Meghan Murphy, a former leftist turned free-speech advocate, details her shift away from rigid ideologies like socialism and feminism after years of ideological suppression, including Twitter’s ban for critiquing gender identity. She debates biological males in women’s sports, citing fairness concerns and medical risks, while Joe Rogan questions uncritical acceptance of transgender identities, comparing it to extreme political polarization. Their discussion highlights systemic censorship and the clash between personal authenticity and ideological conformity, culminating in Murphy’s Women Leaving the Left event on June 10 at Austin Central Library. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I mean, I guess, so part of the thing that happened was that I realized that attaching yourself to any movement and any ideology limits critical thought and independent thought, you get trapped into this box and the people that you're allied with in these movements also trap you into that box.
And I am a writer.
And that's, you know, I'm a thinker.
You know, like, I want to learn.
I want to know.
And I want the freedom to change my mind about things.
I want the freedom to explore new ideas and I want the freedom to talk to, you know, I also do podcasts and I want to be able to, part of the reason I do it is because it's interesting, like it's a great way to learn.
I've learned so much just from the opportunity to talk to so many different kinds of people and ask them questions about things that I don't know about.
Running a podcast and being able to have conversations with people has changed who I am.
I mean, if you go back 12 years ago to when I started the podcast, what I know and the way I talk and the way I think about things, it's very different.
This is the thing that I have a problem with, with all this stuff.
It's like...
I'm very open-minded and very liberal when it comes to gay rights, women's rights, civil rights.
You know, even things that I'm still on the fence about now, like universal basic income.
Boy, I was all in until the pandemic.
And then watching the way people behaved when they got a hold of a lot of unemployment and the money from the government, the COVID relief money, and they didn't want to work anymore.
I was like, ooh.
I know it's not a lot of people.
It's not like all the people react in the exact same way.
But I have friends that own businesses and they couldn't get people to work for them.
I have a friend who owns a restaurant and he couldn't get a bartender.
The bartender would only work for $20 an hour, or excuse me, for 20 hours a week so that he could get unemployment.
But I think that's partly, like, baked into left-wing ideology nowadays because there's this, like, opposition to...
You know, independence, there's an opposition to trying to better yourself as an individual person.
There's an opposition to individualism because you're supposed to blame the system.
You're supposed to blame capitalism, racism, patriarchy, you know, and then all the myriad of phobias, transphobia, fatphobia.
And so the solution is not to change you.
It's not your fault.
It's their fault because they're phobic or the system's trying to keep you down.
So I think that not wanting to work anymore is like, well, why should I? I don't have to.
They don't realize that it's good for your mental health to work.
It's not good for your mental health to sit around in your apartment on Netflix or on Zoom or on social media or on dating apps or looking at porn all day.
Well, the thing is, it's not good to not be self-sustaining, is my thought.
I think there's an issue.
I think for many people, you get unemployment and you use that unemployment to try to find another job and to sustain yourself, and it's great.
But for some people, there is a general human tendency to, when you're offered a break, to take that break.
You know, when you're offered money to do nothing, to do nothing, and you'll do nothing.
I think my thoughts about universal basic income were, and this is what I liked about it, I liked the idea of giving a person an opportunity where, like, we pay for so many things.
We just sent 40 billion dollars to Ukraine, right?
Why can't we figure out a way to give people enough money to sustain themselves so that they could actually pursue their interests?
And do what they want to do.
And I think that would make for a stronger world, a stronger economy, a stronger community of people, and happier, healthier people.
That was my thought.
But then when I saw how people reacted with the government money from COVID relief and from unemployment, I was thinking, man, I don't know.
There's a lot of people that aren't going to react the right way.
And what they're going to do is they're going to take an easy way out and they're going to lay around.
And that sucks.
If you give people an opportunity to be lazy, unfortunately, a lot of people are going to be lazy.
And the problem is if you oppose that, if you oppose that relief, then people say you're cruel and you're not looking out for the working people.
First of all, I hate those fucking categories like working people.
Goddammit, everybody's working.
Shut the fuck up.
It's not a working people issue.
We're all working.
Everyone's doing something, right?
Or you're not.
And if you're not, that is the problem.
The problem is when people don't want to do anything.
Because that is a general instinct that people have towards laziness.
And the problem, I think, with whether it's universal basic income or any other social safety nets, which I very much support for the most part, is that some people, it's not everybody, but some people have a tendency to just be fucking lazy.
And again, this is attached to, I think, leftist ideology, because I think what I've realized of late is that leftist ideology is about idealism.
Like, it's like, we want to create this world, and this is the way the world should be.
But in reality, that world doesn't exist, and people don't work like that.
Like, what they want.
And I'm saying this as somebody who believed these things.
People get really mad at me.
People are mad at me all the time.
Nothing new.
But, you know, people, when I start criticizing the left, people get angry at me.
First of all, because people, I think, like to categorize people and box them in.
And when they start moving outside of the box, they get angry and confused and frustrated.
And so they'll just want to write you off or hate you or call me right wing or whatever.
But, you know, I was a leftist, and I thought like these people, and I thought that it was right.
And the reason that I was a leftist is because I care about people.
It's not because I'm an evil communist.
Like, the right is very bad at writing people off, too.
It's like, all these communists.
It's like, these people don't even really know what communism is.
I'm sure they've never read Marx, for the most part.
But, you know, I didn't want people to be poor.
I didn't want people to not have housing and food and access to healthcare and education.
I wanted things to be more equal and just.
That's why I was a leftist.
But the solution was an idea.
You know, like if we create this kind of society, then we'll all live in happy communities And everybody will work and nobody will slack off and like there'll be no exploitation and like rape will disappear and oppression will disappear.
And that's not what happens in the real world.
That's not what's happened in places that have implemented communist regimes.
The argument is always that socialism has never been implemented correctly.
This sort of utopian idea of what a real, genuine, compassionate socialist community could look like.
That's never really been done correctly.
But do you think it's a human nature issue?
The idea of socialism is great on a surface level if you're thinking about people that work hard and that want everyone else to do well and they want to all contribute.
I think you could have a socialist community of very driven, disciplined people where they share.
They share things.
We have some socialist things, right?
Like the fire department is an excellent example of socialism.
Because we pay in to this thing that supports these people who put out fires.
And nobody complains about it.
It's a normal thing.
It's something that we contribute to.
It's like a fund.
And that fund puts out fires.
And it puts out fires based on your tax dollars that you put into it.
And you don't want a society where if you don't have money, they don't put the fire out, right?
But some people would argue that that's where it ends.
Like you shouldn't have that and extend that to education.
You shouldn't have that and extend that to healthcare.
I think that's where socialism could work.
And I don't mean socialism like across the board.
I mean socialist ideas.
I think the idea of A universal healthcare system where everyone is covered and you never have to worry about anything bankrupting you because you broke a leg or you hurt your back, that you're taken care of and that we all contribute to that.
And again, if we can give $40 billion to Ukraine, why the fuck can't we do that?
We can do that.
That's totally possible.
The education system.
The idea that you have to be in debt.
I was reading a story the other day about this woman who's $250,000 in debt.
From student loans.
And she took out $150,000.
So over the course of the interest that's accumulated, she's got $100,000 more in interest.
I do think that it is imperative that people have access to health care.
And I think the health care system in America...
It's horrible because I think the aspect of it that's horrible is that people can go into insane amounts of debt because they got sick or hurt.
Like, that's not okay to me.
It's not okay.
And student loan debt, like, you're right.
Like, you get...
An amount of debt that you can't afford to pay off with the job that you've gotten from going to university, and then they're charging you all this interest, so it makes it doubly impossible to pay it off, and it's like a trap.
Do you think that there's a certain amount of struggle like that, that is not just good for you, but necessary in order to steal your discipline and create a person who can overcome adversity?
If everything is handed to you, this is the argument that the right will use, right?
That if you make things too easy, if you give people free education, if you give people free healthcare, that they're going to become soft and we need a resilient, tough country that works hard and the way you get people to work hard is you force them to.
Because that's the only way that people are going to do it.
I mean, I think that struggle is imperative and important.
I think that you need pain to experience and understand pleasure.
I think if there's just everything is easy for you, I think you get really depressed.
Like, you need to work hard and you have to know what it means to, like, suffer and feel pain and to, like, be bad at things and to, like, get better at things.
I know I don't need to tell you this, but, like...
I mean, what I experienced was useful to me in the long term, I think, because I understand, like, I understand real life.
I understand why people go into debt.
I understand how hard it is for people who are poor and working class To get out of that.
Like, what a lot of people on the right don't understand is that class still is a real thing in North America.
It's not as overt or as visible or as extreme as it is in third world countries.
But it's still real.
I mean, if you are born poor and working class, it's not that it's impossible to get out of it.
You can, and lots of people do, and that's incredible.
But you're challenged in so many different ways, mentally and in terms of systemic barriers, you know, being able to get a degree, for example, and having the kind of credit that you need to take out loans to, you know, buy property, get a house, so on and so forth.
But there's like a mental barrier that I experienced because I thought, I'm working class.
I'm always going to be working class.
I don't understand money.
I don't understand capitalism.
I think this is partly to do with my politics also, I'll say that.
Like, I don't know...
I don't know how to make money.
I don't know how to save money.
I don't have, like, business sense.
And I was...
I limited myself in that way.
Because I just thought...
I was like, I'm never going to be able to own property.
Like, I'm never going to be able to afford to buy a house.
So whatever.
Like, so I'm just going to...
Work at, you know, making $50,000 a year and pay my rent and that's the end of that.
And I think that people who come from money see money as an option.
It's accessible to them.
So I think that they might work harder to make more money and to, you know, invest and to save and to...
I mean, and I knew when I was a kid, I knew when I was a teenager, and this is still true now, that a lot of people who own houses and properties, that's because they had family money.
You know, their parents put their down payment down for them.
So if you don't have that, I don't have that.
So I was like, how am I, like, what, am I going to save up $30,000, like, for a down payment?
Yeah, the term working class, one of the things that bugs me about it is it's one of those things that gets used often as a cheap political ploy.
Like, we're here for the working class.
And then people, you need to support the working class.
That's what drives me nuts about it, because it's this weird sort of categorization of people.
Because it does classify people in almost an inescapable little tomb.
You're the working class.
You're part of the working class.
What the fuck does that even mean?
Like, are you talking about people that are struggling to pay their bills?
Yeah.
Well, that's the majority of people.
That's the majority of people.
And oftentimes, what we consider not the working class, people are such knuckleheads that if they make $400,000 a year, they spend $399, you know, and they become the working class.
They have a lot of other stuff that they have to pay for.
Well, I mean, I think part of this, again, is that I don't want to categorize myself as anything because then you get stuck in these boxes and it's like, well, you're a leftist, so you have to support Black Lives Matter.
You're a leftist, so you have to believe women.
You're a leftist, so you have to, you know, want to open the borders.
You want to abolish the police.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's what I don't want.
And I don't want to be trapped in any category or ideology.
I support practical ways to help people.
So if these policies work to help people, then I support them.
If there's different policies that are categorized as right wing that help people, that are better, that are more effective, then I'll support those policies.
That's what I mean.
And also, you know, what the left has become is totally different than what the left used to be.
I don't believe that the left supports the working class or cares about the working class.
I think that the left is caught up in...
I think that the left consists of middle and upper class people who don't know any poor people, who don't know any marginalized people, who don't know working class people, who don't know...
As these groups and categories that exist in their head.
But also, I believe that Twitter was going after me specifically because I was speaking critically about gender identity ideology and because I was asking these kinds of questions.
I don't think that it was specifically because of these tweets.
I think they took those tweets as an excuse.
I think they were trying to get rid of me and then they're like, Okay, that's hateful.
I just, I mean, I have to use social media for work because I work for myself, so it's the only way I can get what I produce out into the world, and that's how I make an income.
Almost solely through individual donations.
So people who send me donations through my website, or they sign up to my Patreon, or they pay for a subscription on Substack, which I haven't put anything behind a paywall, so people can just choose to pay or not, so I just appreciate it if people pay because it's how I make an income.
But I don't have...
There's no institution.
It's kind of pure.
It's very pure in a way.
But I also, I would not really, I don't think I would have a public Instagram account if I hadn't been, I didn't start a public Instagram account until I was kicked off of Twitter.
Like, I have to do that.
I don't love spending a bunch of time on social media.
Because his take on it was like, if you were going to buy something and you were buying it under the assumption that, okay, here it goes.
Twitter set to turn bot data over to Musk.
Alright, so this says that Twitter's board is reportedly set to pull an about-face offering Elon Musk internal data on hundreds of millions of tweets as advice for the billionaire to complete his acquisition of the social media company.
Twitter set to turn over information to Musk capturing more than 500 million tweets.
The device the post came from and other information about the account holders The Washington Post reported Wednesday citing an unnamed person familiar with the matter.
Such a move would help respond to Musk's repeated demands for more information about the composition of Twitter's user base and the extent of its problem with bots.
Musk has challenged Twitter's claims that just 5% of its accounts are bots.
Calling the way the company calculates fake accounts very suspicious in a May tweet.
So I'm really interested to see how this plays out because he is what he would describe as a free speech absolutist.
And I think that that is something that people are reluctant to agree is a good thing because they're worried about the negative aspects of free speech.
You know, they're worried about assholes and, you know, and trolls and all that stuff.
I was calling myself a free speech absolutist for a while, and then I interviewed Michael Salina, who's with the Founders Fund, and he organized Hereticon, which was Mm-hmm.
A conference that I went to in Miami in January that was like amazing.
But, you know, if you have a social club that doesn't have employees, you know, like there's places that set up, they set up places as social clubs so that they can get around certain rules.
That's what, if I try to smoke a cigarette now, because every once in a while, in general I find it gross, but every once in a while I'll be like, there'll be a cigarette smell that appeals to me for some reason.
It probably smells like my Du Maurier ultralight king size that I used to smoke when I was 17. And I'm like, I want to try a cigarette.
And then I'm like, ugh, that was fucking disgusting.
And now my mouth tastes like an ashtray.
And it makes me feel ill.
Like, I was lucky about quitting smoking because when I started smoking less, the cigarette started making me feel sick.
So if I would have a cigarette, I would feel sick.
Like, it was not hard.
I wasn't like...
Oh lord, I love smoking cigarettes so much.
I think I just smoked cigarettes because I was like a teenager and I was nervous and wanted to fit in.
Well, it's weird how it is genetic in that some people of certain ancestry, they don't have a historical, you know, there's not like a lot of history of their ancestors drinking alcohol, and they struggle with it, whereas Irish people generally, well, you know, but there are a lot of Irish alcoholics, but they can put it down better for whatever reason.
Yeah, I'm sure there is because it's always been like that for me.
When I had an office job and I had to be at work at 8 in the morning or whatever, I would spend the whole day drinking sugar coffees and then I'd want a cookie and I'd buy some pastry thing at the cafe.
Well, here's the thing that people are pushing back against a lot is the idea of doing remote office work.
There's a lot of people that feel like they're more productive at home, and then there's a lot of other people who feel like their employees need to be in the office because that's the only way they can keep track of whether or not they're being effective or whether or not they're actually working.
One of the things we found out during the pandemic is how many guys jerk off while they're on Zoom calls.
Although some systems of national law still adhere to the view that ships and aircraft are part of the territory of the state, the nationality of which they possess, this is merely a crude metaphor.
In international law, a distinction has been made between three types of state jurisdiction, territorial jurisdiction over national territory, and all persons and things therein.
Quasi-territorial jurisdiction over national ships and aircraft and all persons and things thereon, and personal jurisdiction over all other nationals and all persons under a state's protection as well as their property.
In case of conflict, territorial jurisdiction overrides quasi-territorial jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction, while quasi-territorial jurisdiction overrides personal jurisdiction.
Okay, so there's like tiers.
Okay.
Territorial jurisdiction over national territory.
But that does mean that in cases of conflict, that territorial jurisdiction overrides it.
So that means that if you are over the United States of America, that is territorial jurisdiction.
Because it's territorial.
So like when you're in the ocean, that makes sense.
It's nobody's.
Which is really kind of interesting, right?
It's like we allow people to own everything, but you can't own the ocean.
Yeah, I mean, technically you're not allowed to own a beach.
In Canada, anyway.
Is that true in the U.S. too?
It is, right?
Is it?
But you can buy up all the property close to the beach and then build a fence so that people can't get through.
My parents live on a small Gulf island, and I went to...
In BC and on these islands, you can go to beaches and there's nobody else there.
It's awesome.
It's super beautiful.
Forests are beautiful.
Mountains are beautiful.
Blah, blah, blah.
But I went to this one beach and there's a path down to the beach and it says no trespassing private property, but it's like, well, it's a beach.
I'm going to go to the beach.
And so we're down at the beach and the chick who owns the property comes down and is like...
You know, like, you're not allowed, like, you're basically, you're allowed to come to the beach via a boat, but you're not allowed to walk down her path to the beach.
So she's essentially created a private beach.
She's like, how did you get here?
Like, you guys aren't allowed to walk through this place.
And we're like, oh no, we're just gonna swim back.
People don't own the beach, but you do own everything above high tide.
You can own above high tide.
That's how it is in Malibu.
So I have a friend who has a place in Malibu, and he was telling me that his sons were surfing, and they were in this area, and this guy didn't know that they were his sons.
So the guy comes out and starts screaming and yelling at them.
They get the fuck off the beach.
And he got mad at the guy, and then there's this conflict, and the guy realized, oh, you live here, okay, these are your sons.
But you're not allowed to yell at people to surf.
Because they were laughing and surfing in front of this guy's house.
So he thought, because he spent $10 million on this house, he should be able to tell people, you can't surf in front of my house.
But there's been cases in Malibu where they hire private security.
I think it's called Billionaire's Beach, like Carbon Beach.
These people that have all this money buy these houses and then they hire private security to kick people off the beach.
But they can't.
You're not allowed to.
So then there's lawsuits where people sue the people who kick them off the beach.
And I don't know how they resolve that.
But I know it's ongoing and technically the people that are the beachgoers are correct.
The problem is if you have a bedroom and you like to keep your windows open so you can hear the waves crashing and you have people right below you and they're fucking partying, playing shitty music.
I rented a house there once because my kitchen was getting redone and it wasn't bad because you don't notice that people are there because it's so loud.
You hear it's whoosh, whoosh.
You hear the water crashing against the rocks and everything all day long, and it really is beautiful.
Like in the morning, I would eat breakfast.
We were only there for a couple of months, but I would eat breakfast in the morning, and the way we were at, we were on this place that had like a deck, and the water was almost under the deck.
So when you sit there eating breakfast, it's like you're on the water.
I was born in New Jersey, but I only lived there until I was 7. I lived in San Francisco from 7 to 11. And then I lived in Florida from 11 to 13. And then I lived in Boston for the rest of the time.
I was born in Vancouver and grew up in Vancouver, so I was always near the beach.
We did a lot of camping.
I always swam.
I would bike to Kitt's Pool every day all summer, which is right on the ocean.
And now, the idea of, I live in a beach town now, I would never live somewhere, or I think I would feel almost depressed living somewhere where there was no ocean, or I would feel trapped.
If you really wanted to be a musician, and karaoke is the place where you get to flex your muscles, but then you go back to the factory in the morning.
And it's sad because you're behaving as though you think that you're more talented than you actually are.
And I'm not sure if deep down inside you believe it, but you kind of project that.
Like, I take this really seriously because I'm very good at it and I'm very talented and I can't make a joke about this because that would hurt my ego.
Like, comedians make it now more than ever before.
Talented people, which is great, they get on YouTube, and they put a video up on YouTube, like their own personal thing, and they'll get hundreds of thousands of views, millions of views.
You have to have musicians, have to have fucking sound guys, you have to have the drummer and the guitar player and people that carry your stuff, roadies and trucks for all your shit.
Okay, I understand that some people like different things than me.
But I think when it comes to music, like there's some people who I think genuinely just aren't really into music, which offends me because I'm really into music and I love music.
And people who sort of...
I feel like there's some people who just turn it on and it's noise and they're like, this is the popular thing.
I'm just going to listen to it.
That's what I mean by no taste.
It's not like people who are...
I don't have anything against country.
It's not what I listen to in my spare time, but I totally understand and respect why people like country music.
Listening to that music on headphones, riding a bike next to wild horses and crying because he was so happy because it was such an amazing moment because the song was playing.
I mean, if you don't feel comfortable, you don't have to talk specifically about him, but like, why do you people, like, people who sort of, Who fall into alcoholism or not taking care of themselves.
And maybe they did at some point and then they just stopped.
And I say that, like, I'm thinking of people that I know in my head.
I don't know Bert, so I'm not talking about him.
But, like, people who are, it's like, you were sort of okay and now you're, like, a daily, like, you get drunk every day.
I'm genuinely worried about him because he's almost 50 and he goes hard and, you know, he's very overweight and he decided that when his tour was over, he was going to slow way down and he's going to get in shape.
So he documented it on Instagram.
He documented the size of his gut, size of his chest, like his weight.
He put all that stuff down and he's going to Show measured improvement because I think he's off at the end of this month.
So for three whole months He's just gonna exercise and try to eat right and I feel like it would be really hard to stay in shape and eat healthy if you were on the road all the time You can probably speak to this but like even when I used to before COVID I was traveling probably once a month for work like to go to a talk or something and it ends up being a week and then like I can't if I'm traveling I I'm not working out.
I'm not exercising.
I'm eating on the plane.
I'm buying a sandwich at Starbucks.
I have to be home to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Healthy for me.
I work out four days a week with a trainer and I work really hard.
Not out of self-motivation.
I'm not self-motivated at all.
That's why I have a trainer.
My trainer is excellent.
His name is Chris at Quilombo in Sayulita.
He's so awesome.
I was telling you about him earlier.
He was a really good boxer.
He trained with Canelo.
He's really good at jujitsu.
He competes.
But he's also really into training.
He loves it.
He loves teaching people things.
He loves to see people improve.
I go to training because he'll be disappointed if I don't show up.
And he pushes me really hard, harder than I would ever push myself.
If I was partying, I wouldn't go.
That's the other thing.
If I'm out getting wasted, I'm not going to be able to get any work done the next day, and I'm not going to exercise, and I'm going to eat bad.
It's called The Same Drugs, but I think it's just Megan Murphy at Substack or whatever.
Megan with an H. And it's pretty new, but writing is what I want to do.
I don't have enough time to write as much as I want to write because I spend so much time on the podcasts and the video stuff and just doing admin work and blah blah blah.
There's something about drinking that formulates ideas in my head that don't seem to want to be there without drinking.
Like, there's times when drinking, like, bumps you or shoves you into an area of thought where you're laughing about something that maybe you wouldn't have laughed about.
Or you have, like, what is...
Like, for conversation.
It's, like, one of the greatest things for conversation.
It's a small community, so I know lots of people, and I know if I go to the bar, I'm probably going to see a friend.
But even if I don't, I'll just go sit at the bar, and the person next to me will start talking to me, and they'll be cool, and I'll learn something, and they'll be interesting.
And that's so not the culture.
I would have felt so embarrassed to go to a bar by myself.
Like, men did that in Vancouver.
Men go sit at bars by themselves.
But to be a woman and go sit at a bar by themselves, like, you're going to feel awkward and stupid and embarrassed.
Everyone in Vancouver is so judgy, too.
And you'll feel like people assume you want to be hit on or you're desperate, you have no friends.
Nobody knew what I did or who I was there until I did your podcast and couldn't hide it anymore that I was a bigot.
It was really beautiful because I, you know, I had been so ostracized in Vancouver because of the gender identity stuff.
Like, I mean, for people who don't know, because I'm critical of gender identity and I don't think men can become women and I want to protect women's rights and protect kids.
You know, people in Vancouver, a lot of people just...
Ghosted me.
Some people said, I can't hang out with you anymore.
You can't come to my birthday party because my friend hates you because she thinks you're a transphobe.
Friends of friends who don't know me at all would basically bully my friends into not hanging out with me.
And I was so angry.
I was a little bit hurt, but more just like, fuck you, you fucking pussy.
That is so disrespectful.
You don't disagree with me.
You don't dislike me.
But you're worried about what your friends will think.
And they behaved as though I was causing trouble in their lives because they would end up in these arguments with their friends or in a position where they were being asked to defend me or being asked to condemn me.
And it made things stressful for them.
And they blamed me.
So they would be like, you know, you're making things really hard for me.
And I'm like, I'm not doing anything.
But in Sayulita, so I did your podcast and I came back and everybody was just really proud of me.
One of the problems, Megan, is people agree with you in silence.
They agree with you in hushed tones and whispers.
They'll say it at the water cooler when no one's around.
She's got a point about certain things.
Especially when it comes to athletic competition.
This is one that's dividing the country right now.
It's like this thing where someone can decide or identify as a woman and compete against biological women.
And it turns out the standards that you have to achieve to do that are different everywhere.
It's different with the Olympics.
It's different with certain organizations won't accept trans athletes.
Certain ones will.
Certain ones, all you have to do is identify.
You don't have to have any proof of what you're doing.
Especially when it comes to high school sports and college sports, you are now competing with someone who's trying to get a scholarship.
And if someone is an elite athlete, so say if a woman is an elite athlete in a certain sport, and she has fucking...
Been grinding it out her whole life and then some biological male comes along and identifies as a woman and then a year later is competing against women and has almost supernatural advantages and this is what we're seeing and it doesn't make you a bigot to say that.
This is what's so fucked up about this whole thing.
It's like you can be an open-minded, compassionate person who also sees the truth.
And where the rubber hits the road, in my eyes, is when there's clear classifications of male or female in sports.
It's a great example.
There's a clear classification.
The men don't compete against the women because they have an advantage.
And we've always known that because otherwise these categories wouldn't exist.
And women wouldn't have sports if we didn't know that and we didn't decide if women are going to play sports competitively, if women are going to compete, they have to have their own category because they can't compete against men.
I don't think it's necessarily that the trans person should have to compete as a man.
I don't think that's the answer either.
I don't think there's enough trans people for trans people to compete as trans people, like to win a trans division.
I don't think that's the solution either.
I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that there's rules when it comes to competition.
One of the rules is you can't take performance-enhancing drugs.
Right?
Like if you're a person and you want to compete in certain sports, they blood test you.
They'll Vata test you.
They'll make sure that you're not doing anything.
Well, if you're, let's say, if you're a female to male transgender person, right?
So you're a trans man and you want to be competing with other men.
We really don't hear about that, and we're really not upset at that.
No one's complaining about that happening, right?
But if that person did want to complain, here's what they would say.
This person has exogenous testosterone that's not derived from human beings.
It's derived from wild yams.
Okay, so we do a carbon isotope.
I think that's what it is.
It's a more complicated test.
It's not just recognizing the levels of the test.
It's recognizing where the testosterone comes from.
We have synthetic testosterone in your system.
That's absolutely illegal.
Well, if you have synthetic estrogen in your system, is that okay?
And how much testosterone are you allowed to have?
Because there's a guy named Derek who runs this YouTube show, More Plates, More Dates, and he was going over thresholds.
Because he was talking about that woman, the swimmer from Leah Thomas, and he was going over thresholds.
He's like, the thresholds that were in certain sports where they test and they say, okay, you can compete as a woman, are like, Way higher than most women are.
The solution is that if you're male, you have to compete in the male category.
And if you're female, you have to compete in the female category.
There's no other solution.
The idea of creating a trans category would be fine in theory, but there's not enough trans people for that to make sense.
And my opinion is that if you want to be an athlete, if you want to compete, then you make a decision about whether or not you want to take hormones.
And if you're taking hormones, you can't compete, just like everybody else.
Like, you can be trans if you want, but that might take you out of the competition.
So you choose what's more important to you.
And I'm not saying that to be mean, but there's no other solution.
If you're a male, if you've gone through puberty, you have an advantage.
Your body is totally different.
Like, I just interviewed Taylor Silverman, who is a skateboarder, a female skateboarder, and she lost first place to a so-called trans woman.
Um, so a male who was identifying as a woman.
And she, it was a Red Bull contest and she contacted Red Bull privately.
Like she wasn't trying to make a big show of anything.
She's like a wonderful young woman.
She's like super articulate, super respectful, super smart.
And she's not making a ton of money off of skateboarding.
She's 27 years old.
She's not going to be doing this forever.
She spoke out because she felt it wasn't fair.
She was like, you know, this might affect...
If I have kids one day, it might affect my daughter.
This doesn't really affect me that much.
She contacted Red Bull privately and said, Hey, this happened.
I don't think this is fair.
I lost out on $2,000.
I should have been in first place.
A bunch of other stuff.
Red Bull totally ignored her.
So she posted on social media.
She got a ton of traction, a ton of attention, and a ton of support.
And it's like, maybe some people think about skateboarding, and they're like, well, what advantage does a man have over a woman in skateboarding?
But your hips move differently.
You're jumping.
I don't skateboard, so I'm not going to explain this as well as somebody who's skateboarding.
But there are advantages and differences in all sorts of subtle ways, as well as in very obvious ways when we're talking about sports like track, swimming, MMA. Jesus Christ, you're beating people up.
When that thing was happening where there was a trans woman who was a male for 30 years who was only transitioned within the last two years and was not telling anybody and saying that it was a medical issue.
So she fought two different women that were biological females and beat the fuck out of them.
And that's when I stepped in.
I was like, you're out of your fucking mind.
This is crazy because I've been around martial arts my whole life.
There's a giant difference.
There's a giant difference between men and women.
The big one is power.
The difference is so stark.
It's so different.
Like, if you got a powerful person, like someone who's a really hard striker, like a Tyron Woodley.
If Tyron Woodley transitioned to be female, How much are you going to deplete him where it's not the most ruthless execution every time he steps into the cage?
It's disgusting.
He's too big for most women.
He's 170 pounds.
He was one of the best welterweight champions in the UFC. But if someone was smaller, like 135 pounds, there's women that can beat men.
I mean, I feel like these kinds of things would be the things where people are like, well, I guess women can compete against men, so why are we keeping trans?
But that was a beautiful left hand I'm definitely another one that was yeah, I mean that guy's good What do you do you think that the guy is like how often does this happen where men and women very rarely?
Yeah, that's an example They probably both weigh the same weight, but the amount of power that that guy had like that left It's funny cuz she looks bigger than him I mean, maybe she's taller.
I mean, but people who defend trans women being able to compete against women in sport do use these random examples where it's like, oh, you know, well, so-and-so is faster, or so-and-so beats so-and-so.
But it's like, that's not common.
And to me, the sports thing is so great and interesting because it reaches...
Every normal person who was not engaged in the debate around gender identity, which was primarily for so long.
It really was, like, I don't think people knew this, but it was really, it was radical feminists.
Like, Janice Raymond wrote a book about transgenderism and how it was, like, dangerous to women and women's rights in 1979. What?
You know, she was critical of this idea of transgenderism.
Like she was like, you shouldn't change to fit the gender stereotypes of the world.
I'm fully paraphrasing.
This is not what she said.
She said it's uncritical.
She retracted it in later years because she was bullied into it.
But, you know, this debate was happening in the late 70s and 80s.
And radical feminists were like not having it at all.
Like, it's only recently that all these so-called feminists started to come around and say trans women are women.
And even then, the radical feminists are the ones that have been fighting this for so long.
Julie Bendel, who is a UK journalist, wrote an article in 2004 for The Guardian about what happened at Vancouver Rape Relief, which is a...
It's a rape crisis line and a transition house for women escaping domestic abuse.
And a trans woman, Kimberly Nixon, came to training for counselors.
So counselors who were there at the house working with women who were escaping serious domestic abuse and sexual assault.
And the women who were doing the training were like, you know, sorry, you're a man.
Only women are allowed to train as counselors here.
They only had women employees, volunteers.
Only women are allowed in the house.
And Kimberly Nixon took them to court, to the Human Rights Tribunal.
Vancouver Rape Relief went all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
They won the right to determine their own membership.
They didn't win, you know, trans women or men.
And Julie Bindel wrote about that case in 2004. Radical feminists were trying to warn people about what was happening and what was going to happen if we allowed this to go on.
And nobody listened.
And now it's almost too late.
And, you know, whatever.
This is how things go.
And nobody listens to radical feminists.
This is a very marginal political movement.
Yeah.
But, like...
It's very frustrating to me because now we're seeing I don't want to categorize people because, you know, I was going to say right-wing men, but I like a lot of right-wing men.
There's a lot of right-wing people who are great.
A lot of people who really do care about women's rights.
But we're seeing some right-wing men like showing up online and being like, where are all the feminists on this issue?
How come I'm the only person brave enough to say that men aren't women and to speak up?
And it's like, dude, we have been...
I'm trying to be heard.
I couldn't get anything published on this.
Like, when Bill C-16, Canada's gender identity legislation, showed up, the Liberals were trying to push it through in 2016, I pitched to everywhere to say, these are my concerns with regards specifically to the impact on women's rights.
These are the issues I have with this ideology.
I think it's regressive.
I think it's sexist.
I think it's dangerous.
Nobody would publish anything.
The Canadian media would not have me on.
They would not interview me.
Every single event that we tried to plan, we'd get threatened.
The venues would pull out.
This happened in the UK. This happened in the US. I'm so grateful that I had my own platform and my own website so that I could write about this stuff and so that I could interview women who were doing work on this issue and interview people who were experts.
Because otherwise, I don't know where I would have said any of this stuff.
We finally pushed and pushed and pushed to host talks and that forced the media to cover it a bit.
I don't know why I started complaining about this, except that it makes me really mad.
I don't know who I was talking to about this, but the conversation essentially was...
This person I was talking to, whoever it was, I forgive them.
Forgive me, please.
she was saying that the problem becomes a lot of people that are women who have these groups that are dedicated just to women and then a trans woman will come in these groups and behave like a man and and bring like a man's attitude to this thing and she's like it's specific and it's not discussed so it's this thing that happens where they start to Acting male,
for lack of a better term.
So, like, she was talking about taking over things, running things, like, being, like, very outspoken and aggressive with their opinions about things in almost an intimidating way.
When I say pervert, or when I say fetishist, I know it sounds offensive if I'm like, these men are men with fetishes.
There's research on this.
Men who transition when they're younger tend to be gay men.
I think it's Ray Blanchard that did this research, tend to be gay men.
And men who transition when they're older, middle-aged, tend to be heterosexual men with fetishes, with what might be called cross-dressing fetishes.
They're turned on by wearing women's clothes and by the idea of wearing women's clothes in public, and by the idea of passing as a woman.
Obviously, none of them pass as women.
But it's a fetish, and it's called autogonophilia.
And, you know, a lot of people have talked about this being part of the reason that transgenderism became mainstream, became part of the LGBTQ activism stuff, and why they attach themselves to this born-this-way mantra.
Like, some people are just born trans.
And why this idea of trans kids exists.
Like, some kids are just born in the wrong body.
And some babies are assigned male and, in fact, they're girls.
Because these guys wanted to legitimize their...
Fetishes and their preferred identities, so they had to pretend that it was something innate.
They had to push this narrative that it was something innate, that it wasn't just about them, you know, having this fetish or wearing this clothing.
If someone is born male but they feel in every fiber of their being that they're supposed to be a woman and they're healthy every other way, Is that really mental illness or is there some wiring that should be male and is female?
Some not understood mechanism that makes someone feel like they're a woman or feel like they're a boy?
If you're a male and you feel certain that you're actually supposed to be female, You hate your male body parts so much to such an extent that you cannot live comfortably.
You have to get rid of them.
And to be clear, go ahead and do that.
You're an adult.
You have the right to get cosmetic surgeries.
I think that surgeons should be more accountable and culpable and warn people about the dangers and about the fact that they might not be able to orgasm again or it might be mangled.
These are real serious, dangerous surgeries.
But, you know, that's a mental condition.
Just, like, if you were a man and you believed so strongly, like, there's those people that get, like, you know, lizard, you know, they get, like, bone, like, what are those?
I just don't like your eyeballs done and fucking bolts put in your head But so to go back to that what we're talking about if someone feels like they've been a girl their whole life Doesn't make them actually a girl so you so where does that?
Where should that preclude them from sports should preclude them from?
It's not hilarious that one biological male got two women pregnant.
Here's the question.
If you're a biological male and say you've transitioned and you want to be identified as a female and go to a female prison if you get arrested, do you have to take estrogen?
Well, and in Canada, I've talked to women who have been in prison with men and there are sexual assaults that have gone on in women's prisons perpetrated by men.
It's a celebration and a societal shaming of people who question it and talk about it.
This is not a...
You know, like there's people that are shitty people.
They don't like people for whatever reason, whether they don't like gay people, they don't like trans people, they don't like all kinds of people.
But I'm not even talking about that.
I'm talking about like just there's a mantra that almost you have to say, like trans women are women.
And you say that.
And so if you don't say that, and you even discuss it, if you talk about things like, hey, you know, that swimmer was number 462 with the men, and now she's number one as a woman.
Like, maybe that's not fair.
Like, maybe if that was your kid going to that school, you wouldn't think it's fair.
People would fucking blow up at you.
They'll get mad at you.
There's a certain amount of people that feel like this is their chance to show their loyalty to this ideology and they'll argue it in a very aggressive way.
It's interesting because how many people are we talking about?
How many people is this actually affecting where The discussion has gone through the entire culture.
It's really interesting in that way.
So what happened?
And what rocketed that to the position that it's in now?
I mean, the prison issue specifically, I believe that was just about the Canadian government not wanting to deal with this problem.
And they're like, okay, sure, fine.
Because in Canada, the Canadian government will not discuss or acknowledge that this is really happening Nor will the Canadian media.
You know, there are women who are ex-inmates who are fighting this.
And some, you know, women, you know, radical feminists who are fighting this.
But the Canadian government will not engage with them, will not acknowledge.
I mean, essentially, they've determined that protecting You know, protecting themselves from controversy, protecting themselves from being, you know, attacked by trans activists or criticized or whatever.
They're just going to let this happen.
And who cares what the result is for the women in prison who are having to share their cells with men who are impregnating them?
Yeah.
I mean, they're just, they're being completely cowardly and completely unethical.
Wokeness making its way and woke language making its way into the military.
And they're like, hey, we're in the business...
Like, Tim Kennedy said this.
He said, we are in the business of killing bad guys.
And anything that gets in the way of killing bad guys is not something we're going to tolerate.
Like, they're just not interested.
Like, you can't have that get to that level.
You have, like...
These Special Forces guys who have to do these insane operations under extreme pressure, very high likelihood of death, and you can't have any bullshit there.
You have to have the best trained, most qualified, everything has to be accurate, everybody has to form as a unit.
You can't have any bullshit there.
And if you've got some ideological bullshit like you have to say this We have to have a certain amount of people that are that and there's like no no no no no no no no not there and Because that's the place where literal life or death is in the balance.
Like, imagine, you know how hard Buds is for Navy SEALs?
It's like one of the most extreme tests that any military organization puts on a member.
If you can become a Navy SEAL, you are a highly distinguished human being who can do some things that most people can't do in terms of your will, your ability to force your way through situations that are extremely difficult and uncomfortable.
You can't say with that, we're going to lighten up our expectations because we like to have some trans SEALs.
Like I think that it's like, I really, I don't like using the word privilege because it's overused and it's used in sort of weird ways to shut down conversation and to silence people and things like that.
But I think it's, like, too much privilege.
Like, you don't have enough real problems that you're worrying about people's gender identities.
Like, it's so stupid.
It's not real life.
It's just invented ideology, like, academic ideology.
I think that it's, like...
And I think that it's indulging in, again, fetishes, like...
A lot of these, they call themselves trans widows.
So women who have had husbands that have decided to transition while they're married.
And I've talked to some of these women and their stories are really heartbreaking.
Um...
You know, and in those cases, their stories are often like these guys start acting really, like, teenager-y and, like, get super narcissistic and, like, all of a sudden, you know, they get really superficial.
But like he did, he started off trying on women's clothing and being turned on by it and then would like wear pantyhose under his pants and, you know...
I worked at like a video store in the aughts or whatever and this guy would come in sometimes at night with a leather motorcycle jacket on and then like Flash, he was wearing lingerie underneath.
But isn't it also like they connect pantyhose with being a woman, and if you wish you were a woman, maybe that's something you'd be attracted to wearing.
unidentified
Yeah, they have all these weird stereotypes about women.
And then said, look, I'm the same person and talks in the same voice.
It's really wild, right?
But then it settled down and now is basically dresses, I don't want to say like asexual, but like a flannel shirt, which like a lot of women wear flannel shirts, jeans, a lot of women wear jeans.
Wasn't anything like definitely masculine or feminine about the way...
I mean, a lot of these men who transition to become women have these weird, super old-fashioned stereotypes about what a woman is and what women dress like.
Like, I, in Vancouver, mostly wore giant men's flannel shirts and, like, big men's boots and, like, jeans.
Or, like, I wear, like, dirty Converse and tube socks almost every day.
That's a problem that people are worried about with children, that children are so malleable.
And some people, they don't think you should be worried about it at all.
And they think you should allow people to discuss anything and everything with your child when it comes to gender, when it comes to sexual identity, all those things.
Say whatever you want.
Sexual orientation.
Talk about it with the kids.
Talk about it with the kids.
And other people are like, what the fuck are you talking about?
You're supposed to be teaching history.
You know, and it is a weird thing because children are so malleable.
Well, and also, like, why do teachers feel like they're the ones or feel entitled to, like, they're the ones who should be educating other people's children about their politics or their ideologies?
I mean, now to be trans, you don't have to have so-called gender dysphoria.
I sort of think that term's imperfect myself because I sort of feel like it could be argued that everyone has some form of gender dysphoria because, like, say, like, I don't identify wholly with femininity.
Like, there's parts of me that are feminine.
There's some, like, girl things that I like.
And there's lots of aspects of my personality that I think are kind of masculine.
Like what?
I'm not nurturing at all.
I don't like babies.
I don't.
I've never.
I'm not joking.
Down with babies.
I've never wanted to have kids.
I've never desired it.
I don't really like...
I mean, some kids are cool.
I don't mean like, you know, kids are personalities.
You've probably noticed I'm not very good at not saying what I think.
And in a relationship that can be challenging.
I feel like a lot of people...
I think it's a good thing.
I think you should be open and talk about things in a relationship.
But I feel like people who are able to maintain really long-term relationships and marriages often, not always, of course, are the kinds of people who don't say everything they think and don't feel like they need to be like, I didn't like that.
It's clearly a spectrum, because there's men that aren't interested in sex at all, and there's men that are horny all the time, and it's the same with women.
And that's the problem with things like the left and the right, is that when you get into an ideology and you're in a tribe, I'm in the tribe of the left, and so I have to subscribe to all the same things that these people subscribe to.
You know, I have to take on all their notions that I think are ridiculous.
Some women are more aggressive and less nurturing.
Some women are super nurturing and delicate and emotional or whatever.
So the term gender dysphoria, I think, bothers me just because of that.
Because it sounds to me then like you're just identifying with these gender stereotypes.
Which should be fine.
Like, you should be able to, you know, identify with whatever personality traits you identify with.
You should be able to like whatever clothes you like.
Like, if you're a man and you want to wear a dress and you don't feel very masculine or you don't have a high sex drive or you don't want to, like...
Fight?
That's fine.
Like, be whoever you want to be.
I agree with, like, I think gender dysphoria refers to something different, which is a very, very strong, overwhelming desire to actually be the opposite sex or, you know, to get rid of your sexed body parts.
I mean, it's so weird because all of the gender identity legislation was sort of presented and passed around the same time.
It seemed like everything happened simultaneously at once in a lot of countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US. And I don't know exactly how that went down, but I think those activists, like the trans activists, were very well organized.
I think that part of it, you know, other people have theorized around this, so these are not my ideas coming out of nowhere.
You know, once gay marriage was won, there wasn't much for these LGBT organizations to do and fight for anymore, so there's no reason for them to get funding so they latched onto the trans rights thing so that they could continue to exist, people could keep their jobs, you know, so they could continue to get funding.
Because I don't know, where do you go with the gay rights fight now in Canada and America?
He's like, well, if you don't believe in males and females, you don't believe there's a distinction.
He was like, then what about gay men?
Men who are absolutely attracted to men?
Like, are they...
And then if you're telling a lot of them that these men are actually really females and they should just transition, he's like, I think that there's a homophobia attached to that.
I mean, I absolutely agree with that, because how can you be same-sex attracted if there's no sex?
Gay people aren't attracted to gender, they're attracted to sex.
Males who are gay are attracted to men with male bodies.
They're not attracted to women who are dressing like men or acting like men.
And lesbians have made this argument for a long time, too, that trans activism, gender identity ideology is homophobic.
They're like, no, I'm attracted to women.
I love women.
I want to have sex with women.
I don't want to have sex with a man who claims to be a woman or dresses like a woman.
And, you know, lesbians have been super bullied in their own communities over this and over being critical of like trans women being welcomed into the lesbian community or being pressured to date trans women.
And, you know, Abigail Schreier does a bunch of research on...
You know, young girls are transitioning at really high rates now.
Well, there's also the fear of being ostracized from the group.
If you don't do that, if you don't go along, if you decided that you're a progressive person, you don't go along with all these things, you can get ostracized to the group or from the group.
And it's scary out there on your own because what else are you going to do?
Are you going to be a Trump supporter?
God forbid.
That's what we've polarized the country to where you are either a progressive or you're a Democrat who tolerates progressives or you're a person who doesn't like the Republicans.
You keep going further and further left.
You're like, never Trump.
And then a lot of those people, they get lumped into this thing and you think of them only as the most radical of the people in the group that are the loudest, which is the hardcore left-wing people, the Antifa type people.
Whereas on the right, what's the worst thing?
Would they go to the Proud Boys or some white supremacist organization?
That's what people think of.
The January 6th people, that's what people think of.
So you're either with the January 6th people or you're with Antifa.
Literally, that's what it is on both sides.
When you get to the furthest edges, it's equally crazy.
And it's equally crazy in these predictable, adoptable patterns that these people have to subscribe to if they want to be a part of the ideology, whether it's the right ideology or the left ideology.
Either you want to throw Molotov cocktails at the State House and call everybody a fascist, or you want to take zip ties to the fucking Capitol building and look for a senator to tie up.
It's the same fucking person.
They just found different ways to port that crazy out into the universe.
And I mean, the binary thinking is, I mean, I talked about this a bit earlier, but this is what people are doing to me constantly now that I've been talking about leaving the left or not wanting to identify as left wing.
Like, I just want to be an independent.
I'm not identifying anywhere.
I don't plan on, I don't want to categorize myself or label myself in any way.
Yeah, but that's part of your gift is that you have the courage to talk about things that other people find uncomfortable and say them from an honest perspective.
Like, this is what I'm seeing.
This is what I don't like.
This is what I think.
And then also back it up with like, other people are seeing it too.
And this is not like, this is something that the warning bells were rang.
The distinction between males and females is very weird when it plays out in sports and in games and stuff like that.
I'm always fascinated by that because there's clearly great women athletes and you've got your stories like Jermaine Durand and me knocking out that guy.
But where it gets weird is other games that don't involve physical strength.
I mean it seems to me that like there's only a few competitions where men and women can compete against one another sort of on an equal playing field and one of those I'm told is like shooting like rifle well that makes sense yeah because you're basically just aiming and breath control I would think if the rifle was heavy that would be an issue but pistols yeah and pistols I mean, it doesn't seem...
I don't know, like, if men started identifying as women to compete in figure skating, would that, like, screw over women in figure skating?
But in regular competition, like it's probably not been that big of an issue so far for them to really have to deal with it.
Like Taylor is probably the first person who's ever spoken out about this in skateboarding.
Like it's been talked about in other sports, track, swimming, MMA, like weightlifting.
Yeah.
And those ones are easier because they're so obvious.
I mean, people are obviously still going along with it anyway, but it's very obvious.
Like when you look at, there's like a photo of Leah Thomas at the swim meet and they're all diving and he's like two feet higher than all the rest of the chicks and immediately farther along.
Most guys who identify as trans women are still intact and date girls.
Like, that's a horrible surgery to get, to get your dick cut off and inverted into, like, a neovagina that's not supposed to be there.
Did you just call it a neovagina?
That's what they call it, a neovagina.
That's what they call it?
Well, that's probably not what transactivists call that, but I think, like, if you're going to, like, read a research paper or something like that, that's what they would call it, or surgeons call it a neovagina.
But, like, it's a hole that wants to keep closing up because it's not supposed to be there.
Like, it's not...
It's hard to maintain its gross for reasons that I let people imagine.
It doesn't function like a vagina.
Vaginas are supposed to be there.
They operate in a specific way that's conducive to sexual intercourse.
They are self-cleaning, which is not the case for a surgical hole that's been an inverted penis.
She's a journalist and she'd, you know, she'd reported in like war-torn countries and had been traumatized by witnessing some pretty horrible sexual assault.
And she had a history of sexual abuse, like she'd been molested as a kid.
I think that kind of stuff factors into transition too, especially for women.
It's like naturally you want to get rid of your sexualized body if...
You, in your brain, are like, well, these men did these things to me when I started developing.
You want to go back to not being a sexual-looking woman.
But she, yeah, she decided to be a man, and they did a cover story, and she had this giant, like a giant hole in her thigh kind of thing from where they'd taken the skin and turned it into her fake penis.
It's a horrible thing to go through.
I think that these people are often trying to deal with mental problems in physical or superficial ways.
And now we live in a culture where a therapist isn't allowed to challenge you.
If you go to a therapist and you're a young woman and you say, I'm a boy, you have to take an affirmative approach and say, okay, yeah, you're a boy.
Go get some hormones.
We can give you a mastectomy and a hysterectomy.
So they're not being questioned about anything else that it might be connected to, past trauma.
I think we're dealing with legitimate people that are trans people.
I don't want to delegitimize anybody, but by the word legitimate I mean there's an issue where they genuinely, from the moment they were born, have felt like a girl and they're confused and they don't understand why.
And everything else is great and if they transition, they'll be happier.
I think those people exist.
But I also think all the other things that you said are true, too.
The statistics about people who felt like they were trans when they were young and then eventually became gay men.
How do you know who's getting influenced by culture and society?
And one of the things about Kristen Beck is that she grew up in a fucking military town, like in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Texas and did not have any transgender ideology.
So all of the ideas that that was pushed on her or that she was indoctrinated, it doesn't work with her.
So for sure, there are people out there that are experiencing the same thing that Kristen Beck experienced, the same thing other people experience too, where they feel like they're in the wrong body.
And then also for sure, there's people like Abigail Schreier is talking about that may be being influenced by the trendiness of it, by the social contagion aspect of it.
We have to be able to look at all these possibilities and to say that it's binary.
Either you are a woman or you're a man.
You recognize yourself as a woman or a man or that's it.
And you are.
Oh, you are a woman.
You've always been a woman.
Okay.
I guess I'm a woman.
To make it like that and to avoid all nuance.
And to avoid all these other possibilities, to avoid this term, gender dysphoria, to avoid all of this information about whether or not this is even effective or if it makes people happy.
What is going on?
As soon as you can't discuss an issue without being fearful of being attacked by people that don't agree with you, It becomes very problematic because people get scared.
They become cowards.
And you get people on one side that will virtue signal and they'll claim to fight against you.
The idea that a person can decide to eat unhealthy, to let their body balloon to morbid obesity, and you don't discuss that, you don't ever bring that up, you don't tell them that, you don't say it's unhealthy.
There's even doctors that will lie and cite nonsense and pretend that it's healthy to be fat and there's nothing wrong with it and actually dieting is unhealthy.
They're not even close, unless you're talking about anorexics.
If you talk about people that are up optimum weight, the amount of, I mean, depending upon their diet, of course, I mean, someone could have a terrible diet and you get a bunch of diseases that are connected to that, but obesity is a rough one.
That's one of the things we learned during COVID. There was one point in time where 78% of the people who were in the ICU were obese.
It makes me so angry that they created all this hysteria around COVID and pretended that anybody could just die of COVID in a second when we knew full well that it was old people and fat people, really unhealthy people.
And it's like, Shut down the gyms.
Shut down the gyms because people who are unhealthy and fat are dying of this disease.
So shut down healthy people's lives and force them to be unhealthy.
Well, I think it was an interesting case because it clearly was more dangerous than anything we've ever experienced before in terms of infectious disease.
It's clearly more dangerous than the flu, clearly more dangerous than a lot of things.
But you weren't allowed to look at it like you look at those other things.
But a lot of people who you didn't think were at risk got fucked up by it too, which is really interesting because I don't think it's even across the board.
Look, I think there's a high probability that that fucking thing came from a lab.
And it behaves like something that came from a lab.
And that's why it's wild.
It's wild because there's people that have, you know, no problem with the flu.
And they got fucking wrecked by COVID. Like, real bad.
Lungs scarred, decreased oxygen capacity, decreased cardiovascular output, all that stuff.
My friend Michael Yeo got COVID. And he got COVID early on in the pandemic.
And he was hospitalized for weeks.
And he thought he was going to die.
And it was real bad.
But I don't know whether or not he was healthy at the time.
I know he was exhausted.
He told me the whole story of how he flew to New York, did press, flew back, drove to Vegas with his family, and then drove back the next day and then tested positive for COVID and was wrecked.
But just doing that alone, that's six hours of driving, after flying, hanging out with your wife's family, everybody getting together, probably having a couple cocktails, laughing, not getting enough sleep, jet lagged.
And that is something that happens to people with COVID. So that's what gets the really healthy people.
So when they bring that up as an example...
The problem is, if you are a person that has to fly and has to work late and has to do things where you're not getting enough sleep, then it's fucking dangerous.
Because if you're taxed out and that hits you.
When it got me, the first day I was like, whoa.
I was like, this is fucking strong.
I was like, this is interesting.
Because it hits you so quick.
I was like, from the moment I was on the plane, I was feeling funky.
And then I just thought I was hungover.
And then I got back to Texas, and that night I was sweating.
And I was freezing.
I sweat through three different pairs of sweatpants.
They say you have T and B cell memory too, which is interesting.
It's like even if your body doesn't have antibodies, it has memory and it can develop those antibodies if you're coming in contact with it.
Some of these guys that work here, they didn't catch COVID a second time, but they came in contact with it and then they felt like weird and then it showed up that they had antibodies.
So like when Mercy would test us, it would show that your levels indicate that something recently, your body tried to fight it off recently.
Right, depending upon who's running the study and what the parameters of the study were, and especially if they went into the study with a bias and they tried to accomplish a certain thing.
You would think, but it's obviously not true, that that's because, like, comedy can't be woke, because how do you make jokes if everything's supposed to be woke?
But obviously they've woked comedy, so...
Or they've tried to, in any case.
I feel like it was short-lived, because I feel like the unwoking of comedy came around pretty fast.
Like, I feel like there was, like, a period of time when they were trying to, like, make woke comedy happen, and then people like Ricky Gervais and, like, Dave Chappelle were like, nah...
And it's like, I'm willing to have a reasonable conversation with anybody about any subject, but if you want to pretend that jokes aren't jokes, we can't talk.
You can't say that you can't joke about things.
You can't say that that Ricky Gervais stuff is offensive.
I mean, I feel sort of like jokes and humor trump all.
Like, if it's funny, then I'm like, okay, but it's funny.
So, yeah, if it works, like, I, yeah, I guess I just, I think that there's some people who actually, I really don't like these people, who actually don't have a sense of humor.
They just don't care.
Humor is not important to them and they kind of don't really get it.
Like I'm so weirded out by this culture where people think that they are entitled to control other people, what other people think, what other people say, what other people joke about.
And I don't understand the desire to do that either.
It's like like let people live.
Why are you so obsessed with what other people are doing?
Is that because you don't have anything interesting going on in your life or you feel out of control in your own life?
I keep trying to look at it through a psychological lens, I suppose, and I don't...
But it's just a natural human trait, a natural human characteristic, whether it's through religion or through culture, to get people to adhere to the boundaries that you've set for your group.
And if someone tries to stray outside those boundaries and joke about things or do something or say something or have some sort of an opinion that's forbidden...