Dec. 20, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| So the puzzle is, why out of nowhere in the last decade have we seen a sudden and sharp spike of teenage girls who have no childhood history of gender dysphoria suddenly deciding they're trans, often with their girlfriends? | ||
| And the numbers are quite alarming. | ||
| We now have, you know, between 2016 and 2017, the number of young women asking for gender surgeries | ||
| quadrupled in the United States. | ||
|
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(dramatic music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Joining me today for a long overdue interview is author of the new book, Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Abigail Schreier. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me on. | ||
| So the book came out in June and kind of caught fire in June, and then I was going to have you on in August, and I went off the grid. | ||
| And then, you know, there was election stuff, so I didn't have you on. | ||
| And then a couple weeks ago, all hell broke loose because Target tweeted that they were going to no longer carry the book. | ||
| So let's just start with the controversy, because actually the reason I'm having you on Right now is that after the controversy, the book absolutely sold out everywhere and we had to hold this interview so that the book would be stocked again. | ||
| So a lot's going on. | ||
| So let's just start with the controversy first because what you write about here and the transgender craze is really like the hot topic of the day and the thing that seems to get the most people in hot water. | ||
| So what happened with Target? | ||
| Let's start there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So look, you know, we're living through probably the biggest medical scandal today is that there's a sudden spike in these teenage girls out of nowhere, medically transitioning. | ||
| All of a sudden they want hormones and surgeries and they're easily obtaining them. | ||
| And I wrote a book about it, and because two Twitter users decided the book was transphobic, they told that, they called it That's a Target, Target removed it. | ||
| And people were very upset. | ||
| You know, the book has a lot of grassroots support. | ||
| A lot of parents feel like it really explained the story of what happened to them when their teenagers suddenly out of the blue decided with their friends that they were transgender. | ||
| And they were really upset and a lot of people wrote to Target and Target, you know, reinstated it. | ||
| It was, you know, one of the few victories, I think, against cancel culture. | ||
| Yeah, you must've been pretty enthused to see the amount of support that you got, because yeah, you get the usual Twitter haters and the anonymous accounts and all that stuff, you know, pushing target to a decision like this, but pretty much everybody that still stands on the side of free speech, I guess we don't have that many people anymore, but pretty much everyone that was around supported you to get this thing back and it actually did work. | ||
| Yeah, I was very gratified. | ||
| Look, you know, there are literally hundreds of books out there promoting Unskeptically, the immediate medical transition of teenagers. | ||
| If you want to read that book, there are hundreds you could read. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I certainly would never call for any of them to be banned, because I don't want to live in that kind of world. | ||
| But there is exactly one book that did a deep dive into this phenomenon of teenage girls suddenly transitioning, and it's my book. | ||
| And for the activists, even one book is too many. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so let's start with the most important question. | ||
| Let's just get it out there right from the top. | ||
| Abigail, are you a transphobe? | ||
| Do you have an irrational fear of trans people? | ||
| And is that why you wrote this book? | ||
| No, I wrote the book, first of all, because a reader wrote to me and she told me her daughter had gone through this phenomenon. | ||
| And when she, you know, she said her daughter had always been a girly girl, never had gender dysphoria. | ||
| This is a severe discomfort in one's biological sex. | ||
| But when she got to high school, she had a lot of mental health issues. | ||
| And she went off to college. | ||
| And with a group of girlfriends, they all decided they were transgender. | ||
| And she started a course of testosterone. | ||
| And I tried to find another investigative journalist who would take it up because I wasn't an investigative journalist and I couldn't find one. | ||
| So after four months, I finally got back in touch with her and I said, all right, I'll do it. | ||
| That's the world we're living in. | ||
| And let me just say that a lot of transgender adults, and I interviewed a lot for my book, support the book. | ||
| I mean, the book does not, I'm not against medical transition. | ||
| It just urges caution when it comes to these teenage girls. | ||
| Okay, so just to be absolutely clear, and I know my audience totally understands it, but, so you don't have a problem with adults that transition, that make the choice in their lives to transition? | ||
| No, I mean, not only am I not against it. | ||
| I've interviewed a lot of transgender adults. | ||
| I believe it has helped. | ||
| It can help. | ||
| I know them. | ||
| I've talked to them. | ||
| And I'll tell you something else. | ||
| I'm not even against all medical transition for teenagers. | ||
| The only thing I show in the book is that the current medical regime has no medical judgment in place. | ||
| It's totally based on the judgment of teenagers. | ||
| And doctors are told to affirm, affirm, affirm, meaning they have to agree with the teenager's self-diagnosis. | ||
| So there's no checks in place. | ||
| So the regime, the current medical regime, is really not safe for teenage girls. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So I was trying to think how I wanted to conduct this interview because, you know, this is one of the topics that we've touched on a bunch here. | ||
| Not because I particularly care about these issues as much as when it's become such a hot button issue, then it sort of gets to my plate. | ||
| But I thought, I read the book and I thought that the way that you laid it out, just even in the chapters, the way you separated certain things was really good. | ||
| So if you don't mind, we'll just go through chapter by chapter and discuss each one. | ||
| So the introduction is about the contagion. | ||
| And that's sort of what you're hitting on about what happened with your friend's daughter at college. | ||
| Can you describe that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So it's based on the research of Lisa Lippman, as we'll talk about in the next chapter, but the public health researcher who looked into why there was a sudden and huge spike in teenage girls who claimed to have gender dysphoria. | ||
| And this is not the population that traditionally had it. | ||
| It was always males, and it usually began in early childhood. | ||
| And all of a sudden, across the West, including America, We have this sudden spike of teenage girls deciding they're transgender, often with their friends and often after the encouragement of social media influencers. | ||
| Right, so you talk about this a little bit later in the book, so I'm jumping ahead a bit, but you tell a story of a girl who, in essence, in high school came out as transgender. | ||
| There weren't a lot of issues that she was bringing up before that, but then suddenly she's getting more likes on Tumblr. | ||
| She's now part of an oppressed minority at school and in different groups, and that that allure, basically, and I know I'm getting a little ahead of ourselves here, but that allure, in a weird way, is what's fueling so much of this. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So it's young teenage girls. | ||
| These are often white, middle or upper middle class girls. | ||
| They're very precocious. | ||
| But they are high anxiety and high depression girls. | ||
| They have a lot of mental health issues. | ||
| And for the first time, the moment they get to high school and or middle school and decide they're transgender, you know, it's the first time they get so much encouragement and love Especially online and sometimes from adults and some of these adults are not, you know, are not up to very much good. | ||
| But they get the showering of love and praise and they don't want to walk away from that. | ||
| So, chapter one, which is about the girls that you're describing right there, you know, we've talked a lot about, and I think you know, I was on tour with Jordan Peterson for a year and a half, and he focused more so, I would say, on young men, but it was a message that obviously traversed, it didn't matter what gender you really were. | ||
| But is there something specific going on with young girls that we're not aware of? | ||
| Like, there does seem to be an emasculation of young boys that we see, but what do you think is happening with young girls? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So teenage girls specifically fall for almost every one of these so-called hysterias. | ||
| And the reason they do is they tend to take on their friend's pain. | ||
| If a young man is depressed, very often his friend will say, okay, let's go play basketball or, or suggest doing something, but he won't say, what are you feeling? | ||
| Tell me about your pain. | ||
| And he won't start to take it on himself. | ||
| He won't agree with his friend about how terrible life is just to make his friend feel better. | ||
| But we know, and I interviewed a love psychologist about this, young women tend to not only take on their friend's pain, they're willing to distort reality in order to make their friend feel better. | ||
| And so that's why they tend to, you know, all of these, you know, anorexia is spread this way. | ||
| They tend to, you know, take on whatever their friend's reality is, even if it's, oh, I'm too fat. | ||
| Whatever they think will make their friend feel better, they'll take that on. | ||
| Do you get pushback when even you talk about something sort of as simple and kind of obvious? | ||
| Like, we all know that is true. | ||
| Men care more about things. | ||
| Women care more about people. | ||
| Like, these are things that we all know. | ||
| But even saying something like that, do you find that you get pushback from the scientific community on that? | ||
| That just boys and girls are wired a little bit differently? | ||
| And of course there's exceptions to the rule. | ||
| But as a general rule, what you just said is true. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I do get some pushback, but actually I get a lot of, you know, I interviewed a lot of people for the book and a lot of scientific experts and a lot of them agree. | ||
| I mean, we know that you can't house young women who are anorexic on hospital worlds together without being really careful because they will tend to encourage each other and their anorexia will get more severe. | ||
| And, and it's, we don't, it's not comparable with boys. | ||
| They don't, they don't go through quite the same things. | ||
| So chapter two is the puzzle. | ||
| Let's talk about the puzzle. | ||
| So the puzzle is, why out of nowhere in the last decade have we seen a sudden and sharp spike of teenage girls who have no childhood history of gender dysphoria suddenly deciding they're trans, often with their girlfriends? | ||
| And the numbers are quite alarming. | ||
| We now have, you know, between 2016 and 2017, the number of young women asking for gender surgeries quadrupled in the United States. | ||
| So we know, and we know it's typically teenage girls who are driving this population. | ||
| So the question is why? | ||
| What is it about teenage girls? | ||
| Whenever you have any kind of diagnosis that's exploding, it really is important to ask why. | ||
| And we're not seeing this with women in their 60s and 70s. | ||
| We're seeing the same population that falls for every other peer contagion. | ||
| So what would you say the, well, you get to this a little bit later, but what would you say is sort of the answer to the puzzle? | ||
| I mean, is it, it's just a confluence of many things, education, social media, everything, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And young women who are in genuine psychological pain, and these women are, they tend to look to the culture to help them understand it. | ||
| So in previous generations, they might've said, oh, I'm so fat. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| If I just lose this weight, I'll feel better. | ||
| And today they look in the culture and say, Oh, I know what this is. | ||
| I don't feel perfectly feminine. | ||
| I'm 13. | ||
| I hate my body. | ||
| I must have gender dysphoria. | ||
| I'm supposed to be a boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's one of the hardest things there because you have, you have girls that have legitimate issues that they need to deal with, that adults should be there to, to deal with them. | ||
| And yet they're being prescribed the wrong thing. | ||
| You might even say that's the entire issue. | ||
| The entire issue is really, and here's the problem, it's not that transition is never appropriate, but we are living with this affirmative care model now, which means that across the West, doctors are told with this diagnosis, you must agree with the patient, no matter how young she is or what are her other mental health issues. | ||
| When she self-diagnoses with gender dysphoria, you agree with her, and your next question is basically, when do we start the medication? | ||
| There's no oversight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's an interesting segue to the influencers, which is the next chapter. | ||
| I'm really fascinated by this on how this stuff spreads. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So, um, there are a lot of social media influencers and, you know, for Gen Z, those born in 1995 and after, you know, social media influencers are, are as important if not more important than Hollywood stars. | ||
| They really follow these people. | ||
| They look up to them. | ||
| And unfortunately, there are a lot of trans influencers who are peddling very, very bad messages like transition is easy. | ||
| Even if you don't know if you're trans, you should try a course of testosterone because that's the only way to find out if you're the real thing. | ||
| And they really downplay the medical side effects, which are really severe and irreversible. | ||
| So what do you make of the click part of this? | ||
| The people that are influencers that keep talking about this stuff, even if they don't understand the science, even if they themselves are not trans, but that for some reason, there seems to be a tremendous amount of just clicks. | ||
| I mean, literally just clicks and eyeballs that seem to drive this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So one thing is, you know, I interviewed influencers for my book and I do think some of them really believe they're helping. | ||
| And one of the reasons, and they do genuinely feel great about having transitioned, and one of the reasons they do is because testosterone delivers a euphoria, and it suppresses anxiety, which is some of these girls' biggest problems. | ||
| So they go on it, and they think it's confirmation that they got their diagnosis right, and they feel great, and they can't wait to tell their friends. | ||
| The problem is we're already seeing long-term, when you step out of even just a few years, there are tremendous rates of regret, And there's tremendous rates of anxiety and depression. | ||
| It is not curing depression in many instances. | ||
| And there really was no medical oversight for it. | ||
| Yeah, and there's really nothing that can be done about that, right? | ||
| I mean, about the influencers that, for either good intentions or bad intentions, I mean, it is what it is. | ||
| We're all online. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, getting some of these young girls offline is a good first step. | ||
| When there was lots of, I think they called it Thinspo, you know, the Thinspiration on, I think it was Instagram or one of these social media sites, they took it down because inspiring girls to anorexia was harmful. | ||
| But right now we have trans influencers, people who are suggesting and encouraging taking testosterone, trying it out, seeing how it feels basically online. | ||
| And it's basically a wild west. | ||
| They're never shut down because You know, whenever someone says it's a matter of civil rights or a minority, everyone stops thinking. | ||
| And certainly social media doesn't police it at all. | ||
| How long do they, when people start taking, or when these young girls start taking testosterone, how long does that bump that you described there last, where the anxiety is gonna go down and that sense of euphoria? | ||
| I've talked to trans adults who've said it lasted their whole life. | ||
| In other words, they really felt that In their case, testosterone was a really helpful drug. | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| The only problem, of course, is that in the trans adults I talked to, they had to have certain therapy to make sure, and there was oversight to make sure it was the correct diagnosis. | ||
| Because right now, teenage girls are deciding this on their own, and there isn't mental health oversight in any meaningful way. | ||
| Right, so we'll get more to the medical part of that in a little bit, but so Chapter 5 is about the schools, and I think this is kind of fascinating because we've sort of just watched intellectual rot run across all of our schools, and you just have to kind of go with whatever the thing of the day is. | ||
| How much of this is just sort of being taught at public schools, do you think? | ||
| I know it depends what state you're in, but here we are, both in Cali, So in California, better or worse, right? | ||
| It's very extreme in the state. | ||
| So it gender identity education is something you can't opt out of. | ||
| It begins in kindergarten and it's really extreme. | ||
| We start by teaching, you know, five year olds that whatever, however they were born, a doctor just made a guess and only they know their true gender. | ||
| And this doesn't push kids to transition necessarily. | ||
| But what it does do is the moment these young girls in particular hit adolescence, They go through a period where they hate their own bodies. | ||
| They feel ugly. | ||
| This is something nearly every woman can attest to. | ||
| The solution readily leaps to mind because it's something they've learned about for years. | ||
| And it's that, oh my gosh, I know why I'm so uncomfortable in my body. | ||
| It's because I'm supposed to be a boy. | ||
| Were you able to figure out at all how these bad ideas get so influential at all the schools? | ||
| Seemingly all the schools, at least in California, but New York too, and all over the country. | ||
| Just how infectious the ideas are. | ||
| Right, so I was a little bit, because I was able to get a lot of documents out of the California Teachers Association. | ||
| Concerned teachers sent them to me, and there are There's really no division in California between the activists and the teachers. | ||
| Activists are not only training the teachers, they are providing all the curriculum for gender identity and sexual orientation education. | ||
| So it's coming from very extreme sources, and teachers who are a little uncomfortable about it are completely intimidated into silence. | ||
| So when you say that at five years old, they're taught this, for the average parent that might go into that school and say, well, I don't want my child hearing that at five years old, which no five-year-old, it has nothing to do with even what's true or not. | ||
| No five-year-old can comprehend this stuff. | ||
| In effect, that person is gonna be blacklisted and God only knows what they'll do to the poor kid. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You can't, because in California, they did something really sneaky. | ||
| They put this curriculum into The anti-bullying curriculum. | ||
| So usually you would think this would go into the sex ed curriculum, which parents are allowed to opt out of, but they put it into the anti-bullying curriculum under the pretext that you couldn't possibly police bullying unless you taught every child that only they know their true gender. | ||
| And of course we know that's nonsense because you can absolutely police bullying and should police bullying against sexual minorities and every other student, without introducing everybody to a false ideology. | ||
| Do you have any numbers on what percentage of the public school teachers actually buy it versus who's just going along? | ||
| I guess that would be hard to quantify. | ||
| It's very hard. | ||
| Public school teachers are terrified. | ||
| I spoke to one teacher who posted something on social media. | ||
| It was very tame. | ||
| She said, I don't know, this seems to be confusing a lot of kids at my school effectively. | ||
| And she was suspended immediately. | ||
| And this was on her private Facebook page. | ||
| So teachers are very, very afraid. | ||
| Yeah, so the next chapter is the moms and dads, which speaking of very, very afraid, it seems like a lot of the moms and dads are too. | ||
| Yeah, they're afraid. | ||
| They're afraid to lose custody. | ||
| And these are, you know, the parents who call me are overwhelmingly political progressives. | ||
| They are proud allies. | ||
| They've always been allies. | ||
| But their only sort of hesitation and problem is they think, gosh, this came out of nowhere. | ||
| I mean, I supported her when she said she was a lesbian, but now she's saying she's a boy and she wants to have her breasts removed. | ||
| I mean, I'm not sure that's right for her. | ||
| And couldn't she regret it? | ||
| These are the most sort of obvious questions. | ||
| There's nothing hateful about these questions. | ||
| But today, these parents are treated like bigots. | ||
| They're isolated. | ||
| Their friends drop them. | ||
| And very often friends will go behind their backs to send their daughter's encouragement by way of a binder, one of those compression garments, or otherwise, you know, castigate them for bigotry, allegedly. | ||
| What did this teach you, maybe? | ||
| Or you're a parent yourself. | ||
| I mean, did this teach you anything about parenting in general and setting rules and being honest and the rest of it? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think one thing it taught me was really how Much. | ||
| We've over relied on experts, these so-called experts who show up and claim to know more than we do about our kids that we have spent, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of hours raising. | ||
| And I, and I think that, um, I think that trusting your own instincts about what's right for your daughter. | ||
| I mean, if you, in many cases, parents will call me and they just, it just doesn't sit right with them. | ||
| But they are being pressured by the mental health establishment or doctors to immediately agree with their daughter and fast-track her to irreversible consequences that she's likely to regret. | ||
| So since you said the P word, progressives, do you sense that there is a connection between sort of being politically progressive and that it would end up in a situation like this, that you sort of just, yes, everything goes all the time, there is nothing that's really true per se, and everything is sort of how you feel, that this was the obvious outcome of it in a weird way? | ||
| Well, I think my take is that the reason so many progressive families have have fallen into this. | ||
| And let me say, conservative families have as well. | ||
| But the reason it does seem to be majority progressive families is because they were less skeptical of the culture. | ||
| Conservatives have known for a long time that a social worker or a psychologist might not treat their values with respect. | ||
| But liberals were genuinely taken aback and completely caught off guard because they thought, wait a second, I've been an ally my entire life. | ||
| This isn't about that. | ||
| It's about the mental health of my daughter. | ||
| She's got anxiety, depression. | ||
| Shouldn't we look at those things first? | ||
| And they were really assuming good faith on behalf of, you know, frankly, activists posing as doctors. | ||
| Yeah, and we've just, it seems to me that unfortunately for a lot of the liberals, and I think you know a little bit about my story, for a lot of liberals, until something like this hits them, they think that there's nothing wrong there. | ||
| That it's just like, oh, anything goes, and then next thing you know, they're confronted with this, and then they feel a little bit differently. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They describe themselves now overwhelmingly as politically homeless. | ||
| And it's not because they feel conservative. | ||
| It's because they are really horrified by the assault on their families. | ||
| I mean, that all these medical, these mental health professionals and teachers would go behind their backs to encourage their children to do something that they think is harmful to them is so stunning to them. | ||
| And it really, it does make them really uncomfortable with progressive politics. | ||
| Yeah, so did you have a sense or do you have a sense that conservative parents have some better mechanisms to fight this either by standing up to the school or maybe dealing with the child a little bit differently or whatever it might be? | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I think conservative parents were tended to be and should be, you know, more skeptical of the culture. | ||
| They were more skeptical of the social workers and psychologists who claimed to know so much about their parents. | ||
| But they also, look, their default is that, what do you mean you're suddenly a boy? | ||
| See, sometimes progressive parents were afraid to say that because they don't want to be bigoted. | ||
| But a conservative parent might be more comfortable just saying, what do you mean? | ||
| You've been a girl your whole life, you're a girl. | ||
| I mean, just because you want a short haircut doesn't suddenly make you a boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you worried that the slippery slope of this ultimately is that, you know, a child will, a girl, a young girl will basically announce that she's trans at school. | ||
| A parent or the parents will say, well, we're not transitioning you, something like that. | ||
| And then as the state grows, and again, we're both in California, that literally the state will start taking kids away from their parents. | ||
| Like, is that something that, that you think is really legit? | ||
| It's already happening. | ||
| I mean, yes, you especially hear that now where we're with divorce, divorce couples where they're not on the same page. | ||
| The I've had I've been called by a mother who was, you know, she was divorced, but she had full custody of the daughter, because the court deemed her the more responsible better parent. | ||
| And when the daughter hit 13, out of nowhere, she decided she was trans with the encouragement of her therapist and, and her stepmom. | ||
| And the moment the mom put the brakes on it and said, honey, look, you know, and the mom was not gender conforming herself. | ||
| The mom said, honey, look, you're still a girl just because you don't want to dress girly. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Then a social worker was brought in and decided that the mom was no longer a safe parent. | ||
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God, I mean, it's just, it's twisted. | |
| It's deeply twisted. | ||
| What about on the parent side, where we've seen some stories like this, I can think of one from about two months ago, where it really seems to be the parent that's driving this, that the stuff we talked about earlier about, oh, you suddenly are getting a lot of likes on Tumblr, or you're feeling like you're in a group suddenly, that we've heard some instances where it seems like the parents are the ones driving their children towards this, because then they, sort of by proxy, feel popular, or liked, As an oppressed group, they're an oppressed group adjacent or something. | ||
| Right, so I think that does happen. | ||
| The population I really looked at is the biggest population. | ||
| It's this teen girl population. | ||
| And there, you don't, you know, these are young women who aren't listening to mom at all. | ||
| In fact, the last thing they want is advice from mom. | ||
| And so usually in that instance, the parents aren't so much the driver. | ||
| Sometimes with the little kids, You do see parents who seem to be pushing this awfully hard and certainly seem to be bragging about it online in ways that make you wonder if they aren't getting something else out of it. | ||
| Yeah, all right, the shrinks are up next. | ||
| I know that you're not thrilled with the way therapists have dealt with this. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they have an affirmative model right now, the majority, although I interviewed, look, I interviewed a lot of giants in the field who don't agree with it and are not affirmative therapists. | ||
| But affirmative therapy says we start from the conclusion. | ||
| We know that we're going to agree with that, that a young person who says they're gender dysphoric, we're going to agree that that's the right diagnosis. | ||
| We'll affirm them as transgender. | ||
| And the only question is, when do we get started on the medications? | ||
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And, um, you know, that's, that's just not medicine. | |
| Medicine is an evaluation of risks and benefits. | ||
| And the moment you are open about the risks and benefits of any medical treatment, you're not in the gender-affirmative camp anymore. | ||
| You're on my side of things, which is to have an open look and approach with some skepticism how these girls are and whether they're benefiting. | ||
| So do you sense that some of the psychologists or the psychiatrists, that they're actually not telling these young girls what the numbers are in terms of either regretting it later in life or that it's not gonna solve all of your problems or that suicides are still high. | ||
| I mean, all of these things that are uncomfortable to talk about. | ||
| I mean, do you sense that they kind of hide that because they're just on board? | ||
| Well, remember that we have 20 conversion therapy laws that prohibit them From doing anything other than affirming, because that might be considered, you know, the so-called conversion therapy. | ||
| Might be trying to convert them out of being trans. | ||
| So, in essence, they could lose their license. | ||
| They could lose their license. | ||
| Now, of course, conversion therapy, the reason we passed these bans was to eliminate the really ugly practices of gay conversion therapy. | ||
| That's how they got passed. | ||
| But they inserted, activists inserted, gender identity language. | ||
| So now a therapist can't even say to a child, hold on, I know you say you're a boy, but let's explore some of the other things that seem to be upsetting you. | ||
| Yeah, can you clean that up a little bit for people that have no knowledge of any of this, the sort of difference between sexual identity, meaning your sexuality versus gender identity, and why conversion in each case, or conversion therapy in each case, is not exactly apples to apples? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So with homosexuality, you know, we've long known that this seems to be innate and immutable. | ||
| It's not the kind of thing you can sort of convert someone out of or convince them out of, and nor should you want to. | ||
| I mean, there's nothing unhealthy about a gay life. | ||
| There just isn't. | ||
| But when you're talking about letting a child become comfortable in their own body, Because gender identity, if a young woman suddenly says, I'm really a boy, I need to become a boy, you're setting them up to be a lifetime medical patient where they will put testosterone in their bodies. | ||
| They need to stay on it for life. | ||
| It has all kinds of terribly extreme side effects. | ||
| They're highly risky. | ||
| And unlike, you know, therapy that may make her comfortable in her body, today's therapy pushes her to transition. | ||
| That's very different. | ||
| From being gay, in which all the gay person asks is that you accept them for what they are. | ||
| What a trans teen asks is, can you help me try to be what I'm not? | ||
| And that's a much more invasive intervention. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I'm reminded as you're talking about this, I'm blanking on whether you mentioned the show in the book. | ||
| Did you talk about Transparent at all, the show? | ||
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No, I didn't. | |
| So there's a line in the last episode of the first season where a woman who's already transitioned says to the main character who's about to begin the process, in effect, this is going to ruin your life. | ||
| This is going to ruin your family. | ||
| And that in many ways is what the show Ended up being about, and I know that's not about a child transitioning, but I think a lot of what you're talking about is just that so many people just don't have a holistic view of what this is going to be like on the other side. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And when I interview transgender adults who are very happy in their transitions, very often, they will still tell me, look, this is not easy. | ||
| It's not easy to go through life on all this hormonal treatment. | ||
| You know, holding yourself out as a member of the opposite sex, it's really hard. | ||
| And when transgender adults talk to me about it, they are horrified that teenagers are getting this hormonal treatment so easily, without any kind of understanding of the risks, and not appreciating how hard medical transition really is. | ||
| So all that being said, Chapter 7 is about the dissidents. | ||
| There are some dissidents in the field. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| A number of prominent people have stood out and said, hold on, this is way too much, way too fast with too little medical oversight. | ||
| Um, you know, look, the court found, you know, and I interviewed a lot of them, including, you know, Ken Zucker, who chaired the entry, the writing of the entry on gender dysphoria for the DSM five, the classic psychiatric manual on, on, uh, on mental disorders. | ||
| And, um, You know, these are people who say starting with the conclusion is not medicine, right? | ||
| And in fact, last week, the British High Court examined the same protocols that they have in place in Britain for gender medicine, and the High Court was appalled. | ||
| They said, you know, in effect, what's been going on here is likely to transition a lot of young women who are not supposed to be transgender and a lot of, you know, young people who are likely to experience severe regret. | ||
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So are you, are you surprised? | |
| I guess this is the right chapter to ask you about this. | ||
| Are you surprised the amount, how this thing has become so part of the culture war that it's not just, okay, this is happening to young girls at school. | ||
| That's one portion of it, but this is becoming something that, you know, that Joe Biden is tweeting about transgender violence all the time. | ||
| And Kamala is saying, or Elizabeth Warren, I think Kamala said it too, about black transgender women are the backbone of the economy. | ||
| I mean, like really crazy stuff that no one's against transgender people, but just how this has become such a part of the zeitgeist. | ||
| Like this is like a bellwether thing where you either accept it or you're a dissident, you're a bad guy. | ||
| Yeah, it really has. | ||
| You know, it's so interesting. | ||
| When I first wrote a proposal for my agent, it was actually gonna be on a contemporary book about feminism. | ||
| I had written one article about, This whole sudden spike in teenage girls identifying as trans thing. | ||
| But it certainly wasn't a passion of mine, and I wasn't intending to turn it into a book. | ||
| And my agent said to me, listen, that article you wrote seems to have gotten a lot of attention. | ||
| And frankly, if what you're really interested in is how young women today are doing, it seems to be a really good way to explore all the other issues you're interested in, like free speech and how young women are faring today. | ||
| It did end up being sort of this incredible, you know, lens for looking at so many aspects of the culture. | ||
| So I, you know, I guess that's why it seems to be at the nexus of a lot of different things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's why it's so fascinating to me because over the years, I've interviewed a lot of people who suddenly find themselves in the thick of the battle without really wanting in on it. | ||
| They were just sort of interested in something else. | ||
| And next thing you know, the battle comes to them. | ||
| And even though I hadn't, you know, this is the first time that we're actually speaking one-on-one, When I saw the target thing, I was like, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that Abigail's probably not that combative, probably didn't really want all of this extra attention and everything else. | ||
| So what has it been like for you to be a dissident in something that is so hard to talk about? | ||
| You know, I wouldn't have written this book kind of if I didn't think a few things. | ||
| If I didn't think what was going on today is kind of madness. | ||
| I do believe we're going to look back on this time and say, what were we doing? | ||
| I mean, why were we letting, you know, very upset teenagers and a lot of pain immediately medically transition and risk their fertility and future sexual dysfunction? | ||
| So I think that's what the High Court in England just looked at last week. | ||
| It was a major case. | ||
| Of course, the media in the U.S. | ||
| tried to ignore it, and mostly did, but it was a huge case. | ||
| This is a neutral tribunal, and they looked at the exact same protocols we have in place today, and they were horrified. | ||
| They basically said, these young kids can't give informed consent at 15 to eliminating their future fertility. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Yeah, but what about for you personally? | ||
| Just like going through the headaches of all of this. | ||
| And you know, you were on Joe Rogan and then the Spotify people, you know, some employees at Spotify basically wanted to kick him off Spotify. | ||
| Fortunately, then that didn't happen. | ||
| Everyone heard what happened with Target, but you're back into Target. | ||
| I mean, just for you personally as someone that, you know, you're now out there and you live in LA. | ||
| I mean, you're here in this weird town, you know. | ||
| You know, it's funny, when I wrote the book, I actually worried that it would be completely ignored. | ||
| Little did you know, I wasn't, I was surprised a little bit, but but I had seen I wasn't completely surprised. | ||
| And I'll tell you why, because I had watched every scientist who has ever and many of whom I interviewed in the book, who has ever, you know, come out against Affirmative therapy, who's ever come out and said, hold on, what's going on is, just seems to have a lot of peer influence, or have said, this isn't real therapy, there's no oversight. | ||
| Every scientist who's done that has been cancelled, and sometimes they've lost their jobs, and very often they've been really caught off guard by the vitriol and the frankly bad faith on the opposite side. | ||
| So, I at least had the benefit of their example, and I was a little bit more prepared for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Has it cost you, do you think, professionally? | ||
| I mean, the book is obviously doing well now, but do you think this will ultimately close some other doors that you may not even know about? | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's a question. | ||
| I do believe that we're gonna look back on this age. | ||
| I mean, look, you know, in England, where they have the exact same medical protocols and the exact same spike among adolescent girls, because they have the same social media we do, they, you know, The Economist and the Times of London both just named my book to its best books list for the year. | ||
| So even though the legacy media in the United States completely ignored my book, in England, you know, their media seems to have found it worthwhile. | ||
| So, you know, I'm hoping the sanity at some point prevails. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I'm wondering, I wonder if there's any numbers on this. | ||
| I'm sure someone could figure it out. | ||
| But I find whenever I just suddenly get like a thousand hate tweets in a row, almost every single one of them, if I look at the bio of the people that send it, has gender pronouns in there. | ||
| And I always think it's so interesting that, you know, the people that I suppose purport to be the most tolerant, the most diverse, the most open, that they're the ones that are often sending the most, the most anger. | ||
| So I have, I can only imagine what you were opening up your Twitter to find. | ||
| Yeah, you can imagine the sort of threats I get. | ||
| But I would just say that, you know, look, I know a lot of transgender adults at this point. | ||
| And I try to say this in every interview, because it's really true. | ||
| The crazy woke activists do not speak for them. | ||
| They don't represent these crazies. | ||
| And they are not represented by these crazies. | ||
| And I have to say, transgender people I've met are some of the loveliest, most sober, and really insightful people I've gotten to know. | ||
| So these woke activists, they are the same people leading Black Lives Matter and every other extreme group today. | ||
| And they don't represent transgender people, certainly the ones I've met. | ||
| Actually, I kind of wanted to get there. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about the intersectional nature of this, how it went from Black Lives Matter to sort of Black Trans Lives Matter, that these things all do sort of link together in the woke mind? | ||
| Yeah, it's very similar. | ||
| I mean, it's an extreme ideology which judges everybody according to their rank, and their rank is based on these, you know, so-called victim classes. | ||
| And, you know, the woke trans activists are the same way. | ||
| Declare you're a trans, you are now, you rise in their intersectional pyramid. | ||
| And the problem with that is a lot of lonely teenage, I mean, there are a lot of problems with it, but one of them is that a lot of lonely teenage girls who are white girls, they're members of the oppressive majority, right? | ||
| As soon as they choose a trans identity, they finally get relief. | ||
| They get a shield from all the hate they're getting from their peers. | ||
| It's so pervasive, it's just unbelievable. | ||
| You know, you mentioned some of the adult trans people that you talk to, and obviously how great they can be in society and happy and everything else. | ||
| You mentioned Deirdre McCloskey in the book, who I've had on the show, who's one of our great economists. | ||
| And I wonder, when you talk to any of them, When they talk about transitioning, does anyone say that they actually, you know, and Deirdre is probably in her 60s or 70s, I suppose. | ||
| Do any of them say, oh, I wish I had done it earlier? | ||
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That's interesting. | |
| Not usually. | ||
| And I'll tell you why, because they really believe, even though they obviously wish that they could pass more easily, certainly the male, the female, Transgender adults often wish they could pass more easily and they struggle to pass. | ||
| They also often will tell you that the process they went through in therapy before they were allowed to immediately transition, they felt that that process was a really good process to make sure they were right and that it wasn't some other impulse or other mental health issue at play. | ||
| So the thing that's crazy right now about the discussion is You know, the activists insist we have to transition these kids immediately because otherwise they'll regret it later in life. | ||
| Well, it's mostly biological men who worry about that. | ||
| And yet they're making the case that that should apply to teenage girls. | ||
| I mean, teenage girls who put this testosterone in their bodies 10 to 40 times the amount their bodies would normally handle, they actually transition pretty well. | ||
| You know, they get full beards, they get male pattern baldness, Their voices change, their physique changes. | ||
| They don't have quite the same barriers that men have when they transition to women. | ||
| Yeah, you know, you just mentioned the passing portion of this, meaning that you can transition from one sex to the other and be thought of just sort of generally as that sex. | ||
| So it's easier, in essence, you're saying, for younger girls to transition to boys and be thought of as boys as opposed to the other way around, and you think that probably makes the decision a little bit easier? | ||
| Well, this is what I'll say. | ||
| It's not that it's easy because it's not. | ||
| I mean, they will always be smaller. | ||
| They'll need a double mastectomy. | ||
| It's not an easy road. | ||
| And they end up very often needing hysterectomies and all these follow-up surgeries. | ||
| They're actually quite uncomfortable and have serious repercussions. | ||
| It's not that it's easy. | ||
| It's that the men are, you know, biological men are making the argument that, I wish I could pass better as a woman, so we need to transition these kids earlier. | ||
| But there are no, because they maybe have stubble or they don't have a jaw that looks like a woman's, but the case is less obviously made for a woman who transitioned to a man because other than being, she'll be smaller ultimately than a biological male. | ||
| But look, I know trans men who are very convincing and more convincing than some of the trans women that I know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What do you make of the idea that some of this is actually bizarrely anti-gay? | ||
| Because people seem to think that these letters all have something to do with each other, but I've sort of come around to this idea that if you, you know, we hear this, that if you have an effeminate Boy, so a five or seven year old that is effeminate, who probably is just a gay boy, will grow up to be a gay man, that a lot of these parents, instead of having to deal with the realities of having a gay son, that in a weird sense it's almost like, oh, it would actually be easier if he was just a girl, he behaves like a girl, and that that in and of itself is oddly anti-gay. | ||
| Yeah, I do think there's an element of that. | ||
| There's an element of that homophobia. | ||
| You see it sometimes because the parents will see, and part of it is not necessarily homophobia, I should say. | ||
| Part of it's this discomfort of, you know, I have this child who seems to be like they might end up gay. | ||
| I have to do something immediately. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The parents feel like they have to immediately intervene and do something, and they feel this way about almost everything about their kids' lives. | ||
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That's why they're called helicopter parents, right? | |
| And sometimes the answer is really just to leave them be. | ||
| There's nothing, okay, they may emerge as gay, they may not. | ||
| I guess time will tell. | ||
| But that doesn't mean you have to do something. | ||
| And unfortunately in this age, we don't wait. | ||
| The answer is always start a course of medication right now. | ||
| And I do think that's played in. | ||
| Did you meet a lot of, I guess, well, your research obviously was about girls that were transitioning to boys, but did you meet or have you talked to people that have focused on that idea of these sort of feminine boys who then transition and then years later they just realize, oh, I was just a feminine gay boy. | ||
| I actually don't know about that as a larger phenomenon. | ||
| You know, this is a really recent phenomenon. | ||
| This epidemic is in the last 10 years, and it really has been driven by teen girls. | ||
| So with boys, it's harder to track because there have always been some percentage of boys who naturally would end up as what we used to call transsexuals. | ||
| So it's harder to say in their case, oh, that's certainly, you know, peer contagion or homophobia or anything else at play. | ||
| But with the girls, we know this population never experienced gender dysphoria in any numbers that were at all significant. | ||
| So in fact, there's no extant literature on teen girls transitioning who didn't have childhood gender dysphoria at all. | ||
| So it's a clearer case with the girls. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| All right, let's move to chapter eight, the promoted and the demoted. | ||
| We sort of hit on this a little bit. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, um, I think one of the things at sort of at play with all this is that women have really fallen in esteem and abroad in the broader culture, um, certainly vis-a-vis trans, you know, people. | ||
| And we see this all the time where young girls are asked to, you know, womanhood is denigrated, um, in, in many ways. | ||
| One of the ways is through porn. | ||
| Young, young kids are seeing porn and very violent porn at very young ages on the internet. | ||
| Now it's widely available. | ||
| It's quite violent. | ||
| And being a woman doesn't seem so great to them. | ||
| And then you see that, you know, biological boys are able to out-compete them in sports. | ||
| No one stands up for them. | ||
| I think it's pretty clear that in the competition between, you know, girls and trans, you know, youth for, in terms of esteem in the broader culture, girls have fallen. | ||
| And I do think girls are feeling that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what, who are the promoted then within that? | ||
| Oh, so I think that, you know, sort of being transgender today has sort of risen in esteem. | ||
| And look, I think it's good that a lot of these taboos have fallen away. | ||
| I certainly would never want, you know, transgender people to be at all mistreated or not have full rights or, you know, the same wonderful, you know, open treatment that anyone should be able to get. | ||
| So the only question is, are girls rushing to transition for the right reasons? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So chapter nine is about the transition actually. | ||
| And, you know, I think, you know, it's like for this topic, it's like a lot of people know nothing about this and in a weird way, don't really have to know anything about it. | ||
| But, but what should people know about chapter nine and the transformation itself? | ||
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Sure. | |
| I would just say that transformation, transition, gender transition is always an uphill battle. | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| You know, I interviewed even forensic anthropologists who talked about the bone structure, taught me about the bone structure that's so different between Males and females, including even the skull, the way the forehead slopes is different. | ||
| And the point of this is just that transition's very hard. | ||
| Medical transition's very hard. | ||
| It requires constant medicalization. | ||
| It comes with severe risks. | ||
| Young women are at risk not only of infertility, you know, and depending on when they start, sexual dysfunction, and all kinds of, you know, endometrial cancer, all kinds of things. | ||
| Um, but, but that it's, you know, this is not a decision to be taken lightly. | ||
| And unfortunately today it's taken so lightly that the biggest sort of risk of all is regret. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So that's a perfect transition to chapter 11, the way back. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So, um, one of the things I say in the book is that I do think a few things, young, young women today have to be told that being a woman is a, is a great thing. | ||
| That being uncomfortable in your body during puberty is completely normal. | ||
| And whatever kind of girl you are, you know, same-sex attracted, heterosexual, whatever kind of girl you are, is a perfectly great kind of girl to be. | ||
| And being a woman actually is way more wonderful and comes with a lot more pleasures and joys than the current culture admits. | ||
| Yeah, and that's just something that culture, I mean, again, this sort of gets back to the family and culture and education and everything else, right? | ||
| There's not one culprit here. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| There are a lot of forces trying to say that being a woman is terrible today. | ||
| It's a victim class. | ||
| A lot of feminists have decided it's a victim class. | ||
| I mean, looking at the way lesbians are treated today, their bars are disappearing. | ||
| They are harassed. | ||
| A lot of lesbians have told me that their social groups have had to go online Because they are so often harassed by transgender adults who claim to be lesbians and come on to them sexually. | ||
| It's tough to be a woman today, in a certain sense. | ||
| And not a lot of women are standing up for women's rights and the rights of girls to be whatever kind of girl they want to be. | ||
| You know, it's so fascinating because if you would have said what you just said there four years ago, look what's happening to lesbians being harassed, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| If you would have said that four years ago, people would have thought, oh, she means that people on the right or Christian conservatives or something are coming after lesbians. | ||
| And it's simply Well, it barely exists at this point, at least in an American context. | ||
| But what you're talking about is being bullied by the trans people and saying, if you're not attracted to me now that I've transitioned or something else, now you're a transphobe. | ||
| And that's really fascinating how quickly that has all shifted. | ||
| Yeah, and it's the activists. | ||
| Look, I can't tell you, I've interviewed a lot of trans women who would be horrified to make other women uncomfortable, make women uncomfortable. | ||
| They would never harass women. | ||
| But unfortunately, this activist group, is taking advantage. | ||
| I mean, you know, you see this all over in so many ways. | ||
| Smith College, which was always all women, now admits biological boys. | ||
| You know, lesbians who try to have their own social groups or bars, they're constantly harassed by biological men who claim to be women and are forcing their way in. | ||
| Battered women's shelters, the same thing. | ||
| Prisons in California, if you say you're a woman, You get housed with the women prisoners. | ||
| And this is obviously very dangerous, not because transgender people are dangerous, of course, but because biological men pose dangers living in close quarters of prison with biological women. | ||
| Yeah, which by the way, not to get too political on you, but Joe Biden even said you should be allowed to choose what prison you want to go to based on your gender identity. | ||
| Look, I happen to think that housing a biological woman with a biological man in prison has got to be cruel and unusual punishment. | ||
| And yet we're seeing men who are even found guilty of sexual violence. | ||
| Sexual assault housed with female prisoners is really unconscionable. | ||
| Yeah, so you do it afterward in the book called The Update. | ||
| So what is The Update? | ||
| Where are we at right now? | ||
| Well, look, I think people are waking up to this issue. | ||
| They're seeing that there's very often pure influence. | ||
| This is not organic. | ||
| But right now, because this is being pumped through the school systems, because kids are seeing so much of, you know, getting so much encouragement from social media, you're seeing this. | ||
| We are seeing this younger and younger. | ||
| You know, young teens suddenly deciding they're trans. | ||
| And I would just say, you know, parents, if your kid out of nowhere decides they're transgender and their, you know, peer groups doing the same thing and whatnot, just be aware that there's very often, you know, peer influence or social media influence at play. | ||
| Yeah, well, listen, Abigail, thanks for taking the time. | ||
| I'm sorry it took so long, and I know our social circles have been getting closer and closer. | ||
| So hopefully, when we're free citizens here in Los Angeles, we can do this over a meal or something. | ||
| And we're gonna put a link, obviously, to the book down below. | ||
| Hopefully it'll be back in stock by the time we put it up, but who knows? | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Right now, as we tape this, it's completely sold out everywhere, right? | ||
|
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That's right, but they're getting them back into stores, I'm told, so hopefully. | |
| All right, well, thanks for taking the time. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about women's issues instead of nonstop yelling, check out our Women's Issues playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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