very different role when it is trying to get people to take statins and when it's trying to get people to take vaccines.
Because its role in creating statins, which, you know, are dangerous and almost always not a good idea, is at the individual level.
You never are going to argue that you need to take a statin to protect your neighbor.
Whereas the vaccine argument from the very beginning of vaccines has been in part one of things like herd immunity.
Like everyone, we need more people to get these things so that the people who can't can be protected.
That sort of thing.
I'm not making the point you think I'm making.
Okay.
My point is there is in theory something to be done at the level of public health.
There are problems that are created by treating every patient as an individual.
Now, I am less and less convinced that society ever has the right to prioritize populations and to harm the individual in that process.
In fact, I would never have said they had the right to harm the individual.
There are risks that come along with this.
Having seen what we've seen, I'm not convinced that the argument for public health To me is an academic science.
Turning it into a therapeutic approach is problematic for all of the reasons that we saw during COVID.
But my central point here is if you were pharma, then you would want public health emphasized over medicine.
You would want it to displace medicine because medicine will prevent you from selling bad drugs because doctors who administer them will notice the effects and they will prefer the stuff that works because they are faced with the patient.
So public health provides an excuse for overriding medicine, which is what the corrupting influence of pharma inherently wants to do.
And what that means is that having carved out that territory, hey, there is a scientific realm that allows us to override doctors, is what trans ideology is now parasitizing.
Okay, so you're saying it's a way for pharma to get in the door and then override doctors even in places where public health has no role at all.
Exactly.
There's no reason that public health should have an opinion about statins, I think.
Maybe that's a silly example to be using because I think that drug is insane.
Well, actually, so let's pick one that seems like it should have no public health consequences, but actually Hey, once again, it's probably the opposite of what you might think.
Aspirin.
Let's put aside the NSAIDs, let's put aside the Tylenol, let's take the drug that has been on the market for longest and except in somewhat rare cases we think is relatively safe, right, for adults.
But people take aspirin to reduce fever, and fever is very often an adaptive response.
And so if part of what doctors are doing, but also public health is doing, is just trying to make you more comfortable.
And say, oh, you poor dear, you're experiencing these symptoms that you don't like.
Here, let's get rid of the symptoms.
What that's going to do very often is send you out into the world as a less symptomatic infectious person, more likely to get people sick.
So public health should actually be campaigning against symptom reducers in infectious diseases.
But public health is doing nothing of the sort.
Right, that is exactly the correct analysis.
So, public health is a set of arguments in isolation from any advice about how we should deal with anything.
It is a set of arguments that are important to understand.
It becomes an excuse to coerce medicine.
And once you've carved out that excuse, then everything utilizes it.
And so, I would point out, how did public health Get involved in the coercion of people into getting a shot that turned out did not block transmission.
Because transmission is the entire reason that this is a public health question, even in theory.
It was called a vaccine.
Well, it was called a vaccine, that's one way.
And the other way is the whole flatten the curve argument.
The idea of overwhelming hospitals, which takes an individual level question and again makes it into a population level question.
And so, look, pharma Pharma is aware of where all of the trigger points are in the structure of academic and medical science.
There is one such trigger, for example, where, geez, if you were going to sell dangerous shit, you wouldn't want a control group, because that control group is ultimately going to prove how dangerous the shit you sold them was.
So, how do you get rid of the control group?
Ah!
There's an ethical principle that if a drug is so effective at treating a condition that, you know, it reaches above some threshold, then it would be immoral not to vaccinate the control group or to administer it to the control group.
Ha!
That's a target they're gonna have to hit every goddamn time they can't afford to have a control group, aren't they?
Answer the point as well?
Gentlemen, get to work.
We need to figure out how to marshal enough power that we can always hit that trigger so the control group always magically disappears.
And my point is the public health trigger is another such thing.
We always have to figure out why there's a public health argument for why we get to tell doctors what to do when ordinarily doctors would be discussing with each other what they should do.
And so I'm going to claim that the idea of standard of care is it's a code word for top-down.
Top-down medicine.
And that's what they've done, is they've displaced doctors who would otherwise figure out what to do, painfully and with a whole lot of loss of life.
But yes, doctors would figure out what to do, and they would get better at doctoring, not worse.
How do you prevent that from happening?
You mandate top-down.
How do you get to top-down?
Public health.
And so, the idea that trans is riding on that carrier wave, it's a parasite.
Yes.
Um, and it is taking advantage of the fact that something has carved out the ability to tell doctors what they have to think.
That's what's going on.
But obviously it's a huge boon, uh, to pharma as well.
Oh yeah.
I mean, it, it creates a perennial patients of anyone who starts down this, this train and, um, and you're just, you know, you're, you're, you're a client, you're a customer of pharma for the rest of your life once you start.
Yeah.
So they're mutualists actually.
Uh, yeah.
So a couple more quotes from this Rufo article from June 2023.
He asks this excellent anonymous physician what is going on with the tenets of transgender medical theory and how they have changed medical practice.
The doctor says, could you show my screen here?
But in reality, when you affirm these individuals' gender identity, what you are doing is affirming their hatred for themselves.
You have these children who are going through confusing times, difficult times.
When you affirm this belief system, what you are really doing is telling them, you hate yourself at this moment and I will affirm that.
We have to ask ourselves, why do these people have such high rates of suicide?
Because we're affirming that they should hate themselves and that they should try to destroy themselves.
So that's extraordinary.
And one last thing from which I want to come back to at the end of this conversation, but The very last long extended quotation from our physician here.
Again, please keep my screen up.
One of the physician writes, one of the things I've been thinking about is what puberty blockers do to children.
This medication is called a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist, and it comes in the form of monthly injections or an implant.
And because it simulates the activity of this hormone, it shuts down the activity of the hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus is this almond-sized structure in your brain.
It's one of the most primal structures we have, and it controls all the other hormonal structures in your body, your sexual development, your emotions, your fight-or-flight response, everything.
But it shouldn't be described in such cold physiological terms, because your hypothalamus is not just a hormone factory.
It's the system that allows you to stand in awe of the beauty of a sunset, or to hear the sounds of orchestral music and to stop whatever you're doing and want to listen.
And I always think that if someone were to ask me, where is it that you would look for the divine spark in each individual?
I would say that it would be somewhere beneath the inner chamber, which is the Greek derivation of the term hypothalamus.
To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
So, it got me thinking again about the hypothalamus.
And Well, one of the things I did, I just went, the very last quarter that I was a professor that I was teaching was fall 2016, because I was on sabbatical the next two quarters.
And then I think, did you invite a mob of students to your classroom, May 23rd of 2017?
Or did they just show up?
It's hard to remember, it's so long ago.
But anyway, the last time I was in the classroom full-time was fall of 2016, and I was teaching a full-time program in vertebrate evolution.
Part of the program included a comparative anatomy lab.
We were dissecting sharks and cats.
And then with regard to neuro, we did shark brain dissections and sheep brains.
And we just went back and looked at my notes from the neuro lab that I gave to the students.
And included in it is just my little definition of the hypothalamus, and you can show this if you want.
The hypothalamus has diverse roles, including homeostasis.
It organizes endocrine, especially pituitary, and autonomic functions, controls motivation relating to temperature regulation, hunger, and thirst, and regulates emotional and reproductive behavior.
It's gigantic, right?
It's doing all of these things.
The brain is complex, and the hypothalamus is part of the diencephalon, which is the second of the five primary parts of the brain.
It's part of the forebrain.
It's part of the brain that is expanded, specifically in birds, but also to some degree in mammals.
And boy, do we need it.
Go on.
Well, I was just going to point out that in one way, that list is a mind-blowing collection of important things.
It is also, it implies something, because we're not talking about a huge structure.
It's tiny.
It's not tiny, but it's small.
A set of black boxes that are connected through this mechanism, which nobody can yet understand.
We are a long way from having any sort of detailed understanding of how this thing integrates these things.
We can just sort of list.
If you destroy the hypothalamus, I don't know if you can survive that.
But nonetheless, if it is damaged, here are some things that we see are impacted by it.
So, the point is, it is an integrator of fundamental things.
I mean, in that list is motivation.
So you telling me that you feel comfortable disrupting something that is, in some way we cannot specify, involved in motivation?
Isn't motivation underlying, exactly as that doctor was arguing, the most fundamental things about being human?
What you will choose to do with your precious time on Earth?
So it's a welcome to complex systems moment.
Exactly.
I wasn't going to share this exactly, but I think maybe I will.
Let me see.
I think that's the part I want to share.
Maybe, Zach, you can, oh, wow, that did not work at all.
That's terrible.
You can show my, so hold on just a second, Zach.
Don't, don't do it yet.
Yeah, here we go.
So this is from the National Library of Medicine.
It is related to NIH, but It's a place you can go for a scholarly, like you have to understand some of the language, but a relatively robust, it's sort of an encyclopedic place for the current thinking of various things medical, and even some things that don't necessarily have obvious medical implications.
But so this is about gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs.
Gonadotropin-releasing hormone being something that is produced At the level of the hypothalamus, and it in turn releases luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone, which in turn promote a cascade of the various sex steroid hormones, which are androgens in males, testosterone and androstenedione and such, and estrogens in females.
So it's at the top or at least high up in a cascade that affects lots and lots of systems.
So, background on the analogs are going to be, oh, we figured out things that can actually do the kind of work of gonadotropin-releasing hormone.
Cool.
Isn't that awesome?
What could possibly go wrong?
Welcome to Complex Systems.
Well here, if I try to make this bigger, unfortunately my whole screen goes wonky, so I'm just going to have to read it in this small font.
Gonadotropin-releasing hormone is a decapeptide, doesn't matter, that is produced in the hypothalamus and acts upon gonadotropin-releasing hormone receptors on the surface of gonadotropin cells in the pituitary gland, simulating the release of luteinizing hormone and follicular stimulating hormone, which in turn stimulate the production and release of testosterone by the male testes and estrogen by the female ovaries of placenta, as I just said.
Gonadotropin-releasing hormone is typically produced in a pulsatile manner, and its synthesis is regulated by circulating levels of testosterone in men and estrogens in women.
Infusions of gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists, that is things that enhance the production as opposed to antagonists that inhibit the production, So, infusions of GnRH agonists produce an initial transient increase in sex hormones, but with continued non-pulsatile stimulation, both luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone synthesis are inhibited, and estrogen and testosterone levels decline.
So, GnRH analogs, and you can give me my screen back here, are used.
They're dangerous.
They're used primarily for treatment of prostate cancer.
And they are increasingly used off-label as puberty blockers for people who present as trans.
So the most famous one, the one that people are likely to hear of, have heard of, if they've heard of any of them, is Lupron.
That's the trade name.
But there are many others.
And When I first was thinking on this, we are familiar with this at some level, right?
I mean, I used to teach gross anatomy, but we're not endocrinologists, and while luteinizing hormone and FSH, follicle-stimulating hormone, are part of a background, a training in biology, it's not our first language.
And the idea that you could either use a GNRH agonist or an antagonist to block puberty, and both of those types of things are used to block puberty, which is, again, not safe, not recommended, you should never ever do it.
But is fascinating and it seems at first like why would that possibly work?
Like how is it?
Wouldn't you just want to block it?
Use an antagonist?
Block it and be done with it?
If that's really what you want to do, which again you shouldn't.
Why does an agonist work at all?
Why does giving the body more of the thing?
help to ultimately, in a not too long a period of time, stop the production of that thing in the body entirely.
And we have we have a unrelated but kind of comparable story from a beautiful former epictabby of ours.
Yeah, we had a lovely cat.
He was the sweetest, sweetest cat I think we've ever had.
named Abercrombie, and he had extra digits, and he stood like he had little mittens on.
He was a very cute, very sweet animal.
Anyway, he had multiple run-ins with death.
The law!
The law, yes, but he was also rescued by veterinary science more than once, and one of those cases Uh, you are on topic, but I would just say that, uh, when I, I joke that he had multiple runs with the law, he actually at one point had managed to con a, uh, an elderly neighbor of ours that he was, despite being obviously well taken care of and, uh, and, and, and well-loved, uh, had conned her into believing that he was homeless.
And so she started putting food out for him.
So he started to gain weight on our watch.
What is happening?
And at the point that we finally got him to keep a collar on himself for a while, she showed up at our door, I think, and was like, but he's my cat!
Like, no, he's 12, and he's been ours for a very long time.
Yeah, he was crafty, and he was very hard to say no to.
Actually, the story in question, though, happened with the opposite issue, where we started to notice that he was getting thin and running hot.
He was like literally warm to the touch, uncomfortable, and you know, he was not a fat cat.
No, but he was lolling about miserable.
He became inactive.
He was not happy.
And what it turned out was that he had a thyroid tumor.
And cats have an interesting difference from us, which is that their thyroid is actually divided into two.
Now, that divided into two plays into the story very interestingly.
There is a marvelous therapeutic option in the case of a cat with a thyroid tumor, and it works like this.
When a cat has a thyroid tumor, the thyroid that is afflicted with the tumor, which is one of the two units that the thyroid is divided into, overproduces its product.
The body is monitoring the products of the thyroid, and in response to the one side of the thyroid overproducing, the other side of the thyroid shuts down, because... You don't need any more from me!
Right.
So, the animal still has too much of the product, but it has one of its thyroids sidelined.
Now that actually allows you to cure this disease in a very interesting way, which is you can give them radioactive iodine, which does not sound all that safe.
It is Pretty well regulated and it is much safer than you would think.
Radioactive iodine does not have a long half-life and an owner can actually, with a small number of precautions, control that.
I think we had to be in quarantine for a week or so, right?
We kept him in a room alone and, you know, we dealt carefully with his litter box and all of that.
But anyway, you give the animal, the vet gives the animal some radioactive iodine.
Iodine is taken up by the thyroid, which is why you are instructed to take iodine if you are in a zone where there has been a radiological release, so that you pick up non-radioactive iodine.
It fills your thyroid and you don't pick up any of the radioactive iodine that has been produced in the reactor or whatever.
But anyway, the vet gives the animal some radioactive iodine.
The thyroid takes it up, but not on both sides because one side is shut down.
So the side of the thyroid that is healthy does not get the radioactive iodine.
The side of the thyroid that is tumorous does pick it up, and the nature of the radioactivity is such that it destroys the tissue only immediately adjacent to where the iodine actually lands.
It is beautiful.
It's such a beautiful, medical, veterinary, same thing, right?
Success story.
Yeah.
It's taking advantage of this just lucky fact that the thyroid is divided in the cat.
But anyway, the thyroid, the tumorous part, is destroyed by this.
But the tissue, even outside of it, is left more or less intact because the radiation doesn't penetrate very far.
the point that the thyroid that was tumorous is destroyed, the other one begins to detect there's not enough hormone being produced, and it comes back, and the animal can live the rest of its life with the other thyroid functioning, and it does a fine job.
So what we watched was an animal that was, I don't know, wasting away is probably a decent description, but he was hot and uncomfortable and losing weight and dwindling before our And then this actually put him right back on track and he put the weight back on and was again his healthy, happy It was a beautiful process, but anyway, it goes to your question of... Why does an agonist work, right?
So a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist effectively, ultimately shuts down your own body's production of gonadotropin-releasing hormone.
Because by flooding your body with it, with the synthetic version of it, your body gets the message that it doesn't need to produce any itself.
It's already got enough.
It doesn't need to produce any itself, and if I understood, this is the first time I've encountered that description of how this system functions, but it sounds like the key is that you give a sustained dose, and the response to a sustained dose is to shut down production of the hormones that would be involved in normal puberty, because what is otherwise delivered is a pulsing dose, and it is that pulsing dose that is part of health.
Now, that... The pulsatile thing is remarkable.
We're also In addition to all the other errors we're making, we are not paying attention to things like periodicity and timing.
Right, periodicity and timing, and probably the pulsatile nature allows a modulation that the system, you know, is effectively able to check with a periodicity where it is and thereby modulate rather than just turning the thing to 11 and it shuts things down.
I'd be curious what happens at the end of normal puberty, whether you get a sustained signal or something like that.
Yeah.
And I don't, I don't know that off the top of my head.
But you know, there, there are those, there are those people who would say, well, yes, obviously surgical intervention for children is not, not wise.
And, oh, we don't want to put them on cross-sex hormones because that's, you know, that's not good, but puberty blockers, that's harmless.
No, it is not.
I would not want any child ever, I was going to say anyone I cared about, but any child ever to be on any of these things.
But if I had to choose, honestly, I think if I had to choose between a child being on cross-sex hormones versus being on puberty blockers for a short period of time, I think the cross-sex hormones might be safer because Because boys do produce some estrogens and girls do produce some androgens, and the ratios are going to be messed up on cross-sex hormones for sure.
But the puberty blockers are messing with systems that go way deep.
and are even more ancient, and are even more fundamental in some ways.
And just a reminder that the hypothalamus is this incredibly important and central and fundamental part of our brain.
And And I'm just going to read this one more time from this physician from the Rufo interviews in this June 2023 piece in City Journal.
One of the things I've been thinking about is what puberty blockers do to children.
This medication is called a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist, and it comes in the form of monthly injections or an implant.
And because it simulates the activity of this hormone, it shuts down the activity of the hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus is this almond-sized structure in your brain.
It's one of the most primal structures we have, and it controls all the other hormonal structures in your body.
Your sexual development, your emotions, your fight-or-flight response, everything.
But it shouldn't be described in such cold physiological terms, because your hypothalamus is not just a hormone factory.
It's the system that allows you to stand in awe of the beauty of a sunset, or to hear the sounds of orchestral music, and to stop whatever you're doing and want to listen.
And I always think that if someone were to ask me, where is it that you would look for the divine spark in each individual, I would say that it would be somewhere beneath the inner chamber, which is the Greek derivation of the term hypothalamus.
To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human.
Yeah, that is a stunningly well-articulated argument.
I hesitate to do this.
I do want to add something to it.
It would be great to just simply leave it there, but the argument you are making about Children shouldn't be put on any of this stuff, but if you had to choose, you would choose the cross-sex hormones rather than the puberty blockers.
I think so.
I think you're right, and I think that there's a very strong analytical reason to presuppose that that would be the less destructive intervention, and that is that what we're really talking about is an intervention that is upstream of many processes.
And the fact that it is upstream of many processes means, yes, you can interfere there, but you're interfering with everything else that is downstream, which is a tremendous number of important things.
And some of who we do not even know.
Right.
And that is really the thing.
And much of it is not reversible.
What I would want people to understand when they are talking to a scientist or a doctor or a governmental regulator about these interventions, you need to look at this person, no matter who they are, and you need to understand they comprehend a There is no one on earth who knows the system well enough to do that.
in order to do this well and fully anticipate the consequences.
There is no one on earth who knows the system well enough to do that.
There might be circumstances in which you have to make choices.
You have to accept costs because the pathology that you're faced with is so severe that you don't have a better choice.
We make those choices.
We remove tissues that we don't fully understand because they're tumorous and will kill you if we don't.
But in the case of somebody who is going to go through development, And then you're going to interfere with something as central as the hypothalamus in adjusting some feature of their pathway.
You are inherently interfering with a tremendous number of things that are simply black boxes from the point of view of our current state of understanding.
There's no way that that could possibly be safe or reasonable to do.
And in the case where you've got, again, somebody with a mismatch between their cognitive understanding of who they are and their physiological nature.
Cognitive intervention is A, one that people naturally go through, and B, much more likely to work without having devastating consequences.
Getting a child to understand that these are the cards that they were dealt, some of them may be unfortunate, some of them may be just fine, and really reconciling themselves to those cards is the way to be.
But that is the nature of growing up, and interfering with growing up is nobody's right.
These children have a right to grow up as normally as possible, and that may be perfectly normally, and you're disrupting that so it can never be undone.
So, it seems to me very, very clear, and that this, in a world in which people were not feeling threatened by the accusation that they were anti-trans, then we would obviously be able to talk about things like any intervention should be as far downstream as possible.
The more upstream your intervention, the more likely it is to have devastating consequences you can't anticipate.
That's right.
And I think, you know, just having a bias towards Interventions, when you decide that such things are necessary, should be as old and as tested as possible.
And simply having something be old means that it is likely to have been tested, even if not by science explicitly.
So if you tend towards depression, there's a decent chance that going outside in the sun and moving your body hard will help And you should do that first and second and third and fourth and fifth.
You should do that a lot of time before you ever consider taking a pill for the fact that you are depressed.
You should not trust that the interventions that the people with the prescription pads are offering are the right ones.
We've moved into this mode of giving up, assuming that we ourselves have no agency at all, but somehow these other people with degrees that are frankly meaningless are worse.
Have all the agency and have all the wisdom.
And it's not true.
I mean, if you can't see how misled the people with the Christian pads have been in the last three and a half years, why are you still believing them?
When they come to you and say, I can solve that dysphoria for you.
I can stop your puberty.
I can turn you into something you never were and never will be.
No, they can't.
And whether or not they're lying to you or lying to themselves first doesn't matter.
It's not going to help you.
It's just not.
So this is madness.
And there are some indications that it's turning around, that some people are waking up, that the number of people who know people with trans kids is so outrageous now.
But it can't be soon enough.
This needs to have never happened.
And second best is it needs to stop.
All of it needs to stop now.
Yeah.
We have to maim nobody else.
By allowing this to continue every day that it continues new people are pushed into something that can't be undone.
That's right.
You know it also occurs to me there's something just so obviously wrong here and I think many people have spotted this but figuring out how to how to say it so that it is generally understandable is important.
The idea of blocking puberty Obviously, girls are not immature boys.
So, blocking puberty is... it suggests that medicine knows what to do after that to create the equivalent of the puberty of the other sex, which medicine absolutely does not know how to do.
So, at best, what it can do is it can simulate some fraction of that, either with surgeries that create structures that aren't what they appear to be, Or with hormones that would be part of that process but are hardly the sum total of that process.
So we are inherently talking about a medical arrogance where there are doctors dumb enough to think they know how to simulate the other puberty once we've blocked the one that you're headed towards.
I guarantee you there are no doctors that know how to do that.
There just simply aren't.
We're not anywhere close to that level of knowledge.
I'm sure you're right about what's actually happening, but just so you know what the argument is there, they will tell you that they block group purity and then as soon as they stop blocking it, it comes back.
Oh, I know what they say.
Just so you know what their, well again, terribly arrogant argument is that knows nothing about what will actually happen, but that's what they say.
But Dad's argument here is that if those people on puberty blockers do decide to go down the path to transitioning, which again, crazy, they should be experiencing the puberty of the other sex.
And, you know, that thing that you just said, Zach, If it were true, it would be fine for those people who experience puberty, you know, who have their puberty blocked for six months and then go off them and everything's as normal.
That's, of course, not true.
But the point there is that we are told by the activists that some number of these people are actually trans and then they're going to need to have the other thing.
And it's like, well, okay, so you decided that puberty just isn't a thing at all?
You've just decided to go from prepubescent boy to woman or prepubescent girl to man?
What happened to adolescence?
And adolescence, despite what the postmodern idiots will argue, is not a creation of capitalism or 20th century America or any of the other insane things I've heard people argue.
Adolescence has always been a thing, and different cultures have understood it differently.
But, you know, there is a stage between childhood and adulthood.
And humans are not totally unique in having such a thing, but we are fairly rare.
And you can't just... we're not freaking butterflies!
And even if we were, what's going on in the cocoon is something we don't know exactly what's going on either.
It's such incredible arrogance.
It's such incredible hubris.
Their argument is both wrong and also doesn't deal with the situation, which is supposedly their preferred outcome, which is that you were assigned a male at birth, but now you've come to realize that you're actually female, and so we're going to block your puberty and voila, turn you into a woman, because that's what it is.
It's that easy.
Well, it's the same argument.
It's the same misunderstanding about humans that they have across the board, which suggests that genitalia and hormones are the only things that make you male or female.
Right.
Well, and lipstick.
Yeah, that too.
But I mean, this is seriously what they think, and if that were true, I don't know.
They still aren't anywhere near being able to successfully do anything, but it would sort of make sense at least.
No, the argument that they're making does not stand up.
The only thing that has caused it to get as far as it has is the threat to anybody who points out how absurd it is.
Right.
And in part, one of the things that I really like about this short piece, everyone should go read this Rufer interview with this doctor that I read substantial portions of here today.
But his point, the doctor's point, that when you affirm Someone's delusion.
You are affirming that they should hate themselves as they currently are.
And to the degree that, you know, the stats have been juked all over the place with regard to like, oh, you know, trans people have the highest rates of suicide.
Like, actually, this has been debunked.
Like, this is not true.
But do people with mental health problems such as depression and autism, both of which are correlated with being gender dysphoric, are they more likely to have suicidal ideation?
Yes.
And are they perhaps more likely to succumb to such ideation, to spend more time in that space, if they've been assured by all the adults around them that they're right in imagining that they are wrong and bad and flawed?
Well, yeah.
How about actually encouraging your child to be who they are, as opposed to what their fantasy of what they are is?
We could, we could go on.
I could, I could keep ranting forever, so.
Yeah, I mean.
We should stop.
I do, I want to add one more thing.
Yeah.
Which is that, um, There is a very deep concern one should have that the idea of spreading that story about suicide also predisposes people who discover that this is not the solution to the problem.
I mean, you can imagine, let's say that you're betrayed by civilization, you're not given a coherent path through development, you have hormones that disrupt normal development, Pollutants as pollutants in your food and your water and your air and all of these things so things are not going right and then somebody says hey you know what I know why things aren't going right it's because you were born in the wrong body you'll see it'll change everything and you believe them right I can imagine a desperate person believing them and then discovering
And especially in the first flush of The Agonist.
As I've heard, you're on sex steroids, right?
At least it feels different.
And at the very beginning, it feels different and it feels exciting.
And you're like, this is it!
Right.
This was the magic bullet that I've been waiting for.
Right.
And then if it doesn't work, the point is you've told people something about what comes next and you had no right to tell them that.
It's part of a manipulative story that is built to get people who would otherwise raise an objection to not do it for fear of what it might lead to.
But the point is you are setting people up to consider that as an option when in fact the right thing to do is to say, look, We are all born into a world that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense at the moment.
That is the nature of modernity.
And the question is how to figure your path through it.
And there are ways.
And telling people that yes, you really are hateful the way you are and we can make you into something that wouldn't be was a lie.
You can't do it on your own.
Right.
You're going to need our help.
It's not a cognitive question.
You need doctors.
Yeah.
And you're going to need doctors for the rest of your life.
Some people are just like that.
They need a lot of help.
It's terrible.
It's criminal.
It is criminal.
And we really are talking about maiming people.
We're talking about maiming them psychologically, we're talking about maiming them physiologically, and morphologically.
All three of those things are on the table here as a result.
of the standard of care that we are being coerced into accepting top down.
Yeah.
And it's despicable.
It really has to stop.
Yeah.
I agree.
All right.
I think we've come to the end.
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