Surgical Sophistry: The 216th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 216th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss the WPATH files—internal documents from the World Professional Association on Transgender Health—which were released this month. In them, we find evidence that clinicians are encouraging hormonal and surgical interventions on young people who are too young to consent, have not been informed of...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 261.
Is that right?
That's right.
216.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Do you know how far we are through winter?
No.
You don't?
Really?
We are 92.7% of the way through winter.
Now, I realize that's a little imprecise and you're big on precision.
I am not big on precision.
You are big on precision.
I am big on accuracy.
When you can get precision with accuracy, yay precision.
But your half-assed approach to numbers is really getting under my skin.
I don't know.
Why, a sixth did not pretend to be precise, and it wasn't precise, but it was accurate.
But we are now 92.7% of the way, and the reason I say that that is imprecise is because that is only to the nearest hour, since I didn't know exactly when we'd be having this discussion.
Yes, you did.
Well, not to the minute.
Though I thought, I mean, I thought about the half hour.
I did.
But I figured we'd leave it at the hour.
That's good enough for government work.
You didn't calculate anything, did you?
No, I did.
You borrowed this from people in the chat.
That's actually not the case.
I have my work here in the laboratory notebook.
But I don't know what page it's on.
Typical.
So you are aware, aren't you, that the equinox that is coming up in six short days on the 19th this year, the 19th of March.
At two o'clock in the afternoon local time.
I was just going to ask you if you were aware that there is actually a moment, it's not just a day, but a moment.
And did you actually go back and look at exactly when the solstice was?
Yes, I did it.
I did it correctly.
And yet you claim not to have done it to the hour.
I could have done it.
Oh, I did it to the hour.
I didn't do it any more precisely than that because I didn't know where we would be.
So we are... Where?
Now you're claiming you didn't know where we would be.
Well, actually, that's relevant, too, apparently.
Well, of course it is, but what are you, on some sort of...
Different space-time continuum than the rest of us?
Arguably.
Arguably.
But no, I figured the nearest hour was good enough.
Frankly, I got the acknowledgement from you that you are arguably on a different space-time continuum from the rest of us.
So I feel like if we both feel like we've won, that's good.
Yes, exactly.
Or one of us is incorrect.
But either way, you know, it's the feeling of having one that counts.
Well, actually, that is a great segue.
Today we're going to be talking about the WPATH files, and it is a testament to how feelings in the moment can pass for, you know, science.
And so we're going to go into that a fair bit today.
You know, trigger warning, it is Completely triggering what these people are doing to children and the auspices under which they're doing it.
Yes.
That is going to be a big part of what we're talking about today.
Also, just a little bit on amphibian milk, because why not?
Sure, sure.
That all sounds good.
And you're also, you know, just a mom about what you're going to bring to the table today.
Yeah.
For now.
Okay.
So lots of good stuff.
We're doing a Q&A today after the live stream on Locals Only.
Please go over to Locals Now.
There's a watch party happening right now where people are calculating how far we are through winter and lots of more interesting stuff than that, in fact.
And yeah, Locals is happening.
Great stuff happening over there.
Also, if you want to jump on the question of amphibian milk, that's what I wrote about in Natural Selections this week, so check out Natural Selections this week.
Without further ado, however, Adieu.
We, as always, are going to start top of the hour with our three sponsors for the week, which this week are VanMan, Mudwater, and Helix.
We, as we always say, and as is always true, do not accept as sponsors any companies who make products or offer services that we do not actually vouch for, and that is as true this week as it ever is.
So, As true, 92.7% of the way through winter as we are.
I just laid out that to give a little precision.
Arguably, the second sponsor might make a product that you would be more interested in pursuing in winter.
And so, you know, perhaps I could make an argument that that was a relevant interjection, but it would be a stretch.
It would be a stretch, but I feel like we are now on the same pages.
Well, I've got these two and you've got that one.
That's the pages.
But I did hand you that one.
That's true.
They're all your pages.
No, there are pages.
Okay.
Okay.
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92.7% of the way through winter.
Since I didn't get more precise than the hour, that number applies.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
All right.
I'm going to share a bunch of bits from the WPATH files that came out earlier this month.
But first, what is it?
The WPATH Files is a report written by Mia Hughes.
After Michael Schellenberger's organization, Environmental Progress, was given a large set of internal WPATH files by anonymous whistleblowers, after those or that anonymous whistleblower had seen his work, Schellenberger's work, on the Twitter files.
Hughes then spent months interpreting and analyzing these files that they were given, the result being the report out, which also includes, at the end, all of those files received by Schellenberger.
So, I have spent considerable time with these files.
It's quite long.
It's many hundreds of pages.
And I want to just start by reading the first couple paragraphs from the executive summary, and then going through a number of the screenshots, and we can talk about anything as we're going through.
Great.
So, if you would share my screen, and then you can leave my screen shared, unless my computer... Yes.
Oh, no, sorry.
Yes.
Leave my screen shared.
This is what it looks like, the WPATH file, Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents, and Vulnerable Adults.
Again, published under the banner of Environmental Progress, which is Schellenberger's organization, its tagline being, Nature, Peace, and Freedom for All.
You can see Table of Contents quite in-depth, and then, you know, her report is a mere 72 pages, but the WPATH files themselves extend into several hundred pages.
And here, the executive summary, just to explain, just to frame what we're talking about.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, that's WPATH, enjoys the reputation of being the leading scientific and medical organization devoted to transgender health care.
WPATH is globally recognized as being at the forefront of gender medicine.
However, throughout this report, we will show that the opposite is true.
Newly released files from WPATH's internal messaging forum, as well as a leaked internal panel discussion, demonstrate that the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care.
These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults.
Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.
That is, again, the first two paragraphs of the executive summary, and the 13 or so screenshots that I've pulled from this exhaustive report, I think, serve to bolster those claims.
You had something to say right off the bat?
No, no.
I'm just collecting some thoughts.
All right.
All right.
Well, okay.
So this is from This is from one of the people engaged in discussion in internal documents at WPATH that they never expected to be leaked.
This is a so-called healthcare provider.
But this is not, when you say document, this is a part of a discussion that took place on an internal server, is that right?
Exactly.
Yeah, they're like, no, I just found this, you know, wonderful partner and now we're kids and dah, dah, dah.
So I think, you know, it doesn't surprise me, but I don't know still what to do for the 14-year-olds.
The parents have it on their minds, but the 14-year-olds, you just, it's like talking with diabetic complications with a 14-year-old.
They don't care.
They're not going to die.
They're going to live forever, right?
So I think when we're doing informed consent, I know that's still a big lacuna of that we're just, we do it.
We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really, really talk about it in a serious way.
That's always bothered me, but you know, we still want the kids to be happy, happier in the moment, right?
So this is in some ways a weird place to start, because it's obviously in the middle of a conversation in which so-called healthcare providers are discussing whether or not the children The early teenagers who are getting put on puberty blockers and sometimes cross-sex hormones and sometimes having surgical interventions, all of which have long-term effects including loss of fertility.
can actually engage in informed consent.
And I put this at the top here, even though it's obviously in the middle of a discussion, and most of these screenshots are actually Mia Hughes's interpretations, analyses of the actual words, and so they're not quite so Meandering is this, but one of the themes that shows up for me as I go through these files is the idea on the part of the so-called healthcare practitioners that what they're trying to do is increase happiness in these young people.
That happiness, being happy, being happier in the moment is the goal.
Which strikes me as, right away, right off the bat, an indication that these are not serious people, and that they don't understand what humans are, and they don't understand what adolescence is, or what it might be to live in the body of a 14-year-old who is undergoing adolescence, as everyone who's older than 14 has done, and recognize that actually there are going to be many moments when happiness is probably not your dominant emotion.
And furthermore that that is okay.
So a couple things to add.
One, obviously I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but the idea of focusing on happiness is, I mean it's why you're starting here, it's such a terrible red flag in terms of the abandonment of wisdom here.
Because first of all, what is happiness?
It's an internal, immediate reward.
And I have As I've taken up arms against things like entertainment.
Happiness is also something I've more or less abandoned the pursuit of because it's not a good proxy for what you're actually shooting for.
Satisfaction over a long term makes much more sense than pursuing happiness.
Happiness is nice, but it's an instantaneous measure of something where you're really looking for the area under the curve.
But the point is, Happiness is supposed to cause you to detect that you've accomplished something so that you can build out from that thing that you've accomplished.
And if you instead have a doctor who is seeking to make you happy for electing to do something radical to your body over which it's not like you're learning to do surgery and doing it on yourself.
You're being rewarded for somebody else's business model And what is that going to produce?
It's not like this is something you can go and do again and again.
So the whole idea that happiness is something you're shooting for is creating a developmental circuit that's beyond useless.
You're going to be chasing that ability to create happiness and it doesn't, you know, it was ephemeral and wrong-headed in the first place and unlikely to be a model for anything in the future.
Precisely.
Okay, so that's from page 194 of the WPATH files.
Next screenshot is from page 209, in which a clinician by the name of Dan Metzger says – again, this is sort of meandering language because it's from this internal discussion board that wasn't ever intended to be a public document – I, you know, like sort of 13 and a half is sort of our like a kind of cut off where we're okay to do hormones.
If everything, it seems like it's going to work.
But I always told the kids, God, you're 13.
You don't know everything.
I don't expect to know everything.
And this is like a journey and you're going to take us, you know, we're coming along for the ride.
The we're coming along for the ride there means that the clinicians are coming along for the ride that they're putting the children on.
A ride they can get off in the children camp.
Exactly.
MedScare continues, and you know, we start this.
So this is actually, this is not from a discussion board.
This is a clip.
This is a transcription of the video clip that they were given.
And, you know, we start this.
It doesn't mean you have to continue.
It doesn't mean you have to go up.
Every single time you come, I'm going to ask you what you want to do with your hormones.
Are you happy where they are?
Again, with a happiness, right?
And kids do shift with time.
A lot of the, particularly the non-binary kids, think that they want to be initially more, and I think they should be, masculinized than they end up wanting to be.
And they find that there's a happy dose that's gotten rid of their periods or whatever, and that they're happy on that dose, and they don't necessarily want to push forward as they had thought that they might at the beginning.
So I think it's important that you just lay that out right at the beginning.
Couple of points here, why this is coming up.
Again, with the focus on happiness, it just comes up over and over again.
I think this is the only two places that I point to it specifically, but if you read through the files, you see it coming up a lot.
But also this reveals like, oh, we're just trying to get you to a place where you feel instantaneously, exactly, comfortable with your body.
And in this case, you're talking about 13 and a half year old girls who are beginning to go through menses, who apparently, for some of them, the overriding desire they have is just make the menses stop.
Just make the menstruation stop.
And any woman who has gone through this has definitely had the experience of like, I don't like this.
This isn't fun.
This isn't what I want.
And the idea that the doctors are coming to them and saying, Oh, you don't like that?
We got a solution for you.
It's they're not even pretending that these people are Desperately miserable because they feel that this shouldn't be happening to them because somehow their bodies are out of sync with their mind.
A highly questionable conclusion anyway.
But this has now gone on beyond that.
Any justification to medicalize people so that they can bring their current discomfort into some kind of alignment with what they view themselves as being, which in the case of newly pubescent girls is, this never happened to me before, therefore I'd like this not to happen to me now.
This is what these clinicians are doing to these children.
Yeah, it's insane.
And it's such a betrayal of the idea of wisdom, right?
You've got kids, in general, we go back to the pre-madness world, you know, maybe it's always been a little mad, but we go back to the pre-madness world where people did grow up into adults and, you know, they weren't Switching genders all the time and all of this.
Yeah.
That world is one in which You grow into somebody who is, I want to say this carefully, who is worthy of the attention of the adult world, right?
And it's not to say that we should not pay attention to kids, but it's to say it's very rare that somebody very young has something important enough to say that adults should be paying attention in some large scale.
This You can imagine for a kid who's adrift and trying to figure out what is the way that they're going to make their mark in the world, that suddenly having the focus of adults saying, well, how do you feel now?
And how do you feel now compared to last week?
The obsession of these highly trained adults and what you happen to be feeling this week.
Are you happy with the dose we have?
We could tinker that a little bit.
Tell me exactly how you feel.
Right, so that is an unnatural state, and to have highly trained adults tuned into your, you know, your fluctuations as you try to figure out how to be a human being is unnatural.
And of course, not every kid is going to like that, but a bunch of them are going to like that.
The idea, you know, it's going to feel to a kid who doesn't really yet get what life is about, it's going to feel like, oh this is a good path, when in fact what this is going to end in is somebody's going to pick some level of change to your body, and then it ends!
It will feel like a centering of self, and as the WPATH files reveal, so many of these kids who end up down this path that is encouraged by these
Fraudulent clinicians have many comorbidities and they're generally mental health diagnoses and the idea that they have found in declaring themselves trans a way to be the center of attention for people who claim to know what is best for them It's going to be the rare person who's already wrestling with other demons who says, no, not that.
I'm going to go wrestle with my demons alone in a corner.
When these clinicians are trotting themselves out as if they are experts, as if this is science, which is exactly, you know, Hughes's argument throughout these files.
This is not science.
These people are not experts.
This is pseudoscience, and they're making it up as they go along, but they don't tell the children that.
And then the children end up harmed for life.
Alright, here's something else to think about.
We have talked many times about the Milgram experiment, but I don't think we've talked about it in this context.
The Milgram experiment took individuals and put them in the role of ordering sadistic and, in fact, medically dangerous activity on the part of study subjects, shocking an individual to the point of death.
And what they brought to the table that caused the subject individuals to follow the orders was a lab coat.
Now here you have the equivalent of somebody in a lab coat talking.
So my real question is, adults pass the Milgram experiment rarely, like 10% or something of adults pass the Milgram experiment and tell the pseudo-experimenter to go fuck themselves rather than shocking somebody to the point of injury and death.
Yep.
What fraction of children faced with, you know, not even a kid in a lab coat, a child faced with an adult who has an advanced degree, probably is wearing a literal lab coat, and is talking to them about the particulars of how they feel?
How many children would pass the Milgram experiment, rather than, oh doctor, you think you think I really am in the wrong body?
Like, it seems to me highly likely that Most children wouldn't pass it, and especially kids who have some sort of mental health disruption.
That's precisely right.
All right, let's go to the third of these.
This is from page 30 of the WPATH files.
Dismantling guardrails.
This is Hughes's language.
WPATH's aversion to caution and dislike of psychiatric gatekeeping is evident in the files.
In an undated thread, a psychotherapist expressed her dissatisfaction with the group regarding a surgeon's requirement of two referral letters from her before amputating the healthy breasts of a 17-year-old girl.
To the psychotherapist, this seemed like extra, extra gatekeeping.
The letters appear to be little more than a formality for insurance purposes, but in the replies, a therapist suggested the reason could be that the insurance company wanted evidence that the quote status of the client had not changed over time.
However, the rest of the replies are a chorus of agreement that the request is unnecessary gatekeeping, with one even suggesting reporting the insurer to the local state regulator quote for their clinically unsound coverage determination requirements end quote.
A Florida non-binary counselor with they-them pronouns replied, offering her services.
She told the therapist that she provides consultation specifically regarding letter writing.
Quote, if you're interested in consultation with a provider of lived experience, I'm happy to chat further, said the counselor.
I've written quite a few second letters and I've written letters for minors as well, she added.
So here we have the financial incentives.
It's not just the pharmaceutical companies that are making customers for life by encouraging people.
The puberty blockers aren't for life, but the cross-sex hormones are.
And then if they go into surgery, they have a bunch more drugs that they're going to be on for life.
But there's a whole cottage industry around what is going on here, where you've got a Florida non-binary counselor with they them pronouns.
Who knows what their background is?
They presumably don't need to know anything.
They probably don't actually need to have jumped through any hoops, legitimate or not, in order to present themselves as, I will write that second letter.
If what you need is a second letter, in order to get a surgeon to sign off on chopping off the healthy breasts of a 17 year old.
Yeah, I mean, so much of this verges into the question of sophistry.
It's like a sophistry industry where an individual can plant themselves in the position of writing quote-unquote second letters.
Let's suppose 99 out of a hundred clinicians think it would be absurd to chop this person's breasts off because there's nothing about their psychological state that suggests that that's going to make them better off.
And one person has decided, I'm the person who believes wholeheartedly in this and I will write those second letters.
The point is that what they're doing has nothing to do with the patient.
And I don't think there's any reason to suspect that the people writing those letters need to believe wholeheartedly in anything except their own income.
You're not going to write these letters for free.
You're going to charge for them.
And you needn't wholeheartedly believe in anything at all in order to hang out a shingle that says, we'll write second letters in order to get the kid's breasts cut off.
Yeah, all it takes is willingness to engage in barbarism, to facilitate barbarism.
And if you allow a system like this to exist, the chances that there's somebody defective enough to do the job of becoming a full-time second letter writer in exchange for money, what are the chances that in a, you know, a cohort of professionals that somebody will be Sociopathic enough to decide that that's a good way to make a living.
It's easy.
The letters are all the same.
You swap in, you know, some stuff into some boilerplate and voila!
It's a, you know, it's a pretty good racket.
Somebody will... A good income stream.
Yeah, somebody will adopt that racket.
And so the fact of there being a second letter means nothing.
Right.
Literally nothing.
Right?
Exactly.
Okay.
Let's see.
Screenshot four.
This is from, this is again Mia Hughes's language.
In the past, the emphasis on autonomy in medical ethics was meant to act as a shield.
There were things a doctor could not do to you without your consent.
Nowadays, and especially in gender medicine, autonomy acts as a sword.
In its name, there is nothing a doctor may deny you.
The consumer-driven model of autonomy involves giving the patient whatever he or she wants, so long as certain criteria are met.
The clinician is technically capable of doing it, the patient wants it for whatever reason, it's legal, and the patient can pay for it.
And when Mia lays it out this way, with this crisp clarity... This is Mia speaking.
This is Mia speaking.
This is, yeah, it becomes clear why we, you know, the vast majority of people who, frankly, either can see quite clearly or know that there's something wrong with what is going on, you can see why we are going after the legality of it, right?
Because the clinician is technically capable of, there's four criteria as Mia lays out.
Yeah.
The clinician is technically capable, the patient wants it, it's legal, and the patient can pay for it.
Well, at a societal level, the horses have left the barn with regard to technical capability, unfortunately.
We are still learning and will be learning for, unfortunately, many, many, many years to come.
Just how dangerous these technical capacities are.
But we have the technical capacity to block puberty and to give cross-sex hormones and to chop off healthy breasts and, you know, kinda sorta to do so-called bottom surgery.
The patient will want it, regardless of what society says.
The patient's ability to pay for it is outside of our scope.
And so that leaves only one of these four criteria, as Mia lays it out, with this new model of sort of patient autonomy above all, which is legality.
Which is precisely why so, so many people now are saying this should not be allowed.
Even those of us who would increasingly say, oh my god, you know, medical freedom, you know, we need to allow things, but actually when you're talking about interventions that are brand new and that are known to have diabolical costs, it would appear to be the only way in to stop it.
So I wanted to actually... I think what we have here is another case of...
Everything is done through double standards.
When some mysterious force wants something to become impossible for you to access, it can drive the standard beyond anything that is attainable.
And when it wants it to be made available to everyone, it can eliminate the standard entirely.
And it doesn't notice that it is actually advocating for those two things, or maybe it just doesn't care.
But for example, if we look at what happened to Ivermectin during the COVID crisis, Whatever the nature of that crisis was.
The evidence that supposedly said that ivermectin did not work for COVID was not apparently sufficient to convince doctors not to prescribe it.
It's a prescription medicine in the United States.
So they interfered at the pharmacy, which was a highly unusual thing to do.
In fact, I think unprecedented.
Yes.
They blocked the ability of people to fill prescriptions that doctors had written for them.
That doctors had written for them.
And so the point is, well, here you've got a doctor Authorized to prescribe drugs off-label if they think it's a good idea, which is part of what medicine is about, is that the doctor has access to tools and they have a lot more information than some arbitrary checklist written by a government bureaucrat somewhere.
But the point is, they could prevent you from getting it by interrupting it there.
And then here we have the inversion of that, which is, well, there's a thing we can do if the patient wants it, who are we to say no?
And the, you know, of course, you would want the inverse, the idea of... It's us to say no if they can't afford it.
But if they come with a checkbook, then who are we to say no?
Right.
Of course, the folks who are profiting by mutilating children under this rubric are, of course, influencing the mechanisms that can pay on the patient's behalf.
Precisely.
Right?
That's part of why they phrase this stuff as, you know, affirmative care.
Affirmative care.
Yes.
Yeah.
Affirmative care.
Precisely.
Okay, next one.
This is again from the part that Mia has written based on her analysis of the whistleblower files that were given to Schellenberger.
So this is Hughes' analysis.
There were plenty of examples of improvisation in our leaked panel discussion as well, where Dr. Cecile Ferrando, a surgeon, tells the assembled WPATH members that she experiments with underdosing natal females with testosterone.
She explains that these females desire cessation of menses but not virilization.
Ferrando added that these young women in their 20s err on the masculine side of the spectrum but don't want to be fully masculinized.
The gender surgeon tells the group that her experimental use of a schedule 3 controlled substance improves the young women's state of being.
So this is very much like one of the earlier, um, one of the earlier screenshots, but in which it is being quite explicitly stated, uh, that what the, uh, what the doctors, in this case a surgeon, um, are doing is not even
Uh, what it is that we have been told, which is to say, um, believing in a fiction in which, uh, human females can turn into human males or vice versa, um, but actually trying to create a sort of bespoke human future in which you can be whatever you want, we're just going to titrate the hormones to your satisfaction.
And that is about as dystopian a future as I can imagine.
Yeah, I mean, think about where this actually goes, right?
Okay, so we can imagine that there are women who will want to titrate in testosterone in order to modify how they present to the world or, you know, what their strengths are.
But what can't be titrated?
Can they, you know, can they turn off your conscience?
Might make you more successful in business.
Are we going to tolerate that?
Probably shouldn't, right?
That does not suggest a world that we're going to want to live in.
That's going to be a world that would have to be tightly regulated in order to prevent people from acting on those.
Let's just dial the oxytocin down.
It feels like you're too nice.
But it also presumes that these hormones are just on-off switches, which we know they're not.
We know that many of these hormones, oxytocin especially among them, but also the sex steroid hormones, the estrogens and the androgens, including testosterone, do different things under different circumstances.
They are not simply a, add this and add X, you will get Y result.
They're not like that.
But they are being treated like that by the doctors who are giving them to their so-called patients.
And the patients understand that to be how hormones work, which is part of why we had the lie, which is now beginning to be dismantled for so many years, of puberty blockers are reversible, just go off of them.
That's not the way development works.
That's not the way time works.
That's not the way mammal anatomy and physiology works.
That's not the way any of it works.
But all you had to do was say the thing because it's simpler.
It's simple.
It's understandable.
It's completely wrong.
But you can take that away if you are a 13-year-old or an 18-year-old or a 28-year-old, honestly, a parent of a young person and say, Oh, well, you know, doctor assures me these are fully reversible, so why not?
Just give them time to think.
Like, no, you do that and you are going to change things forever.
And for many people, like, they will be able to recover and live lives that are full and fulfilling, but there will be changes forever if you block puberty, even for a short period of time.
Yeah, it makes several of the errors that we point to in an extreme form that is rare to see.
One is, this is not a complicated system.
These are complex systems.
So to take one of what must be thousands of different flaws in their reasoning, at the point that you start jacking up or down a hormone, The body is likely to alter the number of receptors.
And so what that means is they're creating an addicted pathology because they will have adjusted the system itself.
And this is a totally predictable fact.
It works in their favor with respect to creating customers for life.
It creates dependency.
Right.
And the other thing, I think the Cartesian crisis is going to ultimately leave all of us who are attempting to think through things stuttering without the ability to find words because what we are facing is such a preposterous violation of principles which are delicate and subtle and hard to state but nonetheless govern our lives.
But the You are a dynamic system.
Development is a special state of that dynamic system in which the system discovers how to be something new.
It discovers how to go from being a child without responsibilities to an adult on which responsibilities right up through life and death can rest.
Right.
How do you get there?
Hundreds of different feedbacks in which the mind and the body discover what doesn't quite work and adjust it in tandem.
You start dumping potent chemicals like testosterone on that system, and not only are you disrupting the functioning of the system, you are disrupting the fundamental capacity of that system to go from a state of not very functional to highly functional.
You are taking over responsibility for making it functional, and how much do you know about how to make it functional?
Nothing.
That's exactly right.
And I would say over in a less politically fraught part of the hormonal universe, we are now coming to understand something very similar with regard to melatonin.
Right?
Like, melatonin is a hormone.
Is it just one?
Or does it, in its different forms, do very, very different things in the body?
And so the circulating melatonin, which is what is measured when it is measured in people, and what is affected when you pop a melatonin pill, may not actually be the thing that matters nearly as much as we have thought, as the subcellular melatonin, which is produced by exposure of your body to infrared light near and far.
And where do you get that?
You get that by being outside at almost any time of day.
You get it from firelight, you get it from moonlight, you certainly get it from sunlight.
But we're not talking about the UV part of the spectrum, but the infrared part of the spectrum produces, creates subcellular melatonin, which is actually not only A modulator of things like mood and sleep, but also a potent antioxidant.
You pop all the melatonin you want, and it doesn't affect your subcellular melatonin.
What do you want to do to affect your subcellular melatonin?
Go outside!
Get outside already!
It's very much like that, and we're allowed to talk about that without people coming after us, because I don't know.
The melatonin lobby isn't that strong.
It's relatively easy to wean yourself off of the pills that are melatonin, and it doesn't seem to leave a lasting disability the way the gender activism is.
But let's just apply that thinking over into sex steroids and all the other hormonal messings that we're doing and go, huh, maybe we don't know as much as we think.
So I wanted to use this.
If we look back at history, our ancestors evolved outside.
Obviously, the ability to live inside allows us to live in habitats where living outside isn't really even conceivable for Homo sapiens.
But if at the point that somebody comes up with a way to live indoors, somebody had been able to say, actually, that seems like a pretty good idea from one perspective, but we don't know how this is going to affect various systems of the body, right?
What we've discovered, what you've just said, another way to phrase it would be that your complex adaptive living system is actually in a delicate interplay relationship with a universe in which there is a strongly oscillating exposure to far-infrared light.
All infrared, not just far.
Near in particular, actually.
And in fact, it's not even just infrared.
If we extend it across the electromagnetic spectrum, you are in this relationship with your star and your exposure to it is altered in a highly regular, but not perfectly regular way.
By the way, the globe rotates.
And that, of course, is something that natural selection has picked up on.
And it is now using it as both a productive methodology for vitamin D and things downstream of it, like melatonin, intracellular melatonin, intracellular melatonin.
But it is also using it as a cue to what time of day it is, and therefore the interplay between, you know, the vitamin D, not a great term, right, melatonin, Melatonin, hormone, not a great term.
Right.
Your circadian rhythms.
Maybe that's a defensible term, but the point is all of these things are more complex and more interrelated than we are capable of stating.
So that's not a problem.
It's early in biology.
Why?
Because biology is so darn complex.
There's nothing wrong with it being beyond our ability to say it.
What's wrong is when you walk into one of these systems and you imagine that you know enough to tinker to improve a healthy individual.
The fact is, we didn't know enough to go indoors.
Right?
We didn't know how much damage we would do to ourselves by going indoors.
We didn't know how much damage we would do to ourselves by putting glass in our windows.
We don't know how much damage we do to ourselves by flipping on light switches where the bulb is You're telling me a lightbulb is dangerous?
That flipping on a light at a switch is dangerous?
Yeah, I'm telling you it may be.
of light from the point of view of all things, all sorts of things other than your eyes.
So all of these are places in which you would think, come on, you're telling me a light bulb is dangerous, that flipping on a light at a switch is dangerous?
Yeah, I'm telling you it may be.
You're telling me that going inside because it's cold out might be dangerous?
Yeah, it could well be.
You don't know what relationship you have with your natural system, and so we ought to be... It's the precautionary principle and Chesterton's fence all the way down.
We keep missing this, and in this case, you've got this... You've got a case of our blindness to the danger of abandoning the precautionary principle on steroid hormones.
Precisely.
Okay, more from the WPATH reports, again on autonomy.
This is again Mia Hughes's analysis of the files that were given to them.
WPATH places a high value on patient autonomy and a low value on minimizing potential harm.
Or rather, it conceptualizes harm, as in do no harm, as unfulfilled consumer desire.
In 2022, the aforementioned activist professor who believes developmentally delayed minors ought to be allowed to consent to life-altering experimental hormones and surgeries posted in the forum in defense of, quote, trans people whose embodiment goals do not fit dominant expectations, such as those who want, quote, mastectomies without nipples, mastectomies for people who do not want breasts from estrogen, and vagina-preserving phalloplasties.
For those of you not sure about what is being said, these would be people who are hoping to have both sets of genitals.
One of which is a complete construct and doesn't actually bear almost any resemblance to the real thing.
The professor, who has previously described, quote, trans embodiment as a free-form artistic expression of gender, end quote, and believes teenagers should have the right to treat their body like, quote, a gendered art piece, end quote, demonstrates the flawed beliefs held within WPATH when claiming that transgender health care is about creating bodies that, quote, challenge cis-normativity.
Now that's a lot of ideological doublespeak, but cisnormativity is a term invented by the trans activist brigade, just like transphobe, to make it seem to people who aren't paying a lot of attention, like there is some kind of
Errant, like in error, there is the expectation that walking around the world as the sex that you actually are is a normative belief and one that we can get beyond if only we were enlightened enough.
The other common place that that suffix normativity shows up is in heteronormativity, where, again, the queer activists will claim that it is only a result of our patriarchal This heteronormative past in which every single one of our ancestors is a result of a man and a woman getting together and having kids.
That thing that I just said is itself, you know, probably an act of violence, but not reality.
It is my Bizarre belief based on these normative values that I have come to believe probably because I have paternalized misogyny or something.
I can't even say it clearly.
It's so insane.
This is what I'm saying about we're all going to be babbling, unable to find the words to describe just how insane things have become.
But I also think maybe I'm just wrong.
If I'd known we were going here, maybe I would have done a little looking into the etymology.
But I also think there's a trick in the cisheteronormativity claim, a linguistic trick.
The trick is that normativity does not mean normalcy.
But to a naive person, or to somebody who has not studied in the area of philosophy that would tell you that, it sounds like it means normalcy.
And so here's what I think is happening.
The claim that society was heteronormative means that society judged people for being gay.
And we can talk all day about what the reality was, but it is certainly a viable position to say that that was incorrect.
That it is not fair to judge people for being gay.
For one thing, gay seems to be something that happens to you, so Judging people for it is an absurdity, right?
But if you say, ah, well, we've all gotten over heteronormative-ness, and what that sounds like to people is we've gotten over the idea that hetero is normal, well, no, it's perfectly normal and the most usual state, by far.
Wikipedia, which is unreliable in many ways, and I hate going there at all anymore, in part because of the slanderous things they have written about us.
But on this topic, what they have to say is, normative generally means relating to an evaluative standard.
Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good, desirable, or permissible, and others as bad, undesirable, or impermissible.
A norm in this sense means a standard for evaluating or making judgments about behavior or outcomes.
Normative is sometimes also used, somewhat confusingly, to mean relating to a descriptive standard, doing what is normally done or what most others are expected to do in practice.
So, it's both things.
Well, sometimes used and confusingly implies that it is being abused into normalcy, that it is used in this way, and I'm claiming that that's happening because people have found it useful.
To take the correct judgment that something that was once judged bad by society is no longer understood, that we have become enlightened, and that we no longer persecute people for being gay.
That is being used to erase the claim that being straight is normal.
And I think that's reflected rather perfectly in what Wikipedia says in this case.
I think you're right.
So good job, Wikipedia.
Now clean up the rest of your goddamn game.
Yeah, indeed.
Okay, um, seventh screenshot here.
This is from the actual files, and I don't need to read the whole thing here, except that it begins with, as a gender doula.
Oh.
A gender doula.
That's a new one on me.
That is a new one presumably on everyone, except for the I'm imagining burgeoning gender doula industry.
A doula, as pretty much everyone will of course know, is someone who is not midwifing a birth, but is there as the mother's advocate during the birth to assist with anything that might be happening that the midwife, or the doctor depending, the obstetrician, may feel is out of their domain.
And of course, birth being a difficult process.
There are many moments when a birthing mother may not have the capacity to advocate for herself.
And so a doula is someone that she has worked with in advance of the birth and who is there as her advocate during the birth itself.
Gender doula borrows this important term, important role.
I didn't have a doula, but I've known many mothers who did, and they are wonderful and valuable, and many mothers I know have found them indispensable.
Gender doula would suppose that understanding what gender you are and transitioning between genders and having this be, you know, a significant part of your life is significant in the way, if you are pregnant, getting that child out of you so that you can start to become a mother as opposed to being a pregnant woman is important.
And of course it's not.
But this is part of the story, this is part of the activism that we are being told.
That if you don't have a gender identity, if you claim that you don't think about it, if you claim that it's a silly thing to concern yourself with, you are denying some part of yourself.
And that's just wrong.
Like, gender doula is an appropriation of a real role in many women's lives for a thing that is a fiction.
And I would say it's a barbaric fiction.
And I imagine this is going to happen a lot, but this is the first one I've seen of like, oh, we're going to take this important thing and plug gender onto it and make it seem more respectable as a result.
All right, now I'm going to do some struggling for words because this is so absurd.
But just as with the normativity question, where it blurs a distinction to the advantage of those who would engage in this kind of sophistry.
The idea of a doula, a doula exists in a context where something inevitable is happening anyway.
So the point is, by importing doula into this context, they create the impression of, well, if you're born in the wrong body, transition is going to happen.
And you need an advocate, because you wouldn't want to go into such a thing alone.
You would want somebody who's an expert in this sort of thing.
And so it creates this, you know, unstoppable freight train of gender transition, when in fact what you need is somebody to talk to you.
And this is, I think, the hidden demon in all of this.
What you really need is somebody to make, if this is to be allowed at all, and I'm not for children, it shouldn't be, but for adults, what you really need is somebody who isn't tied to this industry to make absolutely 100% certain that you are aware of
The risks and unknowns of what you are doing, what a successful surgical alteration actually means from the point of view of your functionality sexually, reproductively, and otherwise going forward, what the rate of success is as studied by people who are not involved in this industry, what percentage of people are actually ten years down the road glad they did it, what percentage of people have To regret it, right?
You need to know all of these things before you even contemplate this which is part of why you couldn't possibly rationally do this to children.
Right.
And there are many good therapists out there who are pushing back, who are resisting, who are trying to offer exactly this kind of therapeutic service to young people, but they are having their livelihoods put at risk.
I've met several such therapists in Portland, in fact, and it's incredibly difficult
to continue doing the work when you've got people who declare themselves gender doulas who again presumably can make money doing so when the people who are actually trying to protect the children are constantly being bombarded with threats to their livelihood because they're you know spurious complaints made to their board and such right so it's uh it is a terrible moment that we find ourselves in with regard to um how it is that therapists uh can and should be protecting children
Okay, screenshot number eight.
This is again Mia Hughes's analysis with quotes from the files that they were given.
In the replies, one WPATH member shared a story about young natal females developing pelvic floor dysfunction and even pain with orgasm.
A trans-identified natal female lawyer and prominent trans activist shared a personal account of developing a condition after years on testosterone that caused, quote, splits in the skin which bled and were excruciating, end quote.
And another trans-identified natal female member described, quote, bleeding after penetrative sex, end quote, painful orgasms in an atrophied uterus.
Natal males don't fare any better on estrogen either.
When a doctor posted asking for, quote, any insight as to why some trans women may experience significant pain with erections post-hormone therapy, end quote, the replies indicated that this is not an uncommon problem.
A trans-identified natal male counselor confirmed having experienced painful erections while taking estradiol and described, quote, trying to avoid them, that is, erections, because of this, explaining that even when the erections were not painful, quote, they were physically uncomfortable and not pleasurable.
A registered nurse told of natal male patients who described erections as, quote, feeling like broken glass, end quote.
This is the treatment pathway WPATH endorses for adolescents.
Let me just read the next one.
Also, again, Mia Hughes analyzing the WPATH files.
Also in May 2023, a gynecologist in the WPATH forum described a patient who, after penile inversion vaginoplasty, was leaking prostate secretions through the urethra and was finding it bothersome.
The replies inform the gynecologist that there is no remedy, but one nursing lecturer, who self-described as, quote, a woman of trans experience, end quote, suggested telling the distressed patient to enjoy the ride, adding, it's the ultimate physical sign of orgasm.
what's not to like.
This is what is mostly in these files, and we're not going to spend a ton of time here, but the fact that internally between them,
The WPATH clinicians are discussing the pain and agony associated with exactly the interventions that they are pushing on people, both young people and adults, but publicly declare that the rates of regret are almost zero, that these surgeries are successful.
It reveals a lack of ethics that is astounding.
Utterly astounding.
A lack of human decency, in fact.
Because these patients walk in at a massive disadvantage in terms of knowing the reality of what they are contemplating.
Increasingly, informed consent is the central question of at least all of medicine.
It's something we agreed on so completely that, as we pointed out before, seven doctors were hanged in the aftermath of World War II for having violated patients' informed consent even before informed consent was codified as a principle.
So, this is something we have taken very seriously and somebody has persuaded us to abandon it en masse across many different domains, things as deeply separated as mRNA transfection shots for COVID and gender transition surgery for children.
Right?
I mean, for children.
An elective surgery That derives from a radical interpretation of the evidence that a person, that there would be regularly people who are close enough to born in the wrong body that surgical intervention, which cannot possibly make them more functional than they were, could possibly be the right thing for them.
So this, you know, if there's ever a case for informed consent, it would be this.
Yes.
Now, my question is, why, well I know why, but in a rational civilization that became convinced that this was necessary, would you not have a entity inside of government whose purpose was to evaluate whether informed consent was being adhered to across the board in medicine.
That's one thing you would have.
And the other thing you would have is you would have testing for people who were facing, testing that did not come from the people who are pushing these surgeries, testing.
Testing of patience or how much they comprehend about the actual realities of what happens to people who have gone through this surgery.
Are you aware of these side effects?
Are you aware at the rate that they show up?
Are you aware of the rate at which people Regret transition.
Are you aware that you are forever forgoing your ability to produce children?
Are you aware of the sexual dysfunction that is likely to derive from this?
Etc, etc.
You would have an independent evaluation and a patient, I mean... One of the things that the WPATH files reveals is that the doctors themselves understand that the patients can't possibly be aware when they're young.
Yeah, the doctors are aware of this.
Therefore, the doctors, in not correcting for this, are guilty of a wicked violation of informed consent.
This is not inadequate information.
This is an obscuring of information that these people vitally need to know.
There's a paper that I couldn't get the entire version of, so I'm not going to spend time on it here, but a published peer-reviewed paper from some years back which actually invokes the principle of subsidiarity.
The Catholic principle of subsidiarity as a justification for always trusting the child client over their parents who say, no, my child is not trans, you should not do this.
So that is an abuse of subsidiarity in the most extreme form, in the way that sometimes people will abuse Jefferson's claim that the government that governs best governs least, right?
Jefferson obviously was not advocating for no government, right?
You have to just know very little about the man to know that that's not what he was saying.
What he was saying is the lightest hand possible to accomplish the goal is the right thing.
But in this way, subsidiarity means that everything should be governed at the lowest effective level.
And what they've effectively done is decided that the lowest effective level is the kid who's demanding sex change surgery.
Rather than the parent who's trying to protect the kid because the kid doesn't know well enough, right?
This is a violation of subsidiarity.
Yeah.
How old is this paper?
Let me see.
I actually do have... Oh, no, it's not that old.
You can show my screen here.
I just don't have the access to the whole paper.
It's 2023, Journal of Medical Ethics.
Youth should decide the principle of subsidiarity in pediatric transgender health care.
This article develops a framework for allocating medical decision-making authority in the absence of capacity to consent and argues that decisional authority in pediatric transgender health care should generally lie in the patient.
And again, I can't say much about it because I couldn't get access to the actual paper.
Well, what I would like to know is how far back the use of that term goes because subsidiarity, I became aware of it maybe 8 or 10 years ago in Good Governance discussions, and I started using it.
I later heard Jordan Peterson using it in his musings on the topic.
It's possible it goes way back for Jordan, but I'm wondering whether or not there's any evidence of the use in this context, given that Jordan has been so active in this space at challenging the wisdom.
Did they get it from him?
Were they watching Jordan Peterson?
And is this, you know, Stealing a term.
Is this sophistry coming at the question of subsidiarity because it would be useful to mangle it in an effort to make sure it is not properly applied?
Don't know.
Okay, here is a transcription of another part of the video discussion that Schellenberger and then Mia Hughes were given as part of the WPATH files.
So yeah, one of the things I would like to highlight on this case, I think that it underscores that from the outset, we also may help people explore more non-binary options.
You know, I have a young person I'm working with right now who's been on blockers for about two years.
Mother's anxious for the kid to come off.
Pediatric endocrinologist is saying maybe go a little longer, and the kid is vacillating.
Really not wanting facial hair, but about having menstrual cycles and kind of vacillates about whether breast development, chest development bothers them or not, and which pronouns they use.
And we all know that chest surgery is pretty inevitable, or at least looks like that, because this has consistently been a bothersome thing for this person.
So is there more benefit of staying on blockers or letting the kids switch back to their endogenous estrogen?
Or is it better to go low-dose testosterone or what?
You know, and at what point in time?
So if the kid doesn't want facial hair but maybe doesn't mind their chest growing and they're planning on having chest surgery anyways, so we may want to, you know, be creative in how we help folks approach these situations that are complex.
Complex.
Really, you don't say.
Yeah.
So, that just, again, to reveal some of the inner workings of what they're admitting.
Like, here's a young person who doesn't, isn't comfortable with her breasts because she didn't have them until yesterday, practically, right?
She's been a kid and suddenly her Her body's changing.
She's got menses.
She's got breasts.
And, um, she finds them bothersome.
Bothersome.
Bothersome.
Well, she finds them bothersome in a world where people, instead of leaning into the reality of the situation, which is you're going to have breasts and because that's not a choice, the basic point is, okay, how are you doing with that?
Rather than, do you want to change that?
Do you prefer your pre-breast state?
So, things are being presented as options that are not options, and people come to recognize this afterwards, but they aren't told it in advance.
And actually, to that point, here's the next screenshot, the 11 of 13.
Dr. Az Hakim ran therapy groups that combined patients wishing to embark upon surgical transition with post-operative transsexuals who regretted their surgeries.
In an interview, he described the pre-operative group as one of excitement and euphoria, and the post-operative group as one of mourning, depression, and sadness.
The typical pattern, writes Hakeem, was gender dysphoria, transgender euphoria, and then transgender dysphoria, Hakeem said of the post-op regretters.
They realized they didn't really feel that authentic in their transgender identity, so they were still feeling just as inauthentic, but just in a different body.
Hakeem observed that this process took, on average, seven years, which casts further doubt on the validity of short-term follow-up studies showing high patient satisfaction post-transition rates.
Meyer and Hoopes of Johns Hopkins made the same observation in 1974.
They described an, quote, initial phase of elation, end quote, that extended for two to five years post-transition, but after that honeymoon period is over, quote, the patient is overtaken by the painful realization that nothing has really changed except certain elements of body configuration, end quote.
This honeymoon period has also been observed more recently.
That right there.
Dysphoria.
Something is wrong.
I don't feel right about my life, and I think it's maybe about my body, but I... and I'm being assured.
The people in lab coats with degrees tell me they can fix this.
It is my body.
Oh, we've seen this before.
Yeah, it's a thing that happens.
Yes.
This is a thing that's happened.
So many people are going through this.
You are not just right in what you understand to be the problem, but we have the solution for you.
And look at all these other people we've helped.
Yep.
So that dysphoria becomes an elation.
And as this quote that I was just reading from, often it's pre-op euphoria.
Oh my God, this is the answer to all of my problems.
I have been wrestling with comorbidities, with mental illness, with a family that's dysfunctional, with just a changing body that I don't know how to deal with because the world is not reacting to me the same now as it did five years ago.
And a doctor in a Fancy coat with a fancy degree on his wall tells me that he can fix it.
Awesome.
I'm so excited about this.
Oh, please let me get the surgery at 16 instead of 18.
Please let me do this.
This is going to solve all of my problems.
And then they realize that the only thing that's different is the medical or surgical intervention that is not reversible.
All of the problems are not solved.
In fact, none of the problems are solved.
But you've created new ones and you've made yourself a patient for life and things are only worse.
So dysphoria, euphoria, dysphoria again.
So think about this mapped onto what's actually supposed to be happening.
You've got somebody There are two things that are happening.
One, subject of our book, hyper-novelty.
Yes.
These kids are living in a world they're not fit for because the world was not constructed with kids in mind or with development in mind.
It would have to change more slowly in order to be properly adapted to it.
So that's one thing.
But normally, even given a proper world to develop in, the discomforts are part of a motivational structure built by selection to get you to discover what niche to be in as an adult.
How to interact, right?
Yes.
Are you going to be funny?
Are you going to be poignant?
All of the things you need to discover in order to live in that adult world get motivated by the fact that you don't like not knowing what to say or do.
So the point is a natural developmental process has been spotted as an opportunity by an industry selling something.
So instead of allowing you to develop, I guess my point is the idea of the normal pattern would be discomfort and then increasing satisfaction upon discovering what it is you're supposed to be doing in the world.
The point is, oh no, that discomfort is a pathology.
That discomfort is a pathology and the remedy isn't you, it's a consumer good.
The clinical language, that the idea in play here is one of autonomy, bodily autonomy, of personal autonomy, when it's exactly the opposite.
We will make you subservient for life.
We will ensure that you have no capacities or skills to solve your own problems, to become more resilient, to become anti-fragile, to become productive and forthcoming and generative and discover things and create things.
You are, no, we got you.
And that sounds nice at first.
I got your back.
Yeah.
You're not alone.
You're not alone.
We got you.
We've seen this before.
It's going to be okay.
But they're lying.
They're lying to these children and to these young people who are of age.
They're lying to all of them.
Who, what they need to do is go out into the world, you know, get outside, go out into the world and start finding challenge and start figuring out how to overcome challenge and identify what things that they encounter Feel like something that they can become excellent at and pursue that.
And there will be things that they run into and they're like, Oh, this is challenging.
This is challenging.
Oh, you know what?
It's not for me.
I'm just not, not, not going to be what I excel at.
Not going to be the thing that I spend time in.
And so you pivot, you learn to change.
Go back to the last node you ran and go like, how about I try this instead?
Nope, not that.
How about I try this instead?
But it involves me trying.
I am going to go out and try things and test my own capacities and in so doing strengthen them and also discover where I am weak.
And sometimes those weaknesses can be made into strengths and sometimes they are things that you have to live with and go, you know what?
I can't be best at everything.
I can't even be good at everything.
But now I know what the things are that I'm not good at and what I hopefully need to do in order to live the best life I can, understanding what my weaknesses are.
That is what growing up is.
I mean, that's what all of human life is, you know, through all stages of development, but especially in adolescence.
Yeah.
And these so-called clinicians are stealing this.
They're stealing the children's lives, their childhoods, their adolescence, their humanity.
They're stealing the kid's map to get into a future that's livable.
And what they're going to do is they're going to create actual, they've got a phony story.
You've been victimized by biology, right?
Biology screwed up, wrong body, right?
And they're going to create actual victims.
And these people, that is going to be their skill set.
Is there going to be victims in the future?
But there'll be something to it.
Who will they have been victimized by?
By the people who sold them the false story that told them that surgery and hormones was going to fix things.
That's right.
Those people will be long gone, right?
They'll be off to something else.
And, you know, imagine having to live an entire life downstream of a sales pitch, which is what this is.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, there's lots that we haven't touched on in these files, but the last two screenshots I want to share are about some of the most common comorbidities, or maybe not the most common, but some of the comorbidities that seem to accompany coming to identify as being gender dysphoric and then pursuing hormonal and surgical
So first one, this is again Mia Hughes's words in her analysis of the files that came their way.
Others inside the forum object to surgical restrictions based on high body mass index, BMI.
It is widely recognized that obesity increases the risks associated with surgery, leading to complications such as prolonged operative time, increased risk of surgical site infections, and various other complications.
Therefore, it is standard practice for surgeons to have a BMI cap for elective surgeries.
However, inside WPATH, some members are unhappy about obese female patients being denied elective bilateral mastectomies.
A research associate within the group suggested that this denial is the result of quote, systemic fat phobia, and challenged the conventional belief that the patient's obesity directly contributes to adverse outcomes, instead suggesting that it was the result of quote, weight bias, influencing how patients are cared for and operated on.
It's pure sophistry.
the, quote, high prevalence of eating disorders in trans individuals, end quote, this WPATH member expressed concern that withholding surgery could potentially exacerbate these issues.
Yeah.
A Washington social worker contributed an anecdote about a client seeking top surgery who had been told to lose weight.
This apparently triggered disordered eating.
It's pure sophistry.
Yeah.
Okay.
Last one.
Yeah.
At WPATH's 2022 International Symposium in Montreal, a team of researchers presented the preliminary findings of their research into the confluence of transgender and plural identities.
The team grappled with the complexity of obtaining informed consent for sex trait modification hormones and surgeries from patients with hundreds of alters, many with differing gender identities.
So, let me pause for a second here.
And she uses the acronym later DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is previously called Multiple Personality Disorder.
That's what we're talking about here.
Plural identities as people, which most of us will have heard of multiple personality disorder now being called DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder.
The team grappled with the complexity of obtaining informed consent for sex trait modification hormones and surgeries from patients with hundreds of alters, many with differing gender identities.
Their research quoted an individual called The Redwoods, who identifies as nine separate people sharing a, quote, trans body, explaining the difficulties faced by patients who were forced to choose between their gender dysphoria diagnosis and their DID diagnosis, quote, because providers wrongly believed you could not be both.
The research team drew few solid conclusions, but recommended affirmation of both trans and plural identities, which could lead to, quote, gender and plural euphoria, end quote, as well as the suggestion that plurals have their separate personalities use an app to talk to each other to reach an agreement about hormonal and surgical sex trait modification interventions.
The lead researcher appears in the WPATH files in a thread dated September 2021, discussing the, quote, robust community developing of people who identify as plural, as well as plural positivity conferences.
He stated that there was a "general consensus that mental health and medical providers need more training on this topic so they can provide affirming care." Affirmative care.
For children who have been lied to, they can change their sex.
I don't care if you call it gender.
You've been lied to.
Affirmative care sounds very kumbaya, and it's a lie.
It's the opposite of kumbaya.
You should run screaming from it.
They're now using that same word, affirmative care, for not just transness, but for plural identities.
As if, People who are walking around calling themselves the Redwoods, with nine separate identities that they wish to present to the world, need to be affirmed, as opposed to treated, so as to consolidate those identities into a single
Personality that can go forward into the world and again, possibly, hopefully, if there's any hope at all left for someone who has been encouraged in these delusions this far, actually learn how to be generative and productive and self-sufficient in the world, as opposed to demanding affirmative therapy for both their plural personalities and their gender confusions.
Especially in a world where kids are being trained that attention is the coin of the realm rather than accomplishment or insight or something like that.
It is not surprising to find people leaning into what may be a pathological tendency to display more than one personality.
Right.
But I even find something insane about, okay, the various personalities need to use an external app in order to discuss with each other... No, it's being recommended.
They don't need to.
But the clinicians would like them to use an app so they can figure out amongst themselves.
So first of all... Themself?
Let's just agree that if there is any argument at all for radical interventions, Let's agree that it can't possibly be true for kids.
But if there's any argument at all for the radical interventions that you couldn't possibly justify doing it on a person who was not entirely in agreement.
And I don't care if you have a thousand personalities and one of them disagrees.
To the extent that there's one personality Well, I mean, that is actually, this is one of the very few places in these files where you see the clinicians who are wrestling with these, you know, very intense issues going like, well, we, you know, we, we must get the personalities in agreement before we proceed.
Let us talk to the personality that doesn't want a sex change and convince it.
Yeah, like if the app doesn't work.
Right, but in a rational world, in a world with any rationality left to it at all, what you would have is this is a destructive set of surgeries.
Maybe somebody has a right to them if they are fully adult and they fully understand what they are giving up in order to get what they are getting.
Big maybe.
Big maybe.
But... One which I, yeah, I don't think... Let's just say, in the case that somebody has that right, Nobody who is composed of many personalities.
How do we know that somebody doesn't have a silent personality that objects?
Right?
That won't sign on to the app.
Right.
You don't.
Somebody in that condition is not sane enough to discover whether they are completely of one mind.
Precisely.
With respect to the need for this.
And presumably a, you know, maybe, I mean, look, probably it is true that Most of what us normies are is not the part that talks.
Right?
Yes.
Right.
So does the person's inner self that doesn't have a name, does that person get a vote on whether or not to have a radical body modification?
I would think they would have absolute veto power over it.
You would hope.
But you're creating A nonsense story in which that person has to speak up and may not have the ability to do so.
So anyway, I mean, once again, we are deeply into the sophistry, trying to explain why it's nuts.
When the point is, oh, well, look, that's obviously nuts.
How do you know that it's obviously nuts?
Because go back 10 years and ask anybody, right?
It's that kind of thing.
And this isn't like some discovery.
Yes, there can be things that we weren't aware of 10 years ago, but this isn't some discovery.
This is some claim that this has always been how it was and, you know, we're only enlightened now and the people who are the experts in it are barely articulate enough to make a transcript and understand what they're even talking about. we're only enlightened now and the people who are the So, the WPATH files came out earlier this month.
This week, there are two relevant things that also happened before we leave this topic, mercifully, for at least a little bit.
A positive thing that happened this week is that England's NHS, the National Health Service, banned the regular prescription of puberty blockers, where they had the Tavistock Clinic, which was doing great damage Almost by rote to girls in particular for a long time.
The Tavistock closing happened a while back, a few months, I don't remember, sometime in the last year.
They haven't banned the prescription of puberty blockers under any circumstances, but they have said this is no longer part of our regular retinue of things that we're going to allow to happen in the NHS.
So that's That's good, right?
Also this week, however, was the publication of this article in New York magazine, Intelligencer, Freedom of Sex, the Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change Their Bodies, by Andrea Long Chiu, who is a man who thinks he's a woman.
And there's a lot here.
I just have two little sections to read.
Given what we just went through with the WPATH files, this piece being published this week is particularly, frankly, diabolical.
So here's one.
It seems to me, this is Andrea Long Chu writing, it seems to me that this is a fear we can no longer afford.
To confront the reality of biological sex is not by definition to swear fealty to that reality.
No one knows this better than a child who wishes to have their biological sex changed.
We must be able to defend this desire clearly, directly, and crucially, without depending on the idea of gender.
Back in the 1970s, sociologists hypothesized that the withering away of gender roles in a liberal society would lead to a decline in the number of people who wanted to change their sex.
We may now say this hypothesis was wrong.
An increase in gender freedom has coincided with a rise in the number of people wishing to change their sex.
For these people, sex itself is becoming a site of freedom.
This freedom is not unprecedented.
Many Americans, though they may not realize it, already enjoy a limited version of the freedom to alter their sexual biology.
What is new is the idea that this freedom can be asserted as a universal right by a group as politically disenfranchised as the young.
This is why the anti-trans movement is so desperate.
It is afraid of what sex might become.
So that's a lot of gobbledygook.
I will say that one of the things that Andrea Long Chu is doing here is reviewing a new Judith Butler book that's either already out or is going to be coming out later this month, and this sounds like just the language of Judith Butler.
It sounds like English and it doesn't mean anything language that Butler has traded in for her entire career.
You're right.
It does sound like Butler Road.
It sounds like Butler, right?
Yeah.
So later in this Long Chew piece in New York Magazine this week, we have this.
This is the larger historical reason why the anti-trans movement does not want transgender people to receive sex-altering care.
It is not clear how, if at all, such people will fit into the division of sex in America.
The TERF does not, after all, fear being assaulted by a Y chromosome in a woman's restroom.
Her paranoid fantasy is of a large testosterone-fueled body wielding a penis, an organ to which, as Butler points out, the TERF attributes almost magical powers of violence.
TERFs often seem to reject the idea that trans women are women on the basis that they are not sufficiently rapable, when in fact trans women face much higher rates of sexual assault.
This entire piece is reprehensible and disgusting, but this claim that women don't want men in restrooms because of the threat of sexual violence against them is actually women claiming that you aren't a woman unless you're sufficiently rapable?
is actually a bridge I did not even think this man would cross.
Like, this is beyond abhorrent.
Yeah, it's insane, and it, you know, it is pure sophistry because it removes the central issue, which is that people who claim to be women, who still have a penis, are capable of rape.
Right?
So, I mean, this from someone who presumably sometimes claims that other people are victim-blaming.
Like, that term is largely an absurd term, but that's what's going on here.
And that's frankly what's going on with a lot of the trans ideology, as women increasingly stand up and say, no, not in my space.
We have sex-separated spaces for reasons that are historical and undeniable and unchangeable, not in my space.
And here we have women being accused of I don't even know.
I've lost the language again.
And it does this to a person.
It just removes the ability to discuss it rationally.
But the question is one of vulnerability, and it is a question of vulnerability that Actual women did not choose.
Right?
This is something that biology has inflicted on actual women.
And, um, I'm sorry, but you can't, you can't torture the logic such that that concern about actual vulnerability is somehow, uh, petty or whatever it's being portrayed as.
It's a biological fact.
Right.
So.
So just one more little thing from, uh, Longchew's article from that same From that same paragraph, widespread discomfort at the largely fantastical idea that trans girls will always dominate in their chosen sports reflects a basic patriarchal belief that the physical advantages of being male are perfectly acceptable so long as they are possessed by men.
In this sense, sex division in sport is meant to enshrine inequality, not to mitigate it.
I include that because, okay, you went from disgusting to laughable in one paragraph, Andrea Longchew, and that's quite a feat.
Yeah.
Like, from an utterly abhorrent statement that, you know, if nothing else, reveals that you're a man, because no woman would say that thing about being rapable, to It's the patriarchy that created sex division in sport, and it's the patriarchy that is enshrining inequality by keeping women's sports free of men.
Sure.
Good one.
Yeah.
I mean, this is what sophistry is.
It's like, look, here's a wrong argument.
Do your best to defend it.
Yeah.
Right?
And here, you know, we've spent a couple hours now going through this Trying to sort it out because the point is it has to be fielded.
It would be absolutely not worth anybody's time if it wasn't actually resulting in medical treatment of kids who need to be protected from it, which means that there's no amount of time that would be too much to spend on it.
We are literally mutilating children who deserve a defense, right?
They deserve to be rescued from that situation, which is why this is worth our time.
But the arguments are so low quality that under any other circumstance, it would be like, okay, there are dumb people in the world.
I'm sure they say stuff, let's not waste our time on it.
Right.
Yeah.
But for the fact that... Yeah, but for the fact that it is altering physical reality and life for people who are deserving of compassion.
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you want to talk about something else?
I think this actually stands well on its own.
Well, then I want to say just a couple of words about amphibian milk.
Of course you do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could show my screen here.
This is the sentence which I began my natural selections piece this week with.
An amphibian of a sort you've probably never heard of provides parental care by offering highly nutritious skin for her babies to eat, and making something highly analogous to mammal's milk, which is solicited by the babies when they click and chirp, and then the babies collect their mother's milk from around and within her cloaca.
So I then go through each of those lines explaining to the non-biologists and many biologists what actually is happening.
I will say that it's an amphibian you've probably never heard of because there are three extant clades of amphibians.
The frogs and toads, which are the leggy, jumpy, tailless-as-adults amphibians, of which there are more than 4,000 species.
And all toads are frogs and not all frogs are toads.
There are the salamanders and newts, which look superficially like lizards, but they're amphibians.
And they're a little more than 400 species of them.
And all newts are salamanders, not all salamanders are newts.
And everyone knows what a frog is, kind of, and knows what a salamander is, kind of.
But then there's a third group that most people haven't heard of, which are the Sicilians.
Spelled differently, but sounds like they're people from Sicily, but there are actually no Sicilians in Sicily, as it turns out.
Because Sicilians, C-A-E-C-I-L-I-A-N-S, These are burrowing, limbless amphibians that are restricted to the tropics.
As it turns out, and this is going to trigger some people, here's a picture of this Siphonops annulatus.
This is a mother caecilian.
This is an amphibian.
This is not a worm.
Some are for babies.
These are some of the babies who emit these high-pitched clicks.
Near their mother's cloaca, which is the rear entrance in female amphibians that does both excretory and reproductive purposes, and in birds and in other reptiles as well.
And in response, the oviducts of the mother caecilian start to produce something that is very much like mammal's milk.
Not obviously a shared history with mammal's milk, but it's high carbohydrate, high lipid production, which in the viperous species of caecilians where the kids are in the mother for a long time.
The kids are eating these oviducal secretions, and here we have an oviparous species.
She lays eggs, the kids hatch out, and then they go back to that same cloacal vent and start chirping at her.
Those oviducts produce milk, but they have to stick their heads in her cloaca to get it.
All right, that was completely wild at so many different levels.
Isn't it amazing?
The fact of there being a milk-like secretion, that's interesting, but I would imagine That's straightforward enough to see.
A, I'm a bit surprised to find a Sicilian involved in extreme parental care.
That's pretty interesting.
But apparently, so the bit about them eating nutritious skin, as the mother is coming close to, I can't remember if it's I think it's in both some oviparous and some viviparous species of caecilians.
So as she is coming close to either giving birth to live young or having her eggs be ready to hatch out, her skin starts to become suffused with lipids.
And they eat, they have this rasping stuff on the front of their heads that they use to slough off the lipid-rich skin and they eat it.
And it's only when she's got babies.
The babies?
Wait, wait, wait.
The babies are eating the lipid-rich skin of their mothers.
Across Sicilians?
In some species.
In some species.
Yes.
All right.
Well, that is pretty wild.
Yeah.
So that means that there's extensive parental care in Sicilians, which I did not know.
Yeah.
Also interesting, the vocalizations.
Now, do adult Sicilians have vocalizations?
I don't, so I don't, I don't know if they're vocalizations.
I had used the word, I think I took the word vocalization out.
Yeah, they're not true vocalizations.
Yeah, I think they're, they're mechanical noises.
Yeah.
And they, you know, there's a video, which I'm not going to show because it's a little, it's a little grainy and it's also, it's probably, I just discussed a bunch of people, but you can certainly go find it.
There's, there's links in my natural selections piece.
And it's kind of soft, it's kind of like high-pitched clicking sounds, kind of like a more fragile, softer version of what we see with baby birds soliciting food from one of their parents when they come back to give them food from their crop.
What I read, or maybe I missed it, didn't specify.
I suspect it's not vocalizations.
And no, I don't see any evidence that adults are vocalizing.
But I don't know for sure.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that is very surprising stuff.
Isn't that awesome?
Yeah, that's wild.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we're not done yet.
We're going to take a break.
Before you put up the end stuff, though, let's see something from the store, as I say that we're going to do a Q&A in 15 minutes or so on Locals.
So please come join us at Locals for the Q&A, and I'll say more about that in a minute.
But here we go.
Here's Dark Horse Store, where you can find lots of cool stuff like blueberries, because oxidants happen.
Epic Tabby, do not affirm, do not comply.
That's unfortunately timeless, I think.
And the First Against the Wall Club, and just straight up Dark Horse merchandise as well.
So lots of good stuff there at darkhorsestore.org.
And Let's see.
We've got Locals, where we encourage you to come support us there.
And of course, we're streaming now on Rumble.
We encourage you to just join the channel there.
There's no money required there.
Yeah, I don't think we can emphasize this strongly enough.
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Yeah, especially on Locals.
And we do things like Q&As, which we're doing shortly here on Locals.
Brian Cole came out and sat down with you, and you did a podcast that's going to be released on Locals only at first, and you also did a little section that is already out on Locals.
What's up?
And it's just a lot of good stuff there.
Let's see.
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Anything else to say?
I think that's it.
All right.
Until we see you next time then, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
