All Episodes
Previous Next
July 6, 2021 - The Matt Walsh Show
31:26
The Transgender Craze Seducing America: An Interview With Author Abigail Shrier

Matt Walsh sits down with Abigail Shrier to discuss the transgender agenda, the future of America, and her new book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
We're joined today by Abigail Schreier.
She's the author of the book Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters, which is out in paperback this week.
And you should definitely pick it up because it is, and I've told her this, I think it's one of the most important books of this century, which is not an exaggeration.
So first of all, Abigail, congratulations on the book and thanks for writing it.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me on.
So I want to talk about two recent articles you wrote, but before that, we'll start with the book, of course.
And the first thing I'm curious about, before we get to the substance of the book, Is the reaction to it.
I'm curious how that's been for you.
Clearly, there are plenty of people out there like me who are grateful that the book exists and that you wrote it.
But I can imagine, given that this is the most toxic subject in our culture today, that you've encountered some extremely intense pushback, which is probably an understatement.
So how has that been over the last year?
You know, it's been wild.
It's really bifurcated, the reaction.
So you get, I'm completely flooded with thank you notes from not only from parents, but therapists, doctors, and across the political spectrum.
I mean, people are really grateful for people who are willing to speak the truth about what's going on.
Then you have the small group of very, very energized activists Who, you know, somehow, you know, really want to rape me, apparently.
So it's a very strange sort of position to be in, because you do have these sort of two extremes.
And have they successfully... I know there's been campaigns to get the book taken down from Amazon or kicked out of various booksellers, but has that been successful, any of those efforts?
Well, you know, it's hard to...
To say, I mean, here's what I'll say.
You know, it depends how you define success.
I mean, look at Target.
So Target.com, I sold a lot of books because Target.com removed it after two Twitter activists complained.
They removed the book.
There was outcry.
I sold a lot of books that sold out everywhere.
They put the book back up for sale.
And then the second no one was watching, they quietly deleted it again.
So it's not available and has not been for months and months and months has not been available target.com.
And you see this testing going on at all over the place.
I mean, I got a letter the other day from a man in Vermont who had offered to donate it to his library and the library refused to take it.
This is a book that people are on waiting lists to read.
And, you know, libraries won't, you know, very often won't carry it.
They just refuse.
And we're seeing that, you know, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, there are 150 people on a list to read the book.
And Pride tried to shut it down and have it removed on the grounds that in a library of literally over a million volumes, this one book made them unsafe.
And the libraries, do they give a reason for not carrying it?
I can imagine what reason they would give or would claim, but do they give an actual reason?
Sure.
Anything from, oh, she's not a medical doctor, which of course, you know, no journalist who writes about any medical scandal is ever a medical doctor.
We're just, you know, that's why we interview experts.
To, you know, this is not the consensus view.
Well, there is no consensus view.
That's the problem.
Um, there's a lot of disagreement within the medical community, how this should be handled.
Unfortunately, what's going on right now is a real medical scandal and the few doctors, you know, who are willing to speak up really risk losing their license.
And of course, the thing about the book is you're, you're allowing for the vast majority of the book is you're allowing other people to simply tell their stories.
So it's not like it's, it didn't come across to me as It wasn't polemical at all.
It was just, this is what's happening, here are the stories, and I'm just sharing them with you.
That's what the book is.
Yeah, I didn't start with a belief, and I don't, you know, I have never pushed a policy, prescription, or anything like that with regard to this, you know, transgender healthcare.
I just pointed out, you know, I did an exploration of the sudden rise out of nowhere of teenage girls deciding they were transgender.
I looked at why.
Why are they suddenly the leading demographic?
We have a hundred year diagnostic history of this thing called gender dysphoria, the severe discomfort in one's biological sex.
And it was always boys and men.
And now overwhelmingly the leading demographic is teenage girls across the West.
And I wanted to look at why, why that might be.
And I explored, you know, I talked to a lot of experts who offer a lot of different reasons and that's what I explored in the book.
Yeah, so let's continue along with that, because to me, the book was eye-opening on a number of levels.
Originally, I didn't think, because I spent a lot of time talking about this subject as well and researching it, and I like to think I'm pretty aware of what's going on.
So at first, I was skeptical that, honestly, the book could tell me anything I didn't already know.
But it did actually have quite a bit that I didn't know.
And the first is the most basic thing, like you just mentioned.
That this is a really, especially among kids, this is a phenomenon that is affecting girls the most.
I had always thought of it as a primarily male phenomenon.
So can you talk, you mentioned you want to explore why girls are so susceptible.
If you could summarize why that is, I mean, why are they so susceptible?
Teenage girls in mental health distress, anxiety, depression, and other, you know, anything from borderline personality disorder to other Um, you know, psychological struggles have always been susceptible to peer contagion.
They've always been susceptible to the idea that there's something really wrong with them.
And that if they just lose enough weight or, you know, um, if they get control of these multiple personalities, or, I mean, there's a, you know, they, they come up with these explanations.
Sometimes they're introduced from by therapists.
In this case, it's all over the culture.
And social media and the ideas, they look to the culture to figure out what's wrong with them.
And today, the answer that they're landing on is, oh, I know what the problem is, I'm supposed to be a boy.
And the moment a young person says that, a young woman says that, she goes from a lonely teenager who may struggle to find friends to someone who is celebrated in her school, congratulated by her therapist, and whose doctor can't wait to start her on a course of hormones.
So this is kind of, we're taking these universal feelings that all teenagers experience, especially girls.
And what we have now is they're being presented with a handy kind of framework for understanding those feelings.
And that's what brings them to transgenderism, basically.
That's right.
I mean, imagine, you know, a young woman who, you know, prior era would have, who would be anorexic and be convinced that if she just lost enough weight, everything would be better.
It's very, you know, They latch on to the, because they are in real pain.
This does not discount their pain.
We know that rates are very high of anxiety, depression, self-harm for this generation.
And they're in a lot of pain and they look, you know, psychological pain is very hard to explain to someone in a way that gets you noticed and in a way that gets you, you know, interest and help.
And what they want, they want the affection.
They want the celebration and they want the attention.
And one way to frame it so that they get those things, which I think they do need, they do need attention, they do need compassion, but the way that they're framing it is not necessarily accurate.
In fact, very often I think it's inaccurate.
What they have is not real typical gender dysphoria.
That's what gets me when I listen to people talk, whether it's kids or even adults, oftentimes talking about Their discovery that they're another gender and you hear things like, well, I didn't feel comfortable in my body.
Um, I knew, I just knew that I was different and those kinds of things.
And I always think, well, yeah, but that's, that's a, that's a pretty universe.
It's real and it's a, it's a serious thing.
And it's not to discount it, but at the same time, these also sound like pretty universal.
Human feelings.
I wonder if there's any person on earth who's never felt uncomfortable in their body or like they didn't fit in, but now we just have this framework.
Do you think we're at the point now where For kids, it's, it's looked down upon in their peer groups to be just sort of a normal person who identifies as the sex they were born with.
We're at the point now where that's even where it's, it's, you, you, you would be embarrassed to be a quote unquote cisgender as a kid.
Parents tell me that all the time.
I see that all the time.
You see parents, you know, in, in detransitioners, young women who regretted their transition, talk about that all the time.
Um, on social media, these young women are constantly coached in, You know, gender ideology and told that, oh, if you feel uncomfortable, every woman goes through a period around puberty of feeling uncomfortable in her body.
And she's taught and they spend tremendous amount of time on social media.
They're taught that that feeling means you're transgender at a time when it's very uncool to be a straight girl who is cisgender, you know, comfortable in her body at all.
So the number of forces pushing on her So, how is this happening so quickly?
lot and the one as soon as she declares a trans identity or non-binary identity, the next question
is, oh yeah, okay, let's prove it. When are you going to start with surgeries and hormones?
So how is this happening so quickly? That's one question I get a lot.
I don't feel like I have a really sufficient answer for it, but because I, you know,
I was in high school in 2000-2004, and I think it wasn't all that long ago.
Transgenderism as a concept existed.
I think I heard of it a few times.
I didn't have anyone in my school that identified that way.
And we've gone from that to, in a matter of a couple decades, Now it's, we're at a point now where if you identify as just quote-unquote cisgender, it's strange.
So this is a rapid, extreme change in our culture.
How did it happen so quickly, do you think?
Well, the activists were able to corrupt many institutions.
So the activists, and they are extremely, extremely aggressive, were able to corrupt both the public school system and infiltrate it with gender ideology.
Which teaches kids in California, they start at age five, teaching them that only, you know, your true gender, um, not, you know, not the doctor, the doctor assigned your gender randomly, but only new, you know, your real one.
And you, if you declare it here, it's a safe space.
We, we don't have to tell your parents.
So that was one force, but also the therapists were put under tremendous pressure to go along with this.
We have conversion therapy bands in 20 States in America now.
Which say that if a therapist tries to convert you out of your supposed gender identity, in other words, to translate, if a therapist actually just tries to get you comfortable in your body and say, wait a second, I know you say your problem is that you were born into this body, but what about the other things we haven't explored?
The therapist is at risk of losing their license.
And then when I looked into medical organizations, nearly all of them had adoptive Affirmative care, which means it's now their job of doctors to rubber stamp the patient's self-diagnosis when it comes to this one diagnosis, gender dysphoria.
So with the affirmative care laws, in how many states did you say had those?
20 states have conversion therapy bans.
And conversion therapy is if you help a boy remain a boy, then you are converting him into what he already is, which makes a lot of sense.
Affirmative care.
So if a child comes into the counselor and says they're experiencing confusion about their gender or discomfort, The therapist is not allowed to explore any other cause for that confusion or discomfort.
They have to immediately jump to gender dysphoria and transgenderism.
Is that what it is?
Well, that's effectively what affirmative care pressures them to do.
And if they go against that, they are at risk of losing their license.
They could easily be accused of running afoul of the standard, which is don't try to convert a child into being cisgender.
Um, obviously this grew out of the anti-homosexuality conversion, um, you know, process, you know, attempts that were, you know, historically could be quite grisly.
Um, and so they passed these laws and people unthinkingly went along with them, even though they had inserted gender identity language into the bands.
Now, gender dysphoria historically was always treated holistically.
It was always treated with, wait a second.
I know you think, Your problem is gender, but let's talk about how you arrived at that.
Why don't you want to be a boy?
I mean, that's the kind of exploration that therapy really required.
Now it's prohibited.
Yeah, I confess I don't have a lot of experience with therapy, but I had always thought of therapy as sort of the opposite of affirming, because you're going in there with feelings or psychological troubles that you don't want affirmed.
You want to be freed of them.
That's what I always thought of it as.
Right.
And same thing with doctors.
You never started out with the conclusion.
Today, we start with the conclusion.
You have gender dysphoria.
And then the question is, when do we start the medication?
And speaking of doctors, I think a lot of people don't realize How bad the medical part of this is for kids, the quote-unquote medical.
So how does that work?
You got a 13-year-old kid diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and they're put on the medical track.
How does that play out?
And do we get to the point where they're doing actual surgeries, potentially, while the child is still a child, still a minor?
So it depends if they have parental permission, and it depends on the state.
So yes, they absolutely do It on minors, the surgeries, um, with parental permission, um, whether they can do it without parental permission varies by state.
Um, but, but, you know, this is an area in which, unfortunately, a lot of very good doctors who are really uncomfortable with these treatments have bowed out and they bowed out because they know, listen, I don't want to do this.
Um, you know, this is, we're really pushing kids to something.
They may, they are very likely to regret.
So the best doctors very often bow out of even doing this kind of medicine, and instead you have the most aggressive activist doctors who can't wait to make the really considerable remuneration that it offers.
Do you know how young, potentially, the surgeries are happening?
I mean, are they happening 16, 15, younger than that?
Well, in California, 13, with parental permission. 13?
Yeah, 13-year-old girls have been, you know, have had double mastectomies.
You know, without parental permission, you know, you can get it in Oregon, the state, you know, the state will cover it and allow it at 15, but it varies by state.
Have you talked to any parents?
I know you talked to a lot of parents in the book.
I don't remember a parent like this, though.
Have you talked to a parent that actually gave their 13-year-old permission to have her breasts cut off?
Have you talked to any parents like that?
No, I talked to parents who were planning to do that.
who are planning to go along with it.
At that young of an age?
Well, parents, in one case, it was a boy, so it was planning to start on the blockers.
You know, I talked to parents who are, you know, considering or planning to go on blockers, but I didn't talk to anyone who had agreed to remove the girl's breasts.
So, let's stay on the parents for a minute.
And you talk a lot about, you have a chapter on parents and then, of course, they're featured prominently throughout because they're a big part of the story.
You highlight many parents who are blindsided by their child's trans identification, which is a really tragic situation those parents are in.
I can't imagine what it's like for them.
And I think that probably As you explore in the book, that probably happens frequently with adolescents who go this route because they pick up this stuff in school or YouTube, and then all of a sudden they're blindsiding the kids.
But my view is that young children, you know, 5, 6, 7, or younger than that, who quote, come out as trans, My assumption is that in 100% of those cases, that was pushed on them by the parents, because I don't see how a kid could go that route at that young of an age without the parent being very much involved in it.
Do you think I'm being unfair to the parents with that assumption?
What role do you think the parents play exactly here?
I think there are a few different parts or a few different cases to consider.
We know that kids have had gender dysphoria.
We have a very long diagnostic history.
So, have there been kids who said, no mommy, I'm not a boy, I'm a girl, from a very young age?
Yes, there have been those kids without parents necessarily pushing it.
Yes, there have.
Now, the transgender identity, okay, that is something that is typically, and we know that it's introduced by the culture.
And that's not something we ever did with kids before.
I mean, they might have, you know, had some gender confusion about who they really were, but we didn't validate it immediately.
Today it's getting validated all over the place.
And it is also true that I've interviewed parents who say that their kid is transgender.
And it is true that when you ask them, oh no, he always wore, you know, he always loved nail polish, you know, from the age four, when you ask, well, how did he get the nail polish?
You know, very often the parents did supply it.
Right, and why should liking nail polish be an indication of anything other than the kid thinks that that looks cool, that you have paint on your hands?
I mean, this is one of the... I can never get a straight answer on this, but when a five-year-old boy, let's say, says, I'm a girl, what is that statement even supposed to mean, given that the five-year-old boy, and I have four kids, They have no idea what a girl even is.
It seems to me that if a boy makes that statement, what he's really saying is something like, you know, I see the dollhouse that my sister's playing with and I think it's cool and I want to play with it too.
Why does it have to be anything more significant than that?
And I can never get a straight answer on that.
So when you interview, as I have like the best gender therapists, um, who so many of whom have been basically run out of town, I mean, meaning like giants in the field of gender dysphoria have been canceled by the activists.
But when you interview men like Ken Zucker or Ray Blanchard, um, you know, Ken used to work with children and he would absolutely push back and explore where did you get that idea?
Oh, you know, let's talk about it because, You know, he was the therapist.
He didn't think the child was some sort of prophet.
But today, these young children are treated as prophets.
The moment that they, you know, declare they have, they are uncomfortable in their bodies and their gender, they're treated as prophets.
And then the question just begins, what, you know, the next question is just, when do we start?
Right.
Now, I did want to get to two of these articles that you've written.
The first, for the City Journal, is headlined, When the State Comes for Your Kids, and it's bone-chilling stuff, but I wanted to let you summarize it, because you'll do a better job than me.
Can you just tell us what that piece is about, and what do you mean, the state coming for your kid?
So, I looked at the laws of Washington, Oregon, and California, because I was getting calls from parents That their custody was being threatened if they didn't go along with the idea that their troubled teens were transgender.
And I looked at both what the laws allowed in, um, in many cases really allow not only in, well, to take the case of Washington, a 13 year old has total control of his or her mental health care.
Um, including, and this includes gender affirming care and, um, Uh, insurers are blocked from even sharing information or medical care with, uh, the parents.
So kids of 13 and up have total control over their own mental health care.
Parents don't even get to know about it.
They're not even notified by the insurers.
They're not allowed to be notified by doctors.
And what you had was a situation and there are these safe houses all over, which is very, which are very hard to extricate your kid from, um, if they've shown up at.
So we had this, I kept getting calls that people were losing their kids to the system who weren't bad parents.
In fact, they were loving parents desperate to get their kids back.
The only thing they had done wrong was that they had failed to, they had declined to affirm the kid's new gender identity and someone in the state found out about that.
That's, I mean, it's horrific.
How widespread is that?
Would you consider these cases so far to be extreme exceptions, or is this really becoming an endemic problem?
I think it's increasingly an endemic problem.
I'll tell you why.
First of all, a lot of the parents who called me couldn't even talk.
I mean, I guess I profiled five or six for this article I wrote, but I was contacted by many others who said, I'm so sorry, I can't tell you anything more about this because there's an ongoing case right now.
The number of parents, there are a lot of parents in court right now fighting to get their kids back who won't talk because they're terrified.
There are parents who have lost custody who are afraid that if they ever, you know, say anything to me that their kid will find out and then the kid will never talk to them again.
So I think it's much more widespread than I was even able to include in the article, but you're also seeing, you know, a generation of extremely woke, not only social workers, therapists, But increasingly, you know, we're going to see doctors, we already see woke doctors, we're also going to see woke judges, as these young woke people who are real gender ideologues start becoming appointed judges.
And I think this is a problem that you see across the whole landscape here.
When we talk about how widespread the problem is, that in so many of these areas, a lot of people affected by it can't talk about it or are
afraid to talk about it because of the professional repercussions. And another great example of
that, the other article you wrote for the Wall Street Journal about the situation in women's
prisons, where men are being sent into women's prisons. And there is certainly a place where these
women have no voice and they have no real way, unless someone like you comes along, they have no
way to get their story out there.
So can you talk about that a little bit?
These are men who, if I understand correctly, and I guess it depends on the state a little bit, but they don't have to have surgery or anything, right?
Not that that even would make it okay, but they don't have to have surgery or anything, right?
These are just men who are being put in women's prisons because they declare That they feel like women?
Yeah.
And so I talked to the women of the Chowchilla prison, which is the highest security.
It's technically called the Central California Correctional Facility, colloquially known as the Chowchilla prison.
And this is the highest security women's prison in the state of California.
These women are tough women, but they are terrified because now a new law allows men, biological men, to transfer in.
All they need to do is declare A female identity, no surgery or hormones are required for them to become eligible for transfer.
And the reason that we have these laws in a few states now, Washington has the same policy.
A woman was raped by one of the biological men who was placed in her prison.
I've been in, you know, sorry, there are even serial rapists who are declared a female identity and were put in women's prison in the state of Washington.
And the problem is even more serious than and dire than a, you know, That I was able to convey because in the future, as these laws, you know, continue to exist right now, the men are transferring into women's prison from men's prison so we can track them.
But, you know, in laws like Washington, where you can just change your birth certificate and in California, where you go into the system now as a female, it will be extremely difficult for reporters to even be able to track who these men were.
It will look like women-on-women violence when they rape and assault the female inmates.
And part of the problem, right, is that in women's prisons, a lot of them anyway, they don't segregate based on the severity of crime as strictly as they do in men's prisons because there isn't as much violence to begin with until you start putting the men in there.
So you could have, you know, a man convicted of murder in there with women who, what, you know, shoplifted or something, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, one thing that I learned from the women prisoners, which I didn't know, and I was able to corroborate, was that a lot of, not only are a huge number of female prisoners, abuse survivors, sexual abuse survivors, but very often when they committed crimes, and they committed, a lot of these women committed very serious crimes, they did it at the behest of a scary man they were involved with.
So these are women who have been pushed around by men their whole lives.
Um, and, um, are even though, you know, these are very tough women, um, the men transferring in the men, male convicts are, are quite, quite scary.
Um, they're huge often.
They are extremely strong and they can easily overpower them.
And these women are terrified.
You mentioned the one case of a woman who was raped by a male prisoner sent in there.
Are you aware of any other cases?
Because it strikes me that this is probably happening a lot, just given what we're doing here, how we're mixing things together.
But it also strikes me that we would never find out about it.
So are you aware of any other cases like that?
I am not, and I'll tell you why.
It's very complicated because you hear even from the women That the men who are in there can very often, even if there's a sexual relationship, it's hard to tell if it's consensual.
And the reason is, is the women are trapped in small cells with them.
So the women will, in some cases will say that the, it is consensual.
But, but a lot of the, you know, other prisoners disbelieve that given how much, much stronger.
The men are and how trapped the women feel.
And remember these cells, women cells, everyone is just together.
Because women are less violent, they're not set up to keep people separate or to safeguard women from each other.
So the men who enter really have free reign.
One other thing on this, this seems to me, well, the whole thing really, but especially when it comes to women's prisons, you've got a real women's rights issue here.
Has there been any interest among the Me Too crowd, left-wing feminists at all?
Have they shown any interest in this story and wanted to follow up on it or anything like that?
No.
Women, you know, feminist groups today, I mean, I think just this week, the National Organization of Women declared that trans women are women and are to be treated as such.
Feminist organizations in general in America have completely betrayed women.
They can't wait to give away women's rights.
And they couldn't care less about the female prisoners who are not only a very vulnerable population, they have no political clout.
So no one's looking out for them.
Democratic politicians don't care.
By and large, Republicans don't either.
They don't vote.
So there's no natural constituency.
You just have to have something of a conscience to care about what happens to these women.
And there aren't a lot of people with those walking around these days.
So last question, going full circle here, back to your book, out in paperback this week.
You have a chapter in the end on the way back.
And I have to be honest, I'm a bit cynical, which is an understatement, but I don't really see a way back from this culturally, but you do.
So what is the way back?
I do with this because, you know, this is just Really just a blizzard of lies.
And if we can call a lot of them out, I do think we can get through this.
One of the things to protect your kids from is, well, first of all, is to be aware of the lies.
So, for instance, I was just speaking to a woman the other day who said, oh, I called my daughter's school to make sure there's no sex education, you know, that involves for the five-year-olds.
And I explained in the book how California hid gender identity Um, education in the SOGI curriculum, which is not part of sex ed, it's part of the anti-bullying curriculum.
So there's a lot of that really, there is a lot of duplicity around this.
Um, but I think just as we're becoming aware of the critical race theory in the schools, you know, the more we're aware of the gender ideology in the schools, the more we can demand that this, this madness be stopped.
There's no reason to indoctrinate an entire student population and gender confusion.
Um, you know, you can throw, you can show compassion to trans, Gender identified kids without doing that.
And, and we need to demand it.
But another thing is social media.
We got to get the kids off the social media.
This is just so obvious.
I know it's hard, but you're talking about skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm.
These kids are showing up at the hospitals, you know, for, for attempted suicide younger than we've ever seen before.
And, and the stakes are just too high.
Yeah, I, uh, It certainly has to begin at a minimum with reclaiming your child's attention rather than letting, you know, YouTube influencers and so on guide them through life.
So, maybe there is a little bit of hope, and I appreciate that you could at least end on that note.
Again, the book is Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Cray Seducing Our Daughters, which is out in paperback this week.
Definitely pick up the book.
Abigail Schreier, thanks a lot for joining us and for the conversation.
I appreciate it.
▲
Export Selection