What is "Science in Transition" feat Liv Agar & Spencer Barrows (E331)
The QAA crew is excited to announce the launch of a new podcast series network: Cursed Media. We hope you’ll also be excited for this expansion of our editorial line and support it by subscribing!
The very first Cursed Media podcast series is Science in Transition, an investigation into the intellectual origins of the contemporary right wing backlash against transgender acceptance. Through six deeply-researched episodes, hosts Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows unearth a bizarre coalition of well-meaning clinicians, aristocratic sexologists, militant feminists, right-wing culture warriors, headline-chasing journalists, and conservative politicians.
On this episode of QAA we are joined by Liv and Spencer to chat about what they found by digging through FOIA documents, interviewing experts, and diving into dense medical journals.
Get access to Science in Transition plus all other Cursed Media content by following this link:
https://www.cursedmedia.net/
Subscribers to Cursed Media get access to three new podcast series per year, plus every episode of QAA’s existing mini-series (properly organized!)
Manclan by Julian Feeld and Annie Kelly,
Trickle Down by Travis View
The Spectral Voyager by Jake Rockatansky and Brad Abrahams
Perverts by Julian Feeld and Liv Agar
Cursed Media logo by https://dayoff.ltd
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakotansky, Julian Fields, Liv Akar, Spencer Barrows, and Travis View.
Well, folks, it's happened.
You've typed her name endless times into the comments boxes.
You finally summoned me again.
Thank you, everyone.
She reads every reply.
I've been just waiting in a room somewhere, in a damp room, for you to type it in the Patreon comments enough times.
She's basically internet bloody Mary.
The prodigal daughter has returned from her vision quest.
Liv, how does it feel to come back from the wilds working on your new mini-series that we're going to talk about in a moment?
How does it feel to be back on QAA?
It feels good.
Yeah, I'm glad to be back.
It was definitely fun.
The series was a lot of work, and I've missed the boys.
I've missed the unkn cast.
That's it, dude.
Today I felt really unkny, I think.
Having you and Spencer come on at the same time, I just was like, oh, oh, I'm actually old, actually.
I'm so honored to be your unks.
Nothing makes me feel better than having like two young cool friends to tell me about, like, tell me, like, how I suck and like what I like isn't cool anymore.
And like, you know, what are the new styles?
You know, what's the new drip?
What's the new songs to listen to?
I need that in my life.
Otherwise, I'm just, I'll just be listening to Weezer forever.
So, you know, with us, we've got Spencer Barrows, who's been working with Liv on their new podcast miniseries, Science in Transition.
How are you doing, Spencer?
I'm great.
Like Liv said, this has been a lot of work, and it is work that will make you feel completely insane to research and read about for an extended period of time, but it's all come together quite nicely.
And I'm very excited for people to hear this.
Yeah, I mean, you guys have really structured it and kind of narrowed it down.
And there were many, many conversations about small details.
So there's a lot of love that has gone into this.
And it's definitely like one of our most put together things, I think.
You know, I mean, a fact-checker?
I mean, unheard of.
I know.
What the hell?
And she caught a lot, too.
Yes.
Well, don't show her any of my episodes.
When you get the fact-checking email and you just realize like all the shit that you missed and were just like, oh, that would have been bad.
That would have been so bad.
Yeah.
Getting in trouble.
Well, it's definitely a topic, you know, that's going to invite scrutiny and criticism.
So it should be very fun.
So yeah, before we jump into that, I wanted to talk a little bit about something very exciting that we've been working on for a while behind the scenes, which is this new mini-series network, podcast miniseries network that we're calling Cursed Media.
It's going to be a home for a growing amount of miniseries, combining some of our finest in-house talent and bringing in some heavy hitters to really make these stories special.
Spencer, you know, you're first up.
So, you know, I hope you feel like you were an outsider of special importance to us.
Yes.
Yes, I was.
We're bringing him in.
So the model we're going to go with for the network is an annual fee.
And that's just like, we'll be putting out three new miniseries a year.
And there's also going to be like organized access to like all the previous miniseries with like their own podcasts.
They're all organized as different podcasts with like the different art and stuff and, you know, basically recut for this little network.
And you can find all of that at cursemedia.net.
But I am going to throw to Travis because he told me he was threatening me that I would not be fucking enthusiastic enough.
So then now I'm, I feel weird reading what I wrote.
So take it away.
No, no, I'm really, really super excited about this.
I'm glad we can finally unveil it because I really loved when we were all working on our personal miniseries for like, you know, the QAA feed because it allowed us to like really craft something that was, you know, that where every single line and every single beat was a little bit more carefully considered.
And it really, the whole thing was something very, very personal and something that was, I think, was worth saying.
And I'm excited about that and what I'll be able to do.
But I'm also very excited about this, our, the very first series, very first new series we're launching, which, which was the science in transition, because it is very much a kind of broad topic I'm fascinated about, which is about the history of science and the way it doesn't always serve like empirical objectivity as much as specific agendas, which is just very deep and it's difficult to unpack.
But I think both of you, by the way, did an excellent job on some very difficult subject matter.
I have to say that while Travis was giving that incredible, incredible speech, the light in his office is as he looks like the last Templar, like guarding the grail in the last crusade.
He's intimidating.
Yeah, we happen to be recording at the exact moment the sun is streaming through my skylight.
But yeah, no, we're excited about the, you know what I realize is that we never have to sell our audience anything.
So even like announcing like a network, just like a breakaway of like us doing the job we love feels so bizarre.
Like, I mean, Jake always is advertising for a variety of giant corporations, fast food, big gaming, gaming outfits, anything he can get his hands on.
But anyways, so that's why it was weird.
Now that we've explained why I'm weird and I'm no longer weird, I'm totally normal now.
I'm not weird.
We are moving on to talk a little bit about science and transition.
I guess I'll read the quick blurb.
Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows investigate the intellectual origins of the contemporary right-wing backlash against transgender acceptance.
Throughout the series, they unearth a bizarre coalition of well-meaning clinicians, aristocratic sexologists, militant feminists, right-wing culture warriors, headline-chasing journalists, and conservative politicians, many of whom carry completely antithetical images of their ideal society and trans people's place within it.
Great, great blurb.
What do you guys think?
Great blurb.
I do like, like, Julian doesn't.
The one part about creating you don't like is like the capitalist portion of it.
I think that's the thing.
Like, all the other stuff is cool, but then you have to sell something, and it's like, well, fuck.
Yes.
No, legitimately.
I absolutely hate that part.
And, um, but too fucking bad.
Buy our products.
Buy our thing.
Go pay.
Go to the website cursedmedia.net.
Buy.
Yeah, I don't have nearly enough lefufus.
I need more.
I need to collect them all.
Wait, what's a I know what a laboo boo is, but there's a new thing already?
Yeah, it's the fake.
It's what they call the fake ones.
No, come on.
We can't already be two layers in on the laboobu thing.
I don't accept that culture moves this quickly.
I do not accept it.
We are, dude.
We're three layers in.
No, no, I fucking hate this.
Don't buy a lafufu.
What you should buy is a subscription to cursed media.
Correct.
That is so true.
Yeah, instead of spending $27.99, I don't know how I know the exact price, but instead of spending that, you could get a whole year worth of new mini-series from your favorite podcasters.
This also feels bad.
I don't like selling shit.
Get me out of here.
I'm done.
Yeah.
But the series was like kind of insane.
Like the further you go into this rabbit hole, the more you realize it's more insane than you thought before.
And the people who are the object of study are more evil than you could imagine.
It's very interesting how a lot of the, to be, I guess, unspecific, a lot of the terrible things that people who are associated with the anti-trans backlash have said, they do so in like such an open context, in a way that's very on the nose about like what their goals are in relation to controlling a group of people who are like marginalized and unable to speak for themselves.
But they just do it so openly and so brazenly.
And I feel like a really important part of the series was to like just even point this out because it's like so few people are like this component of trans people's lives are so are getting such surprisingly little attention in popular discourse.
And you go back, I mean, quite a bit in history as well.
Like, you know, why, why this angle?
Why, why kind of start some years back?
Yeah, it seems like a lot of the contemporary anti-trans backlash is really held up in a lot of the old guard of kind of trans clinicians when like trans medicine kind of comes out of like really endocrinology and sexology in the beginning of the 20th century when they realized like oh you can give firstly when they synthesize like testosterone and estrogen they're like oh you can give you a natal male access to estrogen and then they will like develop secondary sex characteristics like oh we can give people these like surgeries to change their sexual characteristics
And then, you know, people started asking for them.
People were like, hey, can you do like I would I would much prefer to do this other thing.
This would be a lot better.
And this is born out of experiments that they did on plants and animals.
One of my favorite stories in Jules Gil-Peterson's book, who we interview her a couple of times for the series.
She talks about how some early either endocrinologists or biologists removed the testes from a chicken and then saw that it started acting female.
And then they put the testes back in the chicken, but in a different place, like in the stomach or something.
No.
And it flipped back to acting male.
OK.
Yeah.
Well, that actually is inspiring.
Yeah.
I wouldn't mind just being having them swapped spots.
Oh, God.
You don't have to worry about sitting on them.
And like every time you cross your legs, you don't have the fucking fear of God put in you.
It's like, all right, this might be it.
I'm thinking you hide them in plain view on your forehead.
That's that's probably the safest that I would want.
Yeah.
I want like a male version of a wandering womb.
Yeah.
I want my testicles to wander through my body and like change my humors.
I want them to be on my chest.
So like if I'm wearing like a low cut shirt, I got like ball cleavage.
How dare you stare?
Having the tiniest slit in like a t-shirt.
The tiniest, yeah.
Like it's just.
Just the tiniest little window, the little like upside down triangle cut in.
Yeah.
Let them breathe a little.
Genius.
Oh.
Well.
So it starts, it starts like, you know, it does feel exploring these.
early days that it was much more of like just a scientific curiosity and they hadn't really made that many connections to any kind of psychological you know impetus to this right like you said i mean it sounds like they're just screwing around with chickens and seeing how they act yeah it's interesting the early fascination like one of the examples we talk about the most high profile is of christine jorgensen who is a woman who i believe transitioned it was what like 54.
She read some book where she realized that it was possible to change her sex characteristics.
And then she, because in the United States, it wasn't legal at the time, she made trips to Denmark to see a Danish, I believe, sexologist or endocrinologist there to get access to medical transition.
And when she came back to the United States, she wished to just like transition and for people to not know about it.
But the letter she wrote to her parents was like leaked to the press and it became a front page story.
So when she actually arrived back to the United States, there was this massive press conference.
And everyone was fascinated by this possibility of like, oh, you can you can change someone's sex, asking obviously very invasive questions.
But there seemed like at that point there was almost an open question about how how society would see it.
I mean, generally, unsurprisingly, the answer when more knowledge came around, it was especially conservative elements said, no, this is bad.
But the specific way that it coagulated, especially in the last like even decade, is like not a certain set thing that had to happen.
But one of the more important aspects of that relates to like the question of people wanting to transition in early trans medicine, especially in like the 60s around then, because like a lot of the doctors that were studying had this like what they saw as a problem of like, well, people are asking for hormones.
Like, what do we do about them?
And a lot of the main camp was give them psychotherapy to just like, oh, they're clearly mentally ill.
So you like treat their depression or whatever.
And then that urge will go away.
Then like some of these cisgender doctors were like, well, maybe we'll give some of them access to hormones.
We'll see what it does.
It seems to give them a positive outlook.
And that's really where modern medicine, modern trans medicine comes out of is these people who are like, well, we don't really know.
These people are kind of freakish and weird and they're psychologically.
But like, we'll give them access.
We'll give some of them access to hormones and then it'll produce a positive psychological effect.
Although in very American style, these American doctors were quite worried about giving people experimental medical procedures and then those people suing them.
This is a point that Jules Jale-Peterson, as Spencer mentioned before, made in her book and also made.
also her her interview we had with her: that these doctors, instead of just giving people, you know, access to hormones if they asked for it, access to these medical procedures if they asked for it, they gatekept it really strongly.
So it's like, we're gonna make you jump through these years of hoops to create a docile subject where we make sure you really want it, and then we'll give you access to hormones so you won't sue us.
And that really became like the status quo of trans healthcare in the West was you really have to jump through quite a few hoops.
And there's a very kind of idealized image of what a transsexual has to be to be able to get access to hormones that people had to jump through.
And that was the status quo for quite a long time.
How this relates to the question is that in the last like couple decades, that old guard of clinicians have lost power.
Like trans people have started to have a lot more choice in their healthcare.
And these requirements, like in Canada-America, it's based on an informed, gender-affirming, informed consent model.
So really, like you go to the doctor and you say, hey, I've been wanting to transition for six months.
And then the idea is they give you access to hormones.
You don't have to jump through all the hoops.
You don't have to, like, one of the examples is the real life test.
Okay.
Where like you would have to live as your opposite sex without any access to hormones for like a year.
Two years, I think, in Canada.
In two years, yes.
One year was the limited version that they updated, I believe, in the 90s.
So they basically, they were like, okay, transness is a psychological disorder.
We're going to stuff it right into the DSM.
And also, the reason we're giving you hormones is because they basically work as antidepressants for you, you mentally ill people that are like asking for this stuff.
And that's how it was born?
Yeah, well, there was a two-pronged element with some of the like early transition care.
For example, Jules does a really good job of illustrating how a lot of it was in the context of rehabilitating these people as workers, essentially.
Like you have someone who is too depressed or too mentally ill to work.
And it's like, well, we can give you these hormones and then you'll become a working, like not a working girl.
That's a different term.
You'll become a secretary or whatever.
Like you'll be able to get a, you know, you'll be able to pass a pretty white girl, basically.
An emphasis on white as well, because it was really only like white upper middle class people who are getting access to these official hormone things for decades.
You know, these doctors reinforced the existing racial hierarchies of the time.
Like if you were black or poor, like especially early on, you might just get diagnosed as schizophrenic and then thrown in an asylum somewhere.
And the really only option for a lot of people who weren't white was DIY, which is something we talk about, where these communities would essentially procure or get hormones from like cooperative doctors and then pass them around to like kids who lived on the street or each other if they couldn't get the access they wanted themselves, which is probably why a lot of like the early big name trans activists like Marcia Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were not white.
But this status quo is essentially overturned really in the aughts and leading into the 2010s.
And this old guard of clinicians who've seen this gay kumi status quo and want to maintain it get thrown out of authority in a lot of the important medical institutions.
And their alienation from these medical institutions is a really important component of the trans backlash.
It's really a really foundational kind of member of the anti-trans alliance that provides the trans backlash with scientific legitimacy is the remnants of this old guard who are saying, no, these trans people are getting too much access to hormones.
They have too much of a say over their own lives.
Yeah, so, okay, so take us a bit into this idea of backlash politics.
And now we're zooming out a little bit from these old clinicians, understanding that they are essentially going to be the fuel or like the, I guess, the expertise that this coalition of like anti-trans actors in different areas of society, they're all going to use this information to start pushing their agenda.
Yeah, tell us a bit about that.
So a big influence on this series was the 1991, I think, book by Susan Faludi called Backlash, The Undeclared War Against Women.
And she is like just a liberal feminist author.
If you read the newest edition of the book, much love to her, but the newest edition of the book has like an intro about Bernie Brose or something.
It's very charming.
Very charming.
Yeah, we're part of the Backlash too, apparently.
But no, but the book is like this really rigorous, like 600-page survey of the state of feminism and anti-feminism in the 1980s, where after a brief window where feminism was considered trendy, like in the early 70s, this mix of conservative culture warriors like George Glider and Paul Weirick, as well as former feminist leaders, I think like Betty Fredan counted.
There were a few that like flipped.
I don't want to pull the names up right now, but like I think Fredan was one of them.
And also just like journalists who were more broadly unsympathetic and a couple of, you know, left-wing culture writers like Christopher Lash, who essentially they had all come to the conclusion that while gender equality is a good thing, it's a noble goal, it has gone too far.
We have reached a point where we have upended the normal order and, you know, we are alienating men, you know, like men are getting mad.
We're driving them out of the workforce.
You know, they're all getting angry and now women aren't having kids anymore.
And maybe they don't actually like working.
Maybe they are actually happier in the home all this time.
And the big, like, one of the big talking points that Feluti debunked was the idea that a woman over 40 is more likely to die in a terrorist attack than meet a husband or something like that.
I didn't know that that was even a statement being made, but I love that you have to debunk that.
Yeah, yeah, there was, there was all sorts of just completely wild stuff.
And in her book, like the best sections are where there would be like these studies that would come out and they would have, they would like use terms like empty nest syndrome or like there's a conference on Freud, for example, where there's a handful of women there who would like try and say, hey, let's do this.
And like all the male old guard would like universally shut them down.
And this idea of progress having gone too far was very instructive and like worked alongside the 1980s and the Reagan Revolution, which saw this tremendous rollback of women's ability to be in the workplace and women's ability to make equal wages and just have bodily autonomy, get, you know, abortion care that they needed.
And like what she goes through systematically is shows like we have not gone too far.
We are still very much, you know, we are not even on first base, but People are like, you know, we're getting this pushback.
We're going back further than what we even had.
And that, you know, when I read that book, I was like, oh, God, this is what's gonna happen, isn't it?
Like, I was reading this book in like 2023, and then Trump won, and then all of the stuff like HHS and some of the stuff we talk about happened.
I'm like, yep, this is about what's going on.
Yeah, so you're seeing the same kind of pattern of backlash politics and kind of, I guess, turning back the clock on some of this progress that we thought we had achieved.
But in this field, I mean, obviously he's doing more than that.
I mean, there's DEI bullshit mixed in and all this other stuff, but definitely the trans issue has been such an insanely large part of the right wing's messaging and platform.
And then also, yeah, how they, you know, like they backed it up.
Like they passed laws and they have been like, you know, going out of their way.
Am I tripping or did I just see that Kier Starmer was like, yeah, the bathrooms can't let trans women in anymore?
Yep.
Oh, yeah.
The British Labour Party is completely just agreeing with the backlash.
They're completely on board.
It's fully won in the UK.
Like it's full.
Like the UK is fully, and we talked to an academic named Ruth Pierce about this.
She's from the UK and like knows more about the inner workings and like does some activism there.
But like it's bad here, obviously.
But I mean, you know, I don't want to give any credit to the Democratic Party, but they did like vote against sports bans and like, you know, kicked the Medicaid, like the Crenshaw Amendment off the big beautiful bill that just passed.
So like there are holdouts in the Democratic Party, like, I don't know, Tammy Baldwin or whoever, who are still like trans supportive, but in the UK, it's complete surrender from the Labour Party.
Which is so crazy, too, because I feel like most of the people that are that are championing, you know, these kind of bans and all this stuff have probably never met a trans person in their life.
Like it just feels like, you know, that the right has like created this, you know, this like boogeyman.
They go by boogeyperson.
There's an Atlantic article.
Don't say boogeyman.
No, sorry, the Atlantic article would be, we can't say boogeyman anymore.
We have to say boogeyperson.
We do have some focus in the series of like, why is the UK like that specifically?
Yeah.
Like what the fuck, the JK rowling phenomenon.
Like they really have pioneered anti-trans panic and just being completely not normal about any of this.
Yeah, it seems like the main backlash coalition members are the old guard clinicians we were talking about that we're like really tracking the history of who have like a lot of the main like the explicit content of the justification and legitimacy is from them.
And then it's like the Christian conservative right, especially in the United States.
And then it's the radical feminists.
And for a while I was talking about this with Spencer.
It was like the Christian conservative right were the ones who had like the most money to raise funds.
But J.K. Rowling has really made it.
Like she, she is probably the largest source of funding for the anti-trans movement.
The British turfs treat her like the second coming of Jesus Christ.
She's really like her individual.
She's the funder.
She's like the Peter Thiel of the She's the Peter Thiel, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, money-wise, the U.S. groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom still probably run the boards.
Like the ADF, like in the United States, we just have this structure of like conservative religious power here that's existed for decades.
And, you know, they've got very like full coffers.
Like, and, you know, that's not going away anytime soon.
But the infusion of like a handful of billionaires who have gone completely insane by, I don't know, living in their house and not talking to anyone has been definitely been a bit of a game changer in this regard.
So speaking of fun, fun, cool people being normal, why does pedophilia keep coming up when examining this old guard of like trans medicine?
Yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting question.
It was really strange the degree to which like, it's specifically like the pro-pedophilia journal Paiteca.
It's this like Dutch English journal.
Yes.
We were talking, it's like the velvet underground of like pedophilia.
Of pedophilia, yeah.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Not everyone read Paiteca, but everyone did, went out and became a pedophile.
Yeah.
Start their own pedophile organization.
No.
No, Paiteca keeps coming up.
Like we would keep finding these old clinicians.
Like they would get up and they would just be like, I'm following the science.
And then they would have like an interview for Paiteca where they'd be like, God invented pedophilia and it's perfect.
The funniest example of this was the, I don't think he was like specifically an anti-trans mover.
Richard Gardiner, who came up with the pseudo-diagnosis of parental alienation syndrome, which we talk about in this since it ties in with these things.
And he had like a long rant about how like discrimination against pedophilia is a Jewish plot, which is the wildest way anyone has ever done anti-Semitism because usually it's the other way around when they're saying these things.
No, but with the pedophilia stuff, so a lot of these clinicians we talk about are sexologists.
And sexologists, they study not just trans stuff, but paraphilias more broadly, like, you know, fetishes and just, you know, various sexual disorders to use their own language.
And one of the things that they naturally study is pedophilia.
And it's instructive because a lot of these people like kind of see transness and pedophilia as the same thing, but not in like the traditional homophobic way where it's like, you know, like all gay people are pedophiles or whatever.
They see them both as like unfortunate conditions that need to be treated compassionately but firmly.
And that language and that overlap really manifests.
And it's to the point now where a lot of these names are a lot more sympathetic to pedophiles than they are to trans people.
And, you know, I mean, one of the things that like has been a huge kind of talking point win for the right is this focus on children specifically.
Gender affirming care for minors is like their, the rock that they have built a lot of this latest wave around.
So could you kind of get into that a little bit and instruct us?
Yeah.
Give the young some information.
Yeah, the history of like, I guess, trans care for children, to use like maybe not an expansive enough term, is very interesting, especially insofar as like a lot of the members of the old guard basically Treat like not trans kids necessarily, but gender non-conforming kids more broadly, again, as like an issue to be solved generally with psychotherapy.
And with a lot of the old figures, like Richard Green and like Stoller.
Yeah, Robert Stoller.
There was a big circuit of these guys at UCLA.
Yeah, Richard Green, Robert Stoller, would basically attempt to convert.
Like basically, they would course correct for these kids.
Like, you know, there was a big study in the early 70s pioneered by Richard Green, who is one of the big figures we talked about.
And he, like, he and some of his coworkers at UCLA, like George Reckers, who was a conversion therapist, and like Stoller, like Liv mentioned, essentially went around recruiting, like on TV and through private referrals, quote unquote, feminine boys, or what they called sissy boys.
And the idea was that we're going to get these kids and then we're going to study them and we're going to try and use like Pavlovian conditioning to get them to desist.
And eventually what the conclusion they came to was, and this is like sort of received wisdom for a lot of this old guard, is that something like 80% of kids who express gender variant behavior will grow out of it and will stop.
Now, there's a lot of problems with this.
One, in this book, Gender Shock by Phyllis Burke, I believe.
Is that her name?
Yeah.
She goes over like some of the case studies from these.
And a lot of these kids were not trans.
And I'm not using that in like the, oh, they're not really trans.
They're just X, Y, Z. Like these kids, no inclination that they wanted to transition, no inclination that they were uncomfortable with their, you know, gender at birth.
They were just kids who occasionally like just like, you know, tried on cross-gender clothes for the, for the fun of it or were feminine like for the time by like 1970s standards.
One kid, I remember like when his parents asked him why he wanted to be a girl, his reason had nothing to do with his anatomy or like his psychological state.
The reason he said was, I don't want to be a boy because boys have to go to the army and then die.
Yeah.
Good reason.
Good reason.
Yeah.
Good reason, buddy.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's also like the problem that a lot of these early like psychotherapeutic techniques for treating trans kids were extremely coercive and harmful.
And, you know, in like the 40s and 50s, it is barbaric.
Like the stuff you will read about is a black void of terror.
It is kids would be sent to basically these psych wards that were dens of electric shocks and omnipresent threats of rape.
Like they would have to station guards outside of bathrooms to stop kids from being raped.
And eventually, you know, they spend, even as trans adults are getting more care, they spend decades essentially trying to slowly stop kids from doing this.
Another big figure that we talk about is this Canadian like gender clinician named Ken Zucker, who pioneered this model at the Clark Institute called Living in Your Own Skin.
And it did not use like electric shocks or beatings.
It just used like more standard, like you bring your kid to us.
The kid likes dresses and Barbie dolls.
And then what we're going to do is take away the Barbie dolls and then give a kid a bunch of like worksheets, basically.
And with the Zucker model, it was like the idea was that you have this very narrow window of time in order to be able to stop a kid from being trans until they're like 10 or 11 or something.
And once the kid turns 11 and they've gone through this gauntlet and they're still like, I want to be the opposite sex, then Zucker would usually be like, okay, you can have hormones.
Yeah.
You know, I really loved your episode on conversion therapy because it sort of corrected the misapprehension I had about its origin because I always kind of assumed that conversion therapy was like the creationism of sexual science.
Like it never really entered in sort of like the mainstream.
It never came from that.
I never looked into it.
I assumed it was invented by some sort of southern pastor or something.
But it was like, it was just pretty startling to discover that, you know, there were otherwise credentialed scientists in universities who were working on these sorts of things and it spread from there.
Yeah, I mean, it was basically developed alongside gender affirming care.
Like the idea for a lot of these people was that gender affirming care is the last, like, it's the last ditch thing that you do.
And everything before that needs to be like, okay, you're sure you're not just mentally ill.
You're sure that you're not, this isn't a face.
You're sure like X, Y, isn't just a fetish or something.
And then eventually, like after you'd gone through this gauntlet, especially if you were a kid, they would be like, okay, finally, maybe you can have hormones.
But Liv, why don't you talk a little bit more about like the shift that comes in the 90s?
Yes, in the 90s, in the Netherlands, there begins to develop at a very, very small scale, an attempt basically to mirror, I guess you could say, like what the old school kind of old guard of transmedicine is doing for adults, for children or for adolescents, which is basically like putting someone on puberty blockers or something to delay their puberty starting at 12, and then quite a bit of thorough psychotherapy.
Are you sure this isn't because of a mental illness?
You know, screening out any potential like mentally ill children who wouldn't get access to this.
And then at 16 or 17, giving them access to gender affirming hormones.
And that became generally referred to as the Dutch model of the Dutch Protocol, which was universalized or generally used in the West for trans medicine.
And the way that backlash people often talk about the Dutch Protocol is as something that's much more radical than it is.
It really is a continuation of the gatekeeping model, but like, oh, let's just actually try to give kids access to hormones now or access to puberty blockers and then teens access to hormones.
I mean, the Dutch model was really like almost like a Hail Mary.
Like it was basically like, we have tried everything.
It hasn't worked.
Maybe we'll do this.
And the Dutch cohort was really small.
Like it was like, how many people was it?
Like 60?
72?
72 people.
60% were denied because they were screened out due to like mental illnesses or what have you.
And like it was very, very, it was like a really rigidly gatekept.
And you were like ultimately getting hormones at like 16 or 17.
So it was like two years before you'd be able to get them on an informed consent basis.
And very narrow.
But for a lot of like the modern scientific types, the Dutch model is like this unfathomably radical like break.
The way they talk about it, you'd think like in the Netherlands, they were like rounding up kids with a dog, like a dog catcher net and like giving them, you know, giving them hormones and stuff.
Like they were just like dragnetting gay kids off the streets and then just being like, take this.
Yeah, they were doing it through the net once they were in the area with a syringe.
Yeah, no, it was a very conservative, very conservative protocol and it existed, but even Into like the 2000s and the 2010s, like the conversion model was still really popular.
I mean, it was less brutal than it was during the early 20th century for like legal reasons.
But there's this article from NPR from 2008 where it told two stories.
It profiled two families who had a child who was either transgender or gender non-conforming.
I don't know what like the follow-up happened with them.
So I'm just being a little vague about terms.
And one of them was sent to a psychiatrist who just said like, yeah, you have a transgender kid.
Your kid seems healthy and happy, just wears, you know, different clothes than other people and has like, you know, is just, it's just like a difference.
It's not really a big deal.
It's like, the only reason you should be sending your kid to me is if your kid's really anxious or something.
So like, yeah, don't bother.
And then the other one was Kenzucker, who they sent kids to.
And Kenzucker had all this like protocol, which was take away the Barbies.
Kid has to make friends with their own natal sex.
The kid in this story was like, once they had all of her toys taken away, she would like start doing drawings of like rainbows and unicorns or whatever.
And Zucker was like, nope, you got to have manlier drawings.
Like let's get some boys in there.
Let's get some death and violence in there.
Yeah, let's get a big rock that he picks up and puts down.
And like when they asked the affirming therapist, like, what's the more common model?
Like, she was like, oh, it's suckers easily.
Yeah.
It's so interesting to kind of reframe the conversation because so much is kind of like weighted on the side of like, you know, the perspective of the trans child, like under the law and the parents' rights over the trans child.
But it's like, if you look at the larger pattern here is that we have been incredibly uncomfortable about our kids showing natural dispositions towards blurring the genders, feeling like the opposite gender, and that we've just felt so fucking uncomfortable with that that we've just basically been torturing them in different ways.
And out of that like weird control mechanism on something that's happened forever, you know, naturally in kids, we've now gotten to a completely different framing.
Like they've managed to completely flip that.
Yeah, I mean, again, a lot of these therapies, like, you know, they'll deny it now.
Like there's this big idea that like, oh, yeah, obviously like the Joe Niccolosi like conversion therapy is bad for gay people, but for trans people, you know, it's a different strain, bro, or whatever.
You know, but like a lot of these old clinicians, I won't name names, but like a lot of them are on record basically saying like, you know, in the 80s, like, yeah, parents bring their kids to me because they're gay and I worked to change that too.
Yeah, a lot of it is all mixed up there.
So yeah, tell us a bit about like, were there any interviews that you did as part of the series that you haven't talked about yet?
So we interviewed a journalist about this one specific issue because there's this, like, essentially for a lot of the backlash contingent, what they're pushing for instead of the affirmative model, mostly for kids, but a lot of them will privately admit for adults too, is something called gender exploratory therapy.
And that sounds like when you put all the words in order, that sounds fine, you know, like therapy is often offered for like trans kids.
So it's like, well, what's the harm in offering therapy so you can explore your gender?
And we interviewed this journalist who had talked to a whole lot of people who had gone through it as kids.
And we also talked to a friend of ours who wrote a paper like kind of interrogating the practice.
And while it's a heterogeneous cohort of psychotherapists, I'm sure some probably just like, are just like kind of like, you know, just like shuffling the kids along, just like, all right, you can go take it or whatever.
But for the most part, like the picture that emerges is that the idea is just to delay the transition process as long as possible.
It's just to kind of keep kids in therapy until they're 18 and like see if you can kind of like, you know, convince them that there's something else.
And then when they turn 18, it's like, all right, you're off.
Go do whatever.
Yeah.
It's a different goal than a lot of gay conversion because like the idea is like, well, if you've gone through the puberty, you're less likely because it's going to be harder for you.
Yeah.
So there's this really motivation of like, you know, you hand them off and they're 18 and they're adults now.
And like in the States, I guess historically, and this is becoming less the case, or this is under, this is somewhat under threat in certain states.
If you're an adult, you can choose to have access to hormones.
But as a minor, because you're in that category, you have a lot less control over your capacity to decide for yourself.
So basically they're using you as a kind of like Hail Mary.
It's like, if this kid, like, we don't know what to do, it's kind of not working.
Let's kind of hold them in a holding pattern in therapy while puberty hopefully does its job because, you know, what we really want is for them not to transition.
We just assume that's the better outcome.
And, you know, that's, that's kind of, is that the model or am I getting it?
Yeah, that's more or less what they want.
And the idea for a lot of these is to universally ban transition care for children.
Not even just like, you know, the, you know, you see from like some liberals this like idea.
It's like, oh, we're going too fast or we're being too blase.
It's not for a lot of the groups pushing this, it's not even just like a slowdown or caution.
It is just full tilt, no transition until you're 18 or 25 for some groups.
And then and only then you can go through, you can like transition if you want to.
I saw recently gender affirming care on the, it was Drake and he took a photo in front of a bunch of drinks.
Can you explain to me what happened there and why it's total for Drake to do gender affirming care?
High school pics, he was even trans then.
I don't even know what you, what you guys are talking about.
What happened with Drake?
Yeah, I don't know what happened with Drake either.
He got like an ab job or something.
Oh, yeah.
He's like, abs are like absurdly.
And a BBL.
Yeah, like one of those really fake sculpted abs and then a BBL.
So yeah, covering his bases.
Yeah.
This was the important stuff I needed to bring up.
One of the most covered topics that you broach in this series is the idea of false memories.
And like there's an entire fucking rabbit hole that probably could be its own series.
And even then would just be like a nightmare to research and look into.
But yeah, tell us a bit about how that was, like looking into that and determining like how much of a part of the show you wanted it to be.
So one of the core like things that we go through in this series is the ability for people to tell their own stories and not be spoken for.
The ability for a group of people seeking medicinal or like some sort of treatment or some access to medicine or something else, maybe financial compensation.
Their ability to tell their own stories and not have like a group of clinicians like kind of talk over them.
And there was a huge controversy in the psychiatric And psychological disciplines in the 80s and 90s called the memory wars.
Now, I will say the memory wars are a really complicated and messy topic.
And if you read from both sides of it, which I did, I read a whole lot from like both parties, it's remarkable to the extent to which people talk past each other.
Like, there's almost no agreed upon terminology.
There's no, like, you can read an article from one author and then read another article from another author.
And like, they won't even talk, they won't even mention the same events or trends.
It'll just be as complete, it's a complete mess, basically.
And we really emphasize that in the show.
But basically, there are a couple of things that happened.
So in the 1980s, satanic panic happens.
Now, you all have talked about that on QAA.
It's a favorite hobby horse for a reason.
And within the satanic panic, some of the things that helped kick it off are these psychotherapists, psychoanalysts like Lawrence Pazder and Bennett Braun, who were performing these not good psychological techniques that involved hypnosis and like drugging people basically to get them to like produce these like fabulous stories of like horrific abuse and usually in like a satanic context.
They would tell someone like, oh, you're probably abused or you're likely abused.
Here, take this hallucinogen or go under this hallucination therapy.
And then they would claim to remember being abused by like a satanic cult.
Yes.
Yeah.
Hypnotherapy, right?
Yes, hypnotherapy.
Now that practice, again, it's difficult to get a read on how many people practiced it and when it stopped happening.
Again, depending on who you read, it's either an epidemic that's still going on or a vanquished practice.
Like, and who knows?
But around this time, you also have like lobbying and legal calls for better remuneration and awareness of the scope and scale of sexual abuse of women and children.
This is going on in the 80s.
Now, this group, like, it's largely called like a feminist group, and it is to an extent.
Again, this is where things get really, really murky, but you do have this essential like lobbying for, you know, better child protection laws, better laws for, you know, stopping kids basically, you know, in divorce settlements, stop it so they basically always get punted to their dad or whatever.
Like all of these things that are trying to basically make the world a less hostile place to children who've been abused and children like and women who've been abused.
And this brings about its own backlash.
Now, part of that is because some of the, I don't know, like, I don't want to say science, but there was like some sort of like pop science trends about this that were not very good.
But there was a lot of just like more formal and serious academic work being done on this subject.
And that brought about its own backlash.
The big name here is a couple named Ralph Underwagger and Hollida Wakefield.
Ralph was a Lutheran minister and they formed a group called Vocal or Victims of Child Abuse Laws, which is one of my favorite evil organization names I've ever encountered.
To be clear, the abuse law here is a law that allows for formally like abused children to sue their parents for sexual abuse.
Wow.
That's the law that people are being the victims of.
Yeah, yeah.
Lawsuits.
Or like, you know, there would also be like custody battles, which is a huge topic for, you know, huge topic for these types.
And Underwagger and Wakefield were like star witnesses who would travel around the country.
They'd write books.
They'd publish papers.
And they did all these things basically like trying to undermine the credibility of people on the witness stand, like, you know, abused children and abused women.
And the reason why this is such a messy topic is because the satanic panic was going on and these bad therapeutic techniques were going on and, you know, stuff like recovered memories.
Like that's all there in the background.
And it gives them an immensely powerful tool to like weigh in on these cases where it's less clear cut.
Like for every case like Gary Ramona or whatever, like these cases where someone was probably falsely accused or like the McMartin Preschool, there's a bunch of others that didn't make a significant amount of headlines where it was, I mean, we can't ever know, but like it seems like a more quotidian case of child abuse.
And Underwagger and Wakefield would usually be there to help serve to undermine the witnesses.
So in the 1990s, and this is also building off the work of a popular psychologist by the name of Elizabeth Loftus.
Now, Loftus is really, really well known for her work in memory.
And while the idea that your memory is unreliable precedes her by decades, she played a very big role in undermining it in a legal context that memory is not reliable.
Now, I'm going to say that there is a good side to this.
And I think that needs to be stated, that a lot of people have been thrown away in jail for a very long time based on eyewitness testimony that is not reliable and often horrifically racist.
And the ability to undermine that in a legal setting is a very, very good thing.
However, Loftus herself is a very fascinating figure that we get into, and she's also been like a witness for the defense in a lot of cases like the OJ trial, Ted Bundy, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Glenn Maxwell, the officers in the Rodney King case.
No way.
Yeah, yeah, no.
She's like Forrest Gump.
Yeah, for every, every single one.
And in some of these cases, like she usually makes the argument, like people deserve a fair trial.
And she was in cases where someone got acquitted, like Gary Ramona or whatever.
And I think in the Bundy case, there was like some like fuck up with one of the witnesses or whatever.
So like I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to insinuate too much, although some of the later stuff, like the Ghislaine Maxwell stuff, is really, really dicey, to say the least.
So here you can see what a rabbit hole it is because we are now talking about the Ted Bundy case.
Yeah, the Ted Bundy case.
Which is so good.
Like the memory wars are just so sticky and nasty.
There's just so much little fucking strange offshoots.
Yeah, I mean, it gets everywhere.
And like this really culminates in the 1990s.
There's this family of PhDs, the Fried family.
And what happens is, is that the daughter, Jennifer, she's an adult.
She has a PhD.
I think most of her work is on memory and trauma.
And she like, you know, does all this research and she had like kind of remarked offhandedly that there was some like weird feelings she had about her parents.
You know, there's a couple of articles from like, I think the Stacks reader that really goes into this.
And she was started seeing a therapist and the therapist asked her a screener question, which was, have you ever been sexually abused?
And I need to make it clear.
If you go to a therapist, they will ask you this.
This is a screener question that, you know, they often ask.
And she said no.
But later that day, according to her husband, she was like a complete mess.
She was like Completely discombobulated and was like her sister had also recently told her that her father had been sexually abused as a child.
And she realized, oh shit, I think my dad might have abused me.
So she tries to like contact her parents about this and wants to keep it as a private family affair.
And the parents involved with this, Pamela, you know, there's like an email correspondence that goes back and forth.
It's really, really messy and ugly.
And eventually what happens is contact breaks and Pamela publishes an anonymous article, you know, basically saying, I was falsely accused, my husband was falsely accused by my daughter.
And after that, what is it?
I think she like kind of leaks to the press or like leaves enough of a trail that people figure out who it is.
And the Frieds, alongside a bunch of accused parents in the Philadelphia area, Hollida, Wakefield, Peter's therapist, and Paul McHugh, who is a opponent of gender affirming care from the 70s, formed this group called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
And why is this?
Why are we bringing this up?
Why are we getting into this?
Well, a whole lot of the people in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation are former trans clinicians.
Richard Green and Paul McHugh are both prominent members of it.
And while John Money was not a member, he was in touch with them and people used the false memory syndrome defense to at least exonerate him of some things he was accused of.
And this really acrimonious battle over to what extent is your memory reliable?
Can you repress memories?
Like all this stuff, which like we don't want to get too into like the actual mechanisms of how memory works because we're not memory scientists and the field is pretty small to this day still.
But there is this like undercurrent of these people who were part of this lobbying group to undermine the credibility of people accusing their parents of sexual abuse.
And not all the cases they were involved in were recovered memory cases.
Like we found a few where there was people where the parents confessed to abusing their kids and they would still get some false memory syndrome foundation people.
They would come in and be like, no, actually, it was recovered memories.
I don't know like what the ratio is there.
There's like a big archive of all the false memory syndrome stuff somewhere.
It's insane.
But it's a huge mess.
There's also a surprisingly large connection between them and Paiteca.
Like Wakefield and her husband were interviewed by Paiteca.
Oh, it connects to pedophilia?
Cool.
Yeah, it does too.
Because like, well, what happened was that there were a handful of journalists.
And look, maybe these journalists were way too into the recovered memory stuff.
I don't know.
But there were a handful of journalists who almost overnight, the stories flipped from like satanic panic and accusation stuff to false accusation stories.
Like there was a nightline documentary that basically was just like a PR press kit for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
There were a handful of journalists that were and like clinicians that were like a little skeptical of this and a little more like, you know, I don't know about this.
Like, or it's like, you guys might have a point, but like, it's more complicated than this.
And one of the big things they dug up was that Underwagger had given an interview to Paideka where he said that pedophilia was God's will.
Okay.
He was booted from the foundation after that, but his wife was not.
His wife was emphatically not booted from the foundation.
Okay.
Yeah.
So we go into this.
It's a huge rabbit hole.
It was a huge headache to research because, again, like the extent to which every single aspect of the story, like even the story about the Fried family, I told you, is heavily contested by the parents.
Like New York Magazine did a like a story on this and then the story got slammed by like the surviving members of the organization and the parents herself and they all said, you lied about this, you lied about this.
I actually have all these emails that exonerate my husband, blah, blah, blah.
It's such thoroughly contested ground.
It is a complete fucking mess from top to bottom.
My lord.
Huge headache to research.
I felt insane reading all of this stuff, but it is important to bring up because the takeaway here is that a lot of modern like critics of gender affirming care and transgender rights compare it to the recovered memory movement because the recovered memory movement was a moment where this, I mean, I guess according to their framing, this victim focused or this like civil rights focused movement went too far and hurt a lot of people.
And we contest that pretty heavily because if there's anything that's similar to recovered memory hypnotherapy, it's conversion therapy because it's pseudoscientific therapy that's set to produce a fixed outcome in the mind of the clinician.
But there are a lot of things and the idea of false memory syndrome, which I don't know how much that's talked about by psychologists.
It was never added to the DSM, but you know, who knows?
But we really do want to like pick apart this narrative of if you transition, you're basically doing a false memory syndrome to yourself.
Yeah, like they would compare like especially like children or adolescents who say they want to medically transition with like these kids who are claiming that they've been sexually abused, even though they supposedly, according to the false memory syndrome people, haven't.
Where in both cases, according to the false memory syndrome people and the members of the trans backlash who are comparing it to false memory syndrome, someone is implanting an idea into the kid's head.
Yes.
Like, oh, that's why there are so many trans kids now because of these gender-affirming doctors who are like forcing them in.
You know, it's the comparison.
It is wild how transphobia will make you extremely creative.
Suddenly you can make connections that like are kind of tenuous, but man, are you going to stretch across that gap?
Look, to credit the false memory syndrome people very, very mildly, something that we do touch upon in this series as an overarching theme is the power that doctors and therapists have over the patient.
It's very funny because when people pitch gender exploratory therapy and psychotherapy as a replacement for gender affirming care, they usually say therapy is less invasive.
You know, you're not like, it's not, it's less invasive, blah, blah, blah than this.
And it is not.
I need to make that abundantly clear.
Therapy is a great thing for a lot of people, but it can be harmful.
It can be harmful.
And recovered memory therapy is a perfect example of how historically it was harmful.
Yeah, I mean, therapy modalities are, there's just so many of them.
Like it's used so loosely to describe so many different approaches.
Yeah.
So that's also its own fucking mess.
Like, I mean, I have really severe OCD, and which is useful for researching, but I have really severe OCD.
And talk therapy can be really bad for people with OCD because it reinforces obsessions and compulsions.
It can be good.
I mean, it's been mostly good for me, but the gold standard treatment for people with OCD is exposure and response prevention for a reason.
And so the idea that therapy is this wholly neutral thing that can only produce good outcomes in patients is such a load of shit that, yeah.
we're definitely going to get some write-ins about that.
Well, I mean, because it's also people, it's humans, you know?
Like, I remember like years ago when I first started in therapy and I was telling my guy like what I did for work.
And he's like, oh, that's really interesting.
I had a partner who, like, a therapist who had, had their degree in this was a, you know, not like an online life coach type person.
No offense to anybody who's that.
It was like, oh, yeah, my partner, like, I had to part ways with because like she got really into QAnon.
Having a pill therapist would be crazy.
A QAnon therapist would be dope.
Yeah, I was telling him about, we actually just recently covered a QAnon therapist, didn't we?
Yeah, the Yeti, the Yeti therapy.
Yeah, the Yeti, the Yeti.
Yeti for Trump.
Yeah, he, he, we actually had some people write in that like said that they like did therapy with him and he did talk about QAnon stuff.
Yeah.
And this is a man who like started a Sasquatch-based cult and was talking like transdimensionally to an entire race of them.
One time we covered a Australian psychiatrist who lost his license to practice medicine because he was so into QAnon.
Yeah, I mean, that's what happened with Bennett Braun, basically.
He was a psychiatrist who kept telling his patients that they were being abducted by ghouls and goblins.
And that's why there are all these things wrong with them.
And like, again, I need to stress, I am in therapy.
I recommend it to anyone who can't afford it and thinks they would benefit from it.
But this treatment that it's somehow less invasement, especially psychiatry, which can, you know, give you medicines that have long-term lasting effects on your body for better or worse.
The idea that it's this neutral, like it's this like neutral alternative to hormone therapy is, again, it's a crock of shit.
All right, guys.
Well, is there anything like that you think didn't make the cut, you know, that you'd want to chat about?
I mean, I hope that this has excited people a lot for the series.
It's so well structured.
You know, we use music.
Spencer did an incredible job cultivating some of like the music interludes.
So yeah, I think that everyone should definitely obviously check out the show.
But yeah, what?
Give us some cutting floor clips.
One of my favorites is that this screener that Ray Blanchard, who is a member of the old guard sort of backlash figure, did.
Some of the questions in it are very ridiculous.
It's an attempt.
Basically, Blanchard is someone who categorizes trans women in two categories.
Either they're homosexual, transsexual, which means they're attracted to men, or they're an autogynophile, which means that they're attracted to women as themselves.
And basically the point of his screener is like the homosexual transsexual is the main one that's good.
It's the traditional model that the old guard would like let have hormones.
But then there are these newer transsexuals who are like attracted to women, but also benefit from hormones.
There's kind of a resentment about them.
So Blanchard contextualizes them as like more pathological, more kind of sex crazed.
And there's a certain screener he had to kind of detect what type of trans woman someone is.
And some of the questions are really, really cool.
I think my favorite one might be this one, which is on the endrophile scale, to see how attracted you are to men.
So the question is, what kind of sexual contact with a male would you have preferred on the whole, even though you may not have done it?
Now, the four questions are, one, your partner putting his privates between your upper legs, so your thighs.
So we're talking thigh fucking.
Okay.
All right.
You going Greek?
We're going Greek.
Number two, your partner putting his privates into your rear end.
So that's pretty androphilic.
Number three, you would have preferred one of these two modes, but you cannot decide which one.
Okay.
Four, you would have preferred some other mode of sexual contact.
And then five, sorry, five of them.
Had no desire for physical contact with males.
So how would you...
Which one would you expect to be, like, I guess in this context, the chaos?
The one that you're most...
Is it, is it Thai fucking?
Is it in the act?
I'm not sure if I'm answering this trick question, Liv.
There's no fucking dice.
There was no fucking dice I'm weighing in on this, not even for a fucking second.
If you had to, I feel like, I feel like.
I'm back in like sixth grade PE, where back, by the way, back in the 90s, the gym teacher was the one who would teach you sex education.
I remember this guy, he got up in front of big, big fat guy, he got up in front of class.
He's like, I'm 70% deaf in this ear.
I'm 80% deaf in the other ear.
You want to hear, you got to, if you want me to hear you, you got to speak up.
And he was like, no, I'm going to have to read some words.
We're getting into sexual education.
I'm going to read some words.
Get your giggles out now, ladies and gentlemen.
And he picked up a fucking notebook and he was like, penis, vagina, anal sex.
And it's just like a bunch of sixth graders in a classroom going bonk wild, just being like, what?
No, we had a, so I had two different sex ed teachers.
One of them was like this old gym teacher that was just like, or like.
He's still doing the gym teacher.
Yeah, he was like a wrestling coach, and he was just like so dry.
And it was just like slideshows about STDs or whatever.
And when I got to ninth grade, we had like a sex positive sex ed teacher, which sounds great.
But then I realized like as an adult, she would just like, she was not correct.
Like she was like, now, if you want to eat pussy, but you want to be safe about it, you put a layer of saran wrap in front of the pussy.
And girls love that.
And then I remember just like realizing that when I was like 24.
And I'm like, wait, what the fuck is that?
You were like, what?
What kind of, what do we tell Reynolds Kling wrap?
You've been doing it all these years.
I've never gotten a complaint until now.
It is very sex positive to talk about the saran method, you know?
Yeah.
Did she do the entire grapefruit video?
No.
Yeah, no, it was like, it was mostly like a better approach than just having like some like old head wrestling teacher being like, gentlemen, this is what a gonorrhea is.
But like, it was also just like some stuff that was just straight up wrong.
So to return to the screener, your partner putting his privates into your rear end as a male is negative 0.1.
So it's a little bit not gay.
Oh, okay.
That means you're slightly, it means you're a bit more attracted to women.
Your partner putting his privates between your upper legs is positive 1.1.
So that's the gay one.
That is the androphilic one.
Is wanting a guy to thigh fuck you.
Wanting a guy to fuck you in the ass is like a little bit autogenophilic.
It means you're a little bit more.
So remember, getting fucked in the ass, straight.
Sword fighting, having a little penis party with your friends.
What gets dance on feet?
No feet.
But, but.
No feet is HE feet.
There is one.
Tell the other one.
The one that, like, when I learned about this, I like dropped my fucking dream.
This a dancing one?
Yes.
They ask if you, like, they ask if you've ever gone dancing and why you went dancing.
Did you gayly go dancing?
Yes.
Since the age of 17, when you went dancing.
Listen, kid.
Literally.
And what you're thinking while you're dancing.
Why do I feel like this doctor is going home pulling out these sheets and cranking them?
But like the, the plan.
So it's so funny because the thread that emerges for so many of these doctors is because the field was like, you know, new according to them and they were so unwilling to take input from their own patients, they were just throwing shit at the wall.
They were fully just like, all right, I guess this is how it works.
Let's go nuts, buddy.
And in the Blanchard case, it's pretty funny.
In the case of John Money, he would perform non-consensual corrective surgeries on intersex kids that had disastrous results.
So there's definitely you're trying to tell us we should stop laughing now.
It's not funny anymore.
Things are not funny again.
Yeah, yeah, that's not funny.
Yeah, there's nothing funny about a doctor like very seriously asking you if you've ever thrown it back.
On that note, there's nothing funny about not listening to the show.
So you have to go and listen to the show.
We're going to put up the first episode.
The second episode will be already available when the first one is up, but it will be behind the paywall.
Please support Cursed Media.
It is a very young endeavor yet, and we want to see if we can build a platform where we can have more funds to like hire more people and give everybody a chance to do a show about what they really care about, which I think curiosity is always the best leader when it comes to these kinds of documentary topics.
So yeah, good job, guys.
I'm a big, big fan of yours, you know?
Yeah.
Congratulations is a deeply researched piece of media.
They go into like FOIA documents and memoirs and like journals and stuff.
It's, I mean, it does one of my favorite things that happens to me when I listen to a podcast series, which is like reorient how I think about a subject matter.
So now whenever I like, I like watch a Fox News host do like the one right-wing joke, I now all of a sudden see 70 years of history in my mind.
So it's very great stuff.
Congratulations.
CursedMedia.net, cursedmedia.net.
You got to go there.
You should go there.
Yes, episodes every week for the remaining ones, right?
Yeah.
Yes.
It's a six-parter and we're just getting started.
So get ready, folks.
And there's nothing funny about that.
I mean, Julian, but if you had to.
If you had no chance.
All right.
Well, I would have fucking said, I would have fucking said the opposite of what she does.
Yeah, I would have probably said the opposite, but I did not say that.
And now we already know the results.
And I can't look bad.
And I'm fine with it.
It would have been the other one.
It wouldn't have been the thighs.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QA Podcast.
For this show, you can go to patreon.com slash QA and subscribe for five bucks a month and get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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Tell your friends about this URL, this hot new URL that just dropped, and go sign up for this stuff and listen to this fantastic show.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
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What the hell are we trying to defend?
What is left of the United States to defend?
A school where I can't send my child to pray to God without spending $20,000 a year on top of the taxes I pay?
A school that my friend sends her sixth grader to with a trans music teacher asking her kid to do some dance in class?
