Irreversible Damage? | Abigail Shrier - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast S4 E11

[Music] today i'm speaking with ms abigail schreier who uh is a writer for the wall street journal and the author of a recent book which was named by the economist as one of the notable books of 2020 irreversible damage the transgender craze seducing our daughters thanks for agreeing to talk to me today thank you so much for having me on so um why did you write the book i wrote the book because a woman wrote to me i and i had written a piece for the wall street journal on our transgender pronoun laws that we have in new york and california now that assign criminal and civil penalties for failing to use someone's preferred pronoun and i pointed out that these laws are straightforwardly unconstitutional in the united states and a reader wrote to me she read this and she said maybe you'll take up my issue but i'm a mom my daughter had no symptoms of gender dysphoria throughout you know her growing up but um gender dysphoria being the severe discomfort and one's biological sex but she went off to college he had a lot of mental health problems and she went off to college and with a group of girlfriends they all decided they were transgender and she started a course of testosterone and i'm you know i've had this problem with they're now an epidemic of these young girls who are in a lot of very real pain deciding that gender must be their problem and very quickly obtaining hormones and surgeries and she told me that no journalist would take it up she had she had written to many journalists and i tried to find her an investigative journalist who would write about this or at least investigate it and when i was unable to find one i finally three months later i got back in touch with her i said all right i'll i'll look into it okay so well i can tell you that i uh have had some trepidation about even conducting this interview um yeah well it's because because this is such a it's exactly the sort of issue that you can get pilloried for and uh i've had a fair bit of that over the last number of years i mean i was very unhappy with the canadian government's language law provision bill c-16 and my comments about that caused a whole sequence of chain reactions i suppose that changed my life completely i was concerned at that time that the movement let's say the political movement of the political ideology that i saw as driving the language legislation bill c-16 would manifest itself in psychological trouble for many people and so i'd read this book called the discovery of the unconscious by henri ellenberger and he talked about psychological uh contagions and documented them going back hundreds of years as a matter of fact and i was aware that such things occurred and it struck me as highly likely that confusion about gender identity on the ideological end and categorical front would translate itself into confusion about gender among adolescents in particular who were just starting to catalyze their gender identity and so you claim in the book that this is a epidemic and one of the things i'm wondering about is what are what relevant stats do you have at your disposal and why why language like that well i actually asked a bunch of you know i interviewed i conducted nearly 200 interviews for the book and i actually asked a lot of scientists once i had some numbers what what do you call this what is it when you have we have a hundred year diagnostic history of gender dysphoria and it always afflicted boys and men okay and now for the very first time the last decade there has been a giant surge in a different population claiming to be gender dysphoric it has shifted from from onset in young boys and to teenage girls with no childhood history and it's shifted from men to women so i asked them when you have a giant demographic jump and all of a sudden they are as as these teenage girls now the leading demographic so these are girls who as a population experienced virtually no gender dysphoria throughout history suddenly being the leading demographic i would ask them what do you call that is there a scientific term for this and they would always all say yes epidemic i see i see okay so in your in your wikipedia page which well i read it this morning and it struck me as a place where a battleground was likely taking place occurring um in the book it says in the book schreier accuses social media of playing a driving role in girls decisions to identify as transgender transgender excuse me based on the unproven and contentious hypothesis of rapid onset gender dysphoria she advocates for withholding gender affirming medical care for transgender youth a fringe position not currently supported by most reputable medical organizations now one of the things you do document in the book is the rapid move by organizations like the american psychological association and the american psychiatric association to change the wording that they've used surrounding the discussion on gender identity correct yes that's right they've i mean they have changed the wording but the bigger change of course is that they've gone to an affirmative care standard which means that they no longer apply any medical judgment they simply surrender all judgment and agree with or affirm the patient self-diagnosis right and along with that goes the and this is part of what made me nervous about talking to you and i still probably am is that as a medical practitioner as a psychotherapist psychotherapists are now bound as far as i've been able to determine by examining the law to adopt precisely this gender affirming position and i believe that that's the case in ontario so i don't do adolescent therapy but if i had a young adult say 18 or older come to me who was expressing confusion about their gender identity let's say or was gingerly testing the waters to determine if perhaps they were transgender i believe that i'm required by law to to adopt a position that would affirm that fundamentally that's right yes sort of damocles hangs over professionals heads now and what it says is you must agree with the patient self-diagnosis put another way it must it suggests that you should begin with the conclusion your conclusion must be that this person has gender dysphoria and then you can you know go along from there and start prescribing treatments that's not how medicine or any other area of therapy is practice you don't begin with the conclusion you investigate it now you brought up my wikipedia entry oh sorry you know that go ahead i mean obviously it's it's the number of lies that have been put into that i didn't start the wikipedia entry others did and there's been you know back and forth fights with activists and so so forth to to rewrite it but of course i i don't you know advocate any i mean it's not true i mean so much of what what what has been said is not true um first of all the the affirmative care standard that's that's the problem and i don't i don't advocate a particular method of treating transgender people i don't even advocate a method of treating transgender teenagers all i'm pointing out in the book is that there are there seems to be a sudden rise in these teenage girls who are subject to pure influence in social media influence deciding they're transgender and there are no medical safeguards for these girls there's no means right now and no one determining whether they actually have the correct diagnosis before proceeding to treatment that's it right and so i guess the the catch 22 here is that if the statement um most reputable medical organizations uh affirm or uh put forward an affirmative care requirement then any position that questions that or objects to it is in some sense by definition fringe well it's yes i'm not saying at all that your position is a fringe position it's it's a matter i don't see how that can be avoided under the current circumstances because the laws and guidelines are written as if this is a fate accompli right that we understand transgenderism completely and gender dysphoria and that you know all the answers are already in and i don't think that's true for any psychiatric diagnosis yes i would just say that it is friends and so far or it appears fringe because all the doctors who disagree and there are many and they're speaking up all the time are silenced they are told that they could lose their license if they don't immediately affirm the the adolescent no matter what her other mental mental health problems are and immediately go along with facilitating her transition right you you talk about uh the former about the occurrences at the uh the uh mental health institute in camh in toronto yes that's right i mean you had you know ken zucker you know the the truly a giant and and the um in the field of gender dysphoria who actually oversaw the authoring of the definition of gender dysphoria he was fired right you know let's talk about ken zucker for for a moment or two so as you said he occupied a very a prestigious position in the world of transgender treatment and i think was universally regarded as the most outstanding and most objective scientist working in this field i've spoken to him about it on some occasions not publicly ever and he struck me as a dedicated clinician and researcher and he advocates advocated for and still advocates for as far as i know uh wait and see treatment method based on the presupposition that most children with gender dysphoria who are who events and interest in transforming their body to that of the other sex should be encouraged to wait because if a waiting technique it's not a technique even i suppose if waiting is with sufficient patience most of the children who manifest these concerns desist i think it's 70 to 80 percent of them uh a certain percentage fairly high come to the conclusion that they're gay and it's perhaps the case that that's driving some of their early gender dysphoria confusion about their identity and zucker was fired from camh and also pilloried in a variety of newspapers and other publications as a consequence of what was essentially his mainstream stance now i believe and i haven't followed this up recently but i believe that he was engaged in a number of court battles with the publications that had um gone after him and i believe that he won his legal cases he did they had to apologize and he and they settled with him i mean what they really wronged him yes i mean that's what happens when professionals speak out on this issue and of course when i say speak out all they're expressing is concern that there is an over diagnosis here you're seeing young teenage girls who do not seem to have typical gender dysphoria nonetheless be immediately fast-tracked towards transition so i'd asked you a little bit earlier about numbers do you have any sense of how how prevalent this is and and also i'm interested in and i'm sure the listeners watchers would be as well rate of increase sure so um in america it's a little harder to look at to come up with these numbers although i'll tell you the numbers that i do know okay it's harder because we don't have centralized medical care like they do in britain in britain where they have centralized um medical care they they can tell you that the number of young women being referred for gender treatment has um exploded over four thousand percent in the last decade okay in america we don't have centralized medical care and um you don't even need a a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to start treatment you can start a course of testosterone without ever having received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria so um so they're a little harder to come back but here's what i can tell you in 2018 two percent of high school students said they were transgender so that's two and a hundred kids that's an enormous increase over the what was historically the rate of gender dysphoria in the population which was 0.01 percent so one in 10 000 people went from roughly one in ten thousand people to two and a hundred high school students we also know that between 2016 and 2017 the number of um females requesting gendered surgery in the united states quadrupled so we know these are the exploding rates and then of course you know i've interviewed many therapists and lisa litman of brown university did her survey and when you talk to therapists when you talk to parents you get the same thing over and over and that is that the leading demographic asking for gender transition is teenage girls teenage girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria now here's here's a contentious issue so generally speaking for the the story of long-term gender dysphoria to be coherent a girl would have to claim that she'd always known that she was in the wrong body that she was a boy and that that had been the case ever since early childhood so maybe she'd be speaking as a teenager now you make the claim in your book that girls who go online who are searching for information about transgender identity often encounter coaches who tell them to falsify their personal narrative and to claim that they've always been gender dysphoric despite the fact that that's not the case is that is that a reasonable summary of what you found yes yes so you can see that it's a complete diagnostic mess from a therapist perspective because and even from a conceptual perspective because the people who are on the other side of the argument than you let's say are going to claim that the reason that these rates have skyrocketed to the point where they're at now is because there were always that many people who had gender dysphoria or who were transgender but the weight of public opinion was held so strongly against them that they had to stay in the closet essentially and were unable to adopt their true identity and the claim is going to be made as well that you're radically exaggerating the proportion of people who are putting themselves forward for transgender transition uh procedures let's say who have been coached right okay so let me respond to a few of those things first of all i don't think that's right i think that i i mean i agree with you that that's what they would say but here's i thought about that claim because um and here's here's what i would say in response um if there were this were just as they say a natural reversion now that there's greater societal acceptance of transgender people that they would say oh you would expect to see a natural reversion to what we're seeing now which they might claim is a normal base rate of transgender identification in the population the problem with that is number one we're only seeing this sudden spike among teenage girls where are the women in their 30s 40s 50s and 60s who were denied the opportunity to come out as transgender they should be coming out too but they're not can you also point out i guess the other thing that you might conclude is that if the people if the bulk of the proportion of people who were claiming a transgender identity in the past were male then release of the social strictures on identification should have produced an explosion in males it's not easy to figure out why there is an explosion in females okay so that leads us to another extremely troublesome topic which is why the explosion in teenage females now you do attempt to explain that in your book and so maybe you could outline for the listeners exactly what what your conclusions were sure teenagers teenage girls are famous for for this for falling for every hysteria right we know that the way young women and there are psychologists who've done wonderful work in this area amanda rose is one of the university of missouri uh who i interviewed um teenage girls tend to spread these psychic epidemics because they are very their modes of friendship involve co-rumination taking on their friends pain they like to rehash their own pain and they like to take on their friends pain and they are even willing to suspend reality in order to sort of get on the team of their friend okay so i'm being a real son of a [ __ ] in this interview to some degree because um like i've been trying to think up all the objections i possibly could to your perspective because it's so contentious and so i'm going to put forward things that i'm i'm thinking about that are critiques and it's not that i'm believing them but they need to be brought forward so a skeptic might say that you are relying on stereotypes of feminine behavior in adolescence to justify your claim that it's girls that are susceptible to a kind of hysteria and that that's an outdated that's an outdated and sexist i suppose hypothesis no i'm not relying on stereotypes at all i'm relying on evidence if you look at the anorexia it afflicts one population if you look at bulimia it afflicts one population and it grows and it spreads among friend groups just as this does it's young women encouraging them each other in self-harm this is and if you look at cutting same thing and we know we've clinicians have known for years that you cannot house anorexics together in a hospital ward without being very careful because they will encourage each other to learn lose more and more weight we know that women right and you see that online with regards to anorexia right with the proanocytes and the pro-bulimia sites right it wasn't men who came up with thin sporation now i inspiration right inspiration to lose more and more weight it was young women now of course men get involved in all kinds of you know bad behavior and encouraging each other in all kinds of bad behavior but this this kind of so you know um socially spread self-harm has proven over and over to be endemic to young women you can't group anti-social males together when they're teenagers because they get worse so that's that that's well known and in fact if you take antisocial boys and you put them with pro-social boys the pro-social boys become more anti-social the anti-social boys don't get better and that was discovered back in the 1930s in the summerville study the the uh detrimental consequences of of grouping anti-social boys together it was the um very large-scale study that was designed to uh in principle to reduce the risk of children boys at risk for developing criminal behavior and alcoholism and so forth was one of the first longitudinal studies um it was a complete failure in that the treatment group who were subject to all sorts of benevolent at least in principle benevolent interventions did much worse than the control group and after much painstaking analysis and and and heart-rending doubt the study's authors concluded that housing the children together in the summer camps they had put out for them to get them out of the inner city was actually the cause of their increased pathology in adulthood so it does happen among males now tumbler is also something that you discuss as a new mode of perhaps a new medium of social contagion and as far as i'm as far as i know that's also a social media forum that's essentially female dominated is that correct um i believe it is um still but though i have not you know up to date on the latest you know of who looks at tumblr but it always has been yes predominantly right so all right here's another question um what made you convinced that you were qualified to do this because if i was a critic again i guess that's the next place that i would attack right because you're not a mental health professional and so it might be asked well what right do you have to investigate this even that might be one question but then also to draw conclusions well as you'll as i'm sure you saw if you you know when you read my book i didn't draw any medical conclusions that is i relied entirely on experts and i do believe it is a journalist's job to look into medical you know phenomena including epidemics and so forth and investigate them and and rely on the medical judgment of experts and that is precisely what i have done this isn't my you know all i did was investigate a phenomenon with neither a particular hypothesis in mind but but just being willing to listen to a lot of experts and it was their testimony and their explanation that i put into the book do you think that it's do you think that you were even-handed in your selection of experts i mean because one of the ways that you can bias an outcome obviously if you have a political agenda you can buy us an outcome by selecting experts that testify in one direction and of course that the transgender activists and and perhaps the medical and psychological and psychiat medical and psychological associations themselves might regard people like ken zucker as experts who you know would appeal to someone of more conservative sensibilities perhaps well sorry i'm not i think what you're saying is did i bias it by only looking at certain kind of experts will i say no i didn't if you read the book i interviewed experts of all persuasions but but but more importantly there are literally thousands i believe certainly hundreds of books celebrating immediate medical transition for teenagers there is precisely one book that did an investigation of the risks and benefits and concerns that that that might be had around the medicalization of teenage girls that's it one one book and and the question is so so do all these experts have a voice of course um i don't claim to have done and conducted my own scientific study all i did was show a willingness to speak to the experts who are very very concerned about what's going on here okay so so let's let's dig even the layer deeper i suppose is um why the the claim that you just made for example that there is a very large literature supporting the idea of medical transition and very small literature criticizing it is striking i don't understand it what's going on like what's driving this why is it that the the medical associations and the psychological associations have rushed so precipitously into gender identity affirmation when the cost of it when it's taken to its logical conclusion is extraordinarily invasive surgical modification which carries substantive risk and which i think it's of which i think it's fair to say has disputable benefits what why is this happening well there are a number of reasons it's happening but if you're asking why um more medical you know more doctors and therapists aren't speaking out i think the answer is because if even jordan peterson is a is concerned about having this interview with me and with with all of your courage and all the stances you've taken imagine what far less courageous doctors are willing to say it still strikes me it still strikes me as as remarkable that this change has occurred over such a short period of time i mean one of the things you do in the book and maybe you can you can talk about this um is document the the the nature of the treatment the the medical treatment for gender dysphoria when the treatment is gender transition so you you talk about the use of testosterone and its subsidy on university campuses and then you talk about the more invasive surgical transformations double mastectomies phalloplasty and and which is the creation of a new penis if you use that word loosely um these are very these are not minor procedures including the use of testosterone and it's remarkable to me given that how fast these guidelines for treatment have changed well i i think you're right the medical the the activists have been very aggressive and very effective here in the medical accrediting institutions but i think that all of at root of all of these changes is a series of polite lies that we were um that we swallowed unfortunately in the public sphere so in the last week for instance the california insurance commissioner has has said that for the purposes of insurance in california that breast surgery top surgery double mastectomy on healthy breasts for even teenage girls needs to be regarded no longer as cosmetic but something that corrects abnormal structures because if you've accepted the lie that a a young woman who says she's a boy truly is a boy then healthy breasts become abnormal structures this is the corruption of language so you must remove them regardless of her age yeah well language tends to be associated with action and it was the corruption of language that i objected to you know four years ago because it has consequences now you know you made the strongest statement so far i would say that you made in our interview which is the lie that an adolescent girl who thinks she is a boy truly is a boy and i suppose it's language like that that gets you in trouble to the degree that you get into trouble because that's a pretty strong statement the gender theorists who are driving this movement i would say put forth the proposition that first of all that an individual always knows what gender they are even if that changes from day to day there isn't an authority outside the individual themselves that can opine on gender identity that's that's part of the philosophy that that drives the gender affirmation movement i would say correct right that's part of the philosophy but unfortunately there's no biological or empirical or or means of verifying that we have no means of establishing that a girl who believes she is a boy is truly a boy well it's more it's more of a definition than anything else right it's a place to start it's an axiom the axiom is that the only person who can offer an informed opinion about the g about their gender is the person themselves no medical professionals no parents no loved ones no one else only the individual and that's even the case if it changes from day to day or hour to hour right exactly you could begin with a conclusion okay and then then the other claim and this is the one that that i have difficulty with logically is that a girl who thinks she is a boy is in fact a boy trapped in a girl's body which seems to me and that that's been the case ever since birth and it seems to me that this is a form of the biological essentialism that the gender theorists typically decry proposing as they typically do that gender is a social construct now it isn't obvious to me how gender can be a social construct and be something immutable from birth that's only known to an individual themselves which sounds a lot more like a biological explanation to me so right right i mean i interviewed affirmative therapists and i would say to them and they would say well some kids are gender fluid and i would say to them well then how can you recommend rever you know top surgery on a young woman who's who maybe turn out to be gender fluid meaning she decides at some point she isn't she was wrong she isn't a boy she's a girl and and um you know this response was essentially well only she can know her truth i mean we are we are we're this is not medicine any longer it's closer to witchcraft so let me let me let me start at the beginning and outline the hypothesis of the book so over the last five years there's been a tremendous transformation in the language and the conceptualization that's been applied by medical associations in relationship to gender and gender is being defined as something that's a personal choice essentially and that personal choice has been extended to the um to the domain of physiological transformation and medical professionals have been required are now required to accede to any requests for physiological transformation on the part of their clients or patients as a consequence of the mandates of their professional organizations and the consequence of that has been a shift in the transgender phenomenon from a tiny percentage of primarily males to a 1 in 50 percentage of primarily adolescent females many of whom are undergoing the full physiological or many of whom are undergoing at least part of the physiological transformation process that sums it up essentially i believe i'm not sure i totally followed that but i think so okay well um i probably should have asked you this at the beginning of the interview but the basics i was trying to outline the basic argument that you were making right the basic argument that i'm making is that girls are is that a lot a large population of teenage girls who probably do not have gender dysphoria they certainly have an atypical form of gender dysphoria are able to um quickly obtain hormones and surgeries they're they're very much you know they're acting under so you know social media influence and peer influence we have numbers on that certainly not my studies but others have done studies on this and they're acting under the influence of peer influence in social media influence they are quickly obtaining hormones and surgeries and there is virtually no over medical oversight of this process that's the thesis of the book right and so so the alternating hypothesis are either that there's been an explosion in um transgender identifying individuals because the social structures have been taken off the diagnosis or that this is a form of psychological contagion right i i don't i don't think it's the former i started to explain why one of the reasons i said is you would expect you know a large you know rise in transgender identification across populations it wouldn't just be teenage girls you would see women in their 40s 50s and 60s you would see more men you know coming out as transgender um in incomparable rates but but not only that you're seeing among this population we we know that rates of suicide and depression are rising as social acceptance um of of gender dysphoria is going or transgender identification is going up but but we would have predicted that those things going down with social acceptance instead it seems to be you know coincident and comorbid with teenage girls mental health crisis in which we're seeing very very high rates of um anxiety and depression i have to think about i have to think for a minute herein i want to go back to why this is happening so there's been a political arguably no i won't i won't say that there's been a transformation in the way that transgender identity is conceptualized and treated in the last five years what's what's motivating the people who are who have been behind this transformation what's in it for them well i think that there are you know people who are there there are a number of things there is a strong ideological and and um financial commitments and incentives for certain people to insist that that that transition on demand regardless of age context or other mental health problems be always immediately facilitated right well it seems like that's it's that becomes necessary to prove something it seems to me and that's what i'm i know that's what i'm trying to get at is that it's necessary to set up the medical system so that gender dysphoric transgender identifying teenagers have access to the full arsenal of medical transformation and that helps demonstrate that some other axiom is true what what is that is that is it the is the axiom that gender is in fact socially constructed do you see what i mean is that there's you said there's an ideological reason what i'm trying to do is to specify that reason i'd like to understand that reason i i don't know know that there is a larger sociological or ideological goal i think they are ideologically motivated so in other words they have these commitments but i don't think that they're trying to prove something um you know except in the way that i suppose that they're that they are saviors of some kind um you know look well that would be that would certainly be something to that would be motivating to prove i mean if you notice the doctors who are pushing this very often that we what we we're certainly seeing in the united states is a young generation of doctors and and therapists who are activists firsts and doctors or therapists second we're seeing this across society um in all kinds of you know professions their their ideological commitments precede their their um professional investigation they begin with their conclusions yeah well the ideological commitment is that i this is what i i ca i can't wrap my head around it because the ideological commitment if it's that gender is socially malleable or a social construct which seems to be that seems to be a fundamental axiom that drives this kind of ideology i can't see how that can live side beside side by side the proposition that the girl who's trapped in a boy's body has an immutably male identity well i think a lot of them yeah a lot of them just insist on the immutability the problem is we know that's not true well except that they also insist on gender fluidity right but they also insist on gender to fluidity i mean i could i could i could answer your question this way what is non-binary because right now in the in the united states and throughout the west certainly true in canada you can get your breasts removed not if you say you're transgender you don't even have to say you're transgender but if a young woman 16 or up says she is non-binary um that's enough to allow her without a therapist note to get her breasts removed now we how do we know that a non-binary person has no breasts i know that a man has no woman's breasts how do we know that a non-binary person has no breasts well that's what we know see that's that's that's a that's a very good illustration i would say of the mystery that i'm trying to nail down is that your claim is that breasts or no breasts it's all the same to the non-binary identity but that isn't the way it plays out the way it plays out is that there's the breast removal proceeds forthwith and so that's not i don't i don't understand that um well there are no diagnostic markers at all or evidence of a non-binary identity except the say so of course part of part of it's a matter of definition now one of the things that you do in your book i thought this was quite interesting is make the claim that when gender theory is taught in schools the classic binary genders are presented in a very stereotyped manner very stereotyped very unidimensional unidimensional stereotype manner and then any personal deviation from that stereotype is regarded as evidence for a non-binary identity and so so that's a matter of definition in some sense right because you could say that the only genuine genders and this would be the redefinition of the word gender in some sense the only binary genders are the stereotypes and if you are deviant from those stereotypes on any of the multiple dimensions along which they're defined then you are in fact another gender you can you can you could you can set up a definitional structure in that way and have it be coherent the the question is what are the consequences of that so the consequences is a lot of confusion for young people trying to sort these things at who they are um out at a time when that's typically done in adolescence i mean right do you think these can you distinguish that from freedom you know because if i was going to take the perspective that was opposite to that i would say no no what you're doing by deconstructing the concept of gender itself is allowing adolescents much more freedom and exploration of their identities during a critical period than would otherwise be the case now i would temperamentally tend to side with the confusion hypothesis i think it's a catastrophe to confuse adolescents with regards to their gender identity just when they're attempting to catalyze that identity right at the same time that hormonal transformations are at their peak and they're undergoing a profound transformation in self to offer them a plethora an infinite plethora of ways to be none of which have been tested in some sense in the world seems to me a recipe for disaster but does it look like freedom no it doesn't look like freedom and i'll tell you why because these girls are miserable just look at the number of of young women on youtube who regret their transitions already um they they they they adopt behaviors after deciding online on some social media site that their true identity is is is non-binary oh no wait it's two-spirit now i'm a two-spirit oh no wait i'm agender once they go through these they they leave lives i mean if you you know if you talk to them talk to their parents they are when when i i wouldn't if these young women were flourishing i wouldn't have written the book that's that's not a sad story they're flourishing but instead they're cutting off their parents they're dropping out of school they have no meaningful employment they all their friends are only transgender they hate all cis people you see patterns that are desperately unhealthy well it seems to me you know and maybe this is a consequence of not taking the idea of a social role with sufficient um seriousness is that there's a lot more to identity than your personal feeling identity is something that's negotiated in the social community and an identity is actually a tool that you use to adapt so that if you have an identity that functions we could say you managed to find a long-term stable mate you managed to have children at some point in your life you managed to have gainful employment so that you can support yourself and maybe in a meaningful and productive manner you were able to use your own time outside of work and social obligations in a manner that's meaningful to you you regulate your use of drugs and alcohol so that you don't fall by the wayside in in that manner so what it means is that an identity is partly who you think you are but it's also partly the manner in which you interact with other people and if that identity is going to be um useful let's say if that identity is going to be valid it has to provide you with a mode of being in the world and part of the problem with this multiplication of gender identities is that it's not obvious how you can manifest them in the world without transforming the entire world which isn't going to happen in your lifetime and so that's see and maybe that touches on to some degree touches on what it is that's driving this is that it's some deep desire for a radical social transformation so that anything goes and some what would you call it's it's pushing look everybody feels to some degree the restrictive nature of social roles you know i just said that you have to adopt an identity so that you can get by in the world but that doesn't mean that there isn't a fair bit of your individuality that's squashed and crushed as you adopt that identity and and become in some way like everybody else and maybe this is a rebellion at least in part against that notion of having to become like everyone else the unfortunate reality is though that if you don't there's no place for you that i i think that's right i mean the young women who do you know these are overwhelmingly and you look at lisa littman's study and uh you know the oh the number of women were and i've seen you know my own interviews the these women are overwhelmingly white middle and upper middle upper middle class and they they have no um victim status they have no easy victim status and they need one they need one to get by socially um they aren't a minority in any sense but this is the one status they can choose see they can't always choose to be gay you know but they can choose to be trans no one no one knows better than they do who their gender is as is the saying goes so so no one can question them the moment they say they're too spirit or trans well then another theme i would say that emerges from your book is the increasing social inacceptability among adolescents of what would have been more normative gender identities like these these girls that that the um the generation that you're describing it was also is also characterized according to the research that you did in your book and research that's been put forward elsewhere by a dearth of intimate relationships and so it also seems to be right one of the things you pointed out was i think it was i don't remember if you talked about 16 year old girls or 18 year old girls but in the year and a half preceding being asked the question half of them hadn't had anything that resembled any aspect of an intimate couple's relationship that seems to be a radical transformation so is it also partly that the more traditional gender roles aren't working no i i don't i don't know that they aren't working i i don't know that they've ever explored them look these are young very sheltered young girls these are the generation that grew up with helicopter parents and they have had barely ever had a kiss they've never held hands they spent all their time on their phone they don't know their own bodies and their own desires and they don't know and they haven't experienced romantic relationships with each other so they don't know who they are and they don't know what they want and instead they turn to the internet to answer all their questions what do you suppose has happened i mean i i thought that the statistic that you put forward about the lack of intimate relationship because you those were population-based statistics if i remember correctly right you weren't looking at a small minority of teenage girls who who were on the road to transition this was that generation right why aren't these teenagers dating and and and interacting with members of the opposite sex like they were only 15 years ago or 20 years ago what's failed like do you see this as a as a consequence of technological transformation there are many many many things at play one they're with mom all the time these kids report being at mom with mom they don't they get a driver's license until much later they don't spend time with each other they're with mom all the time um even they talk to her all day they text her all you know in a constant basis um so they don't have freedom to be alone with each other and then when they are alone with each other rather than being intimate and sharing things and exploring each other and you know even just in in a verbal way or in any way um they're on their phones um so that's at play there's also pornography i mean we've seen you know there's been studies that show where there's statistics that show that young men are experiencing erectile dysfunction young men men under 30 at rates we've never seen before because of online porn so basically the one thing that biology evolved that men were evolved to be able to do social media or online porn content has made it hard for them to do you know difficult for them to achieve we've never seen you know these kinds of um rewiring of human sexuality that's going on because people aren't spending time with each other in person there's these young people are spending time online a lot yeah okay so so part of you you do see at least part of this transformation as being driven by by the phone by the by the constant by the constant constant electronic tethering let's say and part of that tethering is to the parent and part of that tethering is to friends but it's mediated by electronic communication it's not direct one-on-one interaction and maybe that's the case with the boys yes but the images that girls see online are just as frightening because they're seeing violent porn at very very young ages women being choked within an inch of their life this is what young girls think sex looks like with the opposite you know with with the man and they're terrified of it um it doesn't look anything to look forward to instead it looks like something to run away well it's never presented with with in with regards to pornography sexuality is never um represented as part of an intimate relationship right it's its own thing sex it's not an integrated part of a loving relationship which is what it should be under optimal circumstances you don't you don't see that that doesn't attract widespread impulsive um viewing right but it's also violent and that's the that and some you're right there's always been this porn that exists in playboy and whatever um divorced from intimate relationships fine but what young girls at age 11 younger are seeing are violent violent porn that's what they know of sex and they're seeing it at a very young age and it's terrifying okay so let me ask you about that i mean um how confident are you in that proposition i mean uh you're we're we're trying to determine why it is that there's a generation of young women who are much less likely to engage in dating intimate relationships of of the classic teenage style and it's not like anybody knows the answer to this because it's such a new phenomenon and so are these tentative hypotheses that you're putting forward or do you have some um how how solid are you in your belief that these are the fact that you've correctly identified the factors that are driving this well the the core you know thing i look at in the book is you know what's going on with why is there this epidemic the sun explosion and what are the risks and benefits and what why you know are these girls thriving are they doing well and should we be concerned and why okay now the the part of this observation was to look at the culture and what was going on in the culture and observe the fact that young women are having sex and intimate relationships at much lower rates that is not my research that was done you know by gene uh by the there are a number of people who've been doing this um kate julian had a wonderful article in the atlantic in which he interviewed many psychologists about this but it's it's it's been you know something that many psychologists have observed and studied and very unexpected very unexpected development right right not exactly it's not what you'd predict at all when all the social constraints or many of the social constraints have been removed from every possible form of sexual behavior the consequence of that has been a precipitous decline in sexual behavior among adolescents and i guess we didn't talk at all about what the role of the boys might be in this like are girls not um dating let's say and engaging in intimate relationships when they're teenagers because of something that's changed with them or or have the boys stopped asking um you know it that that's a good question about whether so i didn't what i was trying to say is i didn't look into specifically or investigate why there's this you know sudden drop in sexual activity or even intimate relationship activity among teenagers um so there are things i can surmise from looking at the culture and writing about the culture as i do but do i have studies on this no i don't know i don't have you know a a real answer that i've i've come across yet well the pornography question's an open one right because right that that's a form of easily accessible gratification with endless novelty that's never been you know it's possible for a young man to see more beautiful nude women in one afternoon than any human being that ever lived before 1950 would have seen in his entire life right and and right and and of such variety i mean that's right well novelty is a huge driver of sexual arousal and and pleasure and so the and i mean i also think that's part of the reason why i don't just think that there's evidence for this but it's one of the drivers for the the proliferation of multiple forms of pornography is that novelty is a driver of sexual arousal and so there's an arms race online that consists of a combination of sexual imagery and novelty and that would drive the production of violent videos for example or anything that's different right is is going to add an edge a novelty image especially to a hardened pornography user hardened is probably the wrong word there by the way right and the problem with this of course is not that there's so much pornography i mean online but of course that that we're also seeing men be less inclined to engage in intimate relationships lesson able to even perform i mean these you know because of it i mean it's the rewiring of young people so that they're so incompatible for each other that's the real sort of disturbing part if these young people and this applies to this young you know group of of women who suddenly decide they're transgender if they were forming families and living good lives um that's a success story but that's not the story that's not the story that i found in my book right unless you define success as being allowed to pursue whatever fragmentary identity occupies their consciousness at any given time and you can define it that way right i mean you're using and i would use as well i would say more conservative criteria for what constitutes a good life you know as a clinician i i listed as a clinician it struck me that you can assess someone's mental health with some degree of accuracy by looking at the success of their embeddedness within their social community and that's why i outline markers of a good life like gainful and meaningful employment and education to the to the to the extent of your intelligence and the ability to form an intimate long-term relationship and children and all these things that seem to make up the bedrock of life but again to some degree that's a matter of definition right you could object to all of that and say well no that's a very 1950s or 1970s way of looking at the world and that's long gone and and now what we're trying to do is facilitate people's the broadest possible range of choices among people so that we have a world that's much more diverse and it's in its expression of identity it's a very difficult argument to contend with i think it's deeply wrong i think it's too confusing for people but i mean except that they a lot of these young women their mental health after the trans identification deteriorated so they're not able to function look i have no i i have interviewed many transgender adults who are flourishing they're leading good lives they're in they're gainfully employed they are happy they're socially connected that is that is not a problem story the reason that these young girls are are the subject of my book is because they're not flourishing they're not doing well they're not connected to friends and family they're not staying in school do you think and i don't know the literature on this and i guess it's partly because it's so soon after the phenomena emerged itself um do you know the literature on the relationship between mental health and movement through the transitioning process it's tricky a because you point out in your book that if you're an anxious teenage girl or maybe even an anxious teenage guy and you're given testosterone at least in the short term that can do wonders for your anxiety and so whether or not mental health improves might depend very much on when you measure it so if you're anxious and your identity is chaotic and you take testosterone the immediate consequence of that is that you're going to be much less anxious at least and why wouldn't you think immediately that that's evidence that there was something astray with your identity that this magic hormone fixed you know time frame is a killer problem when you're trying to assess mental health so what studies are or what data are you looking at when you generate the proposition that going down the medical transition road isn't producing the positive outcome that it's hypothetically designed to produce well first of all i only say that it's not producing that outcome for these teenage girls who i believe are misdiagnosing okay so i don't make a claim about transgender adults who went through therapy arrived at this decision as mature adults and and are living you know a life as a transgender person i never make a claim that that wasn't a good or the right move for them right well i don't and i don't know i don't think that there is a reliable literature on the long-term outcome of gender transition surgery even in those cases because so so and the phenomena we're discussing is much newer than that so the data aren't it's very difficult for the data to be in yet so i'm wondering again why you concluded that it's not working well there are a number of reasons first of all you know obviously i used lisa littman's um study which was the jumping off point for my book um brown university public health researcher who looked into this you're also seeing clinicians report the same across the western world that they're seeing a sudden spike of gender dysphoria that seems to be pure motivated or claimed gender dysphoria that seems to be pure motivated and social media motivated okay it's not an organic problem and it doesn't look like traditional gender dysphoria um you're also seeing numbers of d transitioners explode on youtube so if you go to youtube week to week the number of d transitioners and you're right about the timeline by the way of course that's always going to be relevant so testosterone does deliver a high as you said and it does suppress anxiety so some women who self-medicated with it feel great after they've started a course of testosterone but very often if you listen to these transitional accounts i've listened to many many of them um um they will report that then then after that you know spike their anxiety and depression came right back and there's a woman i recently listened to called waffling willow she goes by on youtube who did a 12 part series on my book i i never met her i didn't know about her until she did this but she's a d transitioner did a 12-part session on my book in which she said yes this was totally her experience as a teenager she transitioned very quickly and at first she felt great on the testosterone and then she realized that and then she had basically a crash in which all of the other mental health issues that she had returned yeah well that well that's a good example of the difficulty in doing longitudinal mental health outcome studies especially in an uncontrolled environment their clinical studies are notoriously difficult to conduct and the time frame problem devils bedevils them and this is this is a particularly nasty situation given that testosterone produces that initial high so you can cherry pick your data to some degree if you look early in the transition process you might well see an improvement and then you you can argue about what what's contributing to that you know whether it's just the pharmacological effect of the testosterone or if it is actually proof that the gender identity confusion in question was real there's also of course the tavistock report out of the gender clinic the largest gender clinic in the united kingdom which showed that there was no um mental health improvement no improvement in suicidal ideation for young women who have been started on you know puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones so um you know the there we aren't seeing the improvement that was supposedly you know claimed as the the rationale for starting young people on these um treatments yeah i wonder i'm going to go back to something that we talked about earlier when we're trying to pin down what the motivation for this ideology might be like the the notion that your identity is yours alone to determine strikes me as it's a profound it's profoundly narcissistic it seems to me to be predicated on the idea that you have the right to be master of your own master of your own domain master of your own uh uh your outcome regardless of people around you you're the only person that has to be taken into account so that would go along with the um the express claim that you're the only person that can determine what your identity is it seems to me to be a very infantile and narcissistic wish that that might be the case you know that you could decide who you were and that the world would be forced to bend around your will and i can understand that again as i said because everybody fights a battle against society molding them and destroying their individuality while they're socialized it's a it's a there's something there that's valid to rebel against but generally speaking as you mature you start to understand that you have to negotiate your way through the world with other people and that the benefits of being acceptable to other people outweigh the costs to your own narcissistic self-determination and it's it's the desire to not have to contend with that compromise that drives i believe that drives the insistence that you are the only person that can determine your identity that's right i think that the activists in this movement have a lot more in common with say the black lives matter movement and others such um uh you know so-called woke movements than they do with adult transgender people when i talk to interview you know a gente or adults they don't insist that they were always girls or always boys they don't ask you to suspend reality they say look i had gender dysphoria from the time i was a child you know i struggled with it for many years as an adult i went through therapy and i realized this was the way to you know calm my gender dysphoria and this is how i'm most comfortable presenting that's not imposing anything on the world really but the group of insistent activists many of whom are not transgender themselves but insist that we suspend reality that medical professionals agree with them yes you were always a girl or you were always a boy this kind of stuff this is an aggressive ideological movement that really has nothing to do with um gender dysphoria per se yeah well i'm i've been trying to put my finger on while i was reading your book as well what it is that's the driving factor and you know if you look at there's broad philosophical streams like those that emerge from the writings of rousseau that claim that human beings as individuals are essentially good and pristine in their fundamental nature and that culture its culture that corrupts them you know it's a very one-sided view you can take the hobbesian perspective which is exactly the opposite and say that well people are self-interested narcissistic and malevolent and it's only society that makes them good and i would say a balanced viewpoint emerges if you integrate both of those views even though they're paradoxical to some degree you pay for your socialization and you benefit and you sacrifice something of value but you also gain and that's what you decide if you're mature if you if you stay locked in the notion that social pressure in and of itself is the perverting force that destroys your soul and your psyche then you're going to be motivated to push as hard as you can to justify your claims that your identity is something that you yourself determine and that no one has any right to interfere with that whatsoever and maybe if you have to sacrifice people in order to justify that claim that's okay because the claim is important enough to you so that those sacrifices are warranted you know i got a sense of horror in some sense from reading your book especially when you started to describe the surgery and so maybe we could walk through that a little bit let's say that you do decide to walk down the gender transition road as an adolescent female you can look forward to a high that's generated by testosterone and maybe that's something short-term and positive but what else can you look forward to well um i i i suppose then the next what can you look forward to no i'm being facetious gotcha yes um well the the so the testosterone delivers that but it also comes with risks i don't know if you want me to talk about those yes i i and and also the experience you talk about voice deepening and hair development and all of that walk through it what walk through what happens to a person if they if they go down this road for the in the first few months on testosterone at 10 to 40 times what a young woman's body would normally experience her voice will change and masculinize that does not seem to go away um you know her she made she will her facial features will change they will round her shoulders will broaden and it will redistribute fat so if she's concerned about her fat all of a sudden in the places women develop fat belly and and thighs all of a sudden wow she's lost weight and she can develop more muscle the problem is is that a lot of these changes are permanent the masculinization of the facial features and whatnot and also that comes with very big risk of cardiac arrest and cardiac risk seems to be you know much much higher than a woman would normally experience even more than a man would normally experience it seems um and you also discussed the effects on um fertility and and um sexual threat right so um there were a vaginal atrophy and uterine atrophy occur there can even it can be quite painful and um so in some cases making intercourse impossible if there's enough atrophy it's quite painful and because of the increased risk of endometrial cancer doctors typically recommend at five years on testosterone and prophylactic hysterectomy so even assuming that the testosterone doesn't impact her fertility which it may the hysterectomy certainly will make that impossible um so you know those are some of the rest of testosterone but the biggest risk of all of course is that we have no idea all the long-term effects of what testosterone at 10 to 40 times what her body would normally happen will do to her right and that's a long-term course of treatment right because she can't go off it because if she goes off it at any point she will go back some of her changes will revert she'll go back to an in-between male and female look so once you start you become a permanent medical patient and we just don't know you know we don't have enough evidence of what this what will happen you know to these patient population all the problems they will incur in the long term then of course there's there's double mastectomy which is the only cosmetic surgery or considered cosmetic surgery i'm aware of that you show up without a mental health professional's note even as a minor you can have your breasts removed um it destroys biological function obviously it destroys all capacity for breastfeeding as well as erotic function very often and um and and yet you know it's and you outline some of the the potential side effects of that as well um the i believe monthly engorgement of breast tissue and leaks and that sort of thing as a consequence of only partial removal of the breast tissue i got that right right and whether the testosterone is enough i mean you know if you go off testosterone your breasts may refill with with milk even after they've been removed you may have some drainage problems i mean drainage is another side effect that often happens very often women are unhappy with the look they want a second surgery to repair the look of it and why are they unhappy with the look because they're they're they're chasing an asymptote they're running after a horizon the the final look of being a man which they never which is always a little bit out of reach i mean i uh some of the people i interviewed for the book were forensic anthropologists because i wanted to know about skeletons what you know are there skeletal differences between men and women and it turns out there are even the sloping of the forehead won't be quite quite right they'll be smaller they'll have smaller hands they'll have differently shaped pelvises no matter what other you know surgeries they get there they're they're actually their femurs will attach differently for a woman than they do for a man right and that accounts for the difference in gait and there's a difference in in angle of the forearm connection to the to the upper arm as well because of the difference in hip hip to waist ratio all these subtle differences between men and women it's hard enough for a man to be an ideal man much less a woman to be transformed into an ideal man and if you're an individual who has some questions about the acceptability of your physical appearance then you can imagine that it's quite likely that that's going to be maintained as you make the transition to another gender right and there's something else i asked one of the doctors about because i started looking at many pictures of the young women who had received a double mastectomy and i i noticed something i said wait a second look at their hips they have a woman's hips which become even more obvious once they've had their breasts removed so um you know the doctor said to me that's right there's a surgery there's another surgery they can get if they if they're concerned that their hips are protruding too much so you see that there this is not an easy fix and yet it's being doled out you know quite quite casually right and but and by casually you mean that there's no screening in place essentially to stop women from beginning this transformation process and that also you point out that so many um medical uh health insurance schemes like those provided by universities now cover the testosterone certainly but also the medical procedures themselves to reduce their costs to a point where they're much more accessible than they would be otherwise that's right i talked to a woman a week or two ago who whose daughter suddenly decided she was trans at university she was at a very top american university and at university she not only started a course of testosterone but she was able to get her breasts removed yes well that would be rather shocking news for any parent to contend with so let me shift gears for a minute if you wouldn't mind what has been the personal consequence for you of writing this book i mean i can't imagine hitting a more active hornet's nest so is it okay that you wrote it do you regret writing it and and what's happened personally to you because you've written it you know it's it's been something of a a journey um you know when i started this project it was so you know once i started i i was just in a sort of a constant state of shock and revelation and i couldn't really believe this was happening and it was struck me the more i investigated it it struck me as so so such obvious madness that there would be no um you know oversight and no you know guardians or or gatekeepers in place that i just kept thinking at the end of this everyone's going to be shocked and you know this will become a safer procedure or you know everyone will have to agree i didn't write the book for religious people i didn't write the book for conservatives i just wrote it for common sense people who were interested in the number of of teenage girls suddenly coming out as transgender and i was i couldn't i mean the number i can't even tell you how many parents have called me since the book came out while the book was coming out um telling me that 20 30 40 of their you know whatever very high 15 20 30 of their daughter's seventh grade class suddenly decided they were transgender sometimes at girls schools their boys weren't even relevant it was at a girls school or at least they weren't around um so on the one hand i and then then of course in the in england the high court came out and it came out with a decision that effectively um verified everything i had to say in the book um they said right that was the case of the detransitioning girl i mean i thought i thought five years ago i thought or more i thought this will all come to an end when these adolescents hit adulthood and start to bring the lawyers into play for everything that was done for them let's say when they were teenagers and that that high high court case do you want to just outline that briefly for sure a young woman named kiera bell brought a case against the she brought a claim against the tavistock gender clinic in england in which she said i was started on these treatments hormone treatments i was sure i was transgender i had i started um i you know i i had never had a childhood history of gender dysphoria but as a teenager i was very uncomfortable in my body and i decided i was transgender and at 16 i was started on the course of puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones she eventually went on to have her breasts removed and she realized as an as a young woman in her 20s that she was she had gone down the wrong path that none of this had made her any happier and that she wasn't supposed to be transgender she was a lesbian and that was all and she had no and she was very upset that nobody had stopped her nobody had exercised any judgment it had been a celebration only zone from the moment even from medical professionals and therapists from the moment she decided she was transgender and the court looked at this population of teenage girls and was horrified and if you read the decision you know as i have um and written about it it's it's it just came out in in december right right they said that it's basically you know young people under 16 should not be allowed to be giving informed consent they can't give meaningful consent to doing away with their future fertility their children and there's in no sense is this informed consent for a possibility of a sexual life because in many cases they may this may lead to sexual dysfunction they can't foreclose sexual life a healthy adult sexual life and and fertility as as as minors you know um how many 19 year old women who claim to not want children have children in the upcoming decade i mean i don't know the statistics but i do know that a very large number of 19 year old women that i knew when i was 19 had decided that they weren't going to have children and all of the ones that i knew either eventually had children or were very unhappy that they didn't you know by the time they had hit their mid-30s and so that's right i mean we don't know that much about our future selves and the question is under what circumstances we should be allowed to sacrifice them you know so that that's right and that's the problem it's not that these girls are having these feelings but that our adults are immediately supplying the irreversible treatments without any medical judgment or differential diet well you also this is part of what's horrifying about your book we didn't talk about some of the other surgical complications for example with regards to phalloplasty which we might want to dive into just briefly because i wasn't aware of the mechanics of that particular operation let's say and it's enough to give you pause i would say um in any case uh well let's do that now why don't why don't you talk about phthaloplasty and describe that sure it begins with the de-sleeving of the forearm they have to remove the fat and muscle from around the forearm that's what's used as the shaft of the knee how much is removed oh gosh um many inches if you see young women videos you can go online and see views of women who've had their forearms de-sleeved it's a long stretch of the forearm in order to get enough skin to form the neophallus um then they have to transfer a peripheral artery and and nerves to that area they have to graft it obviously it's extremely difficult work future surgeries are needed if you needed to be able to um first of all just making it able to um you know have a urine stream um without infection is extraordinarily difficult often that you know complications include urine that sprays rather than streams um it's extremely difficult to to achieve and and and then of course having it harden um at all is difficult it requires a further surgery and and what does the surgery entail for that is that inflatables yes that's right there's some sort of inflatable um thing put into what would be like the sort of the testicle i mean the uh scrotum um the manufactured scrotum um so that that to make it inflatable but it's very hard to get it hard it's very difficult to get it hard enough to penetrate for sex and if you do get penetration what's the pleasure that oh are they able to get the same amount of sexual or the you know achieve orgasm actually that it depends on um i don't know how often they're able to achieve any kind of sexual orgasm but i do know that um you know if they start out if their their puberty is blocked by um by you know early on and then they go to cross-sex hormones and then they have these operations um sexual dysfunction and inability to ever achieve orgasm is becomes much more likely um because they never finished their you know all the tanner stages involved in you know um making a young person be able to eventually achieve orgasm so um there are a lot of problems and but the biggest problem with the surgery i'm told you know i've interviewed a lot of surgeons and i'm told that that surgeons who do this very well and are very skilled at this and very highly trained in this can do a pretty impressive phalloplasty um but the problem of course is these are big money makers and for hospitals there's a lot of pressure to do this surgery and i keep hearing from surgeons that the people who are doing these surgeries are very often not qualified they're not qualified to transfer peripheral nerves each of these micro surgeries involves a different separate fellowship and they haven't done those because the the hospitals are so desperate to make this extra money that they're not putting the safe they're not applying the the traditional safeguards that they normally would it doesn't take much imagination for someone who's undergone surgery or have have witnessed someone under who undergone who underwent surgery to imagine just exactly how complicated and difficult this is especially to bring about anything approximating success so we didn't finish our discussion of the impact on you personally so you said that you were continually shocked so it was i imagine somewhat demanding psychologically to do the research that was necessary to write the book but then there's also the consequence of publishing it and and the notoriety or unpopularity that that might have produced right so i i suppose you know i i suppose i would fall into disagreeable as my uh personality you know um category that i learned from you um in the sense that you know i'm not someone who i you know things lies really bother me they just bother me on a moral intuitional level um so i really sort of wrote this not looking to make friends but just because gosh the truth seemed obvious and it was fairly horrifying and it didn't affect me personally or my family personally so if it had i think i would have had trouble writing it um i i don't think i would have been able to women who's who's and fathers mothers and fathers who've watched their daughters go through this are are absolutely devastated and it's not something i would have been able to do if this had been a personal issue but i wrote the book i thought it was a very fair treatment makes you wonder too when yeah when you're doing analysis of the outcomes of surgery if you take into account the effects of that on the immediate family members if that's a valid scientific question you know what i mean that like you could say look the only person who's ever affected by a surgery is the person upon whom the surgery is performed and perhaps that's the case and perhaps that's a reasonable perspective but we are embedded in familial structures and if if a surgical procedure makes person a temporarily happy or even maybe happy over the long run but devastates five other people it seems to me that it's at least worth asking the question of whether that should be taken into account especially when you're talking about teenagers right i i don't think it's that it devastates the parents because they they can't stand the thought of having a transgender child son or daughter in fact they were overwhelmingly politically progressive and supported and they were big they considered themselves allies uh long before gay rights was was was possible you know sorry gay marriage was possible in america so illegal in america so um the it wasn't that it's they were so miserable and so devastated because they thought their daughters were so miserable and likely to and regretting this already or likely didn't regret it because they saw the lives their daughters were leading so i think while i was writing the book i just thought this is so obviously true you know everything there's everything in the book is true nobody has pointed to a single factual error and the book has been under a tremendous amount of fire now for six months so and how have you withstood that so i think that the hardest thing about the fire in in a certain sense is all the to be honest i you know it's all the polite people out there who who won't even you know who are willing to to to say oh you know you're you're effectively provi well you wrote that provocative book as if as if they don't they almost don't seem not to know that it's a journalist's job to go out and investigate phenomena especially cultural ones that seem to be real i didn't go looking for trouble trouble is all around us in america today i mean you know i mentioned the you know states are lowering the age of medical consent across the country so that so that kids can get all kinds of surgeries i mean in oregon the age of medical consent is 15. so a 15 year old in oregon can get her breasts removed without her parents permission now you don't need to be a religious person to find that disturbing or alarming you don't need to be conservative for sure but just a thinking person who says gosh that seems really young i know i had a lot of crazy ideas at 15. you know i'm glad no one would have given me that option who do you want to read your book oh i you know i mean and the books for anyone to read but i suppose parents parents um have been very helped by it um or they felt you know they felt it was very useful clinicians have told me it's very useful um in in in just helping them sort of develop a you know sense that they're not completely insane when they think this is a whole lot of kids suddenly deciding their transgender out of the blue this can't be right there's no oversight you know feeling that they're not alone um but you know i'm happy for people who are affirmative therapists to read the book i mean i'm happy for anyone to read the book um you know i unlike those who have called for my book to be banned and burned um i i you know i'm not in favor of those things they're you know i i would happily be happy for anyone to read it and of course i would never want another book banned or burned and so you're you remain pleased with your decision to write it the truth is i'm not sure i could have done anything else i mean once i was aware of what was going on i wrote an article about it for the wall street journal and it's got a huge amount of traction i mean people were writing to me across the country even across the west to say yes this is going on in their daughter's school yes let me tell you my story i mean i'm sure there are people who could have walked away from that but i i'm not one of them i thought gosh there's something worth investigating here and how could i just walk away from that and not look into it well you know i think that's probably a reasonable place for us to end what do you think do you have anything else that you'd like to say oh um no i i just uh thank you very much for having me on and uh and um you know a big admirer of yours and i really appreciate the opportunity to talk about well i'm i'm i'm pleased that you were willing to discuss your book and uh it's i'm hoping that many people will read it and think about what it and think about it um there's lots to think about uh the transgender surgery being part of that but by no means the necessarily the larger the largest part so thank you very much can i just say one more thing yes just say one last thing look the lies have to stop somewhere i could have walked away from this i'm not saying it's been fun and i'm not saying it's been easy since the book came out there have been plenty of times when i thought i really don't know if i have i chose the right path here but i have to tell you something the lies have to stop somewhere don't they i mean they're just we're right now we're living through a blizzard of them and at some point someone has to say you know a few of us who are just you know willing to need to say enough we we have to subject this to the same medical scrutiny and this is skepticism that we would subject anything else to any other medical phenomenon yes well terrible as objecting to the lies might be i suspect that it's not as terrible as the consequences of letting them flourish unchallenged i mean that's right i mean a lot of young women are getting badly hurt and at some point somebody has to be willing to say something well i i hope i hope that your book helps that would be would be that would be what anyone who was thinking clearly would hope thank you [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 826,017

Rating: 4.9283175 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, abigail, discourse, podcast, podcasting, abigail schrier, JBP, jordan, peterson, lecture, education, learning

Id: fSKQfATa-1I

Length: 92min 5sec (5525 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

Abigail Shrier and I discuss identity, gender dysphoria, the increased rate of gender transitioning procedures among young female adolescents, details of these procedures, de-transitioning, her personal experiences writing her book “Irreversible Damage”, and more.

Abigail Shrier is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Abigail used her experience as a journalist to interview a wide variety of experts on the explosion in the number of young women self-diagnosing and taking steps to transition to male using hormones and surgery physically.

Find more of Abigail Shrier on Twitter @AbigailShrier