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Jan. 31, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:52:06

Interview with De-Transitioner TullipR/Ritchie - Viva Frei Live!

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Time	Text
	All right, everybody.
	Looks like we're live.
	Changed the format today.
	Hold on.
	Satisfy my...
	There we go.
	Changed the format a little bit today.
	There is no intro video.
	There will be no intro rant.
	I was thinking of starting with a Justin Trudeau video, but it would be a non sequitur to this discussion that we're going to have today.
	I was thinking of starting with a Jeffrey Marsh video, but I don't want to start...
	I want to start this...
	I don't want to have any distractions or anything that could be misinterpreted, misconstrued, or otherwise pre-frame the discussion that we're going to have for everyone watching this.
	And some of you might be new to this, although some of you who've been following me for a while will be familiar with the interview that I did with Chloe Cole a few months ago, telling her story, following it up, talking about the lawsuit that she's filed against the medical practitioners who participated in her We're going to be talking with an individual named Richie today.
	He's on Twitter.
	It's tulipr slash Richie, who is a, I say a young man in that he's 30, in his 30s, early 30s, who has, we're going to get into the details and I'll let Richie explain the 30,000 foot overview, but someone who at one point, Got into the philosophy of transitioning from male to female.
	Went through the physical procedures.
	Woke up and it's not, regret is probably not anywhere near a remotely serious enough term for it.
	Realized the error in everything and has now become a vocal advocate for detransitioning and awareness on this issue.
	It's a fortuitous, I don't even know how it happened.
	Yesterday, I'm sitting there scrolling through Twitter and I come across a Twitter thread from Richie, which concerned me a little bit in the tone and the content of the tweet thread.
	And then I was like, this story sounds familiar.
	I reach out and say, would you mind coming on the channel to discuss?
	And Richie says, yes.
	Then I spent the better part of last night and this morning.
	Catching as many interviews as I could that Richie gave on other platforms.
	And I know a lot of the story now that I know where we're going to go with the discussion of my questions.
	But this is going to be eye-opening for those who are unaware of what's going on.
	And it's going to be enraging for those who are.
	And it's also going to be sensitizing for those who think they understand and think they're in a position to judge what I call the victims of this entire frenzy.
	This psychological frenzy that we're seeing in the world go on in the medical community today.
	Everybody, share the link around.
	Tweet it out.
	We're live on both Rumble and YouTube.
	Let me just make sure we're good on Rumble.
	We are.
	And we're going to cut it on YouTube and go to Rumble sooner than later.
	But Richie is in the background.
	Yeah, someone said jump scare.
	You all got used to the intro videos.
	Well, not today, people.
	Jump scare with this.
	I should have been staring at the camera like this.
	All right.
	I'm bringing Richie in.
	Richie, get ready in three, two, one.
	Richie, how goes the battle?
	Hi David, thank you very much for having me and thank you for not putting me next to Geoffrey Marsh because I would hate to be compared to that individual.
	It's funny because there are people out there who have become the faces of one side of the movement and who are the basis of people ridiculing everyone who's caught up in this from It's victimizer to victim.
	And so I said, I'm going to err on the side.
	We're going to leave this as a blank slate.
	And then people can now, after listening to this, go and reassess the people who have become the faces of this movement for good and for bad.
	30,000 foot overview.
	I don't know if you've ever...
	I sent you the link to my Chloe Cole interview, but in general, I delve into childhood and it's going to be all the more relevant for this discussion.
	30,000 foot overview before we get into that.
	Sure, let's go.
	I am male, obviously.
	I was born in 1987 in the northeast of England in a former mining town.
	My dad was a miner and the northeast of England is quite a tough place to grow up.
	It's generally just a more difficult place to grow up anyway.
	I knew very early on that I was different from all the other lads, very affectionate, very soft, and, you know, I was gay, and I hated, I hated it.
	I hated the fact that I was gay, and when I really realised that I was gay, about, I think it was somewhere about 11 or 13 that I really, like, started to think, oh, shit, I'm gay.
	In the background, I already had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety and stuff like that.
	And I was obviously very depressed.
	And growing up in the 90s was one thing in itself, but growing up in the northeast of England, it was like really homophobic.
	So all the messages I was getting were, you know, how wrong I was and how wrong anyone who thinks this way is.
	So I kind of catastrophized a lot and I was very small.
	For my age for up until about like 15 or 16, because I went through a very, very delayed puberty, not like because of blockers or anything, just had a delayed puberty.
	And because of that, and because I'm like a big camp and stuff, I got really badly bullied in school.
	And around that time, my parents were sort of going through divorce as well.
	And the reason I'm bringing these up is this isn't just my story.
	It's like all of our stories seem to be carbon copies, right?
	You know, you've got somebody, a kid, and they don't always have to be gay.
	It's not just the gay kids who are just getting caught up in this.
	This is just any affectionate or soft kid that gets drawn into this movement, but we'll come on later down the line.
	I was obsessed with the internet from about 10. Got me on internet connection at 12. You know, back in the days when you used to dial up and if somebody picked up the phone, you'd get disconnected.
	And you'd be like, Mom, I'm trying to download a song.
	You were born in 87. So that makes you...
	I'm 35. 35. And people who didn't grow up with the advent of the internet will probably have no idea what we're talking about.
	Dial up internet with that.
	It's so good when it connected, man.
	And then someone would pick up the phone and it would interrupt everything.
	But back it up just one more step here.
	So your dad is a miner.
	Yeah.
	A coal miner, you said?
	Yeah.
	If I may ask, you know, your dad's demeanor as a parent.
	Is he big, burly, not putting up with effeminate behavior?
	Or is there, there's no element of him that's living something of a repressive life that he then imputes onto you?
	This is, this would be more a situation of a big, burly, minor dad.
	My dad's a good man, I think.
	But he's a man of his time.
	He's quite traditional.
	You would say he's quite...
	He's not, like, pushing people over, but he didn't take any shit, you know.
	I've seen him confront people and stuff like that.
	Scary dude, you know, to be on the wrong side of him.
	But I think because I was the youngest and I had an older brother, me and my brother were, like, totally different.
	My brother was very much like him, you know.
	He's very easily masculine and, you know, he just wasn't like me.
	I think my dad was just like, whatever, I've got one straight son, so whatever.
	So, I don't think me, I think I, when it comes down to, like, the sense of, like, rejection and fear and stuff like that, I think a lot of it was my catastrophisation because of what I'd seen, when, in sense, I think parents know the kids quite well, from a young age anyway.
	Like, when I was, initially, when I was very little, like, when I was four, I demanded, like...
	You know, like a play kitchen that was normally for girls and stuff, and you went fucking ballistic on that.
	But, you know, I got it anyway, and nothing, well, I'll say nothing happened, but something did.
	We'll get on to that.
	And about, when I got to about seven or eight, and I was trying to be a ballerina, and I know it's really cringe, but whatever.
	And I had, like, a very, very typical experience as an effeminate boy growing up.
	You know, it was just a very hard environment to do it in.
	And I think a lot of it was, like, the fear of that.
	But I think...
	Sorry.
	But your dad now, so I'm just, you know, giving him the name of the minor dad.
	Burly minor dad.
	He has a kid.
	You're the youngest of three.
	Two boys, one girl?
	Yeah, me.
	Me sister's the oldest, and then me and my brother.
	And so he's got, the youngest kid is into kitchen sets and ballerina at the age of seven or eight.
	Is he trying to talk you out of this?
	And there's no coercion, there's no sort of, it's just like, okay, now when you say parents know their kids, they do, but sometimes they also live in the most serious of denials, where they say, my kid's not gay, as if that would be a bad thing.
	Was your dad in denial, or was it just...
	Or was it sort of dismissive, like, okay, I'm going to write that one off and I'm going to focus on the one who's not gay?
	Maybe.
	It's hard to tell.
	I'm reluctant to speak for him because I've never sat down and had a proper conversation with him.
	We are quite distant now because of transition, but we are, like, in contact, but I haven't seen him in quite a few years.
	And, like, we've got, like, very limited text contact and stuff.
	What happened was when my parents divorced when I was 16, when it got put through and everything, I became a little bit resentful and distrustful of my dad because of affairs and stuff.
	I'd learned about this myself before that because my dad was using the internet to hook up with people and shit, right?
	And obviously, I'm perpetually online.
	Of course, I'm going to know what everyone else is doing on the computer.
	Because of that, I had this real sort of sense of, like, I kind of, like, I hated him for it, to be honest, and it took a long time to get past that.
	And when I was in my early 20s, and I was, like, matured past that teenage angst of hating your dad for walking out on the family, whatever, right, or getting sort of, like, making amends, and it was nice, and then I transitioned, and that just threw a pipe in the wrench completely.
	11 to 12 to 13, you definitively know you're gay.
	How does that affect you growing up, going to school, and demeanor-wise?
	Are you living in shame, in hiding it?
	Shame, denial, completely.
	Did not want to acknowledge it.
	Terrified to acknowledge it.
	Even though everyone else was saying it, we know, in a way.
	I think a lot of...
	Everyone saw it coming before I did.
	Ironically enough.
	And I think it was one of those things where I just built up the fear so much in my head and that had really built up the sense of this is going to be a terrible outcome for everyone, least of all me.
	But no one gave a shit, really, I think.
	My mother knew very early on I was different.
	And I think for me and my dad, I think you might be right that there was a sense of denial in both of us.
	But there was definitely some acknowledgement.
	But what I did do is, when I'm like 11 to 13, is it made that OCD really, really bad.
	Made it worse on the inside.
	You just got like out of control.
	And I went on the internet to talk with other, while I was looking for other gay people my age.
	But the late 90s in chat rooms.
	When you're, like, 12 and 13 were not safe places.
	You did not find other kids your age, funnily enough.
	You just found predators.
	And I had a period of time when I was just talking to these men.
	And it originally started on games like Diablo 2 because you had, like, this chat function in the game.
	What's the game?
	Diablo 2?
	Diablo 2, man.
	Total brilliant game, you know?
	You know Diablo at all?
	I was never much into that.
	Shit, right?
	I have no idea what Blizzard is.
	It's a game.
	Oh, right.
	Okay.
	Never mind.
	It's a game.
	Are these like interactive fighting games or are they like Minecraft?
	You know World of Warcraft?
	Yeah, kind of, I guess.
	Yeah, that's Blizzard.
	That's Blizzard.
	And so you have the chat function where you go to meet and like, you know, when I was a kid, I was talking to people on the internet.
	I used to play a game called Acrophobia, which had a private chat or it had a main chat and a private chat.
	And you realize now that, yeah, people back then were not who they said they were, but you're now...
	A young gay kid looking to meet, you know, innocently, naively, and genuinely trying to meet other kids who are going through the same thing, and you quickly realize that these are not kids, but rather adult predators online looking to meet kids.
	That's the simple way to describe what happened over a long period of time, because...
	I don't want to paint it that, like, everyone online is a predator because what had happened is I'd started playing games like Unreal Tournament.
	This is probably, you know, I don't know if you know that game either.
	These are all PC games, PC Master Race.
	And I started, like, chatting with, like, loads of guys in there as a lot of internet gaming is predominantly, like, occupied by males.
	So I became very used to talking with people and, you know, it just felt like...
	Mutual sort of thing, but there was always like this boundary pushing conversation that would happen at one point or another.
	And it wasn't like it was if I was going online and I'm going to search out these men.
	It was very, there was a lot of opportunism as well.
	And I was so desperate to talk about these things, but in my own way that I knew how to.
	And my only safe...
	Guiding factor when I was 12 and 13 was the internet speeds were really shit.
	So there wasn't that danger for the cam stuff until 2000 when for my 13th birthday I'd saved up money to get a webcam and it was quite expensive then because it was like the early life cam webcams, like 360p ones.
	And by that point I had Skype, MSN, ICQ, I had all these identities and easily reachable.
	And, you know, you've got shit self-esteem.
	You're getting bullied and you're spending more time online.
	And you talk to these guys and they just tell you what you want to hear.
	And one thing just leads to another.
	And before you know it, you're just doing what they want you to do.
	I'm reluctant to ask the question.
	We talked for a couple of minutes before this and I told you, like, I ask a lot of questions.
	There's nothing malicious and there's nothing.
	I don't know what the opposite of.
	Exhibitionist is.
	It's not like rubbernecking that I'm asking these questions.
	It's because this is a world that people either don't know about, don't fully understand, or don't want to understand.
	Does this online interaction actually result in real-life meetups?
	No.
	That fortunately never, ever happened.
	So you're 12, 13, and now 87. So in 2000, you're 13. You get a webcam and things start getting worse in terms of...
	The rabbit hole of the interwebs.
	When does it...
	As well, like, requests.
	So, you know, like, you'd get a request to take a picture or a snapshot because there wasn't...
	You couldn't really have video calls that well.
	You could, like, later on when I was, like, 16, 17. But by then it was...
	In a way, there was, like, a degree of protection because of that.
	The bandwidth issue.
	So you could only really do snapshots off your webcam.
	So it would be like, take off your shirt and chose your chest.
	Snapshot that sort of thing.
	And it would be dumb things like, hold this object in this way.
	But you don't know what you're doing.
	You're just fulfilling these requests that you think are stupid.
	But they're getting a sexual kick from.
	Because it's all somehow linked back to their...
	I don't know what it is.
	It's some dominating crap.
	I did that for a couple years and when I got a 15-16 and he had videos I started doing video calls but that's when I realised all the guys were like I wasn't attracted to anyone because I didn't really like see them.
	They were just like old men basically.
	Like one of them was like most certainly at least the same age as my granddad or older and I'll never forget that video call like what happened in there but That was the shit bits of the internet, but that wasn't all the time.
	That was like that time when you're not playing the games and you're not doing whatever you're doing as a teenager.
	It was like the later puns in the evening and stuff like that, you know, when you get fueled and stuff, as I say.
	And that's what led to that.
	But the reason I mention that is for a lot of...
	For a lot of D-trans males, because males and females have got a totally different pipeline, is whether it was in early transition or before the transition, there's always this period of, like, overexposing themselves online, whether it's to other adults or other children or adults as children when they are kids.
	But there's, like...
	Again, this doesn't apply to every single trans person.
	I'm just talking about the people like me who have got a lot of mental health issues and...
	You come into this for the wrong reasons to escape yourself.
	And doing everything that I did initially did kind of give us a little bit of a confidence boost, but it also eradicated my self-esteem because I had this fear of what would happen if those pictures get leaked out in school to my family and stuff like that.
	There was always that fear in the background.
	And I always believed that I was going to get in trouble for it somehow.
	I don't know.
	It was probably what was being said to me.
	And I can't remember the exact details.
	But it was something along the lines that what I was doing by sharing pictures was illegal because of my age.
	So I would get in trouble.
	Do you know what I mean?
	Yep.
	So that's kind of what some of the panic was.
	And obviously I had the bullying and I had what's called a cholesterol hematoma, which is like a really bad ear infection that eats out the bone.
	So the only way to cure that is to have a surgery where they remove inner part of the ear and I'm half deaf because of that.
	And that was all happening at the same time.
	And, you know, my mom and dad's relationship is coming to an end.
	Having a shit time online, shit time at school.
	And it was just a fucking disaster for us.
	Like the perfect storm of vulnerable children who can be exploited for ideological purposes.
	The question that I had was this.
	Now, you mentioned OCD.
	I imagine you've since been diagnosed.
	Were you seeing any therapists at the time as a child or is this sort of a retrospective?
	Different time period, you know, that just didn't happen.
	It was rare for kids to go see therapists and probably just as well because...
	I think of all the therapy I've ever had, and I don't know if it's ever really helped.
	Listening to a bunch of interviews, it certainly has helped you now put things into perspective and actually understand your responses.
	I've listened to a few interviews, and in one of them, I forget which one, where you were described as aggressively smart, or I forget how you described it, but I'm thinking aggressively smart and very fragile as well, or vulnerable.
	It explains a bit of the trajectory.
	Okay, so you're a teenager, a kid, gay, living with that sort of shame in an era where it wasn't as popular as it is today.
	Parents are getting divorced.
	Dad has had some issues that caused some animosity.
	When does it take the path into changing...
	People take issue with the term transition because you can't, but when does it go to there?
	Because one of my underlying theories is that...
	Go for it.
	From a very young age, I wanted to be seen as a girl, and that is a very natural reaction for kids who most likely end up gay.
	It's so normal.
	And it's because you relate to your female peers, and not in matters of sexuality, you just...
	In interest and demeanour and how you are and stuff like that.
	So you think, oh, therefore I must be a girl and I want to be seen as a girl because that's my crowd.
	I don't fit in with these boys because I'm not like them, you know?
	They're playing with mud and stuff and I'm not interested in that, right?
	That sort of thing.
	And that brain worm had started very early on, you know, very early on.
	And I liked, you know, people would always run up to us when I was like 10 or 11 and be like, are you a boy or a girl?
	And I'll pretend to hate it, but I secretly loved it because it was like, yes, they're confirming that I'm a girl, you know, even then.
	But again, it's that whole sort of thing.
	If I'm a girl who likes boys, and I think, I wasn't thinking it.
	Like, this clearly then, but you can see how the logical loop goes, then it doesn't matter if I'm gay, because I'll just be just like a girl.
	This is the problem, you know?
	I'm in the wrong...
	So something must have happened.
	So around that age, when I started, like, getting the anxiety about being gay, that kind of came out my mind, and it turned into wishing that I was a girl.
	So I would pray that, you know...
	At first I was praying that I don't want to be gay, and then it was like, please make me a girl, and I was hoping I would just wake up the next day as a girl, and that would solve all the issues, because obviously I'd perceived that that would somehow be an easier existence.
	So I had all this horrible shit mental health, and from about 17 to 24, I just basically sat inside and played World of Warcraft.
	All day, every day, non-stop.
	Never went outside.
	Didn't care on my body and just got drastically overweight.
	Do you know that South Park episode where they're all playing World of Warcraft and they just get fatter and fatter and fatter?
	What's South Park?
	That I'm joking, Richie.
	That I'm joking about.
	No, I'm joking.
	I've watched South Park.
	I was more a Simpsons and Family Guy guy because I never appreciated how ahead of the time...
	South Park was.
	Plus, I can't watch it with my kids.
	But no, that's a joke.
	I don't know the specific episode, but I can sort of imagine multiple years, you're just indoors living the unhealthiest psychologically, physically of lifestyles.
	I know in one of the interviews you described how much weight you put on.
	How much was it?
	It was 145 kilograms, so it's about 300 pounds.
	How tall are you, if I may ask?
	I'm about five.
	Now, About five, seven, five, eight, because I've lost about an inch and a half of height because of the fucking...
	Pressure of...
	Don't worry, please.
	Because of the blockers and the oestrogen.
	It curves your spine naturally, so I've got a hunch at the top, and at the bottom of my back, there's this...
	Everyone has a slight natural curve, but mine looks indented.
	Do you know what I mean?
	A curve inwards at the lower back.
	Yeah.
	Really quite...
	Quite protruding as well.
	So whilst, obviously, my height will always be what it should have been, which is like 5 '9", 178 centimetres, which is about 5 '8", 5 '9", or whatever.
	But it's now like 174 centimetres.
	And it's just, that's all because of the curvature.
	But we'll get on to that.
	Just back to story time.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Yes.
	So by the time I was in my early 20s, Out of control, which I'd had for many, many years, you know, I'm talking like intrusive thoughts, rituals.
	So that's like, not like demonic rituals, like you would develop a habit.
	And the first time you do this habit, for instance, I would have compulsions to pray or touch certain objects in the room before I went to bed.
	And the reason we do that when you're OCD is because the first time you did it.
	And it wasn't planned.
	It relieves your stress at that moment.
	So your brain says, repeat that behaviour because it made you feel better last time.
	But it doesn't because it was just a one-off fluke.
	That is, your brain's just kind of misfired in.
	So you end up doing all these crazy, and they are crazy.
	It's like, for instance, before I went to bed, I would have to...
	And I'd lost my religion by my early 20s completely.
	I wasn't religious anymore.
	I grew up semi-religious.
	And I would compulsively pray, even though I wasn't praying.
	Does that make sense?
	Absolutely.
	I'm familiar with obsessive-compulsive disorder and how it materializes in terms of potentially picking at the skin, dermatillomania, trichotillomania.
	Because people sort of visualize OCD and think of...
	Dustin Hoffman from Rain Man, as opposed to the more psychological aspect of what they call pure OCD, which is a very minimal physical manifestation, but all of the elements of their psychological...
	I'm glad you brought up pure O, because I got diagnosed with that.
	So what happened was, terrible shit mental health, and by the time I was like 22, 23, I was like, I can't go on like this.
	I'm just going to...
	Kill myself.
	Like, I just can't.
	Like, the panic attacks.
	And when I say panic attacks, if you've never had one, it literally just feels like you're having a heart attack.
	Like, you know, you can't breathe, your chest is tight, and your heart's, like, beating so hard it hurts.
	It's just, it was unbearable.
	So I went to the doctor and I was like, describe the symptoms I was having, and he put us on an SSRI called sertraline.
	That is a keynote too, because a lot of people, again in my circumstance, because I know a lot of other D-trans males who are in my situation.
	They all seem to start on some sort of behavioral med or SSRI or antidepressant or some shit like that.
	Something, something, uptake, what is it?
	Serotonin uptake inhibitor, neural inhibitor.
	I should know this.
	I've been on it for like over a decade now, so I should know it.
	I'm still on it now because I can't, I've been on...
	I'm on like a very, very high dose and I can't come off it because when I come off it, I get really bad.
	So it's obviously working still.
	And anyway, so I started getting help for that.
	And when you bring this up with the doctor, it triggers like other local therapies.
	So you start at like a very low level therapist, like a nurse practitioner who does what's called cognitive behavior therapy.
	So it's like CBT.
	Very basic six steps, you know, and, you know, all the nurses I've ever encountered, and I don't know if this is a British thing versus US, because everyone says in the US it's not the same, but nurses in the UK are amazing.
	I love them a bit.
	I've never had a bad experience with a nurse.
	Never.
	Not once.
	And she was a lovely, lovely woman.
	And she was one of the first people to kind of sort of acknowledge.
	She was like, I don't think this is just anxiety.
	I think there's a lot more going on.
	So she referred us to a psychologist at a nearby mental health hospital.
	So I went to the hospital, not as an inpatient.
	And I saw this guy and he was a psychologist.
	And I started talking about my interests of thoughts, and that's when he started delivering challenges to them, because I felt I was really evil for thinking all these horrible, gruesome thoughts in my brain.
	A lot of them were very violent, but I discounted all the shit I'd seen online.
	The early internet was...
	It wasn't tame.
	I've mentioned this before.
	It was the holy grail of evil.
	It was murder videos, accident videos, porn, but mostly the violent accidents, the violent murder stuff.
	Industrial accidents and all that shit.
	It was literally like a watered-down MKUltra experiment.
	It really was.
	If anybody knew what LiveLeak in the beginning or this website called Augresh in the beginning.
	I'm going to use this as a good...
	I'm going to end this on YouTube.
	Not because we're going to talk about anything that I can't.
	I'm going to put this up later.
	Let's move over to Rumble, everybody.
	Three, two, one.
	These websites were at one point in my life when I thought I had watched too much.
	I don't want to pull this journalist who said he got PTSD from firing an AR-15 in America.
	Not to minimize PTSD, but you see things which you never forget.
	They traumatize you.
	At one point, I was like...
	I was going to draft legislation for the Canadian government to make those types of videos, you know, make it illegal to host those online.
	But that was back in the day.
	Yeah, no, sorry.
	So, yeah, the early days was bad stuff.
	So you're saying maybe these intrusive thoughts of horrific images, you know, sexual perversion stuff in my mind had to do with what I've done to myself by watching these videos on the internet?
	Yeah.
	I definitely felt it was my fault for, like, exposing myself to some...
	All those execution videos and all the gore and shit that was freely available.
	And it did, it scared the hell out of us because I generally felt like when I was in a railway station or a bus station that I can control the compulsion to jump in front of the bus or something or jump on the rail tracks.
	So I would sit on my hands on the chair and...
	Like, you know, and I knew I was never going to do it or I felt like I was going to push someone.
	Of course, I was never going to do it.
	And you end up, you not only feel scared for yourself, but you also feel guilty for having these thoughts and you think you're a bad person for having that intrusive thought of shoving someone into the rail.
	And I couldn't trust myself because of that.
	And, you know, and everything that I did think, every good thing that I did, I couldn't trust myself.
	I believed every good thing I did was some sort of narcissistic.
	Maneuver for recognition or something.
	Everything.
	So no, even if I was doing good things, I couldn't feel good about it.
	I was always feeling shit.
	Anyway, psychologist kind of delivers one or two ultimatums.
	Well, not an ultimatum, but challenges.
	You know, it was like...
	Really, if you were evil, would you worry about this?
	If you were evil?
	Like, really?
	And I was like, well, that's a good point, I suppose.
	I don't think evil people worry about how evil they are.
	They're just evil, right?
	And I was like, okay.
	My flip side to that is, this is why I think I would destroy therapists.
	Flip side to that is, well, would good people have these thoughts in the first place?
	Now, I know the answer to the question is that everybody has these thoughts, and they just become more trouble.
	Not troublesome, but more invasive and destructive for some people, which is where natural, normal thoughts turn into disorders that they characterize by conditions.
	So that would have been my response to the therapist, and that might have ended the relationship there, but sorry.
	So yeah, would a psychopathic person have those thoughts, and your response is what?
	Well, I was just, you know, the challenge kind of...
	Did give us a little bit of relief.
	And then the next week, he came back on the next session with a printout on pure awe, right?
	Like, funny you mentioned it.
	And that was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that.
	And I was like, okay.
	And when I was reading, I was like, this is exactly, exactly it.
	But at that moment, something else was happening.
	I had discovered the, I had discovered gender dysphoria.
	I discovered the TransForums.
	About the week he gave me that Puro thing, I discovered that.
	What year is this again?
	And how old are you?
	This is 2013 and I would have been...
	Okay, so you're 23, 25. Okay.
	And you're at this time as well in the...
	What's the word?
	Is the word confluence?
	It's like the merging of all of these things.
	You have just started taking SSRIs?
	Yeah, I'd been on them for about a year at this point.
	For six, seven months at this point, I would say.
	And a friend at work, who's a gay guy, announced to everyone he was transitioning.
	And I was like, oh wow, you can do that?
	Is that a thing that you can do?
	I didn't know about that.
	And that sent us to the trans forums to find out about it.
	And I basically told them all, I was like, listen, this is my upbringing.
	These are the things that happened.
	And everyone was just like, 100% trans.
	And I believe them.
	So I went back to my therapist the next week and I went, forget everything we just talked about.
	Forget it.
	I have figured it out.
	I am 99% sure because, you know, you've got to leave 1% for doubt that I am trans.
	And then he was like, okay.
	And then the next week I came at him with fucking crazy eyes.
	And I was like, bro, I am 100% sure I'm trans.
	100%.
	And he was like, okay then.
	But at that moment, those sessions are coming to an end.
	So he wasn't in a position to sort of challenge that.
	So what he did is he noted me obsessive nature and that I had now apparently thought that I was trans.
	So he'd kind of put...
	That in quotation marks, if you know what I mean.
	So it was like, he knew what was going on, but he knew that I just basically entered another obsessive state.
	And at that time, as those were ending, because I'd found my solution to why I was the way I was, I, as instructed, self-referred to the gender clinic, because that's what you do in the UK.
	No one gets referred without their own say-so.
	You go to the GP and say, I think I'm trans.
	Can you refer us to the gender clinic?
	So I rang my doctor and told them pretty much a broad outline of my history.
	And again, she noted the red flags too.
	And again, it's not their job to be like, oh, I don't think this is right.
	It's like, oh, that's very difficult.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	I'm sorry to hear that.
	It must have been so difficult for all this time to do it.
	Let me stop you there, though.
	And this is not to...
	Push back on anything.
	It's just to understand the role of the doctors here.
	You are someone who's being treated with SSRIs for OCD.
	Well, Puro is just a subset of OCD.
	But you're being treated for what they qualify as mental conditions.
	And you come in and you say to the person treating your mental issues, this is the solution to my problems.
	Why is it not that doctor's responsibility to say you think it's the solution to your problems, but it's actually a symptom of your problems?
	Who, if anybody says that to you?
	I think it's because, you know, they may not have the specialty to diagnose between that or differentiate.
	So they could be catastrophic in the sense that they might be totally wrong to say that.
	And it's all about liability and risk.
	So if they, they can't just give me a diagnosis without saying me.
	They then refer you to the gender clinic who's...
	Essence, whose raison d 'être is to transition people, not to talk them out of it.
	That was beautifully put, by the way.
	Yes, that's pretty much it.
	So that was the end of 2013.
	Yeah, end of 2013.
	So I knew the waiting list was like 15 months, but I had it in my head that testosterone was poisoning my body, and it was causing me OCD, and it was causing all my mental health problems.
	So, what didn't help was the forum I was on, there was a lot of older trends.
	The forum, you're talking Reddit at this point?
	No, no, this is a trans forum.
	Like, do you know the old PHBB3 boards?
	Like the old forum software?
	No.
	I feel like an idiot.
	What the hell was I doing?
	In 2013, I'm only eight years old.
	What am I doing at this time?
	2013.
	You're eight years old in 2013.
	No, eight years older than you.
	I'm 43. So 2013, what the heck is my problem?
	Yeah, I guess I'm in the throes of law, so I'm distracted from the rest of the world.
	So no, I don't know what that is, but this is pre-reddit, and also this is pre-social.
	Our Reddit was around.
	It was just really based at the time.
	No one used Reddit for trans shit then.
	Like, barely.
	Ask Transgender came around before then.
	It was like 2008, but it was not used much until about 2014.
	Sorry, I didn't repeat the question.
	No, no, no, I interrupted you.
	So you're on these boards, these message boards, and how does that play into confirming the decision that you've come to?
	So these are all what you would largely classify as sexually driven transitioners.
	People who, a lot of them had no intention to medically transition, but I didn't know that at the time.
	And some of them, well, some of them, they all literally look like men wearing dresses when they would post pictures.
	But what would happen is they would post this picture and everyone would be like, you look amazing, gorgeous.
	And I'm thinking, oh, fucking hell, they don't like, but whatever.
	And when I would talk to them and then I would share a picture, I would get the same, but it would be more intense.
	It would be like way more.
	And then they would say shit like, you don't want testosterone to poison your body like it has with mine, because you're young now, because I'm 25, and they were like, if you do this now, you will seamlessly pass and blend in and all that sort of shit.
	So I'd really had this motivation in us that, A, this was the source of all my stress, the testosterone was the poison, and to listen to them, because they had similar lives to me, went...
	I didn't really count on that.
	Some of them were just gay repressed men too, but some of them were just sexually fueled for whatever reason.
	There are mixes to the dichotomy.
	And the idea that you have this idea in your head that testosterone is the poison and people with OCD, they fear germs.
	I say they fear germs and the idea like there's radiation around here and this is just mutandus mutandus.
	A form, a variation of that OCD element.
	But I'm sort of fixated on the idea that these individuals on these forums, and I don't think it's ever changed in nature, but only in degree and severity.
	These are people, are they asking to meet you in person?
	Are these bona fide, what we call groomers who are looking to get you?
	Yeah, I did meet with some of them in person, and that's another story, unfortunately.
	Yeah, I did meet with some of them in person to my...
	There were some really dodgy characters in there, and that's all I'm going to say.
	But one of them, not all of them were.
	A few of them turned out to be good friends and stuff, and they were very similar to me, but some of them were just as delusional as me.
	But there were some bad events that came out of that forum, and it wasn't just me.
	We still felt a lot of people who...
	There's lots of meetups and stuff, and they'll always target the more vulnerable ones, and I do have stories, but I don't really want to focus on that too much.
	But what you do is you've got these men who are, like, in their 40s and 50s, and they've got this fantasy of being in this four-part lesbian relationship, and you've got a repressed gay young person, 20 to 30, in that age range, and they want to...
	Have that dominant partner kind of look after them in a way.
	So there's like this mutual beneficial relationship almost of doing it.
	But the fact of the matter is you have to get over the fact that that's like somebody three decades older being, they look disgusting.
	So in their mind, they think that they're sexually entitled to you because of that, because you want what they can give and all that sort of thing.
	So there's a lot of presumptions on their side.
	Anyway, I really don't want to get too much into that because I'm really fucked off by one of them still and I am writing about that so I will expose it in the future.
	But ours led to shitty behaviour but just to quickly go back to the main story.
	I'd self-referred at the end of 2013 and I got told it would be 15 months so I went back on the forum and, you know, testosterone is poison.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And all this shit.
	And I just had this fucking fire up my ass.
	Like, I need to do this.
	I have to.
	You know, CD.
	And just like, fucking, if you don't listen to that voice in your head, your whole family is going to die for some reason.
	Right?
	You know, it's just stupid.
	It's going to solve.
	When you talk about the suicidal ideations, and no need to delve into that, but it'll solve that.
	Now what I'm asking myself listening to your story is, is there an element of you that's going to say now, This transition is going to cleanse me from all of the things that I've done up until now, above which I'm humiliated.
	Yeah, definitely.
	And I went back and they basically, again, back and forth, fire up me ass.
	And they were like, oh, there's these 2012, I think it was 2012, 13 or 13, 14, intranum gender protocols.
	And it was an instruction from the NHS, and what it basically was is a guide to treat gender dysphoric patients, right?
	And it also, in the guidelines, stated that if an individual has two diagnoses from an NHS GP on the approved gender recognition list, which is a long-winded way of saying approved GPs in the NHS who work privately, you can...
	Um, be eligible to start hormones because you've had those assessments, but that's what the gender clinic normally do.
	They do assessment and then someone else does an assessment.
	So I'm earning like near minimum wage at the time because of the period I hadn't had a pay rise since like 2008, you know, so, um, me, I was barely breaking even.
	And, uh...
	I'm like, how much is it?
	It was like £450 and then £50 for the payroll to go this 150 mile drive.
	But I knew that it would take about a year to save.
	And I was like, I can't wait that long, obviously.
	So I got a payday loan.
	Do you know what a payday loan is?
	No.
	A payday loan.
	It is fucking stupid is what it is.
	It sounds like you're indebting yourself for all future earnings for a period of time.
	It's a short-term loan with like 3,000% APR, right?
	So the idea is you borrow like, say, £50 for a day and you pay maybe like £30 interest.
	But that's not what happens because it's based off the supremely high APR.
	I'd got one for £500 and that put us in a massive debt because of 3,000% APR and I couldn't pay it back straight away.
	So it just got...
	Anyway, that's beside the point, the payday loan.
	But that's another thing.
	They prey on the vulnerable.
	And I was vulnerable and I was desperate.
	So I had my cash and I went up to Scotland on March 17th.
	So the psychiatrist, she diagnosed me there and then.
	And then I was like, can I come back tomorrow?
	And she was like, yeah, sure, why not?
	Rather than going back in like so many weeks or whatever.
	So I went back the next day.
	So it was a waste of time.
	We pretty much said the same thing.
	And then I went to see a colleague about 30, 40 miles away.
	And after those three appointments, in those two days, I had a full diagnosis of transsexualism.
	So I took that to the gender clinic, who I was still waiting for, saying, give me hormones, please, because I can't afford to do it privately.
	And I'd like the NHS to do it.
	And they're like, well, we haven't formally assessed you.
	And then I was like, well, look at the intranet guidelines.
	It says you have to, so like, okay.
	So they give us the blocker in April 2014.
	And then they didn't put us on any estrogen or anything for a long time after because I'd formally assessed us, even though I had these assessments, which were like rushed.
	And finally, we came in 2015 at the Gender Clinic in January.
	Oh, sorry, sorry.
	Was the spot for surgery or for another diagnosis?
	It's just to be seen at the gender clinic to go in.
	And that is when she asked, second I walked through the door, have you given any thought of genital reassignment surgery?
	And I was like, fucking hell.
	I mean, I don't think so.
	Don't know.
	But I'd also heard from all the other trans people that you had to say certain things.
	In my head, it was like, well, I really am trans, so I want to be honest with them as possible, because if I lie, who benefits?
	So I didn't do what they said, and I was just very honest, and I was like, I don't think I want surgery.
	And she was like, what I do really want, though, is I want therapy to work through the OCD, because it was still really bad at that point, even though I'd been on the blocker now for like eight, nine months at that point.
	And I didn't really notice much difference to the OCD.
	It was still really bad.
	So I was like, can I say a therapist here before I make any choice?
	So I got signed up to see what's called a psychosexual therapist, which is a gender therapist.
	That basically is a gender affirmation therapist.
	And gender affirmation means there's no treatment.
	Per se, other than the treatment in transition.
	You are trans.
	Everything is because you're trans.
	You're trans.
	So, started therapy with that guy in 2015.
	I would end up having...
	I had therapy with him for five years.
	It was like a hundred sessions with this dude.
	She was with us all the time.
	I clicked with him, you know.
	He was an actual gay guy as well, funnily enough.
	And by the July 2015, because you see these psychiatrists at the dental clinic like every five, six months, that's normally how, until you get discharged from the service.
	So July 15 said, right, you've been in therapy now three months, do you want surgery?
	And I was like, fucking hell.
	I think so.
	I guess so.
	So they started the referral process.
	And then the referral came through in September of 2015.
	And I was like, fuck this.
	I'm not doing this.
	This is too soon.
	I'm going to cancel it.
	And the psychiatrist was like, yeah, that's fine.
	Take your time.
	Just wait until you're ready.
	You know?
	And I was like, okay then.
	So I went back to the therapist I was seeing as well.
	And we're just working through things.
	And the same thing happened in 2016.
	Got referred, cancelled it.
	And then in 2017, keep in mind, I've been seeing this therapist for ages.
	I had one of my six-month checkups with a psychiatrist.
	And she said, okay.
	You know, you've been in the service now for like two years.
	You've refused surgery multiple times.
	If you don't want surgery, we'll discharge you because we are a medical service here to, you know, we're not a mental health service.
	That's what they said.
	And I'm like, okay, but whatever.
	So I'd kind of swallowed me pride or whatever, and I decided, no, go ahead.
	We'll discharge them.
	Fine.
	Good, do it.
	And that's how it was going.
	Then, the next day, I had a gender therapy session.
	Can't remember what the hell you said it was, but it sparked something within us that made us really panic.
	And at the end of that session, I rang the psychiatrist back to start the referral process.
	Did you want to ask a question?
	Yes, the session that you had that...
	Reinvigorated the desire.
	Is that with the gay doctor who you've been seeing for a long time?
	It wasn't a doctor, by the way, just a general therapist.
	Okay, okay.
	And by that, I didn't mean to...
	The gay was only relevant just so I could know which doctor we're talking about.
	It's very relevant.
	It is extremely relevant for a gay man to do this to another gay man.
	Well, this is one of the...
	One of my underlying theories and views is that this whole trans movement, it's fundamentally misogynistic and fundamentally homophobic, where they're basically saying, you're not good enough being gay.
	There's something wrong with you being gay.
	You're actually trans.
	That's the solution to your being gay as though being gay is a problem.
	Where I was going with this doctor is, you've had a lot of sessions, so some people could say, well, doctor's trying to talk you out of it.
	Am I right in viewing these sessions as trying to talk you into it?
	Yes.
	Definitely.
	And I've got me medical notes to prove it.
	Which is why I'm taking them to court and we'll get to that bit.
	Yep.
	I smile.
	The only thing that's going to end is violence.
	Yeah.
	So anyway.
	This guy, you've been with him for months, if not over a year now?
	At that point it was two...
	Years and two months or something.
	And this is like, look, I'm seeing this through sick and sordid perspective.
	It's like, we're getting there.
	We're getting there.
	A little bit more.
	Oh, back there.
	Richie's not yet ready.
	Comes back.
	Let's try a little again.
	And now he says, oh shit, if Richie's out of the system, I lose this.
	I don't know what financial benefit this individual has other than...
	I don't know.
	I think there was a bit of...
	There was definitely helping at the start, but it quickly did become very much core dependent.
	I think, too.
	And he wasn't a doctor, too.
	He wasn't a psychiatrist.
	And this guy says, look, if I lose Richie, that's it.
	If you're gone and you say, no, we're gone, now I've got to say something to reinvigorate this.
	I don't know if that was it.
	I think it was just, I don't think it was that conscious.
	Basically, I had the session the next day, fire got lit up in my arse, and I suddenly had it in my head that, you know, if you don't...
	You're going to lose the chance in the future and you might regret not doing it now, which is bizarre.
	Anyway, so I rang the psychiatrist back that afternoon saying please refer me and the process started again.
	Only this time I'd surrendered and I'd bought in and I was completely bought in.
	You know, the psychiatrist told us, because one of me had lots of fears and concerns about bleeding, which is ironic, and regret, which is even more ironic.
	And these were all, like, brushed aside.
	There was no in-depth conversations with them about this is what happens in surgery.
	These are the side effects.
	These are the potential complications.
	These are the potential benefits.
	None of that.
	It was, you would be amazed how the skin...
	Can repurpose and repair itself?
	That's what a psychiatrist said was.
	Implanting the idea that my brain would somehow create the rest of the vagina out of it, if that makes sense.
	But the way it was pitched here is like, I'm a crazy person and I'm unwell.
	And you're telling me that my brain, after surgery, is just going to fix the damage and make it look how I want it?
	Okay, sounds good.
	No, and we've only started seeing these videos now.
	TikTok, for all its toxicness, there are D-trans, for whatever you want to call it, people coming out now saying, geez, I didn't know that I'd have to do all these daily procedures.
	I didn't know that there was a risk of compacting hair.
	I didn't know that.
	And they're sobbing about it while saying they don't regret it.
	And it's quite obvious that they cannot admit that they regret it because it's sort of an irreversible thing, and the only way to deal with it is to pretend...
	There's a few factors going on there, though, David.
	You know, you've got people...
	Sorry for interrupting me, too.
	Don't worry, please.
	You know, if you regret it and you're public about it, people are going to jump on you saying you regret it, and then all of a sudden you are now being used by the other side, as they say.
	So there's a lot of, like, People generally don't want to hurt anyone else, but in doing so, they won't allow themselves to feel pain.
	And the pain just comes out.
	And the words, you know, the words say one thing, but the face is something else.
	As you said, they're just crying.
	And I understand that feeling.
	I really, really do.
	But I don't want to be that person that does the social media video of crying about.
	What it is.
	I'll tell people how it is, but I'm not going to sit and sob.
	Anyway, where were we, David?
	We were talking about them telling you it's going to be all hunky-dory.
	We're not going to warn you about the long risks of this procedure, how Frankensteinian it might be, what you're going to have to do for the rest of your life.
	And they say it's all hunky-dory.
	You're going to do it.
	Next day, you're going to be a woman and you're going to be happy for the rest of your life.
	Pretty much.
	Yeah, so I've had friends who were having the procedure at the same time and one friend was like, you know, the research shows you look at like four decades of extra quality life and all this shit, all these statements would come out and I remember talking to somebody who I'd heard on the grapevine it hadn't went 100% well and I was dying to have a conversation with them and I said, is it worth it?
	Is it good?
	She went...
	It's okay.
	That was as much as no sensation, death loss, infections, urinary issues, pain.
	That's all she could muster.
	It's okay.
	Didn't want to say it.
	Didn't want to say how bad it was.
	No one would.
	My friend who had even worse complications than I did, who even drove me back from surgery, and they had their surgery before, wouldn't tell us.
	No one tells each other.
	Even I didn't tell anyone for a few hours after.
	It's so difficult to do it because when you're in that initial stage of recovery, you think you're in the healing process and everything's going to get better, but it doesn't.
	It never gets better.
	It just doesn't.
	So you kind of barter with yourself, like, I'll give it time, I'll give it time, you know, and it's just the healing.
	Everyone says it takes a couple of years for it to be right, so I'll wait then, and it never does.
	But we're skipping ahead.
	Just go back a bit.
	So you make the decision and they tell you it's going to be alright.
	How do you get from there to the surgery table?
	So that was 2017 and I'd kind of bought into the idea and I was desperate to have these discussions with everyone and everyone was really positive about it.
	No one said anything negative about it.
	No one.
	And I was like, right then, I guess this is it.
	So I was quite happy.
	In 2017, I thought, this is it.
	This is all I need to do and just live the rest of my life, you know?
	Cool.
	Excellent.
	And I went to the pre-surgery assessment in about the end of 2017, I think it was, just one.
	And it was a bizarre, the most bizarre experience.
	And you would almost think nothing was happening.
	You would think, like...
	We're going for, like, something as mundane as, like, a swab or something.
	Like, it was so relaxed.
	Like, not in the, like, making you feel welcome.
	It was, like, blasé.
	So I'll go...
	Sorry.
	I'm just going to...
	This is...
	It's actually enraging me, the way you describe this now, because this is, like...
	I went in for a ganglion cyst.
	I went in for a testicular torsion.
	And I'm like, okay, what's the expertise of the doctor who's going to fix up...
	These things.
	And these are relatively simple procedures.
	This is like, I'd call it brain surgery, but it's almost more complex than brain surgery.
	They're physically altering male genitalia to, I mean, the word is neo-vagina that people are using.
	A female genitalia.
	Who the hell's doing this?
	What's their training?
	How has it been around for long enough that anybody has?
	Or are they just literally, I don't want to use inflammatory descriptions, but are they just Butcher doctors who are just going in and doing the best they can with the technology they have at the time, which is manifestly insufficient to do anything because it might be physically impossible.
	Sorry for the rant.
	You're going in on the table and they're doing this to you and they're just saying, oh, it's just an in and out day procedure.
	It was just the whole atmosphere.
	But in terms of these, there are definitely butchers, by the way.
	You can see it in their eyes.
	I'm like, I don't want to...
	Get you in trouble by naming individuals.
	But there are certain people who run TikToks and they venerate surgery and you can see it in their eyes that there's something.
	Missing that from that human.
	It's a little bit psycho eyes and they're loving it.
	And equally, this one individual who I'm thinking of, they also show off their lavish lifestyle and yachts and shit.
	And it's like, well, obviously this is very profitable too.
	And there are definitely sycophants and psychopaths who do surgery.
	But my surgeon, I didn't know because I didn't talk to him long enough to get that vibe.
	The vibe I got from him was...
	He was probably high-functioning autism, I would say, maybe, because the pre-op assessment was the strangest experience of any surgery I've ever had, because I didn't do it alone.
	There were two other patients with me.
	So you get seen in threes.
	Not one-on-one, you get seen in threes.
	So I go in this waiting room, and I get called around to another secret waiting room, and there's these two trans people there with me, and I'm thinking, What's going on here?
	We're going to get seen one at a time.
	No, we got all pulled into this room together.
	The surgeon sat on his keyboard facing like he's like he's on the other end of the room and he's facing sideways.
	So his head is like like, you know, we're over there, if that makes sense.
	And he's just blanket, just staring at his screen, making notes in between him and us is the head nurse.
	Now, I know I had that rant earlier about how all nurses are great.
	She ain't.
	She was a bitch.
	Like, a proper bitch.
	And I'm not just saying that, like, she was, she would slander patients, she would make, like, she would always, at the earliest opportunity, and I know other people, she would tell them stories, and, like, you know, she would just, she would just, I didn't feel like she was a nice person anyway, and she definitely treat us all like we were retarded, and I shouldn't say that word, but we're kind of worried to do what we did.
	But, anyway, basically, I'm in this room, he's on the other side, and she's in the middle, and I've got these two other trans people beside us.
	And she pulls up this big fucking book, right?
	Big, huge hardback book.
	Opens this book and starts slowly turning the pages.
	And on each page was a collage of vaginas, right?
	That's it.
	Just vaginas.
	And the whole purpose was to show us that every vagina was different.
	And these weren't surgery.
	Pictures of people who had surgery.
	These were pictures of women's vaginas.
	And the whole point was to show us that every vagina is different and they were not surgical photos.
	And I'm fucking, I'm confused as fuck, like for, you know, for the majority of this pre-op is taken up with this book, right?
	And it was the most bizarre thing ever.
	And I'm, like, confused.
	And then after, you get each, like, two minutes with the surgeon.
	So what he does is he had a look at your area to see how much hair removal you had.
	And he's like, yeah, that's fine.
	And that's it.
	That was the level of dialogue I had with my surgeon.
	And because it was so casual, I was like, well, I guess this is so common.
	You know, they're putting within three at a time.
	You know, she kind of sounded when I...
	Because any question I had for the surgeon was intercepted by the head nurse.
	So I would be like, I would say his name and she would be like answering it instead.
	So I didn't even have that one-on-one with him.
	And then I had me time alone and he was like, yeah, you've had enough hair removal, we'll book you in.
	And then a few months later, I went down and I had surgery.
	So if I may stop you there, actually, the day with the three was not the day of the surgery.
	That's just pre-operative assessment.
	And I'm not asking this to be glib and there's no but.
	When they're showing you the pictures of the vaginas, it's not like this is what yours might...
	It's just to say they all look different and you don't know what yours is going to look like or is it which one picked the one that you want to most look like?
	No, it was they all look different.
	Okay.
	You describe this.
	It sounds like a horror movie to me.
	It's pretty fucked up.
	Okay, so now this happens and then three months later, so they schedule the actual surgery.
	Do they tell you how long in the hospital for?
	Yeah, so they said you'd have seven days in hospital and so it would be two and a half hours.
	So I got wheeled in at 10 o 'clock, but I came out at half three in the afternoon because I had a severe hemorrhage and I lost a lot of blood.
	Recorded in surgery, it was 1,600 milliliters, but I know I lost a lot more after.
	In bed, because you have like drains and shit.
	But the surgeon refused to give us a blood transfusion for five days.
	And I didn't find out till after that.
	This is all to do with stats, by the way.
	Because if they leave a couple days, it doesn't come up on their stats for blood transfusions.
	So I had it five days after, and the nurses were all, like, saying, you need a blood transfusion.
	You need a blood transfusion.
	Because I was in and out of consciousness.
	So I could barely remember the first five days because I was unconscious, in a high fever, and I wasn't well.
	And then they gave us two units of blood, and then I woke up, and I was like, whoa, I'm awake now.
	And all of a sudden, I'm now aware that I'm in hospital recovering from this major surgery, but it's also...
	On the day the packing comes out, which is the bandaging inside, and I didn't have that, like, mental preparation.
	And the first time he did it, he took out the packaging and the bandaging and had a mirror, and I just tried not to gasp.
	I tried my best not to gasp.
	And it was just such a fucking horrible assignment.
	Like, I just can't explain it.
	Horrible.
	It literally looked like somebody taking a hatchet, like not even a sharp one, and just went at you.
	That's what it looked like.
	Did not resemble anything.
	And then me sutras, which are the scar lines on the side of the thing, they popped open.
	And that left a dent.
	I had massive urinary issues.
	And even though I had a catheter, I needed the medical staff to help empty it for the first, like, days.
	And because I had, like, blood loss, I had to stay in hospital longer as well.
	So it wasn't, like, the seven days.
	And I went home with a catheter.
	I couldn't pee.
	I was in a lot of pain.
	And obviously I had this wound that was popping open.
	Got severely infected.
	Started dealing with infections.
	I couldn't piss properly for about three or four months.
	I drove myself back down to Brighton from Newcastle, which is where I live, which is about 350 miles, because no accident and emergency, our doctors will touch it.
	So it has to be the original hospital.
	And for me, it was in Brighton, which is 350 miles away.
	So I had a minor procedure there in the August following, because I had the original in May.
	And then I had a revision surgery.
	In January 2019 to fix the labia and the unary stuff.
	Because I've got urethral constriction, which is like taking a straw and bending the straw, basically.
	And, you know, it's hard to extract stuff out of.
	So, after...
	I'm skipping over a few key pits here.
	So, three months after surgery...
	Whoa.
	Because I was like, I was bedbound for ages.
	I'd started back at the gender therapist sessions.
	And I said to him, three months after surgery, I've fucking made a terrible mistake here.
	This shouldn't have done this.
	This has been the worst thing I've ever done.
	And he said, you've just had a major surgery and you've had anesthetic.
	And anesthetic is known to lower your serotonin levels.
	You've got OCD.
	This is an OCD rumination.
	What we'll do is, we talked about it there and then, and then I accepted that.
	And then I came back a few weeks later and I said the same thing.
	And I kept coming back and coming back.
	If I may ask you, an OCD rumination?
	I'm not familiar with the term rumination.
	Is that just a recurrence or a manifestation?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So an example of a rumination would be, am I going to hell?
	It's an impossible question to answer, right?
	Like, whether you believe it or not, there's no way you could know, right?
	So you can get, like, religious ruminations that can be really intrusive, where you worry constantly, constantly, constantly, and it's like, it's went beyond your religious belief, and it's now an obsessive rumination that you can't dislodge.
	And mine, at the time, what I got told was...
	I'm regretting it because I'm having problems.
	This is just the absolute catch-22 irony is that they're saying the regret is an OCD rumination, but the idea that you have to become a woman is not an OCD rumination.
	That's right.
	And that's why I got really pissed at them.
	They just said, I kept coming back session after session because they were winding down to discharges because I had surgery and there was nothing else for them to do, obviously, because they got the customer in that.
	And in the end, they were just like, right, we'll refer you on for OCD treatment.
	And then I got referred for OCD treatment in 2019, and I'm still waiting for the rest of it, and it's 2023 now.
	Now, I don't want to feel like I'm...
	That there's any element of me that's trying to get you mad at the situation.
	Listening to you explain this makes me angrier than I thought I could have ever gotten at what I was already angry about by what I thought was exploitation of mentally vulnerable individuals.
	And you're an adult.
	Now, there's people out there who are going to say, you got what you asked for because you're an adult.
	You should know better.
	I think that's a very...
	Callous and short-sighted way of seeing this, whereas this is, there are people with mental issues who need treatment and help, not exploitation and whatever the doctors did.
	Now, there is the silver lining to all this in that you seem, you're dealing with it and you're using it to pivot for good.
	The question though, I mean, I always say, how do you get over this?
	How do you deal with this?
	But before we even get there, just the surgery itself.
	So you hemorrhaged because presumably they didn't clamp down whatever veins they have to clamp down properly before they make certain incisions, certain severing.
	Is that a cat?
	Yeah, it is.
	Let's see the cat.
	This is an animal that's going to distract us from the rage of the moment.
	You'll come back.
	I got my dog underneath.
	I got two.
	They're both hanging around.
	Very nice.
	Okay, so you hemorrhage out, which itself is a problem.
	You're in and out of consciousness, and then you wake up out of sedation.
	Is that a moment that you can never forget?
	Yeah, it was when I first saw everything, because there was that moment when I stood up in the full-length mirror, but the moment for me was when...
	I was in bed still, and I couldn't get out of bed, and you had the handheld mirror, and it was, like, that...
	Because I couldn't control when I was going to see it.
	You just, like, shoved it in me face, and it was just there, and I was just like...
	Like, it wasn't a, oh, that's great.
	You know what I mean?
	It was like a, fuck.
	Like, it was a very visceral, like, something's wrong.
	You know when something's wrong, and you're like...
	And you just gasp, and I just...
	And as I was gasping, I had to stop myself because I was like, I don't want to show them that I'm disappointed.
	And then I had like this, you know, it's really, really kind of fucked up at that time because it's too early to acknowledge it.
	But I just said to myself, what the fuck have I done?
	What have I done?
	Like, what have I done?
	I just couldn't answer it for ages.
	And then for four years, I was pretty much like that.
	Last year I was just like, well, fuck this shit.
	Because I kind of thought, you know, I fucked my life.
	I'm just going to, like, self-delete because I had a run and I failed.
	But, so I was like, well, I've got nothing to lose.
	I may as well tell people how fucked up this is.
	And then everyone was like...
	I didn't expect it to go this way at all.
	I was totally anonymous at the start.
	I had no intention of being public.
	I had no intention of suing.
	All I wanted to do was just tell people how fucking awful it was to warn others, mainly.
	And then I was just like...
	And as that was happening in the years after surgery, I started like...
	Becoming a bit bitter.
	And what started everything was I started Googling my own complications I was having.
	And I was finding, like, so much shit that I'd never seen before.
	Like, Reddit boards that were deleted and that only exists on archives.
	Like, SRS.
	I can't remember what the original one was, but it was, like, surgeries that had gone wrong in SRS.
	And if you go on any of these, like, subreddits on the Reddit for surgery, especially for male or female, well, say male or female, I'll get onto that language game in a second, what you'll find is everyone who lists the complication has deleted their account.
	It's like the most common user in our MTF surgeries is a user called Deleted, because everyone makes a post and deletes it, and that's what happens, and it's like...
	There were so many people who had the same thing, and I just, I was just, I couldn't believe that I, because I thought it was just my own dumb fucking look or my own dumb mistake that this was the way it was.
	And what really, really pissed us off is I started seeing all these people who were, like, just being silenced, and they couldn't talk about it.
	Everything was being contained.
	All their doubts were being managed by the community, by the doctors, and they couldn't even feel grief for the fucker.
	No one was allowed to say, I shouldn't have done this.
	I shouldn't have been allowed to do this.
	And it was like, if I had walked in like this at the beginning with zero, like, mental health stuff, right, that would be a different story.
	But I went in, told them everything, absolutely everything.
	Like, I did not hold back.
	All the worst shit.
	And then what they did was, yeah, nod, nod, nod.
	And when it does go wrong, they're like, ah, yeah, this is because you've got this condition.
	Of course you can't regret it.
	No one regrets it.
	Don't be daft.
	You know what I mean?
	And that's pretty much where it landed me.
	And then as I started speaking out, people were like, yeah, have you ever thought about suing?
	And I was like, not really, because I kind of like...
	I did it, you know what I mean?
	I'm an adult and all that shit.
	Because the narrative was, you know, adults can do whatever they like.
	So that's the message, folks.
	If you know somebody mentally ill, they're allowed to do whatever the fuck they like, you know.
	And not just that, but from the other side, they're allowed to do whatever they like, yes, but doctors are not necessarily authorized to do whatever a mentally unwell patient tells them to do to them.
	That's the other side of the argument.
	And these guys are...
	They've got a great financial incentive to continue doing this.
	It's become a bloody industry in the last 10 years.
	Now, as you come out and start to anonymously talk about your regret and then publicly, I know the answer to the question, but you start getting a lot of pushback and hate and vitriol from the people who had lauded you as a hero for going through with what you did in the first place.
	Yeah, so I was...
	I was a little bit of a preacher, too.
	I wasn't, like, a social media preacher.
	When I say preacher, I'm talking about the Church of Trans, okay?
	So I was very, very...
	I was an organisation, she would say, and I did damage in my own way.
	And I was very much selling this to everyone, and eventually I would sell, like, this sort of, like, calm and polite and well-spoken side of the movement, you know?
	It was like...
	The gay side of the movement, they're all very polite and unthreatening, and it's like, how could anyone, you know, say that you're a bad person?
	I've just heard you speak about all your difficulties, because I would talk about how hard my life is, but I would snipe all the inconvenient details, you know, like the fact that I actually had quite a good childhood.
	You wouldn't hear that, would you?
	Yeah, there was marital problems in the house, but whose parents didn't have fucking issues, right?
	But add everything, my parents didn't...
	Abuse us.
	They didn't tell us I was a piece of shit.
	They didn't shout at us, scream at us.
	They didn't do any of that.
	I had a good life.
	I really did.
	I just had mental health issues and I was gay.
	That was it.
	And I'd kind of retconned that and changed everything.
	And all the instances that kind of were more representative of myself as a person and an emerging soul, soft, sensitive.
	Bit flamboyant, a little bit high attention, whatever, deficit disorder thing.
	Okay, cool.
	And that's kind of all it should have been.
	I'm sorry, I'm going off.
	I appreciate what you're talking about now.
	You're retrospectively looking at what you have done and the role you've played in this.
	I presume when you're preaching the Church of Trans, this is prior to the actual surgery and not post?
	Or is it post as well?
	Both.
	I'm not judging you.
	I don't think many people with an open mind are going to judge you because you're in a position now Where you have to internalize and rationalize and digest what you deep down know is your own mistake.
	And I may be putting words in your mouth, but I hope I'm not.
	And one of the easiest ways to do it is by doubling down and pretending, doing your best to make it look like it wasn't a mistake.
	And these are defensive sort of actions.
	You should not feel guilty about this, although it is very...
	Open to have the retrospective analysis of your own behaviour.
	Thanks, David.
	I also think that a lot of trans people, and this extends to de-trans personalities too, have...
	I'm trying to choose me words politely and carefully, but...
	You don't have to.
	Yeah, you don't have to.
	We are all narcissists.
	We're raging narcissists.
	It takes a very narcissistic temperament for you to change your reality for me, for a style.
	And a narcissist struggles saying that they're wrong and that they've made a mistake.
	I am not the epitome of a narcissist.
	I just have narcissistic tendencies that I've worked very hard on over the years to...
	To battle down, but there is an element of narcissism with the trans movement.
	There is.
	It's crazy.
	You want an example?
	Fucking Dylan Mulvaney.
	Jeffrey Marsh.
	Jeffrey Marsh, that fucker.
	You know, all of us, even the transitioners are to some degree, because here we are sprouting about all our pain and stuff and expecting people to feel sorry for us when really...
	Because the argument is, oh, you know, you would have screamed at us 10 years ago, and I was like, no, I don't scream at people now, so I would have screamed then as well.
	I was mental, but I wasn't, like, at all.
	Piece of shit, you know what I mean?
	I wouldn't, like, do any of the...
	There's this fantasy some people have, that everyday transition, or, like, all trans people are, like, rage and scream, and, like, the ones that you see on the clips on YouTube and that, and, like, all the really cringy ones, and most of them aren't.
	Most of them are, like, damaged and traumatised, and they don't do any of that, and they're very, like...
	They don't stick up for themselves most of the time, and...
	Yeah.
	But there is narcissism in the movement, and it's extraordinarily difficult for a narcissist to say I've made a mistake, which is why it takes a lot of personal growth, and normally it comes from reality, like the trauma of just whatever you've been through is normally enough to bring you back, but also time.
	Women, on average, detransition after about 5.5 to 6 years.
	Of medical treatment, whereas males, it's about 7.5 to 8.5 years, which is why in 2019, 2020, this is when all the female detransitioners started speaking because there was a boom in 2014-15, which is where a lot of the modern transitioners kind of all trace back to.
	And then obviously you've had the Gen Z cohorts since like the TikTok cohort and the lockdown cohort.
	and which are just more stages of getting it to the ultimate level which is to get it embedded in policy school etc which is where we're at now and the cohorts were just the way to get there and we're at that we're at ground zero now where it is literally the policies are everywhere and the need scrubbed off the systems off It doesn't matter if it's a small organization,
	they're everywhere, and the well-meaning, but just their own interpretations of law, and it all reinforces this identity narrative that people can beat each other over the head with.
	It's an interesting thing about the narcissism.
	I'm not sure I would...
	About your narcissism?
	Because you don't strike me as being narcissistic at all.
	You strike me as being quite amazingly introspective.
	But like I said it before, there can be nothing more narcissistic than someone telling you how you have to refer to them when talking about them to a third party.
	With the whole he, she, me, they pronouns, it's not even about how you deal with them one-on-one.
	It's what they're telling you to refer to them as when you're talking about them to somebody else.
	What can be more narcissistic and dominating, controlling behavior than trying to control someone else's speech with other people when you're not there?
	So just so this doesn't look one-sided, let me try to steelman the flip side.
	Have you met in your journey any people who have gone through this and are wildly happy with their new body parts?
	Yeah.
	Do you feel that you're in the minority?
	Or the majority or the unspoken majority of those who have done the ultimate.
	Because you got the Dylan Mulvaney's who, whatever they do, they haven't made that irreversible decision.
	And so it's very easy for them to encourage others and be all smiley-biley about it when they haven't done what is ultimately a very irreversible act.
	Those who have gone through it who are sufficiently self-reflective, I mean, what's the tendency that you're noting?
	Having been in the community?
	My biggest observation is there is a huge degree of medical negligence occurring.
	Whether or not surgery was right or wrong doesn't matter.
	I don't care if it's right or wrong for somebody.
	The problem is the surgeries itself and the complications that they're causing.
	These aren't one-offs.
	I can't remember which one it was I read the other day, but there was an article that came out about the pulse of complications, very recent study, and it was like, you're not just guaranteed to have a complication, it would be rare for somebody to not have at least three, right?
	And that, to me, is like, you know, they might say, oh, it's just minor stuff like bleeding and what they call granulation tissue, which is scar tissue and dead skin on the inside becoming, like, infected and stuff.
	Just small issues.
	That can only cause, I don't know, blood infections, sepsis or whatever.
	Yeah, yeah, just small issues, you know.
	And then, like, I don't know anyone who hasn't had an issue.
	Of my close friends in person over the years who have transitioned, picking names out of six friends, two of us have got sensation.
	The rest have got nothing.
	And we're told it's one in six that don't get sensation.
	And I mean nothing.
	Zero.
	Again, I'm not asking to be nosy.
	When you say sensation, numbness or lack?
	You can't even feel it with your finger.
	Because they've severed nerves going down and the nerves just don't work.
	They don't reattach and it's numb.
	Yes, and there's a reason for that.
	So your body's got a...
	Like a natural response to shock and trauma for obviously all the, you know, like I think humans in our current anatomical form have been around for what, like 250, 300,000 years, I think is the current estimate.
	And, you know, throughout our evolution, we've had limbs getting lost, we've been getting bones broken and all sorts.
	So one of the natural responses to any sort of trauma is for your body to cut the nerves.
	It's like, dead.
	Kill the nerves.
	This is too much.
	Something's happening.
	It's the only natural response for your body to do.
	It doesn't know what else to do, which makes perfect sense, which is why women who have mastectomies for transition have got numb chests, right?
	They're all mostly, totally numb across the chest.
	They can't feel a thing because they've just went through this very, very evasive procedure.
	Someone like me.
	You know, it's not just removing, it's then we're going to move shit around inside too.
	Because I didn't even know that, like, you can't probably have anal sex after because the...
	And this is going to sound gross, right?
	So if you imagine, like, your anal passage and you've got your prostate sort of sitting, like, on the canal, as it were.
	In order to get, like, to achieve orgasm, what normally happens is they move the...
	An extra canal in, which is the neofaginal canal, but in doing so, it kind of moves the prostate over.
	So you can't get the same stimulation through anal, it has to be through the front.
	And if you can't pledge yourself through the front, you've lost that completely, right?
	So not only do they take away your sexual function from your genitals, they take it from the back too, which for gay people is quite important.
	And it's the little things that don't quite tell you with that.
	And obviously, I was in a fantasy land at that point.
	I was totally away with the fairies in 2017.
	I was like, yeah, this is going to solve everything.
	It's going to be great.
	Because I said no, and I've been convinced, and all the professionals are saying this is the right thing.
	It's something, you mentioned it, and I've never even thought of it until you mentioned it.
	That aspect, where it's not just, I don't know, like, we're playing God, or not we, these doctors are playing God or Frankenstein, and that they say, well, we'll make it look like a woman's parts, and I say that without judgment.
	Men are men, women are women, and but for certain genetical anomalies, like an extra chromosome, whatever, there's separate issues.
	Let's just make it look like that, and you can't reposition the male anatomy when you're trying to redesign it to make it look like female anatomy.
	And I had never even thought about what impact that would have.
	And especially, I'm not gay, but I understand what the sexual preferences and practices of gay people are.
	You don't have to be gay to enjoy butt sex, I'm just saying.
	Well, my chat knows I'm a keep a schmeckle in the pants type guy.
	But no, I never even thought of that.
	And sure as hell no that they never mentioned that to you.
	When I interviewed Chloe Cole, they never mentioned what would be the long-term impacts of a double mastectomy on a 15-year-old.
	So of the people you know, two have no sensation.
	Two are lucky enough to have sensation.
	The one thing we're told, the mantra, is that would you rather have a dead ex or a living trans ex?
	And I'm saying that just because it goes either way.
	Would you rather have a dead boy versus a living girl or a dead girl versus a living boy, which is what they said for Chloe Cole?
	And I hate asking the question because I don't like putting the juju out in the universe.
	Have you known people who post-trans have succumbed to the crushing reality of the fear of what they've done and have decided to self-delete?
	Yeah.
	How often does that happen?
	Rare, to be honest.
	I think a lot of people go into some cost fallacy.
	I think a lot of trans...
	Trans Day of Remembrance.
	I think a lot of that is regret-based, rather than transphobia, as they'll say.
	Because you read a lot of these entries, and it's like tidolivesmatter.org or something, if you want to check it out yourself.
	And what they do is they'll list the reason for suicide and stuff, and you'll see it time and time again, person had surgery.
	And then it will give you some spiel about how transphobic the world is for them or how long the waiting times are.
	And it's like, you know, the whole better than a dead kid thing and, you know, the waiting times at the gender clinic is killing people.
	And it's like, can we just address the elephant in the room that there is not a person going around killing these people?
	It's themselves.
	He's basically saying, we need to protect you from yourself by giving...
	By fulfilling all your demands, you're basically suicide-baiting with full authority.
	I didn't suicide bait, but I understand a lot of people who have and why they did it.
	And one of the worst things when you come out of the realisation and stuff is just realising all the bullshit that you said to yourself, to others.
	Now, it could have been far worse in my situation.
	I could have had a social media.
	I could have done YouTube videos.
	I could have, you know, I could have had a viral video.
	And I was definitely, possibly within that category at one point in me transition.
	But I didn't.
	But for a lot of people that do, that do have some cringy shit that they're terrified that's going to get dragged up.
	And it's so hard as well when all your friends and all your interests are trans.
	Because...
	All of a sudden, everything's an allegory for being trans.
	You're like a politician who does something related to being trans.
	It's just trans, trans, trans, trans.
	You lose your individuality and you've just become a member.
	I don't want to say it's a cult, but it has a lot of the hallmarks of a cult.
	It's not a cult, but it's a cult.
	And a cult that's...
	I mean, I don't understand the...
	I know people from the Marxist divide society.
	Perspective say it's a cult for a reason now and media hypes it up.
	Doctors have made an industry of it.
	And what better way to cull a future generation than by effectively sterilizing the next generation, as many as you can?
	There's a lot of theories as to how and why this has become a social phenomenon.
	One thing's for certain, it has.
	So there's two things that have happened.
	You've had the...
	Affirmation model being reintroduced after being dead for 30 years.
	Because it got...
	A lot of people don't realise that the gender affirmation model that is based today, they affirm, by all means, don't question.
	That was put to rest in 1979 by the US's first gender clinic, the John Hopkins University.
	And they'd basically said, doesn't work.
	Stop.
	So they stopped all the surgery procedures.
	And then all the activists in 79...
	Got very annoyed at that.
	And they started WPATH, which started releasing their own guidelines.
	And for some reason, people started listening to them.
	And then in 2011, they released the seventh version of those guidelines, which basically said, forget all the questioning.
	Forget the safeguards.
	You affirm.
	If somebody says they're trans, they're trans.
	And then you also had that with social media.
	And it's social media.
	Plus Sock 7, which is Standards of Care 7. That is what's created this.
	Everything else, what you're seeing on the sidelines with these TikTok doctors and that, they're opportunists.
	They didn't drive this.
	They're just benefiting from it.
	And there are a lot of people benefiting from this.
	But it also...
	If I'm putting my tinfoil hat on and I'm running out of tinfoil, I would have to say that this...
	Is very adequately timed around the time of the financial crash of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement when there was a big move towards talking about how wealth was managed.
	I'm not a comment on that bullshit, right?
	I'm just saying that this was the conversation that was happening, you know, like why should all these big bankers and all these millions, right?
	And then all of a sudden you've got identity politics out of fucking nowhere and sucks.
	I don't know.
	I would be interested to see what investigators of the future dig up.
	There's a lot of people who think...
	I've noticed this trend mostly on TikTok and there's a lot of people saying TikTok is a Chinese-designed app to destroy American society.
	I once thought that was a lot crazier than I think it is today.
	But the social...
	What is it called?
	There's a phenomenon.
	Social rewards?
	No, it's like when something becomes a craze, basically.
	Like the Virgin Suicides, where it becomes a social contagion.
	It's become a social contagion.
	But at the end of the day, there are doctors who are doing this.
	And look, I think in many cases it should be sanctionable.
	And what I was going to say, that was what I was going to say.
	You talk about the SOC 7, the standards of care 7, but people also forget that...
	This gender dysphoria or gender dysmorphia, I forget, I always get those two terms mixed up.
	It's been in the DSM manual for decades.
	And the idea now that you would treat what is a diagnosable mental disorder, and I say that without judgment, the idea that you would treat this mental disorder by catering to it, as opposed to, say, like someone with schizophrenia who thinks that they are an alien.
	Well, you wouldn't go and allow them to perform surgery on themselves to make them look like an alien.
	But then people say, well, gender is fundamentally different than schizophrenia.
	It is a diagnosable mental disorder that has been in the DSM 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 since that manual has been around.
	And the idea that affirming care is catering to it and not avoiding it at all costs, I can't really think of...
	I can think of circumstances where someone is of sound mind and says, I want massive, like, you know, quadruple D boobs.
	Okay, not something I would do.
	I want to do this.
	Can you imagine that?
	Not in the majority of circumstances and certainly not with freaking children.
	Which I guess brings us into the lawsuit, Richie.
	I didn't know about it before we started talking.
	Are you suing anybody?
	Yeah, I'm trying.
	So, I've been in this legal process for quite a few months.
	Five or six months now.
	And it grinds very, very slowly.
	So where I'm at at the moment is no one's...
	People have sued for medical negligence before, but no one's ever sued for this.
	No one's ever said, I don't think I was trans to begin with.
	I think it was just mental.
	No one would dare do that because it's like giving up your trans identity and all that sort of shit and then admitting you're wrong and blah, blah, blah, blah.
	No one wants to do that.
	And I was just like, well, fuck it.
	I've got gender dysphoria in their rules, but in my head, it's all these different things that could have been threat in isolation.
	So anyway, yes, is the short answer.
	I've been in the process for about six months, and what we're doing is we're trying to find out, is this something that can be sued for?
	Like, obviously, the medical negligence of the surgery is another matter, completely.
	So there's several vectors going in.
	So you've got the challenge of the affirmation model, and you've got the, would another doctor, surgeon do anything different, given the scenario, if I was that patient, given everything that's happened?
	And if the answer is, yeah, we probably would have done the same thing, no case.
	That's what we're trying to find out at the minute.
	But I suspect, because of all the red flags, that that won't be the case.
	And I'm hopeful.
	Right now everything's pro bono, like, so you're not paying anything.
	And the person who it's went to to see if it can legally be challenged is somebody very high up in the courts.
	I don't want to say who it is exactly, but it's like what you would call a QC, which is like...
	Queen's Council.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So the top of the top of the top.
	And they decide if this can be...
	Put forward, so if they say yes, let's fucking go!
	Otherwise...
	Well, I don't know if you know the answer offhand.
	Statute of limitations in Britain?
	Three years.
	So, I...
	After I started experiencing regret, I first brought it up, like, 2019.
	And I was like, I'm going to sue you.
	You're a bunch of bastards.
	You've misdiagnosed us.
	But they managed it and all that shit.
	But it still has been over three years.
	So they have to apply for what's called Section 33 Limitation Extension, which is to get that three-year rule change to five or ten, which is allowable, but it depends on the circumstance.
	It's all to do with when you realized and stuff like that and how it was managed.
	So it's like if you said to somebody, I'm really pissed off that I've done something wrong.
	And then they said, no, no, no, no.
	This isn't like that.
	You're fucking mental, mate.
	Remember?
	Go off and have your treatment.
	It's not as if I've lost my qualification.
	There's a lot of coercion and management there.
	So we'll see what happens.
	There is the off chance they might just say, You know, even with the limitations aside, it could be that the affirmation model in place meant that everyone else would have done the same thing.
	Therefore, is it wrong?
	So, there's a lot of complications.
	And also, me surgeon fucking died last year, didn't he?
	The cheeky bastard, right?
	Do you know how he died?
	COVID or some shit, I think.
	It was like, he was 76 years old.
	I didn't know his age at all.
	He was like 72 when he did my surgery.
	And I knew, I was like, yeah, you're a bit white-haired and that.
	But they don't do any competency tests for like 70-plus-year-old surgeons.
	No, seriously, they should.
	Hold your hands out.
	How steady are your hands before?
	I have to know something.
	But this guy, but the thing is, in that year, that was like one of the last years he did surgery.
	And there's a lot of people he fucked up in that, yeah.
	And I think it was because he was at the end of his career and he just didn't give a fuck.
	Chloe Cole is suing in the States.
	She's suing the doctors.
	And it's an interesting thing.
	First of all, you want to avoid the statute of limitations issues.
	You might have arguments, but you don't want to argue over the procedural admissibility before you get to argue over the substance.
	But she's taking the angle that there was absence of consent because they didn't give anybody...
	They didn't give anybody sufficient information to make informed consent.
	If they say, you might bleed out.
	If they had forewarned you about all of the risks, the likelihood of even having sensation in the first place, the decision probably would have been different.
	In Chloe's case, there's the issue that parents signed consent and that's a separate nuance there.
	In your case, you're dealing with someone who has a diagnosed mental condition.
	Who they're now listening to to perform irreversible, life-altering surgery on the basis that it's going to resolve that individual's mental issues.
	And then saying, you've got a really bad mental health issue.
	We better help you out there with that.
	Oops.
	That's what it feels like.
	It was like, oops.
	I noticed someone in the chat said, how did we meet?
	I saw your tweet thread from yesterday.
	I get concerned when I think that I'm reading into something that may or may not be there.
	Psychologically, now, how are you doing?
	I'm a Richard without a Richard, so you know what I mean?
	Hold on, what was the expression?
	I'm a Richard without a Richard, because Dick is the short term for Richard in this country.
	Yeah, I kind of...
	I have good days.
	I have some days when I've got, like, a lot, like, of stuff to focus on and trying to get exercise and walking a lot, but there's pain and difficulty with that too, like the physical stuff.
	Most days I'm okay, but some days I am not, and there's nothing, there's just, it's just how it is.
	It's, you know, like...
	And it hits you at random times.
	There's no build-up.
	Sometimes you just catch yourself or just say something.
	I don't know.
	And sometimes it's really, really hard to keep it together.
	You are doing advocacy work.
	By the way, I'll say this before I forget.
	From your perspective, I can only imagine that the guilt, the shame, the regret...
	From my perspective, I look at this and I say, I don't say this is someone who did something that they regret.
	I consider this to be an injury.
	In my view, you have been injured.
	It's as though you got into a car accident with a wildly unpredictable outcome.
	You have been injured by, despite the fact that you consented to the injury, you have been injured by a system.
	And I would imagine that if you take out the shame and the regret and the blaming yourself for what happened and appreciate that this was...
	This was an act of another who ought to have known better and treat it like an injury.
	Maybe it becomes somehow easier to internalize, but I suspect it's just impossible.
	But I suspect advocacy and what you're doing to raise awareness is itself maybe the way you can internalize it and give back and try to prevent other people from going through this.
	What are you doing these days?
	Yeah, I would say that's a good...
	Let's round up of the advocacy.
	I just don't want to turn into that lifelong advocate that just does it forever because they've got traumatised at one point and they can't get out of trying to help others and save themselves from this trauma sort of thing.
	So I don't want to do it for too much longer.
	Maybe 6 months, 12 months?
	Don't know.
	I don't know.
	It depends how the case goes.
	But my whole thing was to bring awareness and to tell people that, especially people who have went in in similar angles as myself, that you don't have to just live as trans for the rest of your life or do the worst thing.
	There is life after and it is going to be difficult.
	And I'm just finding more and more people like me and every person I speak to, you would think, like, there's no surprises, but I get shocked every time the shit are here.
	It's, well, what's going on in the world, man?
	People, like, in the so-called civilized developed world, it's mind-blown.
	And when people fully understand what's happening to people, no matter how old they are, it...
	It'll just break people's minds, you know?
	If I had less dignity, like, I said in that thread, I would show people, and, you know, I'm not gonna, but it would end there and then.
	It really would.
	Like, you've got no idea until you see it.
	You think those top scars in girls are pretty bad with a scar across the chest?
	You've seen them.
	Like, you really haven't.
	It just doesn't look good.
	Okay, we're going to end this on an uplifting note, Richie.
	What do you do for fun in the UK now?
	What do you do for work and what do you do to spiritually heal yourself through distraction and through something totally unrelated?
	Oh, God.
	Well, I...
	I work in IT.
	I'll just put it that way.
	I work in IT.
	That doesn't sound very exciting.
	I'm joking.
	If I told you what my job was, it would take a real long time.
	I've got an interesting job.
	I like my job.
	I just don't want to talk too much about what I do because of the work I do.
	You know what I mean?
	Absolutely.
	And the advocacy.
	And I don't want to ruin that.
	And I'm sure it will get ruined at some point.
	Whilst I've got my job, I want to keep it, so I'm trying not to mention too much about it.
	In my spare time, I write.
	I love writing.
	I find it super cathartic.
	I'm writing my own sort of story out at the minute.
	I don't know what's going to happen with it, but I am writing it.
	And after that, I would love to do some...
	Creative writing.
	And in April, I am scheduled to join an archery club to be an English long bowman.
	An archery club to be an English long bowman.
	What?
	Bow and arrow.
	Yeah.
	That's pretty cool.
	I guess in the UK, you don't have...
	I guess you don't have gun competitions, so you have to have bow and arrow competitions.
	Well, no, there are shooting clubs.
	You can own a gun here.
	I would never be allowed to own a gun because of me history.
	It's very tightly controlled.
	So if you're on SSRIs, even if you've got no mental health diagnosis, you can't have a gun.
	It's extraordinarily hard.
	You've got to have a lockup that gets inspected and the ammo has to be stored a certain amount of feet away in another vault.
	Like, it is so hard to own a gun in this country.
	And I'm kind of glad, in a way.
	Not that I'm going to get involved in your shit, right?
	I'm just saying from my perspective.
	I won't.
	Richie, I'm Canadian, so we have similar gun laws.
	I took the firearm course.
	I did a two-day course.
	I could only own an unrestricted long arm, so like a rifle.
	Like you said, it can't be stored loaded.
	Ammunition has to be in a separate location.
	And my goodness, the penalties for violating that, it's prohibitive and it's almost...
	It almost criminalizes gun ownership.
	And small arms, forget it.
	You need a special license for that.
	To get past it, you really need to be into it.
	Or you need a really good purpose for it.
	So a lot of farmers might have them or whatever.
	But as for me, I just thought, you know what?
	I love archery.
	I love medieval shit anyway.
	And I was like, fuck it.
	I'm going to learn the longbow.
	And there's nothing anyone can do to stop me.
	And have you ever explored fishing?
	Fishing is my cathartic relief.
	I went fishing once a twice with my dad, and I kind of enjoyed it, but I really struggled putting live bait on and killing and batting.
	I don't think so, because I can't hurt.
	I've really struggled, especially when you would catch a fish and my dad would just have it in a bucket and they'd just lie in there, just looking all traumatized and shit.
	And I'm like, no!
	I took my daughter to the pier down here, the Deerfield Pier, and people, they catch small fish, they leave them flopping around, they use them as bait.
	I try to be more humane, even when dispatching of a fish that I'm going to eat.
	So I turned one kid off, the other one still likes it, so I got that.
	So what do you have going forward?
	Where can people find you?
	I am on Twitter, at Tulip, T-U-L-L-I-P-R.
	I think it's on the description, I'm sure.
	And you can see me on Twitter.
	I'll do the occasional sad post once in a while.
	But it's mainly just shitposting.
	I do a lot of shitposting, and I like shitposting.
	And that's where you can find me, I suppose.
	And in the future, like I said, I'm doing a lot of writing and I'm just waiting to hear from the QC with a court case because that kind of rules everything, you know what I mean?
	Yeah, that's where I'm at.
	I see you've got a story to tell.
	You've got your story to tell.
	People need to hear it and it's...
	I don't want to be the cliche and say it's brave and courageous, and it takes humility to do it.
	I don't think anybody can possibly understand what is involved in you telling your story as openly as you're telling it.
	First of all, thank you for responding to me, and thank you for coming on to talk about it.
	We're going to stay here.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes afterwards.
	Everyone in the chat, I didn't get any questions.
	I'm sorry.
	I'll take questions later.
	And we'll talk about it later, but Richie, thank you very much.
	Everybody in the chat, I'll see you guys tomorrow.

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