It's in the Code ep 153: “All Women Are Women, Pt. 2”
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Allie Beth Stuckey advances her argument against the legitimacy and reality of transgender identity by considering the testimonial of an individual who transitioned to a gender different from their assigned birth gender, only to “detransition” later, and by appealing to the theory of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.” In this episode, Dan shows why these appeals are not only not compelling, but how they actually prove the opposite of what Stuckey intends. The testimonial she recounts is of an individual who never fit the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria, and the theory of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” is a pseudo-scientific theory without broad acceptance or any clinical basis. Listen to this week’s episode to hear more!
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Hello, and as always, welcome to It's in the Code.
This series is part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
I, of course, am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, your host for this series.
Delighted to be with you.
As always, thank you for listening.
Thank you for everybody who supports us in so many ways.
Thank you in particular to our subscribers.
And thank you to everybody who sends in the feedback.
Daniel Miller Swedge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com.
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I'm going to dive in today, another episode where I've got more to say than I probably should try to fit into one episode.
We are continuing our dive into the cesspool of right-wing religious, wow, that's hard to say, right-wing religious and political anti-empathy.
This notion that empathy is, in theological terms, a sin, the sin of empathy, that empathy is what is leading America astray.
And we're continuing our look at Ali Beth Stuckey's book, Toxic Empathy, which of course warns against the dangers of forsaking religious truth and conservative identity by falling prey to excessive empathy.
And this is where we've been for the last several episodes.
We're going to be here for a long time more.
The book, just as a reminder, is organized into five main chapters, each of which focuses on what she considers a lie that toxic empathy tells us.
And again, as a reminder, I want to be clear.
I believe and affirm all five of these things that she labels as lies.
I think it's important to keep that out there.
You have people sometimes who, well, maybe they missed the beginning of an episode or something, and they think that I'm endorsing exactly what I'm critiquing.
I accept as truth what she labels as lies.
And we spent the last few episodes considering the first chapter, abortion is healthcare.
That was her anti-abortion chapter.
If you haven't had a chance to listen to those, I invite you to go do so.
Again, welcome your insights and thoughts that you might have in regard to those.
But we're now in the second chapter, All Women Are Women.
And this is her chapter where she takes on trans identity and trans inclusion.
Last episode considered the first set of reflections on these.
Specifically, her taken-for-granted assumption, not unique to her.
Again, the reason we're looking at Stuckey is because she's typical of so much of this discourse.
But we looked at the just assumption that biology and gender simply sort of collapse into each other, that biology determines gender and so forth.
That was sort of an overarching issue that we looked at.
This episode, I want to start looking at some of the more specific evidence in quotes.
Every time you hear me say the word evidence today, it should be in scare quotes because it's not really evidence, but what she offers as quote-unquote evidence for her views.
And we're going to focus first on a go-to for this kind of discourse, the testimonial.
And then we're going to have some things to say about a certain pseudo-scientific anti-trans theory that she puts forward.
We're going to talk about like what those are, the problems with those, and say a little bit about why it is that she goes in that direction.
Like why this kind of evidence?
Because again, I think it's very, very typical of so much of this discourse.
So I want to start with this.
The testimonial she gives.
And a long time ago, long, long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, this galaxy.
Long time ago, I did an episode on the concept of testimony.
And if you grew up in churches of a certain kind, you know about the notion of testimony, of getting up and sharing your testimony.
You know about probably the pressure to have a testimony or to share this.
In religious parlance, the testimony is the personal account of what God has done in someone's life.
And sort of related to this, the reason I bring this up is that right-wing figures like Stuckey absolutely love to lean on testimonials as evidence of their claims.
Now, this isn't limited to people on the right.
Everybody, regardless of the topic, the ideology, the political persuasion, and so forth, will sometimes appeal to testimonials, accounts of individuals about their experience and so forth.
And the reason that they do this is that those giving the testimonial become a source of authority for their claims.
Often, and this is a key, the testimonial, I think, is often given as a supposed counter to overwhelming evidence.
You got a bunch of evidence about something, a bunch of social scientific stuff, maybe a bunch of polling data or something like that.
And so what do you do if you can't counter that?
And that stuff feels very abstract.
It feels very sort of far away.
It feels very detached from sort of ordinary existence.
You bring out a testimonial, a flesh and blood person who can tell their story that in some way counters that.
Okay.
And I think testimonials are effective because they play on our typical psychology of privileging personal experience.
I think that that's a human thing that's not unique to a particular political persuasion or not.
And I think different personality types might lean on that more than others.
But the notion that, you know, we trust our own experience more than we might trust, you know, numbers or data or something like that.
And whether it's our own experience or that of somebody we encounter, we tend to privilege those accounts over that data.
And so testimonials are very powerful in that way.
And we know this, you know, all you have to do is think of a simple example.
I'm thinking of something where, you know, somebody takes like a new medication or something and then they get sick and they go to the doctor.
It turns out like had nothing to do with the medication, but in their mind, it did.
And that will be the person that forever is like, well, I know the doctors say it wasn't related to this, but you know, my experience tells me that was the cause, or I know in my gut or whatever.
Like that's the power of testimonial.
Okay.
So it wraps in with both this kind of religious notion of the testimony, the testimony as evidence of something deep and true that one shares with others.
And it's also a methodology, the use of testimonials.
It's very, very common in this kind of discourse.
And so Stuckey structures her chapter in opposition to trans rights around a testimonial.
It's this kind of structure that runs throughout the chapter.
She introduces it and kind of will set it down for a while, turn to other topics, return to it, and so forth.
It's this running theme throughout the chapter as this testimonial.
And in this case, if you read her chapter, again, I'm reading the book, so you don't have to, but if you wanted to put yourself through that, you could.
It serves, I think, both the narrowly religious purpose of testimony.
It's explicitly religious and hers.
It includes the story of this person kind of abandoning her Christian faith and going and living in a particular way and then returning to it.
It's a very prodigal son kind of thing.
It's grounded in the story of like her family who wouldn't accept her identity and stayed true to the Christian faith and it eventually brought her back and so forth.
So that religious piece is there.
And also this broader role of testimonial.
That's what the work is doing.
And it's also, and this is important, it is also aimed to play on the emotions of her audience, the way that it is structured, the way that she wants us to feel compassion and empathy for this individual.
She's playing on the emotions.
And that's the other thing that testimonies do.
They can be very, very powerful and it can be very moving, obviously, to see or hear somebody sharing their personal experience and so forth.
I bring this up not because I think there's anything wrong with that, but because Stuckey says in the introduction, if you remember a prior episode where she talks about, you know, red flags to watch for to not get caught into toxic empathy, one was playing on the emotions.
We're going to see this throughout the book.
She's consistently playing on her readers' emotions.
That's why she uses the testimonial.
So what is it?
The testimonial is, it's that of someone who is identified as female at birth, who later identifies as a trans man, but who ultimately comes to accept the truth that she actually is and has always been a woman and detransitions.
I put D-transitions into quotes.
That's a really loaded term.
It's offensive to many.
I'm not using it to be offensive.
I'm using it because this is what Stuckey is talking about.
Okay.
So D-transitions back to a female identity.
And this notion of detransitioning is a favorite concept in the anti-trans world.
And so Stuckey tells this person's story.
I believe this is somebody who appeared on her podcast.
She tells her story to try and land a knockout blow.
In other words, you want to know the evils and the wrongness and how misguided, you know, proponents of trans identity and trans people are.
How can we possibly disagree with the experience of a quote unquote formerly transgender person, somebody who has detransitioned?
It's intended as sort of a knockout blow, regardless of what you think of the rest of the evidence.
How can you deny this person's experience?
Can we possibly deny this?
Well, folks, it's easy to deny the experience, and here's why.
This person was never trans.
Based on the account that I have read in Stuckey's book, okay, based on Stuckey's own account of this testimonial, this person was never trans and should not have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
And for those who may not be familiar with that, gender dysphoria is the diagnosis that usually accompanies gender nonconformity for purposes of insurance and medical care and so forth.
If you're going to have a prescription for things like hormone blockers or hormone replacement therapies or insurance coverage for gender confirmation surgery and so forth, you got to have some code, some diagnosis you can give the insurance company.
Gender dysphoria is primarily that diagnosis.
Okay.
This person wasn't trans.
And to be clear, be really clear here.
To be clear, that's not just me being dogmatic.
That is not just me dismissing this and saying, well, that person was never trans to begin with.
That's not.
This person, as described by Stuckey, did not meet the diagnostic criteria for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Okay.
So here's the story that Stucker, excuse me, Stuckey tells, is the story of Laura Smaltz, who went through various levels of gender transition, again, to live as a man and then came to the realization that it had all been a mistake and supposedly detransition.
Okay.
But I want us to listen to the reasons why she made this decision.
In this testimonial, the reasons that are given for why she ultimately came to identify as a man and so forth.
And these are, I'm taking these directly from Stuckey's book.
They're on pages 35 and 36.
If somebody wants to go check me.
These are the reasons she gives.
She liked hanging out with her dad and didn't feel connected to her mom.
She didn't have strong pre-female friendships.
She hated being objectified as a female, specifically sexually.
She had relationships where she was used sexually rather than loved and valued.
And presenting as masculine provided a sense of power and authority.
These are some of the reasons recounting her testimony that Stuckey gives for why she identified as a man.
She goes on to tell, you know, so she transitioned.
Transition involves both social transition.
That's things like how you dress, maybe how you grow your hair, wearing makeup, things like that, or not wearing makeup, depending on the transition.
She met with a psychologist, quote, and this is a quote.
This is on page 36.
This is important.
Met with this psychologist, quote, glossing over details of her upbringing and saying the things she knew she needed to say to get approval for cross-sex hormones, end quote.
In other words, folks, she was not forthcoming with the psychologist, which will be important.
Then over time, she realizes this was all a mistake, that she really is a woman.
This is after she's had so-called top surgery and so forth.
That's the knockdown.
Boom.
She goes all of this, identified as male, all of this stuff.
And OP says Stucky, she realized she really is a woman.
And my response will be, yeah, of course she did.
And here's the reason, folks: none of the reasons given for her transitions are evidence of gender dysphoria or transgender identity.
She gives all of these reasons why this person felt that she was actually trans.
None of them are evidence of trans identity.
And I can prove it.
I said this wasn't just me being dogmatic.
It's not me being dogmatic.
Here is the definition and what I want to go through here are the definition and diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria as specified in the DSM-5.
So if you don't know what that is, you're going to get wonky here for a minute.
The DSM, it's commonly referred to as the DSM, is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The 5 mean it's the fifth edition.
It's currently in the fifth edition.
So DSM-5.
It is a big, fat, giant book.
It is published by the American Psychiatric Association.
And the DSM is the widely used handbook in the U.S. and other parts of the world with criteria for diagnosing a wide range of mental health and related disorders.
So if you go to a therapist and, I don't know, you're diagnosed with chronic depression or ADHD or something like that, the DSM-5 has the diagnostic criteria for those.
And that is what those diagnoses are based on.
Okay.
I know I've talked about the DSM and gender dysphoria before.
I've written about it.
I'm not going to repeat all of that here.
But what I do want to do is highlight, first of all, there are actual diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria.
Stuckey doesn't say that anywhere.
You almost never hear that anywhere on the right.
They will decry the medical establishment giving in to quote unquote gender ideology and so forth.
They give the impression that people just decide that trans identity is real and that they'll hand out hormones left and right and so forth.
They don't highlight the fact that there are actual diagnostic criteria that one needs to meet for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
And so here's what they are.
And I'm going to go through these.
Again, it's going to be wonky for a minute.
I hope the reason becomes clear.
Okay.
Here's the first one, the overarching one.
Gender dysphoria requires, I'm quoting now from the DSM-5, a marked incongruence between one experienced or expressed gender and natal gender of at least six months in duration.
So in other words, somebody feels what I refer to as kind of a gap or a disconnect between the gender they were assigned at birth and their experienced or expressed gender, and it needs to persist for at least six months.
And then DSM says, as manifested by at least two of the following, it gives a list of six criteria to reach a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Somebody needs to meet at least two of these criteria for at least six months.
Okay.
First one, a marked incongruence between one's experience or expressed gender and primary and or secondary sex characteristics.
Okay.
Second, or B, it does them by number.
B, a strong desire to be rid of one's primary and or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence of one's experience or expressed gender.
Notice that these are about bodily presentation.
These two things are about embodiment.
A discomfort with the sexed nature of one's body, the physical characteristics, the so-called sex characteristics of one's body.
Okay.
C, a strong desire for the primary and or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender.
D, a strong desire to be of the other gender or some alternative gender different from one's designated gender.
By the way, D is the one where I think a competent therapist is going to want to know what is that strong desire coming from, right?
If it's just because you want, I don't know, male privilege, you hear this all the time, the trans men are really just women who want male privilege, that's not going to meet the diagnostic criteria, okay?
E, a strong desire to be treated as the other gender, same issues as the prior one, or F, a strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender or some alternative gender different from one's designated gender.
Okay?
That's wonky.
What does it mean?
It means that all these criteria, you take them together, they involve one's perception of one's own body and one's felt sense of their own sense of gender identity.
That's why we call it gender identity.
It's their felt sense of gender.
None of the issues experienced by Laura Schmaltz, as described by Alibeth Stuckey, fit this definition.
Everything that she describes is about how she is perceived by others and about how her actions and preferences don't fit social expectations.
She isn't struggling with her gender identity.
Folks, she's struggling with a patriarchal and social structure.
The problem that Alibeth highlights is Alibeth Sucki highlights is patriarchy.
That's what Laura Schmaltz is responding to.
Not gender identity, but patriarchy.
Everything she lists is an issue only because she lives within a patriarchal social structure and quite frankly, because she also lives in the conservative religious structure.
Sexual objectification of women, the expectation for same-sex friend groups, problems with connecting with her dad, the fact that this is somehow problematic, all of those, those are all problems within patriarchy.
Exactly the kind of social structure Stuckey advances.
Who cares if she's close to their dad?
Who cares if she has male friendships?
Of course she doesn't want to be sexually objectified.
None of that is about gender identity.
That's about patriarchy.
So none of the descriptions of her reasons for transitioning actually fit the criteria for gender dysphoria.
And this is even clear in Stuckey's own recounting of her experience.
She tells this story.
She describes how before signing off on her hormone treatments, the psychologist Laura met with, and remember I said, she withheld information from her psychologist.
It says, Alibeth Stuckey says she glossed over her own background.
She withheld information from the therapist.
And she says, this is what the therapist said.
The psychologist Laura met with, quote, put down her pen and notepad, leaned forward, and looked Laura in the eye.
Wow, you really have issues with your mom, she said.
Quote.
The therapist picks up on the fact that there are other things at work with Laura Schmaltz besides gender identity.
Now, she still signed off on it, and it sounds like she probably shouldn't have.
Okay.
But folks, a qualified therapist will be aware that other issues besides gender dysphoria may be at play, that just because somebody doesn't want to be objectified sexually, it doesn't mean that they're really a man or that they need, or that they're questioning their gender identity, for example.
The fact that somebody has a closer relationship with their dad than their mom might mean, as this therapist picks up on, wow, you've really got some issues with your mom, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gender identity.
So in other words, what I'm getting at there is that even though Laura actively sought to mislead the therapist, the therapist was picking up on the fact that there was something other than gender dysphoria at play.
And again, she still signed off.
That's an issue.
Okay.
But here's the point, tying all this together, all this wonky stuff.
Once again, and we saw this last chapter, one of Stuckey's supposedly knockdown arguments actually proves the opposite of what she thinks it does.
In this case, what she's highlighting is somebody who never should have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the first place.
And what she finds is she wasn't able to exist indefinitely living a gender that wasn't authentically hers.
She didn't detransition.
She was never trans.
And it speaks on the flip side to the vast majority of cases where authentically trans folk do persist in their transition.
What's known as desistence or detransitioning is incredibly rare within the whole population of trans and gender nonconforming people.
It is the exception that proves the rule.
It's the exception that proves if somebody goes to those lengths to live in a different gender, it's usually because it is a matter of embodiment and perception, self-perception and feeling and all of that.
So it's true in the case of so-called detransitioning more broadly.
And if you were to investigate this and you can go and you can find information on this, a huge number of individuals who have supposedly detransitioned involve individuals who were never diagnosed formally or they were misdiagnosed and should not have been diagnosed as trans, including from earlier editions of the DSM where the diagnostic criteria, in my opinion, are very problematic.
And I'd go even further and somebody says, well, what if somebody detransitions?
What if somebody like, you know, feels like a woman and wants to live as a man and feels like a woman again?
I'd be like, well, that just to me is more evidence that gender is fluid.
It's not evidence of persisting gender.
It's evidence of the fluidity of gender.
So that's Stuckey's first overarching piece of evidence that runs through this chapter is this testimonial.
And what I'm trying to show is the testimonial not only doesn't do what she thinks it does, it does the opposite.
It's a testimonial that doesn't even apply.
It's a testimonial from somebody who never should have been diagnosed as gender dysphoric.
And we do see what is, in my view, a tragic outcome of that misdiagnosis.
Which is part of why, and this can be controversial, I do support a notion of criteria and investigation to make sure that before somebody makes huge, life-changing decisions, that they're doing what is best for them.
Okay?
Stuckey's first argument, this testimonial that I think unravels with any scrutiny.
Let's move on to the second one because she doesn't stop with just the misleading testimonial.
No, in good right-wing fashion and in line with her discussion of gender and biology that we talked about in the last episode, she also tries to claim the scientific high ground in her discussion.
That is, she's trying to say that she's not just being dogmatic or just relying on this testimony, but that she actually has scientific backing for what she's saying.
And if you want to see the parallels of this, think, you know, the anti-vaxxers and the climate deniers and the way that they appeal to pseudoscience, the way they position themselves as free thinkers and the way that they will trot out supposed experts and so forth to back up their claims, this is what Stuckey does.
And so she highlights, and you can't make this stuff up, folks, page 51.
She highlights, quote, something researchers call rapid onset gender dysphoria.
Okay.
And that's the issue, what is known as rapid onset gender dysphoria, R-O-G-D.
So she says, there's researchers researching this phenomenon of rapid onset gender dysphoria.
Okay.
The hell is that?
It is the name that is given to the supposed explosion, quote unquote, of children reporting and diagnosed as gender dysphoric.
Stuckey runs through the numbers that, you know, many, many more kids.
Kids are a major focus in her text.
We'll get to that next episode.
But the many more kids than in the past now are identifying as gender dysphoric and so forth.
And this is in response to the rapidly increasing number of kids who fit that diagnosis.
And so she sums up the phenomenon to which ROGD is supposed to respond in this way.
Quote, we went from having almost no gender dysphoria to creating a rising cohort of confused, sterilized, breastless teenage girls with geriatric skeletons, and the craziness isn't going away, end quote.
And so ROGD is the supposed response to this explosion in gender diagnosis, this invention of gender dysphoria, and so forth.
So rapid onset gender dysphoria theory provides a supposed explanation for this explosion.
And again, I'm going to keep putting that word in quotes as well, the word, you know, this explosion.
It essentially suggests that people aren't born gender dysphoric, but only come to identify that way much later.
And it blames those increasing numbers of gender dysphoric minors to social contagion.
This is the language that you'll run into by friends and peer groups.
In other words, that's sort of two pieces of evidence to which ROGD is supposed to respond is that many people don't say that they're gender dysphoric until they're well into adolescence or beyond.
And that when it does happen at a younger age, it's basically because of peer pressure.
So again, there we have it.
Scientific research showing that the disruption of God-given, binary, fixed gender is all because of peer pressure or activist parents or progressives or whatever.
Problem solved.
And the conservative Christians have science to prove it.
Except they don't.
This is pseudoscientific nonsense of the highest degree.
Though it has been influential, the National Health Service in England is fully on board with the acceptance of anti-trans pseudoscience and has made decisions based precisely on this idea of social contagion.
People like Sam Harris are accepted believers in this in the U.S. Lots of states that have banned transgender care for minors and so forth, gender-affirming care for minors are fully on board with this.
It's been hugely influential.
It's pseudoscientific nonsense.
And just a few quick hits about what's wrong with this.
These are just a few thoughts about why this doesn't make any sense.
First, again, there are actual clinical diagnostic guidelines for gender dysphoria.
Stuckey mentions this nowhere in her text.
I have had this conversation with enough people to know that most people do not know that there are actual clinical criteria for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
It is not something people just claim and suddenly are trans.
And when properly applied, these help insure against things like supposed social contagion.
A kid or parent doesn't just walk into a clinic and say, hey, my child gender dysphoria.
Give us puberty blockers and hormones.
And off they go.
There's a process.
There's a diagnostic set of criteria and so forth.
Okay.
So that's the first thing that sort of weighs against this.
Second, the claim that researchers, quote unquote, are exploring this is basically as the same as when those on the right saying that climate scientists, quotes, disagree about the fundamentals of climate science or vaccines or whatever it is.
She says researchers are exploring.
There are a few outliers, always.
There are a few scientists who question the fundamental science of climate science.
There are a few scientists who are anti-vaxxers and so forth.
But we know that they are far outside the scientific mainstream.
It's the same thing here.
In this case, when she appeals to researchers, there's basically one name.
It's an individual researcher named Lisa Littman.
And the idea of ROGD, rapid onset gender dysphoria, is just like climate denial.
It's just like anti-vaxing.
It is far outside the mainstream of medical science and diagnosis upheld by every major medical and mental health organization in the U.S. Of course, Stuckey doesn't tell you this.
She just says, researchers are looking into this.
In fact, related to this, and this is the third point, ROGD has no clinical status.
It is not a recognized social or medical phenomenon outside the thinking of people like Littman and Stuckey.
It is not a recognized mental health diagnosis.
And the reason why is there is no significant clinical evidence for it or studies to support it.
There's no evidence for it.
It is a hypothesis that anti-trans activists have come up with to explain why they feel like there are just way more gender dysphoric kids than there should be or have been in the past.
Okay.
And so the final point, if we want to look at that piece there, is that the so-called evidence supported, excuse me, the so-called evidence cited in support, getting really worked up here, for the ROGD hypothesis, it can be explained otherwise.
So Stuckey highlights, people like Lippmann highlight the fact that many people identify as trans, do not communicate this until adolescents or later.
And so their idea is people just suddenly have gender dysphoria.
It's this rapid onset.
That's the rapid onset idea.
This person is 20 years old and suddenly they're transgender.
Well, here's the thing.
And I get this from an article in the Journal of Adolescent Health, peer-reviewed journal article.
Okay.
I went and did some real research, some real homework here.
Studies show that the median amount of time that people report between recognizing themselves as gender dysphoric and reporting that, in other words, the gap between the time when somebody begins to have a sense that of all those things that we read about in the diagnostic criteria, that they're uncomfortable with the sexual presentation of their own body, they identify as a gender that's different than the one they've been assigned and so forth.
The median amount of time between the onset of those kind of feelings or awareness and when they tell somebody about it is 14 years.
What does that mean?
It means when that 20-year-old sits down to people they care about in their life and say, hey, I've got something to tell you.
I'm transgender.
That on average, they've been feeling that since they were six.
That's not rapid onset.
It's a delayed report.
So the people hearing it may be shocked by it.
It may feel really fast.
It may feel like it's coming out of the blue, especially if that person has spent the last 14 years trying to mask it or trying to be comfortable in the gender they were assigned.
And so they really lean into that and so forth.
The authors of the article argue the most likely explanation for this is not that they weren't actually gender dysphoric, but that, quote, this finding likely reflects the concern among transgendered people that others will reject their identities, end quote.
People wait to report trans identity because of a lack of support, a lack of comfort, maybe a lack of language, a lack of resources.
It's not rapid onset.
Okay?
The only basis Stuckey has for dismissing mainstream medical views on transgender identity is that she says it's bunk science.
The problem is that this is bunk science.
It's just an explanation of something that is much easier and more compellingly explained in other ways.
Okay?
And the same holds for the other piece of this when she says that until recently there was no gender dysphoria.
The problem with that reasoning is apparent on its face.
And again, you'll hear this from real people who will say, well, you know, there's been an explosion in gender dysphoric kids and there weren't any before and now there's a whole bunch and we need to explain that.
We're all familiar with this.
We are all familiar with, I don't know, the person of a generation or two ahead of us who at Thanksgiving says, well, you know, back in my day, there weren't any gay people.
like, no, dude, there were.
There were gay people.
You may not have seen them.
They may not have been out.
They may not have been comfortable.
They may not even have the words for it.
Of course, they were there.
Back in my day, there were no trans people.
There were.
There sure were.
You may not have known it.
They may not have known it, but they were there.
Of course there were trans people.
But they were not recognized as such.
They didn't have the language or framework to articulate their experience.
They didn't have the support that they would need to experience that or to explore that or to express that.
And so they stayed closeted, etc.
They were always there.
The fact that they are more visible now doesn't mean that they were there.
There's an old, old saw that says, excuse me, a lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack.
The fact that they weren't visible, that we didn't know that they were there, doesn't mean they weren't there.
And this is a standard argument in the anti-science, anti-intellectual circles.
It's the same as those who insist, a la, somebody like RFK Jr., that there's been an explosion of people on the autism spectrum.
No, people on the spectrum have always been there.
The spectrum has always been there.
It just wasn't recognized as such.
Once we learn more about what the phenomenon is and how it presents and clinical guidelines and so forth, its prevalence becomes much better known.
And we see that and you get this kind of correction where the knowledge of something begins to better reflect its actual prevalence in society.
That's what's going on.
It's simply false to say there was no gender dysphoria.
And if you want to, again, a simple illustration of this, whether it helps make sense to you, whether you want to share it with Uncle Ron or whatever, it just occurred to me, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I had a friend who bought a new car.
There's a car that they hadn't really thought about before.
And they're driving around thinking they might be in the car market, take it for a test drive, really like it, and they buy it.
Not a car they were familiar with really before they started doing the research.
And now as they drive it around, they're like, I see them all over the place.
Lots of people drive the same car.
It's something they hadn't noticed.
It's there all the time.
More people didn't suddenly go out and buy that model of car, but because they are more aware of it and know more about it, they see it more.
Or you watch a movie and it's got an actor in a role that you really like and you really think it's great and just an actor you weren't familiar with.
You start to notice that that actor was in lots of things, things that maybe hadn't caught your eye or you hadn't seen before.
That person didn't stand out to you.
We know this phenomenon where something feels much more prevalent because we are more aware of it.
That's what this is.
So the two big things that ROGD supposedly responds to are much more plausibly and better explained in other terms, on top of which ROGD has no clinical basis, has not been tested, is not a recognized category, and is not something that quote unquote researchers in any large-scale way adhere to or are exploring.
It's just pseudoscience.
It's bunk.
Okay?
I got to wind this up.
We've gone long this episode.
Trying to make her case, Stuckey gives, you know, sort of two of the go-to moves of the political and cultural world.
And that's what we're looking at.
The first are appeals to testimonials that are supposed to play to our emotions.
They're supposed to provide real-life examples of the dangers they say confront us.
And they're supposed to, by appealing to somebody's experience, give us something that we can't argue with, that you can't counter.
Who are we to question somebody else's experience?
And then appeals to supposed scientific claims.
But we've seen that in her examples, her carefully selected testimonial, again, it's sort of baffling to me.
Not only does it not establish what she wants it to, but it actually illustrates the opposite of what she intends.
We've seen her do this before, where she actually appeals to something.
It's like counter evidence to her argument, and she doesn't even see that.
And the research she highlights, it's just anti-trans activism dressed up in a lab coat.
That's all it is.
Her two big examples, supposed to be the heavy-hitting evidence that we need to be able to see we've all been misled by trans activists.
Instead, it does just the opposite.
We're not done with Stucky's discussion of anti-trans rhetoric and anti-trans ideology.
We'll continue this next episode, look at some more of what she has to say, but our time is up for now.
I want to thank everybody for listening.
Would love to hear from you.
This is a tough episode.
Those of you who know me, again, know that trans issues in particular are very personal for me.
So this is a tough episode, and I know it's a tough episode for a lot of people to hear.
Hard topics to talk about, hard positions to hear.
Love your feedback.
Daniel Miller Swadge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J-A-Gmail.com.
Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this.
If you're willing to share experiences with these kinds of arguments, because they are not unique to Stuckey, those who have engaged with anti-trans activism will have encountered reasoning like this.
