Tucker Carlson - Ep. 28 Trans, Inc: genital mutilation is not just a fad. It’s a full-blown industry. How did something this demented happen so quickly? Chris Moritz has been following the money.
Chris Moritz exposes "Transgender Inc." as a $7.5B-by-2030 industry, fueled by Obamacare’s 2010 mandate and WPATH’s unproven protocols—despite 25% post-surgery complications and FDA-unapproved drugs like AbbVie’s puberty blockers. Texas AG Ken Paxton sued drugmakers for off-label marketing to minors, while UCSF’s forced resignation over "sloppy medicine" revealed systemic failures. Hospitals like Cedars-Sinai raked in $200M from surgeries, and HRC’s HEI benchmark pressured clinics into compliance. Moritz ties the movement to Jennifer Pritzker’s Tawani Foundation and "postmodernist cultural Marxism," warning it weaponizes children—diagnosing eighth-graders with suicide threats—to dismantle Western norms. [Automatically generated summary]
If someone had told you 15 years ago that kids in your, say, daughter's ninth grade class would be coming to school in drag...
And would be affirmed in that by their teachers and the broader community, you would say there's no chance that could happen in this country.
And of course, it has happened and it's now happening at scale.
Transgenderism is not just a fad, it's a fact of life across this country.
Not just the elites, but in small towns everywhere.
And so the question is, how did something this unnatural and prima facie demented happen so quickly?
Well, of course, there's got to be money involved.
Interestingly, no one that we're aware of has taken a close forensic look at where the money's coming from and where it's going.
And that's why we're so delighted to see research done by our next guest, Chris Moritz, who's a longtime investment banker and policy guy, has done on this question.
Transgenderism.
It didn't happen by accident.
Some people are profiting from it.
And with that, we introduce our guest who joins us here on set.
But the economics of it, what I call transgender ink, is something that...
It has gotten very, very little attention, and it deserves to be highlighted in a very visible way.
Because this is a market that in 2018, this market is made up of sex reassignment surgeries and hormone replacement therapies, which include a number of different pharmaceutical products.
But the combined value sales of sex reassignment surgeries and The pharmaceutical products in 2018 was $2.94 billion.
By 2022, that figure had rose to $4.18 billion.
And by 2030, our analysis indicates that that would increase to $7.5 billion, which represents an 8.5% compound annual growth rate.
Which is relatively significant within a healthcare vertical.
Well, considering also that the population of patients is about a million people, there's 1.6 million transgender adults, or I should say over the age of 13, transgender individuals in the United States, as of 2022. Now, that number has doubled in 10 years.
So in 2011, there were 700,000 transgender Americans over the age of 13. And by 2022, that had risen to 1.6 million.
Well, I think that there is absolutely zero scientific evidence that would suggest that there is a gene, chemical alteration, any kind of somatic, physical, biological element to transgenderism that biological element to transgenderism that would result in what has become known as gender dysphoria.
And in fact, if we get deeper into the medical research, we find that there are no clinical studies, none, on the long-term Efficacy, consequences, and in many cases, debilitating life-term effects of these procedures and pharmaceutical products, especially on children.
In fact, the FDA has not approved a single pharmaceutical product used in gender transition specifically for gender transition.
Testosterone, estrogen, and what are called GNRH agonists, or puberty blockers, are all prescribed off-label.
So they do not have specific FDA approval for gender transition.
Because this is such a new field of medicine, and many of these drugs, especially these GNRH agonists or puberty blockers, Have been traditionally prescribed for cancer patients.
So there's a drug called Lupron developed by AbbVie Pharmaceuticals.
And this has gotten a lot of controversy and a lot of attention because in Texas, Ken Paxton has actually brought suit against AbbVie and another pharmaceutical company that makes puberty blockers called Endo Pharmaceuticals.
Based on the fact that they are advertising to children these drugs off-label.
Can you think of any, is there any other part of air quotes medicine where over a million people are being prescribed a course of quote therapy where we don't know the outcome?
Yeah, I think there is an analogy that can be made as a millennial growing up in the 90s.
What was a big trend at that time for that cohort?
ADHD. Everyone was put on Adderall at a young age because school teachers identified hyperactive kids and the process of going from...
Being identified as maybe a little different or whatever at the school level, and then getting elevated to guidance counselors, then to psychologists, then to clinicians.
And before you know it, you're prescribed a very powerful pharmaceutical drug.
And I think something very similar- An addictive drug that'll give you brain damage.
For sure.
And I'll tell you that drugs that are being administered for transgender patients, especially these puberty blockers, Are far, far more dire.
I can't say whether there were peer-reviewed studies at the time.
I believe that, you know, even today we don't know the long-term consequences necessarily of some of those specific drugs, but certainly with respect to the transgender Pharmaceuticals, there are no long-term studies peer-reviewed that show the efficacy or not of taking these very powerful pharmaceuticals.
And we may not know for some time.
And in fact, what has resulted in, this has resulted in a situation where clinicians and institutions and...
academics and elementary schools and the entire gamut of this supply chain has had to fall back on protocols established by an organization called WPATH. WPATH stands for the World Professional Association of Transgender Health.
It's technically a medical professional body established in the 1970s.
But I think what's unique about it is that it is, for sure, a medical entity, but it is also an advocacy organization.
A political advocacy organization.
For sure.
Insofar as they are advocating for the advancement of transgenderism.
So, in other words, the protocols and clinical protocols that health systems You know, large and small that are falling back on are the standards that WPATH has enacted over the years.
So in order for all of these therapies to become mainstream, you have to change the definition of gender dysphoria from something that you treat, a problem, a psychiatric illness.
You have to change it from that to something very different.
So in 1952, the first sex reassignment surgery happened, I believe, at Johns Hopkins with a patient named Christine Jorgensen.
It was very big news at the time.
And then about 10 years later, Johns Hopkins established the first gender clinic for purposes of performing sex reassignment surgeries.
But for most of the 20th century and certainly the post-war period, transgenderism or gender dysphoria, as it's become known, was deemed to be a mental illness.
It was called transsexualism or gender identity disorder.
And this was kind of the basis for understanding treatment, and it was deemed to be psychiatric.
However, in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association amended DSM. DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness.
And in this change, they altered the nomenclature of the condition, such that transsexualism or gender identity disorder became gender dysphoria.
I mean, there were, you know, like I said, some surgeries here and there, very small numbers, but really this What we're seeing today accelerated after 2010. But I think most people, if I can interject, didn't feel as threatened by that or threatened at all, speaking for myself, because the stakes are low.
By defining this condition as gender dysphoria, what it effectively achieved was removing the notion that this is a psychosexual disorder and that it is, in fact, a conflict between a subjective self...
Um, perception of gender or, or even as a social perception of gender and, um, you know, one's natural feelings about gender.
Gender-Affirming Surgeries and Pharmaceuticals00:14:02
And therefore that can be a, that distress from, from that comes from the, uh, the, the discontinuity between those two, um, uh, Can be alleviated by surgeries and these very radical pharmaceuticals.
And certainly for many transgender patients, they report...
Positive benefits from the process.
However, many, many also report regret, severe physical ailments that come from the surgeries themselves, which we can get into, and the complications that arise from those, and then, of course, the pharmaceuticals.
Well, let's get into that, if we could, because I spent, I don't know, the last five years talking about transgender stuff on TV. And I don't, and debating people on it.
And I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe what exactly the surgeries are.
I don't think you're allowed to ask.
I haven't Googled for photographs because I'm not sure I want to see them, but that's like not part of the conversation.
For instance, I think probably one of the most graphic.
And invasive procedures is called a vaginoplasty, and that is where a male to female patient is castrated, testicles are removed, the penis is inverted to create a vaginal cavity, and then skin grafting is used to create other elements of female genitalia.
Vulva, labia, et cetera.
But what we found is that there was a study from California.
So, you know, that's one of the, I think, the more, it's, you know, one of the more explosive of these procedures, but, you know, it also includes mastectomies, which are performed at an increasingly rate on minors, on girls.
Even the Biden administration has kind of tacitly endorsed genital reconstructive surgery for minors on a case-by-case basis.
This was promulgated by, I believe, Admiral Levine, Rachel Levine.
The rest of the world, the rest of the developed world, which were, in fact...
The Scandinavian countries in particular had had, you know, kind of, you know, prior in the early 2000s and in the 90s even, were really at the forefront of this field of medicine.
And transgenderism, I mean, it's a very quietly held but widely held view, I think, amongst the LGB community that transgenderism is anti-LGB. Well, of course it is.
Of course it is.
And in Iran, where homosexuality is illegal, they have a very simple solution.
And I'll tell you, in terms of the pace of growth for, let's say, clinics serving pediatric patients on gender issues, in the last 15 years in the United States, we had zero, now to over 100. Clinics?
It's a very complicated question, and there's a lot of different reasons why.
I would say that the biggest single policy catalyst for this explosion is Obamacare.
When Obamacare was enacted in 2010, there was a kind of...
Very quietly written into the law a provision in which insurance companies were mandated to provide coverage for what is deemed to be medically necessary, gender-affirming care.
As a result of that, between 2010 and 2016, there was a 50% increase in sex reassignment surgeries, 25% increase in Insurance coverage for transgender individuals.
And then at the very end of the Obama administration in 2016, an additional amendment to the Affordable Care Act was made whereby gender identity could no longer be a basis for denial of coverage by private insurance companies.
As a result of that, the next year, So, they're required to pay for it.
Well, as I said, for many, many patients that have, especially the male to females that have procedures, general reconstruction procedures, they face a lifetime of zero sexual function because they lose sensitivity in this Artificial vagina.
So in that specific case, since we know that testosterone and estrogen, too, these are really powerful chemicals, and they're necessary, but they're implicated in health disorders like cancer.
But others as well.
If you pump a man full of estrogen or a woman full of testosterone, what are the health consequences of that?
Again, we have no long-term studies on the effects, long-term effects of these pharmaceuticals on transgender patients.
They're simply not.
So clinicians fall back on guidelines established by WPATH. By a transgender political group?
Yes.
Yes.
This is a very interesting anecdote about WPATH. There was a clinical psychologist at UCSF who is the US chapter president of WPATH, and she is transgender.
And in 2000, I believe 2021, she made a public statement that She believed that the industry was moving way too fast and there was sloppy medicine and propensity for false positives in adolescents, resulting in potentially irreversible changes for these kids.
As a result of this statement, WPATH forced her to resign and then issued a moratorium.
On all of its board members from ever speaking to the press.
But you have to wonder about just your garden variety physician who is swimming in the soup funded by the insurance companies, led by the nose by activist groups like WPATH and Human Rights Campaign, etc.
And the effect is...
Like, scary medicine that's destroying people's lives.
Like, where are all the doctors standing up and saying, whoa, that's not science.
In other countries, which actually have longer histories of this kind of treatments and product lines, there's a significant pushback.
In fact, in England, the leading pediatric clinic For gender dysphoria, it's called the Talistock Clinic, was shut down by the NIH, which is the UK Health Administrator, because of, again, sloppy diagnoses, concerns that...
Doctors were neglecting their duty of care, informed consent.
But it does seem like, I mean, we have tens of thousands of physicians in this country and they're all well-educated and by definition smart and you'd like to think they're responsible and ethical.
But it seems like they've been so corrupted.
Like, how could they stand by and allow this to happen?
So I want to ask for the economics in a minute, but I'm just, I'm struck by the moral corruption and wondering, I mean, there are a lot of crappy talk show hosts out there and I always feel like, wow, talk show hosts, I should probably say something.
You know what I mean?
Like, cause it's embarrassing.
But I don't hold anyone's life in my hands.
If I was a doctor, it feels like there's a moral obligation to say something.
So this is a gender-affirming surgeon.
This is a lunatic with a knife called Steve Gallagher describing a brand new group of patients.
Watch this.
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A group of gender-diverse individuals who haven't been very visible.
are eunuchs and there is an entire chapter devoted to these folks in the most recent version of the WPAT standards of care, WPAT's World Professional Association of Transgender Health and so basically a eunuch is somebody who's assigned male at birth but may not be comfortable with the masculine features and may also benefit from gender affirmation care which could mean orchiectomy in some patients.
Proudly Creating Eunuchs00:03:20
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Now we have to be very careful because we know So,
The Tawani Foundation is led by Jennifer Pritzker, who is the transgender sister of Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.
And she established a non-profit entity called the Tawani Foundation and then a private equity vehicle called Tawani Enterprises.
Tawani Foundation has established Grants all over the world to propagate transgenderism at the university levels, funding legal battles and legislative initiatives.
But they have also...
Partnered with corporate entities.
So, for instance, in 2013, Tawani, in conjunction with Wells Fargo Foundation, established a grant at UC Santa Barbara to study transgenderism in the US military.
I would argue it's a kind of extension of postmodernist.
Cultural Marxism, because transgenderism, you know, if we're looking at it philosophically, is ultimately about rejecting what is a foundational principle, philosophical principle in Western civilization, which goes back to Aristotle, that there is such a thing as objective truth and reality.
Yes, and beauty.
Yes, but transgenderism is to say...
There is no such thing as an objective reality that you are born a male or female.
It is your subjective perception of your gender identity that is actualized and made real and where it becomes kind of authoritarian as a movement in the fact that the movement demands society recognize that subjective reality as truth.
And I feel that that is One of the most disturbing things about this entire movement, they've created an entire lexicon that is, for instance, gender-affirming care.
What does that mean?
What does it mean to be assigned a sex at birth, as it's often referred to in the literature?
I mean, one argument can be made, it's very anti-God.
Right?
You are assigned a gender, and that can be changed by medical science.
They're doing so because, and there are many, many anecdotes related to this across the literature and across a lot of investigative journalists' reports on this subject, is that parents are presented, you know, especially at that initial...
Meeting at a gender clinic with a choice.
They'll say your son can either be a daughter or you can have a dead son.
And they will scare the hell out of them with statistics about suicide rates and all sorts of other mental illnesses that will suggestively come to fruition if you do not take this course of action.
Ironically, in Sweden, which was really a leader in this area of medicine and in this field, a Swedish study a couple years ago found that post-op transgender patients have a significantly higher likelihood of making suicide attempts.
Requiring inpatient psychiatric care than the overall general population.
There are very perverse incentives for health systems to go full on board with this line of service and this line of products because entities like the Human Rights Campaign have established what is essentially ESG for trans.
They call it HEI, Health Equity Inclusion.
So, Human Rights Campaign, about 15 years ago, established this national benchmarking tool, and it effectively is an equity and inclusion gauge for health systems.
And it is used coercively.
And examples of that would be that in 2020, the Children's National Hospital received a low HEI score.
As a result of that, The board of directors of the hospital immediately established a DEI subcommittee and then extended sex reassignment surgery coverage to all of their employees and their dependents under the age of 18. The next year...
Children's National Hospital received 100% HEI score.
I mean, if you take a 17-year-old and pump him full of hormones he wasn't born with, like, you know, there have to be massive physical and psychological consequences.
Well, okay, so with puberty blockers in particular...
Which suppress testosterone in men in particular for prostate cancers, as you cited, and affect the pituitary gland and suppress the onset of puberty.
This was also developed to address what's called precocious puberty.
That would be kids, let's say, six, nine years old who start developing early, and this is what it's administered for.
The long-term effects of these drugs, especially in healthy patients, and let's face it, transgender patients do not necessarily have any other comorbidities or medical problems.
They're healthy adults.
It's in the mind that results in the initiation of treatment.
And in the case of puberty blockers, you have concern even amongst gender clinicians that brain development may be significantly impacted by the administration of these drugs because if you suppress natural maturation, that includes brain development at a very critical stage in adolescence.
So we have, you know, that's a side effect.
There's concerns about bone density.
There's certainly concerns about long-term fertility rates.
Pfizer makes testosterone, estrogen, and Q reblockers.
Primarily, though, it's testosterone and estrogen.
And I want to stipulate that the overall sales for these product lines within the pharmaceutical companies are relatively small because the number of patients is very small.
300,000 transgender youth, so 13 to 17 in the United States.
That number has, by the way, doubled over five years from 2017 being 150,000 to 300,000 by 2022. So these pharmaceutical companies are not necessarily making huge amounts of money off Of these drugs.
I think, really, the big money is coming from health systems and the surgeries because they're just so expensive.
And incorporate, obviously, a lot of ancillary costs related to surgeries in general.
As I said, revision surgeries are a frequent issue with transgender sex reassignment.
Because they're just so invasive and so complicated.
It takes 12 to 18 months to recover from a vaginoplasty or a phalloplasty.
Knowing as much as you do about how this began and who's profiting, if you wanted to stop it or slow it down, or make it less likely that your eighth grader wants to transition, what would you do?
I think when you're talking about an 8th grader, for instance, who exhibits, let's say, strong feminine qualities at an early age, may very well just be gay.
But in the time that we live in now, that 8th grader is scrutinized by an 8th grade teacher.
Identified as potentially gender dysphoric, referred to a guidance counselor, who then refers to a local psychologist, who then refers the eighth grader and his parents to a gender clinic.
Go to the gender clinic, and a clinician will make a very stark assessment and raise the stakes for these parents, saying, you know, you can have, again, as I said, a dead son.
Or transition daughter.
And there was a study that Reuters did last year of 18 pediatric clinics, gender clinics in the US. And to assess basically the process of evaluation, they came to the following conclusion.
Effectively, patients will meet with a social worker.
A psychologist and a clinician, either a pediatrician or an endocrinologist.
They'll take a two-hour meeting, assess medical history, talk about the benefits and risks, and so on and so forth, present these suicide statistics.
And Reuters found that seven of these 18 clinics would, after...
After they were made sure there was no obvious red flags or comorbidities and that the child and parents were in agreement, which I think is interesting, the child would be in agreement to this equally with the parents.
Then out of these seven clinics, they are comfortable after this two-hour meeting, after a first meeting, to make a gender dysphoria diagnosis.
I mean, you know it's a passive country that nobody's resorted to violence.
I mean, in a normal culture, if someone said we're going to take your child away and castrate him, I mean, you know, you would die before you let that happen.
I mean, again, I think that so much of this has to be viewed in parallel with the radicalization that happens at the...
At the primary school level and university school level.
Frankly, Elon Musk has talked about his own experience with this at an elite private school in Los Angeles where his daughter or son, rather, became kind of politically radicalized and then transitioned.
And you'll find, I think, that the The political radicalization and the gender radicalization are both coming from the universities and they both have the same end goals,
which is to break down the foundations of our country and of our civilization as we have established for millennia, to replace it with something new in their image.
And it is a kind of playing God.
And it's a kind of cultural revolution that I think even has some parallels to China's cultural revolution.