Abigail Shrier on The Joe Rogan Experience examines the surge of teenage girls identifying as transgender, rising from 0.1% to 2% in high schools, often influenced by peer groups and social media like YouTube stars. Her book Irreversible Damage highlights cases—such as Desmond’s hysterectomy at 21 or Benji’s early transition—where irreversible medical interventions mask mental health struggles like depression and anorexia. She critiques "informed consent" models allowing surgeries as young as 15, citing cardiovascular risks and lost fertility, while questioning activist-driven policies that silence dissent, including conversion therapy bans and sports changes undermining biological women’s achievements. The debate reveals how ideological pressure overrules scientific caution, leaving vulnerable youth with irreversible consequences. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, because it's a minefield, because for some reason the activists who are not representative of transgender adults that I've met at all, but the activists had convinced the world that because, you know, they object to anyone's transition being questioned, we can't talk about a mental health issue facing teenage girls.
Yeah, I actually don't deal with that specifically very much.
And the reason is that's a whole book in and of itself.
Because it is true that a lot of girls who are high-functioning autistic, and I did interview some experts in autism, and that's when I realized that's a book of its own, which is that a lot of girls who are high-functioning autistic, you know, they tend to fixate.
And they are particularly susceptible to fixating on the idea that they might be a boy when it's introduced to them.
So, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
And they are one part of this phenomenon, but they're a big part.
So these are the same girls that would have been anorexic, they would have been bulimic, and they would have been the high anxiety, very precocious girls, but they don't really fit in.
They come to high school and they don't have friends, they don't have a clique for them.
And they're so smart and they're so lonely because they're on the internet all the time and they're with mom all the time.
And they don't fit in at school.
And this is a way to understand their pain that they're really feeling.
They're in pain, but they decide that their problem is that they're supposed to be a boy and the fix is testosterone.
So, I spent maybe a month or so just hearing the reports of the parents and reading the original study.
There's an original study that the book is...
Jumps off from, which is the Lisa Littman paper at Brown University, she's a public health researcher who looked into this, and she found that there was all of a sudden this huge epidemic in America of teenage girls deciding they were trans with their friends after social media emerging and pushing for hormones and surgeries.
Have you had a conversation about this with someone who's a trans activist that says, well, maybe what's really going on, I mean, I'm just taking the argument of it, Maybe what's going on is there are a lot of trans women and there would be more or there's a lot of women who would turn trans become a man there would be more But they never had that door open to them before.
And that maybe there's more trans people than we think.
And I thought about it because I've, you know, I tried to look.
I'm a journalist.
I like to look at ideas in both sides.
I didn't have, like, I did not have a dog in this race.
So let me tell you three reasons I don't think that's compelling.
Number one, when Lisa Littman looked at the prevalence rate, she found that it's 70 times what we would expect within a friend group, which means it's highly concentrated in groups of friends.
But there's two other reasons.
So we wouldn't expect that if it were randomly distributed among the population.
But there are two other reasons I don't think that's right.
Number one, if we're just revert to normal now that there's greater societal acceptance, say we're just reverting to a normal base rate of transgender women.
Why are all the women in their 40s and 60s coming out as trans?
They should be coming out.
Now's their time.
Now's their moment.
We should see tons of women in their 40s and 60s and so on coming out as transgender.
We're not seeing that.
We're seeing the same population that gets involved in cutting, demonic possession, witchcraft, anorexia bulimia, and convinces themselves there's a problem.
And there's one – anyway, there's one last reason is that suicide rates are going up.
But if these women who were living under a prior – you know, supposedly these – all these transgender, these real transgender people who are living under a more repressive regime and are now just finding themselves, you would think the suicide rate would be going down with greater acceptance.
Yeah, and it was on your show that I really like this light bulb went on when I rewatched it because he talked about exactly this.
He connects it to social media and he talked about on your show the huge rates we're seeing and anxiety, depression, all among these same girls.
And, you know, putting it together with Lisa Littman's research and the other investigation I'd done I think it's really pretty clear that one more manifestation of these girls who we know are involved in a lot of cutting and all kinds of self-harm, this is one form of self-harm for them.
So let's essentially say there's young teenagers that are confused and they're looking for something that makes them feel whole or something that makes them feel normal or something that gives them some sort of an escape from this angst that they suffer from.
And you're thinking that turning trans is one of those pathways that they gravitate towards, but it might not necessarily be a good idea for them.
If these girls were transitioning to boys and they were living great lives and their mental health was great, like it is for so many transgender adults, I wouldn't have written this book.
These girls are getting it on their own diagnosis.
So they're just going in and self-diagnosing.
Nobody questions it.
We now have informed consent, which means you walk into Planned Parenthood, you sign a waiver, you decide you have gender dysphoria, you walk out that day with testosterone.
So you could be a confused 18-year-old girl and walk into a Planned Parenthood self-diagnosing with no therapy at all and they'll prescribe testosterone and you can get your breast removed?
I mean obviously there are a lot of surgeons who refuse to do it.
So I interviewed them as well.
They say you don't destroy the biological function.
Like I didn't become a doctor to destroy someone's biological function for something that they've decided they have without even any oversight or – But the ones who do it say, look, this population is really desperate for surgery.
It's a civil rights issue.
I, you know, if I'm, you know, I'm giving them what they what will seem to bring them comfort seems to bring them comfort.
The problem is that there's no like follow up to see how their mental health is afterwards.
So do you think that something about—people are really susceptible to praise, right?
When they lean towards love and they lean towards anything that celebrates their actions.
It's real common.
I mean, you see it with artists and sometimes for the worst, right?
You see it with comedians, which is my general area of expertise when it comes to this.
You see Sometimes a comic will do something, particularly online, and then they get sort of celebrated for that, and then they start doing a lot of it.
And it seems just ingenuous and weird, but they're like fishing for love.
And you see it with social media, in particular with people.
I mean, this is a lot of what happens with social justice warriors and online virtue signaling, right?
They're trying to get this reaction from people.
So if someone comes out as trans and everyone celebrates, if perhaps they're a little confused, And they come out as trans and no one says anything.
And then they're just sort of, they have to sit and think about it for themselves.
That's one way.
But if someone comes out as trans and everybody says, that's amazing, that's amazing.
Well, it's on one hand, see, this is where I'm torn.
Because on one hand, if you are trans and you do feel better about this, but you confuse how people are going to react, and then all of a sudden people are celebrating you like, yes, this is great.
I love the idea of an accepting society and people are open, loving, and happy that someone is making this transition.
But on the other hand, I'm very aware of the influence of the masses and of just people's love and praise.
It can shift you one way or another.
I mean, it's like a classic scene in a movie, right?
Where there's a boy who doesn't want to get involved in manly things, but his dad's like, come on, son, I want you to do it.
And he just does it for his dad, but then he feels bad about it.
And then all of a sudden she looks like someone who's an anime character, like the perfect woman, you know, in terms of like society's beauty standards.
And that's not even really what she looks like.
So if you're a kid and you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're looking at this picture of her, you're like, fuck!
Because there's a reason that social contagion spreads among teenage girls specifically.
Because you don't see tons of boys going around becoming anorexic because their friends are.
If a teenage boy is depressed, his friend says to him, let's go play basketball or video game.
He doesn't say, let's sit and talk about it.
And because girls try to take on their friend's pain very naturally and meet their friends where they are and they care, they take on the pain of other people, especially their girlfriends, they are more likely to share and spread a peer contagion like Like anorexia, like cutting, and like trans identification.
Anorexics, they are always really careful when they put them together.
They have to be on hospital wards because we know that it will cause it to spread.
Anorexia will become more severe and they'll spread it if you put a bunch of anorexic girls together And you don't take precautions to make sure that they're not just encouraging each other to lose more and more weight.
Well, that sort of phenomenon exists in men as well, but it exists like a good aspect of it is if you have friends that are very ambitious and work really hard, you'll want to be ambitious and work really hard as well.
And if you have friends that are losers and they want to drink and just waste their life, you tend to gravitate towards that, too, because you get reinforced by the behavior and the acceptance of your peers.
Yeah, again, this is the problem with social media that we kind of discussed in the green room about the percentage of people that are really fucking stupid that are posting.
You're getting a lot of people...
See, if you just have people commenting on things without knowing who they are...
Like, if you work in an office and you have a bunch of people in your office that you respect and they're your peers and they say, Abigail, I think this.
And you go, hmm, that's interesting, Mary, because...
I respect your opinion, so I'm going to have to take that into consideration.
But if you just read some no face, no name, you don't know who the fuck it is, blocked account, and they write something mean, you will take that Into your brain the same way you'll take your friend Mary, who you respect and love.
It's like, it's a problem with human beings the way we process information.
If we don't have, like, if you know that someone's a moron, they say something to you, you're like, well, Mike's a moron.
Everyone knows Mike's a moron.
It's clear.
But when you just read something in text, your text looks just like some idiot's text.
And when people are doing it specifically just to be mean, it can be very, very confusing.
And it just highlights the really poor quality of discourse that you get when you're reading comments and you're dealing with social media.
YouTube comments and Twitter and all that stuff.
It's just a really bad way to communicate with people and most of the people that are saying shitty things would not say those shitty things if they were right in front of you.
How does a kid know whether they are someone who's being easily influenced and someone who is giving in to this anxiety and you are a part of the way you're describing a contagion amongst your friends?
Versus someone who's genuinely trans, like someone who genuinely is born in the wrong body.
So we have a hundred year diagnostic history of gender dysphoria.
We know what it is.
It's not guesswork.
We know that it is in this whole history.
It typically presents in early childhood, ages two to four is when we see it starting.
And it was overwhelmingly boys, little boys who say, no, mommy, I'm not a boy.
I'm a girl.
Call me a girl.
Only want to play with other girls.
Only want to Do you know play with girl toys and they sometimes they hate their sexual organ.
I mean sometimes you know it's a severe persistent insistent consistent feeling and then a lot of them would grow out of it and some of them wouldn't and they would become what we used to call transsexuals.
Now we're seeing an explosion of young women.
You know, suddenly deciding they're trans with their friends and they are doing it in friend groups.
They'll have a whole friend group of trans kids.
They are, you know, doing it after social media emerging.
Transgender adults never did it because of social media and it certainly never won them friends.
Is it a good sign that we're, like, more progressive now, more open-minded?
But because of that, things have gotten a little slippery in terms of what we celebrate and what we should rationally step back and objectively analyze and say, hey, is this really the right way to handle this?
I think one of the things that happened was in 2012, WPATH, which is the transgender health organization, worldwide organization, changed to an informed consent model saying that people should be able to get the drugs they want or claim to need Based on their own recognizance.
You sign a form, you're aware of the risk, and then you get it.
And the problem was, maybe they felt that there was too much gatekeeping, as they call it, or too much questioning.
They felt that there were people who weren't getting the medical care they needed.
The problem was, you hit 18, and the age of medical consent varies by state.
We were talking before we got on the air about Children like really young children transitioning you were saying that most people who transition know when they're very young That is a real That's a hot-button topic for people children and hormone blockers and children What I keep going to is if you are a woman and You you know,
you're a woman Why do you need to get these hormones injected into your body?
Why can't you just be a woman?
I'll call you a woman.
What are we doing with all these hormones?
Imagine you're a person who says, I need to transition to be a woman and I know that I need a chemical that I've never had in my body before.
And if I get that chemical injected, then I'm going to be happy.
Yeah, which bans so-called conversion therapy, even on gender identity, which means that therapists could lose their license if they say, hold on, I know you want to transition.
I know you think your problem is gender dysphoria.
So a therapist, if you're a 15 year old kid and you come to a therapist and you say, all my friends are going trans and I think I'm trans too, the doctor has to essentially go with you on this little path you're on?
I mean, the American, the number of associations, American Medical Association, Endocrine Society, I mean, you name it, American Pediatric Society, you know, all these medical professional organizations, most of them have adopted affirmative care, which means their job is to affirm the patient's self-diagnosis with regard to this one issue.
I mean, they're, you know, it's turning doctors into, I don't know, life coaches, right?
I mean, these girls are getting these things so easily, and they're 15, they're 16, they're 17, they're 18. How many did you interview when you were doing this book?
So I conducted almost 200 interviews.
So how many teenage girls, or specifically, I actually don't know.
I interviewed a lot, a lot of people, and a bunch of adolescent girls as well.
One of the reasons it's hard to know exactly how many, aside from the fact that we don't have a centralized control of this, Is because you don't need an actual diagnosis of gender dysphoria to get testosterone.
So you just go in and get it.
You don't need the diagnosis.
In England, where you have a centralized medical care and you do need a diagnosis, they know that the numbers for adolescent girls are up over 4,000%.
Well, because, like, even when we're talking about it, I'm like, oh, here's a landmine.
Oh, here's a landmine.
Like, everything we're saying.
Like, if you talk at all about trans people, you run the risk of pissing people off and offending people and staying out.
You know, you're going into an area where it's unless you are 100 percent in support of their decision and their rights and you celebrate them, you're going to get in real trouble.
And for the people that don't think people are easily influenced...
That's how cults start.
Cults don't start because they make sense.
Cults start because people want to belong.
And the idea that there's not a difference between someone who's willing to join some crazy radical cult to belong versus any other sort of social movement That's a lot of what people do.
You're seeing it now with a lot of our society.
There's paths that people go on to where they see other people doing it, and they see a lot of people getting celebrated, and so they go down that path.
This really is a lot of the foundation of the social media influencer.
One of the reasons why they're doing that.
It's because they see other people do it, and they get this sort of positive reaction from it, and then they wind up saying, oh, well, this is the path that I'm going to go on.
To make the jump from that sort of thinking and behavior to changing your gender is where people hesitate.
They're like, is she right about this?
Is this woman a bigot?
Like, who are you?
Who are you and why did you write this book?
And what has the negative reaction been from people who are trans?
I mean, I get so many doctors will contact me like we live in the Soviet Union.
They will say, oh my god, I can't talk about this, but I really, you know, I have to let you know that what's going on here is crazy and I don't agree with this diagnosis and it's clearly socially influenced and, you know, all this stuff.
And you think, like, you can't give your medical opinion without getting fired?
Yeah, this is dangerous, but one of the things that I see is when women or trans women, when a male transitions to being a woman and then enters into women's spaces, they do so with the aggressiveness of a male.
And this is something that a lot of women have been very upset about, particularly TERFs, you know, trans, exclusionary, radical feminists.
They have a real hard time with Biological males talking about feminist issues and shutting down discussion about whether or not trans people are women, whether or not they should be in these spaces, whether or not they should be in these conversations.
People who will push into a locker room, insist on showering where you've got a bunch of...
And this happened.
I wrote about it in Palm Springs.
A girl's water polo high school team showed up to...
shower in their locker room and there's a full man showering in the shower and the girls got scared, you know, got uncomfortable and he announces he's a woman.
And you can have a penis and be a woman, which is also.
Okay.
Like, you're not even gonna make the commitment?
Like, if you're gonna be in a shower with a woman, Jesus Christ.
Like, saying you're a woman and having a penis and being in a shower with a bunch of women, I mean, we gotta come up with some sort of a way of protecting young girls from people who are doing things like that.
You shouldn't have to see a naked man In a shower, if you're a biological female and, you know, you're 15 years old and you think you're showering with your team and a male comes in.
And it's interesting that if you discuss this, you're a bigot.
It's really weird.
And it's this denial of reality that it's not like you don't want someone to be happy, but for someone to say that it's fair for a biological male to compete against biological females, that's crazy.
And when you have this conversation with people, I always say, okay, well, do you think men should be able to join women's teams?
No.
Well, then what are we doing?
Well, what are we doing?
Should men be able to compete against women?
No.
Okay, so biological males that identify as women should be able to compete against women.
Is that what you're saying?
Because they're still males.
Like, when do you make the transition?
Like, when is it...
Do you have to...
And then, well, people will point to outliers.
Well, there's some women that have more testosterone naturally.
Okay, but those are very rare.
You know, when one of those gets in your division and you're a woman and she happens to also be a woman and she has naturally more testosterone, well, I guess you're fucked.
But that's just nature.
I mean, that's also like, if you're my size and you want to play basketball against LeBron James, you're fucked too.
You know, like, competition's not necessarily all that fair when it comes to just human bodies.
Like, some people are just genetically gifted and some people are not.
But we make a distinction for a reason.
The biological distinction between males and females.
It's because men are overwhelmingly stronger, faster, have larger hearts, more oxygen capacity, bigger bones.
Outside of athletic competition, I would like them to be recognized as a full woman.
I would like that.
I would love it if everybody just treated them like they're a woman and respected them with their new name or whatever they want to do.
But when you get involved in athletic competition, where I took a lot of heat was when it was about mixed martial arts, where there was a mixed martial arts fighter who transitioned.
And there was just a story written about it the other day.
It was a ridiculous story saying that the science...
Protesting it is junk science which is horse shit and this person was a male for 30 years Became a woman for two and started beating the fuck out of women without telling them that she had been a male most of her life and And people were so that was where I really realized that's when I first started to realize that There's some crazy psychological connection to this.
The arguments that people have, these progressive arguments, they're saying these things not necessarily because they've objectively, rationally dissected this problem and looked at it in terms of pros and cons and what's really happening.
They looked at it from an ideological standpoint and a very rigid one.
Like if you want to be accepted by progressive people, that is a woman, always a woman.
This was back when I used to talk to people on Twitter, but I had this one conversation with this woman and she said that she was always a woman.
And I said, no, she was a man for 30 years.
And she goes, no, she was always a woman.
I said, even when she got a woman pregnant and had a baby?
Because the idea is that trans women in this Olympics of oppression, trans women are deemed higher on the scale.
They're more oppressed and more marginalized than biological women.
So biological women get fucked over in this design.
Because so few people are trans, This person can do this and everyone can celebrate and if you're not competing against her, so what?
No one has a stake in the game, so they don't really care.
And the women that fought her without knowing...
See, I'm in full support of people fighting her if they know that she's to be a man.
If that's what you want to do, I'm in full support of people skydiving, riding bulls, you want to jump motocross bikes and do flips, do whatever the fuck you want.
But you should know what you're getting into.
If you show up to go on a pony ride and someone puts you on a bull, that's not good.
You should know that you're about to get on a bull.
If you think you're going to fight a biological female, it turns out to be a man who was a man for 30 years and then transitioned to be a female.
And has been on natural male hormones all throughout puberty, all through his life, and then becomes a she, and now you're going to fight her and they're not going to tell you?
Yeah, I interviewed a lot of lesbians for the book who have really like taught me a lot about just how beaten down they are in the broader culture today.
Because, you know, their groups get infiltrated.
They have these underground social groups now.
I've heard this from many lesbians across the country.
They have underground – and the reason they need these vetting processes for their social groups is trans activists will try to come in insisting they're lesbians.
Men – That become women, they retain some of the characteristics that make men gross.
And part of that is being aggressive and competitive and wanting to dominate spaces.
And this is some of the things that a lot of these TERFs have had a problem with.
And this is why they became trans-exclusionary radical feminists, because they felt like these biological males were entering into their spaces with that sort of male energy.
And it's all because if you don't go, if you don't toe that line, you will experience attacks.
And if you read those attacks, they'll hurt your feelings.
And so then you adjust.
And I've seen people do that.
I've seen people say things that they really believe and then get attacked and then adjust and say something that is more to appease the masses than it is their actual thoughts on the matter.
Well, it's also we're denying the nuances of psychology.
That people are malleable, and there's a lot going on there.
I mean, people are not binary.
It's not one or a zero.
You're a this or a that.
You're happy or you're not, and this is going to fix it.
We just need to inject you and slice off your boobs.
That's not human.
We vary so wildly that I think for someone to look at a teenager and come to this conclusion that you, in fact, would be happier, That should be an arduous process where you're presented with all sorts of opposing information.
It's almost like you should be at a debate.
There should be pros and cons presented.
It should be something where you're looking at all life.
Like your future will be radically different if you take path A versus path B. Right.
They have a new drug out for cholesterol and there's a conference and everyone discusses the risks and benefits and what are the harms and what is the percent chance that this could hurt?
You know, everybody is open in discussing it.
And whenever I talk to doctors who, you know, work around this issue, maybe they're an endocrinologist or whatever, they will tell me that when they attend medical conferences and transgender medicine comes up, it is a purely celebration festival.
The one that I think I really struggled with or that surprised me big time was people always try to get me to say it's child abuse to put your kid on puberty blockers and whatnot.
It's child abuse.
The parents are committing child abuse.
And I don't say that.
And I don't say that for a reason because I've interviewed the parents.
And once you interview parents of kids that – you know, parents who have transitioned their kids, you start talking to them and you realize that they thought they were doing what was right for their kid.
They were really scared.
They didn't know.
Like they're very concerned.
I mean they're worried.
And they've been encouraged by mental health professionals who should have been looking out for the child that if you don't do this, your child could kill herself or himself, you know.
And that's terrifying.
And sometimes I'll bring up the risks with them and they won't have heard about them.
I'll say, but, you know, just checking with you, you know, what about the long-term, you know, maybe you're foreclosing orgasm.
Like if your kid goes through all this and goes on the, you know, that to testosterone and then gets the surgeries, because they never went through normal puberty, they may never experience orgasm.
What about that?
And they'll never have heard of that.
Or, you know, we're putting so many capacities at risk.
Well, there's a real problem with the way people are willing to discuss things, that they're not willing to, in any way, address the negative aspects of transitioning.
And one of the things about hormone blockers that drove me mad was they were trying to say that you could put a child on hormone blockers, and if the child changed their mind, there would be no problem whatsoever.
Kids, preschool age kids are pretty, in a typical family where there's not, you know, been abuse or mistrust or whatever, you know, kids pretty much announce, in my experience, announce almost everything.
I mean, they're really open.
I hate this.
Whatever.
They, you know, it's not the kind of thing a parent won't know.
Could you imagine that those doctors and psychologists would be in fear of expressing that they don't think it's a good idea the same way you were discussing therapists will secretly talk to you about the problems of them expressing themselves honestly?
Like, say there's one kid who could be helped by puberty blockers.
Until – I mean, I explored a lot of these issues with a lot of people.
Until, you know, psychologists I respect, people who have been very open on a lot of this stuff, until they tell me there's no children who could ever be helped by puberty blockers, I'm not someone who will come out in favor of abandoning.
But that begs the question, how would one know whether your kid is the kid that could benefit from puberty blockers versus one who you really should just let become an adult and go through all the various changes that children go through?
So not doing anything, not doing a major intervention is probably in many cases a totally safe bet.
In other words, you don't have to go in there and immediately – I mean part of what's crazy about our age is we think the moment our kids are in distress, we need to medicate them.
They can never be upset, right?
We are pushing this accommodation of every discomfort and everything our kids say.
And it's pretty safe to say that there's going to be a lot of people listening to this that don't even want us talking about this because you're a stereotypical biological female.
I'm a stereotypical biological male.
And maybe a lot of people would say this is not even your space to be discussing.
They'll say to me, you know, basically, and what they don't say is, a bunch of trans activists are offended that you're talking about teenage girls, the mental health of teenage girls, not the activists.
Right?
Who are mostly biological males.
This is teenage girls' health.
Why can't we talk about it?
I mean, I've had my publisher.
They're trying to get my publisher to drop me.
There's a huge campaign for that.
I mean, it's like, you know, I've used this example before, but like abortion.
Some people say abortion is just a woman's issue.
No one else can have an opinion about it.
And other people feel, like, people feel different ways about abortions.
Other people feel, wait a second, it's not just about a woman's health.
It's also the life of this unborn child.
And so, you know, people feel differently.
Like, who's allowed to have an opinion on abortion?
But this issue that I'm talking about is just about the health of teenage girls.
That's it.
So why can't we talk about what's going on with these teenage girls?
And objectively, the way you're describing that particular time period in a child's development, it is fraught with peril, right?
There's so much going on in a girl's life as she's transitioning from being a kid to being a woman and going through all the hormones and all the society and all the chaos of school and social stuff.
Well, some organizations are recognizing that it's an issue.
Powerlifting.
They're starting to ban biological males from competing in women's divisions of powerlifting because they've literally blown the roof off what world records used to be.
Well, we're talking about squats and cleans and presses and Olympic lifts, which are particularly...
I mean, these are really difficult to do anyway.
And to achieve the type of numbers that these trans women are achieving, they're world record numbers because they've never had a woman do that before because they really weren't born women.
And think about, like, the heroes for these young girls.
I mean, I grew up in the era of, like, worshipping, like, Martina and Chris Everett in tennis.
I played tennis.
And you really look up to these women.
I mean, they're so strong.
They're so fast.
And what if all of a sudden not only did you never get to hear about Chris Everett because she was beaten long ago by a biological man, now you have a man who says he's a woman who's now—well, how many girls are lining up to be just like him?
The Martina Navratilova thing is where it just shows you how fucking crazy everybody's gotten.
To say that she's anti-LBGT. Like, what?
She's literally the spokeswoman.
I mean, literally, she was out before anybody.
I mean, we're dealing with a really insane byproduct of these times where people are dealing with social media, Organized groups of people attack people for having divergent opinions and this need that people have to be loved and not have people attack them.
So they'll alter their stance on things in order to appease the mob, in order to align themselves with the progressive groupthink.
If it was your child that got screwed over, if your kid was going for a basketball scholarship and all of a sudden a biological male was on her team, I don't know if you know the story about the 50-year-old biological male who transitioned, went to high school, played college basketball, and then transitioned to being a woman and then went back to school as a woman and was in his 50s.
And playing women's college basketball.
I think he was 6'5".
He was enormous.
I mean, see if you can find that story.
50-year-old.
He was more than 50. And then playing college basketball competing.
And I think these activists would prefer to keep scaring people to the point where nobody does read this because they think being trans should never be questioned.
Nothing about being trans ever should be questioned.
Yeah, and if this book reaches one parent that can reach one child and show them this book and explain to them that there's something going on that can influence you physically, mentally, psychologically, you could be very confused and you could think that this is the path towards happiness and cause yourself irreparable damage and still not be happy.
So I leave my messages open on Twitter in case they need to get, you know, there are great resources out there.
Fourth Wave Now, Parents of ROGD Kids, there are great resources, but sometimes they don't know about them.
Because, you know, all these resources need vetting processes now because the activists attack them.
So they'll call me.
I got a call from a woman this week.
And she was sobbing because parents usually cry when they're on the phone because it's about their kid.
And you know what she said to me?
She said, I feel this is a progressive woman in a progressive city in America, totally not religious, you know.
And she's sobbing.
And she said to me...
I can't believe I get – my daughter started down this road and I can't believe I get the benefit because of other parents who went through this who were brave enough to talk.
Yeah, and it seems like that's really the only way these people that are going through this with their children are ever going to get any light at the end of the tunnel is to see that some people have already done this and to learn from the mistakes of the past and to learn from the problems that these kids have encountered.
Upon transitioning and that this group think model, this contagion as you describe it, does happen to kids.
It happens with cutting.
It happens with even suicide packs.
It happens with a lot of weird stuff that kids, particularly kids that feel like they're outcasts and they're depressed.
What could be done different in terms of some education or programs or some sort of psychological help in groups of kids to let kids know in school like we address all these different aspects of a child's development like mathematics and English and history but we spend very little time addressing the one thing that is probably most important is how they interface with the world psychology and what what's wrong what's going on inside of them and We're
them some tools to navigate life.
This is not something that gets taught in school, strangely, and this is one of the reasons why they go looking for it afterwards.
People, they're constantly looking for motivation in self-help people, in books, and trying to find some tools.
I mean, I never considered teaching kids about psychology.
I never encountered psychology until I was in college.
And I think that's an amazing idea.
The problem is, is that these kids are getting indoctrinated instead of, you know, instead of exploring a topic, they're getting indoctrinated in gender ideology.
California starts in kindergarten.
This is a mandated part of the curriculum you can't opt out of.
You know, like all activism is under the same blanket, whether it's, you know, anti-racism activism or, you know, gender nonconformity, non-binary, 50 different pronoun activism.
And, you know, it's a lot of it is indoctrination.
It's indoctrination to progressive groupthink.
And it's not necessarily what you would really think of.
When you think of activism, you think of the civil rights movement.
You think of activism.
You think of positive things and changes that we want to take place.
But when you're dealing with children and developing human beings and minds and in dealing with an influential person who's standing in front of these people who's older and wiser, supposedly, and they try to bend these minds towards the ideology they support, things get real weird.
And if you're a parent and you're not aware that this is happening to your kid while your kid's at school – I have a buddy of mine who found something like this out was happening in his school.
And then he got a hold of the paperwork and he was furious.
He was like, "This is crazy." Right.
Like, "What are we doing to children?
Has this been vetted?
Is this something where we're all in agreement on this sort of education process for children?
So they're reading books like I Am Jazz in California to kids, and that suggests that you might – and it tells kids that you might have a boy's brain and a girl's body.
They're being taught this as if this is true, right?
Now, of course, there's no evidence that you could ever have a boy's brain in a girl's body.
I mean, it doesn't make sense, right?
But they're taught that alongside things that are factual, that are biological.
I mean, there are some evidence that there are neurological differences, you know, that, you know, is certainly worthy of study.
I mean, it's open to various kinds of interpretation and it's a new area that's being studied and there may be differences in transgender people's brains.
There might be.
I certainly would not say that there aren't.
But a boy's brain, I mean, every cell in a boy's body is stamped with an XY chromosome, right?
So the idea that somehow an XX-chromosomed brain got stuck into his head is kind of silly, right?
And when this gets discussed, anytime it gets discussed on this podcast, and I'm assuming on any podcast, It's just people explode and they get so angry about it.
But where people are getting more and more sensible is when it comes to sports.
I mean, that seems to be where the rubber hits the road.
It really does.
It seems to be where people are going, hey, this doesn't seem right.
You know, and particularly like the fighting one to me was like so egregious and so obvious.
I'm hopeful that this is a transitionary period for our culture and that we realize, like, yes, you should be kind.
Yes, you should be progressive and open to all these different people that have all these different ways of being and existing in this world, but not at the expense of other people.
In particular, let's not pretend that that 6'5 gentleman who's 50 is the same as your 18-year-old daughter who's in college.
Yeah, so teenage boys is a harder case because I think for a few reasons.
Are there boys whose moms will call me and say, And I didn't focus on the boys and I didn't do it for a really important reason, but I think it's worthy of explanation and exploration.
I didn't focus on the boys because with the girls it's clear.
Because we have known for 100 years that there's a thing called gender dysphoria and it overwhelmingly afflicts males.
And now, out of nowhere, across America and across the West, the predominant demographic is teenage girls with no childhood history.
We know that's not typical gender dysphoria.
So then the question is, what is it, right?
But with boys, it's more complicated because there have always been these boys, these males, who have had real gender dysphoria.
So I think a lot more research has to be done in that area.
And the problem is, it's hard to do it.
Lisa Littman, who's the one who did the study on the teenage girls, she's been trying to study detransitioners.
She's doing great studies on detransitioners, women who regret it because, well, all people who regret it, but a lot of them are now women.
And the reason, of course, they're now women is because they never had gender dysphoria.
So they weren't cured by medical transition.
So now they regret it.
And they're called detransitioners, right?
And she's already had her study undermined because a bunch of people, trans activists on social media said, everyone come and validate the study essentially.
And they all did.
So they falsified her results, right?
Because they ruined the results.
The study had to be scrapped and now she's redoing, she's trying to redo it.
Well, they took the survey, but they were able to skew the results, right?
And she saw on social media they were directing people to take the study to mess up the results.
So now we have a population, detransitioners, that we need to study, we need to learn from, and you can't.
It's hard.
And that's cancel culture right there.
That's shutting down medical study that will help us understand more about gender transition and more about gender dysphoria and also this population of teenage girls.
Yeah, I was looking at a discussion about, there was a particular website that was dealing with male to female transitioners who then went back to being male again.
And they were furious at this page and furious at these people for expressing their story.
And I was like, I was looking at this and I was thinking to myself, it's so strange that you're looking at, when you're talking about someone who transitions, You're talking about a very small percentage of the population that is a male that feels they should be a female to begin with.
And then you have this surgery, and you have this chemical or hormonal intervention, and you change your body, and you change who you are, and then regret.
And then coming back.
And they were so vehemently opposed to this website.
I'm like, but couldn't you imagine?
Imagine a person who's gone through this change, so you know that you are very different than someone like Jamie, who doesn't have this issue, right?
Who's just a man.
You know that people are different.
So why would you think that there's no way anybody could go through that and have regret?
Because people vary so much, but they were so in opposition to these people's stories, and they were saying that essentially this is These people putting this website out was hate speech, and this is promoting anti-trans feelings and thinking.
And I guess they would point to someone who's anti-trans would point to that website and go see these anecdotal stories of people that transitioned that had a horrible time of it and hated it and went back.
People have – we know that there are different causes of the same kind of symptoms.
I use the example in my book.
I mean osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
Apparently one of the experts I talked to, Ray Blanchard, gave the example.
They both cause swollen fingers.
OK. So you've got two types of people who say they're transgender.
One who's genuinely suffering gender dysphoria and always has in childhood and another who discovered it on the internet with her friends.
So now we're supposed to pretend those are the exact same conditions and we're not supposed to look at them or explore them or figure out what's the difference.
Now, when you present – have you ever presented this discussion to someone who opposes you and how – or this argument to someone who opposes you and how do they treat that?
Just what you just said right there, which is very concise.
I've engaged with all kinds of people online, you know, and I always invite people to talk to me in a reasonable way.
I can't think of, you know, a good, you know, response that I've...
Well, let me think.
Okay.
So sometimes people will say, and I get this, and I actually think this is a good response to me.
They'll say to me, but if you make it harder, if your book makes it harder, number one, people are going to misconstrue it.
They're going to think this applies to everybody, which is a legitimate concern, right?
And then somebody who's really gender dysphoric who needs these surgeries won't be able to get them, right?
And also they're going to think that everybody would regret and no one's helped by transition and some of these people might, you know, come to harm because of that.
I think that's a legitimate response, right?
And it's not compelling to me because my attitude is let's discuss it all.
So the activists will say, some kids are gender fluid.
And you say, well, then why would you push permanent hormonal intervention and surgeries on someone who might later decide that they were fine as a woman, right?
I mean, that you've just acknowledged with gender fluid.
I mean, this thing is all over the place.
I have surgeons.
Surgeons will give this surgery.
They'll remove healthy breasts for a woman who says she's non-binary.
So she doesn't even say she's really a man.
She says she's non-binary now.
Well, wait.
I thought the whole point of the surgery was to help this woman become who she really is, a man.
But now you're saying that you'll give it to 16-year-old girls who say they're non-binary.
Because, yeah, when I was 13, I was a fucking moron.
Thank God I never had an idea to change my gender when I was 13. Right.
It's, I'm hoping that over time people realize you can be both open-minded and progressive and kind and also aware of the pitfalls of a very real problem.
And that's what this seems to be.
It seems to be a very real problem that Again, I gravitate towards things people shy away from.
So people are shying away from this.
I'm like, why?
Like, why are we shying away from this?
Why is everyone so scared of this trans subject?
Why is everyone so scared?
Well, it's because of social media.
It's because of these activist mobs.
They're not doing themselves any good and they're not doing the whole idea of being a trans person any good because they make people associate trans people With the types of mobs that attack Martina Navratilova, the type of mobs that go after these studies that show detransitioners and what their experience were and fuck up the study.
Transgender adults reach out to me online all the time and say that.
They say to me, you know, I'm embarrassed by this crazy activist group.
I don't want people to think that I'm like that.
I don't support their mobbing.
And I just say that, you know, whenever I'm interviewed, I say, listen, this is not, you know, the activists don't represent all transgender adults by a long shot.
And I hope people listen to this with an open mind and just listen to it.
And this doesn't discount anyone who's trans.
It really doesn't.
This is not what we're talking about here.
And if you are trans and genuinely trans and happy being trans, You should want people to understand that there's other things going on.
Right, exactly.
That we're not talking about you.
This is a condition that young girls are facing as they become adults and going through these crazy hormonal transitions and social transitions, and it can damage them.