The Pride Generation with Katie Herzog

[Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman if you're hearing this then you're on the public feed which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements you can get access to the subscriber feed by going to colemanhughes.org and becoming a supporter this means you'll have access to episodes a week early you'll never hear ads and you'll get access to bonus q a episodes you can also support me by liking and subscribing on youtube and sharing the show with friends and family as always thank you so much for your support my guest today is katie herzog katie's the host of the very funny blocked and reported podcast along with jesse single she was also a staff writer at the stranger for many years and she's also a great visual artist in this episode we talk about katie's upbringing as a lesbian in a less than accepting environment we also discussed the rapid rise in the salience of trans issues in the past couple years we discussed the element of social contagion in the recent rise of gen z girls with gender dysphoria we discussed the mission creep of gay rights organizations we discussed the increasing salience of drag queens in the culture as well as the backlash against them we discuss the concept of being non-binary we talk about the difference between male and female sexuality we talk about pedophilia and so-called virtuous pedophiles we talk about puberty blockers hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery katie gives advice to parents with gender dysphoric children we discuss trans women in sports we talk about the so-called don't say gay bill and much more so without further ado katie herzog all right katie herzog thanks so much for coming on my show oh i'm so glad to it's good to see you so i actually went out on twitter to see what people wanted us to talk about and i think 50 of the requests were for us to roast jesse single for about an hour and a half easy so let it begin he's too tall man let's just start with the physical he's too tall oh my god i mean that's the that's just the beginning of it you know facial features let's get the calipers opinions uh-huh his pedophilia is probably the worst of it i'm not i'm actually okay with that you know some people are just born that way that's true it's a valid identity i keep saying this yeah there's a stripe on the flag for it in all seriousness you host a podcast with the great jesse single who has been on this podcast and is a friend and it's called blocked and reported true and uh it's it's really a it's an excellent podcast you guys break down news stories and who's wrong on the internet and delve into twitter controversies in a way that is entertaining and and you always have good takes on the latest you know twitter controversy of the day it's i think it's something a lot of if if my audience doesn't know i think it's something a lot of people in my audience would enjoy thanks coleman yeah i think there's probably a lot of audi uh overlap between our audiences um yeah camille accuses us of being fifth column fan fiction and i think there's some validity to that but we try to do our own thing a little bit yeah yeah michael moynihan accused you of being a fifth column cover band yeah it's fair it's fair so i guess that there's a lot we can talk about i thought uh and i've been wanting to get you on for for a long time but i thought i would frame the conversation this way basically you know in the past seven years eight years of american life there has been a huge revolution and lots of conversation about the issue of gender identity um in particular and i guess i'll just give you like my little window into into this whole conversation which is the first 20 years of my life or so i recall there being a lot of controversy about gay marriage and gays in the military and you know from the very first time i thought of the issue probably as a 10 or 11 year old i thought it was obvious that gay marriage should be legal and i truly did not understand at all the opposition to it because i knew very few devout christians in my life i grew up in a suburb of new york and i i there was some kind of homophobia on the in my extended family that i that i could detect but um you know the answers seemed obvious to me and and then the answer legally came very quickly you know gay marriage became the law of the land and the conversation seemed to have resolved itself on the right issue kind of quicker than i had expected and then and trans issues were not very salient to me in the first i would say 18 years of my life and then in the past seven we've we've been dealing with a whole different set of questions not can you get married but a a set of questions that seem to me to have less obvious answers like what should the protocol be for a kid with gender dysphoria um you know how many years of counseling should such a kid need to have before you know medically transitioning um you know what what do we do with trans people who commit crimes and go to prison which prison do you go to um you know these sorts of questions seem to me a lot less obvious than the question you know the question people were asking in 2010 about should gay people be allowed to get married um and uh and so that's kind of you know i i've i've felt i can see often see both sides of the issue and i i guess broadly it's incredibly difficult to be a person with gender dysphoria it's an incredibly confusing and tough and unlucky lot to to have and there's a side of the conversation which quickly will support the pro-trans sort of side of the issue or what's perceived as a basically there was a set of questions about homosexuality in marriage that i thought were quite easy to answer in the past and now there are a set of questions around gender identity and trans issues that seem much harder for me but are are often talked about as if they're as simple or as easy as as the question of gay marriage and so i'm curious you know i gave you my a mix of my biography and my general takes on these issues how did you come to think about all of these all of these issues and maybe give me some of your biography too yeah so pretty similar trajectory to you uh although i'm a bit older than you and so gay marriage for most of my life gay marriage seemed like an impossibility and i i came out when i was 20 and at the time it seemed like this was never going to happen this was in the early 2000s and you know i would have friends who up until 2015 when uh the supreme court legalized gay marriage i would have friends who would have these like ceremonies and then always felt fake to me it felt like two people sort of exchanged like two kindergartens kindergartners exchanging ring pops you know it seems very very uh symbolic i suppose but also fake and so in 2015 this rapid shift i had you know i am from western north carolina i came from a place where i didn't know any gay people there was there was actually there was like two gay boys two out boys in my in my high school but gayness was so uncommon that it didn't even occur to me that i could be gay because nobody was gay i was a kid when ellen came out i remember the years when you know you would turn on talk radio and she was being called ellen degenerate it did seem very odd and freakish even for somebody who was really sort of a little baby dyke and i had a uh when i was in high school i had a group of friends i didn't there were no lesbians in my high school there's maybe one maybe one like the head of the softball team the pitcher or something like that and uh but for the most part there was just no representation at all after high school like of my group of friends it turned out that three or three or four of us ended up marrying women we're actually we were gay the whole time we just didn't even like didn't even occur to us or didn't occur to me at least that this could be a possibility so it took me sort of a while to even uh even come to realize the fact that i was gay which is sort of ironic because when i was in high school people were also constantly telling me that i was a dyke and i guess they they knew something i didn't but so it was i came from a from a not a super homophobic place but a fairly homophobic place and so when i moved to see when i grew up and moved to cities you know i became immersed in this sort of queer culture and i started meeting trans people around that time and there were always trans guys on the not even on the periphery there are always trans guys who are sort of welcome in in lesbian spaces but they were rare you know there would be like one or two within a within the scene and then that has changed really really rapidly in the past couple of years so i remember sort of first noticing this and i think in 2014 i was living in charlotte north carolina and i had a friend there my best friend there was a trans guy and he lived in a house he had been identified as a lesbian before and he he lived in a house with uh four or five other lesbians and he came out or queer women the term lesbian has been out of fashion for a long time but basically lesbians and he came out as trans and then within a year everybody in his household had come out with trans and he told me this and i thought like this is statistically impossible this something weird is going on here this is this must be an anomaly and so this was 2014 so however many six years ago and in that time i have seen that that pattern repeats among different households different communities different scenes over and over and over so when i moved to seattle i was friends with about five other dykes four of them have had top surgery three of them have or on or on uh are on testosterone and all of them either go by he him or they them i'm the only one of the group who is still a woman and i have just seen this repeat over and over and over and so something something remarkable has changed not just with the the amount of attention that this that this receives which is obviously a lot more than it was when uh when i was a kid and the only the only trans representation was like on jerry springer you know and you would stay home from from school and there would be some some story about a that you could see on your watch on your sick days so obviously that has changed quite a bit i think that there's a couple of forces at play here i think part of it is that after the success of gay marriage you had this infrastructure groups like hrc the human rights campaign and these various state and city-wide groups that had been really focused on gay marriage for years that was the issue gays in the military and then also gay marriage were the primary civil rights issues at the time and they pivoted they didn't say oh we we did it let's let's you know fold up the tent and go home and get new jobs they pivoted to trans rights and i think that was really the start of what have what does this massive shift from focusing on on gay rights which for the most part um have been solved on sort of a legal basis at least although i think we're seeing a lot of backlash now to this focus on on trans rights and you can even you can see this in things like the human rights campaign if you if you look at their annual reports and you search for words like trans or lesbian are gay what you will find is is much less focus on gay rights and much more focused on trans rights and there is a you know a rational reason for that gay rights is kind of solved at least on a legal if not cultural cultural level um so i think that's what what has happened and that has come with some real consequences you know this the trans rights thing it really it started out being about legal protections and and people not being able to be fired for their jobs for their gender identity or uh you know to have equal access to housing and things like this and then like many movements it has crept and evolved and mutated into these tangential issues that i think are actually going to damage the cause of trans rights and damage the cause of gay rights i think we're seeing a giant backlash right now to things like trans women in sports youth puberty blockers and i think ultimately this is going to be bad for genuinely dysphoric people as well as gays and lesbians so it's it's a strange time it's a strange time to be observing all of this and commenting on it i'm struck by your observation about uh you know these groups that formed in an era where gay people couldn't get married and where it looked like gay people wouldn't be able to get married perhaps for decades you know it it looked like that might have been 20 years away it's easy to forget but you had obama and and hillary probably as late as like i don't know 2012 pretty much signaling the party line which was marriages between a man and a woman even among democrats so to think that within the next two years it would be the law of the land in a way it was kind of a shocking victory and maybe a pyrrhic victory was like a victory that came too quick and uh maybe you know popped a balloon of a lot of legitimate and noble activist energy around the issue and um it's possible to be a victim of your own success a victim of your own victory like what this has happened on the issue of racism as well which is all these organizations um that formed you know between 1910 and you know 1960 around the issue of civil rights once you get the major civil rights legislation passed in the mid 60s they don't suddenly say we won everyone go home you know the their institutions have an inertia and a kind of self-justification people don't like to declare their own irrelevance and that's it's it's kind of an unhappy situation or paradox for them to be in because you can commit yourself to a really important issue and god forbid you win it becomes you become this kind of um you declare your own irrelevance or you risk having to do that or verge into you know things that are more and more minutia yeah i think you're totally right about this activists activate that's what they do they do activism and uh and so and i understand that just sort of a self-preservation mode you know you've spent your life working on this thing it would feel more natural to pivot to the next thing but the next thing is smaller and smaller and smaller and then all of a sudden we're talking about trans women in women's sports um which you know i mean if you think about the the last 70 years of the civil rights movement this is the thing that we're focusing on like this is the issue of the day in some ways i think that shows a real success that you know right now the big fights are over leah thomas and a you know divorced father of two who wants to be called brenda and use the women's room you know in a way there's some some beauty to that it shows that progress really has been made but my main concern at this point and i think we're seeing this right now is this is this very real backlash that we're seeing particularly in red states i think there's a lot of panic over this the drag panic this week uh the week before it was the groomer panic um and then we are seeing some very draconian and i think cruel bills come out of red states um and a lot of people have blamed jesse my co-host in particular for this because he has he and i have both written about youth gender dysphoria and detransition and uh and i think the logic goes if you point out that this thing is happening you are somehow responsible for the backlash to it i'm not it's not logical so i don't totally understand it yeah so one thing we'll get to all that stuff but one thing i want to touch on at the beginning is the shift in the philosophy towards gender identity that i've seen in my lifetime which is i remember when i was in pre-k i i thought it was arbitrary that boys were supposed to like blue and girls were supposed to like pink and i was a little contrarian so i would say that i liked pink just to piss my w in my head to piss my stupid teachers off and to show them that i understood all this stuff was arbitrary just to be a little douchebag i didn't actually like pink i just liked to be you know i just like to show that arbitrary things were arbitrary as as a three-year-old or four-year-old but basically what i recall of the ethos of that time which again i grew up in a pretty progressive place was there's no right way to be a boy there's no right way to be a girl if you want to be a girl and you love sports and you love cutting your hair short and you like rough housing with the boys that's a perfectly valid way to be a girl we you would we would have called it a tomboy you're a tomboy that's fine if you want to be a boy and wear dresses that's fine like that's a that's a valid way to be a boy too um you know one thing i i and many other people have noted is that the the attitude the current attitude especially among trans activists and progressives seems to be importantly different in that if you display the stereotypical behaviors of the other sex then perhaps you really are the other gender right perhaps your gender identity is not a boy if you like to wear dresses and that that may seem like a distinction without a difference but but it it could be material in that the latter attitude potentially puts you on a track for eventual medical transition and social transition and pronoun transition whereas the first would put you on a track towards being uh you know oh katie's a tomboy she's a tomboy and and whatever attitude people have towards that so i'm curious if you also observe that difference in philosophy oh absolutely yeah this is something i people are probably sick of hearing me complain about this yeah in the first uh the first version of this the way that you were raised in the way that i was raised there was an expansion of the idea of gender roles i think this was easier for i think it's always been easier for girls at least in in my lifetime to be gender non-conforming or gender role non-conforming it you know because women wear pants it is it is a little bit weirder for a boy to wear a skirt and there's probably going to be some bullying that comes along with that but yes the whole idea right the whole idea was to expand what it meant to be a boy or what it meant to be a girl your your sex doesn't define who you are what you can do and we've seen a retraction in recent years i think the the not the whole idea of non-binary is sort of a bristling against that i i still object to the idea of being non-binary because i think it's it's sort of a selfish individual act to say i i i'm opting out of gender roles but you still you who are who are still female you you have not opted out of this so i i have some problems with that whole concept um but no i think you're right and this is something that people slightly older than me people like megan delm who's raised in the 70s have talked about you know in the 70s this this idea everybody wore were uh overalls you know it was this much more gender-neutral today it's really hard to find even children's clothes that are non-gendered toys are much more gendered so i think part of this is a is market forces sort of imposing this on people and this is not to say that i don't think there are actual differences between males and females i think this is one of the things that i fight with feminists about i think that there are some inherent differences biological differences uh that make men more prone to certain things and make women more prone to to other things i don't think there's anything wrong with that but yes this idea that you know you see this in the literature like little kids books there'll be some kids book about that's sort of supposed to be you know a pro trans book and in the book it'll be there'll be a picture of a little boy who says that he doesn't like he you know he doesn't like the color blue and then all of a sudden he's a girl now and i find that deeply regressive gender dysphoria there's obviously huge a huge argument about this but gender dysphoria in my mind is basically a medical condition it's a mental health issue it's something that people have had for for for a long time and it typically emerges really young in life i don't think that a an infant could uh there's this some some liberals and gender ideologues will say you know babies can sickle signal that they're born in the wrong body i don't think babies can actually do that but i think i think even perhaps toddlers can you know they say things like i you know i wish that god had made me a boy or i wish that god had made me a girl or something like that that's real and it's the distress is real and i think people should there should be adequate and evidence-based treatments for that but there's this other thing going on often called rapid onset gender dysphoria which is much more socially influenced and a lot of people want to deny that this exists but you can just look at the numbers and you can look at the population of kids who are now showing up to gender clinics it used to be there were more boys natal boys natal males then girls would go to these clinics in the past decade or so as these numbers have spiked of patients appearing at these clinics the vast majority of them are natal females you know and so we're supposed to ignore that forever it is no it is known that girls especially pubescent girls are intensely subject to social pressure it is very important for for girls to fit in you know when i was in high school every other girl was anorexic bulimic or a cutter that was the thing the ones that weren't were goth or maybe all maybe all of the above but now it's become this we've attached these identity labels to this thing and once something becomes an identity you can't question it it becomes sacrosanct uh so it it makes the conversation intensely difficult to have because of the backlash and the of course the uh the allegations if you question the stuff that you are literally killing trans people which i get quite often um yeah i think there's i think the vibe shift is coming but uh over the last few years we've seen just really some really bad ideas spread i think especially among uh adolescents and children the people who care for them question what would you do if your business had to hire someone great fast here's a hint you need indeed indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract interview and hire all in one place instead of spending hours on multiple job sites searching for the candidates with the right skills indeed helps you do it all in one place find great talent faster through time saving tools like indeed instant match assessments and virtual interviews with instant match over 80 percent of employers get quality candidates whose resume on indeed matches their job description the moment they sponsor a job according to indeed data no other job site takes care of you like indeed does because with indeed you only have to pay if an applicant meets your must have requirements indeed puts you in control of what you pay you set your must have job requirements and only pay for the applications that meet them there's a transparent flat fee per application and you can pause your job posting whenever you want when you sponsor an indeed post you're 4.5 times more likely to get a higher according to indeed data worldwide even better indeed's the only job site where you only pay for applications that meet your must have requirements indeed is an unbelievably powerful hiring partner delivering four times more hires than all other job sites combined according to talentnest join more than 3 million businesses worldwide that use indeed to hire great talent fast visit indeed.com conversations to start hiring now just go to indeed.com conversations once again that's indeed.com conversations terms and conditions apply so i want to read one statistic that blew my mind and i believe i read this in abigail schreier's book uh what was that book called irreversible damage yeah she wrote irreversible damage i think last year and it got banned from amazon for a while and i think later real loud as an anti-trans bigoted book but she basically is making the point you just made about rapid onset gender dysphoria about the reality of social contagion um and you know like social contagion this is i mean there's nothing unique uh uh on the trans issue on the point of social contagion social contagion we've been seeing on all kinds of issues there was an atlantic article a few months ago about an outbreak of social contagion of tourette's syndrome among mostly among girls and and among girls that are on tick tock there will be there's these tick tock tourette's influencers that will show you their tourettes their ticks and doctors all around the country have been seeing doctors around the country have been seeing an inexplicable rise in girls with tourettes and all of them are on tick tock and there's no there's really no other explanation other than that these girls are following tourette's influencers on tick tock and then actually feel like they are basically catching the the ticks from this influencer that's kind of this cool and like high status person and it's you know there's nothing i worry sometimes about feeling like you're making fun of people that are caught in a social contagion or saying that they're mentally weak or something like that it's really not nothing like that all it is is basically the reverse of the placebo effect right like no matter how objective or you know reality based you think you are i think the truth is we know if we put you in a medical experiment and give you a sugar pill and you have a disease it's it's there's a pretty good chance you're going to actually feel better getting a pill that has nothing in it that's just a fact about human psychology it's one of the weird things about us and social contagion is nothing more than the placebo effect in reverse which is to say you end up feeling worse you feel symptomatic of of something whether it's gender dysphoria or tourette's whether there's been hiccups outbreaks there's been all kinds of social contagion stuff and you essentially get it as a as a consequence of your peer influences so all of that is to to preface this statistic i read in abigail schreier's book which is from the american association of uh let's see plastic surgeons the american association of plastic surgeons reported the percent change in male to female gender confirmation surgeries and the percent change in female to male gender confirmation surgeries from 2016 to 2017. there was a 41 uptick in male to female surgeries and a 289 percent uptick in female to male surgeries in one year so almost a tripling of people seeking to look more like men but only a 41 increase in people seem wanting to look more like women which is very strange because if if it were only about society lowering the overall stigma on being trans you wouldn't expect to see such massive differences by which way people are going whereas if it were about social contagion which in every other almost every other case i've looked at tends to hit women harder than men this is more or less what you would expect to see yeah i think absolutely there was a pew came out with a study a couple weeks ago about five percent of young adults in the u.s now consider themselves trans or non-binary that's a huge percentage and it sort of flies in the face of this rhetoric that that gay activists have repeated for a long time born this way and it's made me sort of change my mind about about about that idea that you know sexuality and gender identity are something that you're born with i think in genuine cases yes that's true but i think there's something else going on here and this isn't necessarily a bad thing i think it's bad if people medicalize a condition that they don't have that they are going to regret later that's certainly bad but just inherently humans are a memetic species everything from fashion music the food we the dog breeds that we have the number of children that we have all of these things are influenced our politics the names that we give our children all of these things are are influenced by the people around us that's just inherent to being a human um and we're supposed to pretend that this one aspect is somehow outside of that yeah so i guess i do feel there's a difference between sexuality and gender identity and this so so like with sexuality with my sexual orientation you get evidence of exactly what you find attractive from your body and it's it's actual evidence that is in principle observable by a third party right like you could and people have done do weird studies where they show you porn and they they like hook up electrodes to whatever and and see what arouses you right and that's actually which is not to say it's impossible to be confused or self-deceived about your sexuality right like you can be all of those things but at the end of the day there is this literal physical reaction almost akin to like an allergy like you can only deceive yourself about being allergic to peanuts for so long even if it's a mild allergy you can just run the test and that's you get similar kind of evidence to what arouses you and what doesn't um even if it changes over time and and the fundamental difference between sexuality and gender identity is that gender identity really seems like kind of just a conversation you're having with yourself in your own mind and there's no real evidence to fall back on if you're confused about what you are it's it's just kind of like a it's a create your own adventure with no rules and no one knows how many genders there are and yeah i guess there's it seems like there's in a condition of confusion if you're confused about what your gender identity is you're sort of going through it you're finding yourself it seems like there's very there there's very little solid ground to fall back on other than what you're feeling in the moment and who's around you and what kind of information you're consuming yeah gender identity itself is a is a relatively new concept it came out of the 1960s i'm not sure i actually believe in the concept of gender identity i don't think that i have a gender identity i know that i am female i think that gender dysphoria is a mental health condition but this has just been accepted especially in recent years that we all have this gender identity it's like a soul you know it exists somewhere in the body or the brain but nobody can point to exactly where and it is reinforced by stereotypes or maybe relies on stereotypes i've had this conversation i know a lot of people who identify as non-binary and i've had this conversation with a lot of them and i ask you know what does it mean to be non-binary and the conversation always goes the same way well i don't feel like a male or i don't feel like a man i don't feel like a woman okay well what does that mean well some days i i want to wear masculine clothes and some days i want to wear feminine clothes and to me that's just a reliance on stereotypes that's all it is that's all it is it's just now i think it's a fad to identify out of this for various different reasons one of which is that as you know uh it is hip to be different and in some ways victimized in the culture that we're now with sexuality i've you know i've read some of these studies that you mentioned where they hook people up to electrodes and basically measure their biological response and one thing that i find interesting about these studies is that female sexuality appears to be much more fluid than male sexuality uh and i i do think that sexuality is something that is for the most part in born but i think the expression of it is socially constructed or socially influenced so for instance my wife uh she was born in alaska came from a fundamentalist christian family or evangelical christian family if she had stayed in her hometown i think that she would be married to a man right now and i don't think that i i think it was moving to a city and being exposed to gay people that allowed her to embrace this thing that was probably always inside of her but i don't think she would have even recognized it had she stayed in her hometown the same way that i didn't recognize that i was a dyke until i was 20 and went to college because i needed to see other people around me uh who were doing this thing to be like oh that's an option um i do so i do think i do think it it's in born or at least attraction isn't born but i think the expression of it is very socially influenced no that's a great point i mean i think without realizing it i was probably speaking from a male point of view and and i've had i mean i've had conversations with uh you know guy friends over the course of my life of like when was the first time you got an erection and you know it's it's it's always an interesting conversation from for me i i remember what it was it was uh it was the scene in coming to america where there's like the naked women in the in the bathtub and i i wasn't supposed to be seeing that movie but my parents were out of town and my grandparents were taking care of me and they just they were dropping the ball and they let me see it an adult movie and then this thing starts happening in my body i'm like i have no i you have no idea what it is but i you know i think pretty much almost every man i've talked to about that has an analogous story where it's it's the first time your body gave you objective evidence that you are attracted to this or that or both or whatever and um it it which is again not to say you can't be confused about it not to say it can't change slowly over time but it's really i think maybe far less subject to influence by your social world or by the ideas that you're consuming because at the end of the day like it's your body's either reacting or it's not and and there's a very little malleability there yeah this is the this is why conversion therapy doesn't work and i i'm talking about conversion therapy when it uh when it applies to sexuality there's that term is often thrown around when it comes to gender identity but specifically with sexuality it it doesn't work um and that's also why i have some sympathy towards what are now referred to as non-offending pedophiles where minor attracted people um because i think that like everybody else their sexuality is or at least their attractions are probably hardwired this is something jesse single this is something that just to be clear jesse is not a pedophile oh no he is no he is uh this is something that that we've talked about on the show quite a bit not jesse's pedophilia but this this the maps that the minor attracted people non-offending pedophiles virtuous pedophiles as they're also known and i've interviewed i've interviewed a number of them um and i do have some sympathy for them because i think their their brains are just wired differently um obviously there's a difference between having the attraction and acting on the interaction not one of my more popular takes well yeah i mean i don't know i guess it's but it's hard for me to see how you could disagree with it i mean if someone like ted bundy who clearly i mean this guy clearly just enjoyed he just enjoyed killing women he he got off to it and he was sick he was psychotic if he had somehow rationally determined that to have the willpower to just not do it to just spend a lifetime fantasizing about it and i don't know channel it somehow and just watch movies or something and just just get the energy out some other way of his two options that's the that's the far better option and for people that are built with something where they just they just do want something that is wrong and they recognize that i mean i i don't see how you could how you could truly blame them because none of us are you know all of us who aren't pedophiles are at some level lucky not to have been born that way oh absolutely this is not something that anybody asked for and many child molesters are not actually pedophiles pedophilia is a paraphilia it's in the dsm it is a mental health condition or diagnosis there are lots of people who abuse children who don't have pedophilia are not pedophiles but they abuse them because of they don't have access to sex it's a power thing uh they're you know there's various different reasons so yeah it's but this is every time we talk about this on the show we lose subscribers because people have this very understandable knee-jerk discuss when you're talking about kitty diddling i think i mean you should have a knee-jerk discuss i i think it is it's uh of all the things to be knee-jerk disgusted by i think it's totally appropriate okay so i i guess i want to i want i want to talk about sort of hormones and transitioning because you know i've talked about this a few times before in the podcast and i've gotten messages from parents of kids that are you know 14 16 18 who identify as trans and don't know what to do because basically how i see it there is there is an unsolvable paradox which is if you're a kid with gender dysphoria and you're 15 14 15 years old basically one of two things basically there's a there's an inevitable trade-off which is that the sooner you start let's say you're even 11 or 12 the sooner you start with puberty blockers hormones and so forth the more likely you are to really be able to persuasively look like the gender you want to look like but the sooner you start the less developed your mind is the less sure of your of yourself you are even if your confidence like we don't 12 year olds don't know what they're going to be like in even two or three years don't know what they're gonna want in six years or ten years usually um so there's a trade-off between how early you start and and how likely you are to regret your your decisions and it's very difficult in the general case to answer what what is a parent to do there you know if your kid is is telling you stably for a year i mean there are cases where people have wanted stably for years to be the other gender and then at 22 25 years old have de-transitioned and regretted that decision so what is um like how what insight do you would you have to give i mean you're not a doctor obviously but like what insight from from studying this issue would you have to give to people dealing with this impossible trade-off where every decision seems like it can turn out horribly yeah this is really difficult and i get this question a lot the first thing that i do is i refer to parents who need support to other parental support groups because this is something especially if you're in a progressive milieu this is something that you probably can't talk to your friends about or maybe can't talk to your friends about because this narrative has uh has proliferated these you know these this rhetoric gets spewed things like you know i'd rather have a dead or i'd rather have a live son than a dead daughter or whatever it is people it's this sort of emotional blackmail where people rely on this idea that if kids aren't able to transition or get puberty blockers on demand they're going to kill themselves the data doesn't actually bear that out yeah how true i mean i've seen one study on that where the pre and post-op suicide rates were were basically the same but do you have a sense of that whole literature what's true there jesse is is much better on the literature than i am but it appears as though we do not have reliable evidence that access to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones greatly reduces suicidal ideation so if i were a parent this is what i would do i would be supportive of my child and make sure that the child knew that they were loved and cared for but i would also probably not allow my kid to get puberty blockers and the reason for this is because you will hear activists will say that puberty blockers are 100 reversible this is not true there are lots of consequences to taking puberty lockers even if you do even if a child has is genuinely this work and i should say i think there's a big difference between a child who from the age of three years old starts saying god gave me the wrong body and has genuine phys distress with their physical body not their gender roles but their physical body and someone who around the age of puberty starts exhibiting signs of gender dysphoria in one case i think you're much more likely to uh to find that it is a a genuine long-held very problematic uh issue and should be addressed and the other one people are more likely to grow out of it and even kids with gender dysphoria like i was a kid who if i were born now if i were a young person now i would almost certainly be diagnosed with gender dysphoria because i was very uncomfortable with my body growing up around puberty very uncomfortable with it i was a tomboy you know the only girl in little league i was that sort and um and i grew up like most people with gender dysphoria do to just be a lesbian and that's fine that doesn't require medical lifelong medical intervention but okay so back to blockers the reason that i would not let my kid if i were a parent use privity blockers is because the side effects are serious there's issues with bone density so if you just google lupron side effects you'll find these stories of kids who are given lupron not even for puberty blocker that is the that is sort of the big puberty blocker but kids who give them for precocious puberty and they have things like spinal fractures when they're really young they have so these guys that are going through puberty at like eight years old or something yeah yeah and they uh and then you know they end up with osteoporosis as young people so there are issues like that that's real but even if these kids let's say you have a kid who is deeply gender dysphoric has been from a young age will probably want to transition and you feel solid you think that this is the right thing to do and of course people can always change their mind but you think that this is the right thing to do the kid thinks it's the right thing to do if you take puberty blockers in some ways and it depends on if you're male or female it's obviously easier for females so trans men f to m to pass than it is for males uh you know male 1 females to pass but if you go on puberty blockers let's say you are if you're a girl a female and you want to be a boy puberty blockers make you shorter that's not going to help you pass if you're a male and you take puberty blockers your penis won't develop this is it depends on what it's called the tanner stages of development but if you take it in the earlier earlier stages of development you get basically a micro penis if you have a micropenis there's not going to be enough flesh to make a viable neo-vagina this is what happened to jazz jennings who is one of the most famous trans kids in the world who is now an adult and had had to have something like four corrective surgeries because uh her penis wasn't big enough to turn into a vagina there's also issues with sexual dysfunction so kids don't puberty blockers not all of them and it depends on what stage you go on but kids some kids who go on people about puberty blockers will never have an orgasm in their life and if your kid who doesn't understand the concept of orgasm i don't think it is ethical to ask a child who cannot possibly conceive of what they are giving up to give up this thing before they can even conceive of it so i've sort of come around on puberty blockers i used to think with thorough diagnosis uh kids who were deeply and genuinely persistently dysphoric maybe it's the best option i don't think that anymore if there were no if these side effects didn't exist i would probably change my mind but they do exist and i don't think it is fair to condemn a child to a lifetime of no orgasming for the for their entire adult life before they can understand it so for me it's just a basic consent issue um but you know social transition is a different thing that is reversible you can sort of ease into it i have sympathy for these people i i know a lot of trans people and some of whom i think you know probably would have if given the option taken puberty bloggers and been happy for it it would have been the right decision but i just think you can't consent to something that you can't understand in this particular case um so i would i personally obviously i'm not a doctor what people should do is is find a trustworthy clinician and therapist to talk to i would personally i would not give my kids puberty blockers i also however uh have a dog who still has his balls so i'm i'm in general in general i'm against the medical interventions right right i won't even castrate my dog much as a child yeah so i mean there are a couple related issues here one is what's called desistance from gender dysphoria which is the fact that for many people gender dysphoria just goes away over time like whether whether because they're going to therapy and they come i mean i you know i've read i spent time reading the subreddit um i think it's called r d trans which is you know over 20 i think over 20 000 people that are at various stages of detransitioning which is to say they've they've they transitioned to the other gender and are now regretting that decision and transitioning back or uh some of them were desisters people who had gender dysphoria and then just no longer have it and i came across a lot of people that uh you know you know a very common story on that subreddit is um you know i thought or i did have gender dysphoria for a few years and then i did mushrooms and i realized that i could be okay in the body that i had or you know i'm i'm i've been autistic my whole life and i began in my teens really fixating on this concept of being the other gender and just thinking about it every day and then you know i dropped acid or i got high once and i realized that i'm i was i was fixating on it as a as a kind of anxiety coping mechanism or something and that i shouldn't actually it doesn't actually mean that i'm trans i don't think i'm actually the same as someone who has a stable trans identity um and and there was you know there's one post i read which broke my heart which was a person who said you know they were absolutely sure that they were trans they were you like you couldn't even talk to them you couldn't introduce any amount of doubt or skepticism and they they i think they got surgery and then had one of these experiences where they realized um that they were fixating on something that wasn't actually the problem they were depressed or they were it was some other mental illness temporarily expressing itself as gender dysphoria and now they were saddled with all of these post-surgical complications and so this is a part of the conversation that's considered taboo in left-wing spaces and will occasionally get your tweets censored or your book censored but it's impossible for me to not um want to throw the spotlight on those these people because they're going through something that may be avoidable may have been avoidable with better and more open conversations and it is is has to be a part of the story that's worth talking about yeah absolutely and we don't know how many people have de-transitions there there's better numbers i think sort of historical numbers on desistance because you can look at the number of people who have gone through gender identity clinics who end up not going on cross-sex hormones and those studies have been done for decades and they all show basically the same thing which is that somewhere between like 60 and 90 of people at least you know back uh before this this wave of rogd um would desist and many of them would grow up to be gays and lesbians because gays and lesbians tend to be more gender non-conforming that's obvious and uh yeah so so i was talking about d transitioners in general and um yeah so when it comes to d transitioners we don't know the even we don't even have an approximation of the number of people who have de-transitioned or who regret their transition because so many people are lost to follow-up during uh during these studies and very few de-transitioners go back to their surgeons or their clinicians and say hey buddy you got it wrong for whatever reason that tends to be something that people don't do so clinicians aren't even getting the messages from their patients who are unhappy um which the transitioners should probably take that extra step and so i wrote a piece on d transitioners in 2017 for the stranger at seattle's all weekly and i interviewed maybe five or sixty transitioners one of whom has now retransitioned uh and they they all told me that they basically found other coping mechanisms to deal with their gender dysphoria and a lot of them had to do with physical exercise dance um really connecting with their body in a way that they hadn't before you know i i think that exercise i hate this but i think that exercise is the solution to many of many of life's problems and i hate this because i hate to exercise it's a terrible solution exercise is the solution to to gender dysphoria that's a hot take i'm connecting with your body feeling good in your body feeling uh feel it feeling like your body um you know i think that exercise is a is a works to combat depression and anxiety i don't do it but i think it's much easier to take the pill um you know but i do think that there are other things that people can do to alleviate their dysphoria and the problem is that there's this trend within therapy so that somebody goes to a therapist complaining about something and they leave with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and we saw this i think there's some parallels between satanic panic and the repressed memory craze of the 1980s and 90s where somebody would would go into a therapist experiencing depression and leave believing that their father had taken them to a cave and raped them for ten years um it's probably not as dramatic as what happened then but i but but this is something that i've i've talked to a number of people about you know they have depression and anxiety there's a connection with autism as you mentioned and instead of addressing the underlying issues they go to therapists or sort of are fast track the idea is that transition is the solution to all that ails you and i can see why because if you watch youtube videos or follow trans influencers it is often time posed as the solution to all that ails you and i think that uh for some people it probably is if there one issue is gender dysphoria but if there are underlying conditions just changing your sex or trying to appear to change your sex is not going to solve all of your problems yeah i think one thing is that you know depression is really a hell of a it's a hell of a drug like if you're depressed for prolonged periods of time often you will do you will do or try anything that seems to hold a promise of curing it and if if you're depressed and you're also you know not exactly the stereotype of your gender it can be very easy to go down a rabbit hole online and be quickly convinced and hopeful that this and sort of put all your eggs in the basket of gender transition as the reason why you are sad in life and um it's it's always it's always a guess and a hope it's a hope that if i get the surgery i will be happy and and like you said i mean that that can be true it it's hard to know it's it's actually impossible to know before you do it whether that will actually make you happy and that puts people in a very difficult position because um you're just you're essentially betting on something that has a lot of side effects and if if the bet turns out the wrong way then you may be out lots of time money effort and and health complications it's just impossible to know how to address something like that on the other side if if i picture being the parent that says no to ev to every request that my gender dysphoric kid asks of me from puberty blockers to testosterone to hormones if i just say no no no i'm basically risking my i could just be risking my whole relationship with my child it's like they they may just hate me for the rest of their lives right i may just basically sacrifice i'm risking that at the very least and that's so difficult for for a parent to do yeah and that's i think that's true parenthood in general um you know in the teenage years are so traumatic in some ways and dramatic and there's so much turmoil i mean even kids without gender dysphoria lots of them hate their hate their parents ideally you grew up and you grow out of it i talked to a trans guy recently who transitioned as an adult and i was asking asking him if he given the opportunity if he wishes that he could have taken puberty blockers and he says no because because he he didn't have that option because he transitioned as an adult he knew that this was the right thing he had lived as a woman and it didn't work it didn't work for him and so he knew that this was the right thing and so he didn't have that lingering doubt in his mind that you might have if you made this decision when you were 9 or 10 or 11 years old um which i think is another reason to be cautious and we are seeing the you know these these things come in waves and we are seeing uh a sort of reversal of the the very liberal um medical guidelines on this not as much in the u.s but in finland and i believe sweden and in the uk um they're being much more cautious about about widespread use of puberty blockers now for these exact reasons yeah um at the same time i i thought i saw something by a world authority yeah wpath yeah wha what was it that they made some changes in the opposite direction yeah so wpath this is the world professional association for transgender healthcare and they just they are in the i don't know if it's formally been released but emily baslon wrote a piece in uh new york magazine last week she got an advanced copy of the w path new guidelines and they set the minimum limit for surgery at i believe 14 down from six or maybe hormones uh i should look it up actually one of the ages went from 17 to 16 i think or it was 18 to 17. yeah or six i think it was 16 to 14 and then one of them there had been no minimum age limit for for surgery i believe or hormones and they set an age limit at 14. i want to talk about some of the other ways in which gender identity has been appearing in the news especially lately i mean there's um there's a lot of flash points obviously leah thomas and transgender women in sports has been a big one it's hard to know what to say about that i mean obviously i think there is there is an advantage to anyone who's gone through male puberty for sure there may even be an advantage simply by being born male for most sports and certainly all sports that require upper body strength and um so i'm curious what you made of the whole leah thomas culture war fiasco i found this to be a very interesting of course moments some of the reporting on this was just egregiously bad i hearing places like npr pretend that there is no obvious biological physical advantage that males have over females was sort of an emperor has no close situation um i saw yesterday i think that there's been some shifts in the media on this in recent months and yesterday the new york times published a piece that said something like uh scientists believe that males have an advantage of females over sports yeah no really i'm just do you remember i remember there was an onion article maybe 10 or 15 years ago that i read a study shows stabbing monkeys with a knife causes them harm yeah yeah this is what this is what is happening but you would still see lots of people say that males don't have a biological advantage or even if they do it doesn't matter it's because the value of inclusivity is more important than fairness so this swimming international swimming association fina just this week they uh established new guidelines basically saying that if you're under the age of 12 if you have if you have transitioned over the age of 12 then you can't swim with with females i think that's and then they so they establish three categories male female and open i would have done things a little differently um for one thing uh 12 to me 12 year old boys do i think have a physical advantage over over 12 year old females so i probably would have set the age lower to like nine or something but i also am against puberty blockers so that's basically saying that that if you're born male you can't compete with females so which is what i believe i do believe that they have a you know an advantage this emerges during puberty but i also don't believe that kids should get puberty blockers so um but in in terms of establishing this third open category i would have just established two categories female and open that way yeah that because a third category there's just like how many it's a small number of people so who's going to compete no i mean if if it's really if it really is five percent yeah of of youth then there could be whole trans leagues there could be that's true that's true that's next but one suspects that that five percent number is heavily influenced by social contagion and if the culture changes to where it was you know eight years ago those numbers may go far down when it's when there's less of a cachet to being trans yeah that's what i anticipate that this this is not going to be a stable identity that people have throughout their adult lives uh when it comes to the sports thing i thought this is a really dumb hill for trans activists to die on because it is so obvious to everybody with eyes that males have a biological advantage and people will deny it i saw megan rapino made some statement about how inclusivity is more important and also if males had a huge biological advantage then trans women would be dominating women's sports i don't care if a trans i don't care that leah thomas is a better swimmer than these women leah thomas shouldn't be in the race in the first place to me winning has nothing to do with it it's just it's unfair and also you know as a as a woman do i really want someone with a penis in the locker room with me no i don't so there's other issues there and i thought just from you can look at the polling on this democrats are obviously far far more likely to uh to think that trans women should be permitted in women's sports than republicans are but it's still they're not there's not huge majorities of people who think that trans women should be allowed in in female sports so i think this was a losing issue on the part of trans activists a really dumb thing to glom on to and i think that we're seeing a lot of actually transphobic and homophobic backlash because of this this push from from trans activists we're seeing bills that will criminalize youth transition i am not in favor of youth transition but i'm really not in favor of parents of kids being taken from their parents like governor greg abbott has threatened to do um in texas these laws are very draconian i think they're very cruel and bad and i think they're a direct response to this this pushing on the left um pushing too far on this issue i you know i all of this stuff was sort of sort of inevitable but it's like it's this pendulum it swings back and forth you know things go crazier on the left and then they go crazier on the right and then they go crazier on the left and then they go crazier on the right and those of us in the center are just sort of here watching it and i also i'll say like even if even if you object to youth transition and you think it's a bad idea and kids shouldn't transition even if you even if you think that these laws criminalizing it you should be against these laws because if texas passes a law criminalizing youth transition california oregon washington are going to pass a law stating that kids don't have to have parental permission to transition which is actually happening now so if you want fewer kids to transition yes this is happening so if you want fewer kids to transition you should also not be in favor of these laws we need to get to some sort of rational center that is based on evidence and we do have some evidence about whether or not these things work um unfortunately these you know medical institutions have been mostly captured at least at this moment yeah it is it is um increasingly people don't trust therapists doctors school counselors teachers and increasingly i i don't trust any of these authorities i mean i would say the older i get the less and less i trust the sort of bureaucracy of so-called experts on most issues especially any issue that's been politicized race gender um so so often ideology comes before evidence and expertise and and frankly iq or innate talent or skill or expertise or um you know preparedness all of that stuff when ideology gets involved it comes before all of that and that's human nature unfortunately uh so the moment an issue gets politicized the opinion of the public school teacher or or you know the therapist is often going to stem from their ideology rather than a neutral dispassionate look at the evidence and once i know that i become a lot more hesitant to you know throw my kid into the bureaucracy and and trust that it will give them the answer that is consistent with the research um and and there's this huge tension now especially going on about parental control in the schools and this is the origin of the so-called don't say gay bill in in florida and um i'm curious if you had a take on that bill yeah i think the bill like a lot of these anti-crt bills uh i think there is a way to get at the root of the problem which is i think there is an actual problem in terms of this spread of what is some like wacky gender ideology among primary schools primary school teachers but this bill doesn't do that the bill was written and like like these crt bills too too vague too broad if you really want to address the problem and not make this some political grandstanding you would make it narrow and specific um but the way that it's written the the the you know it'll have it'll have i think a chilling effect on on gay gay teachers who will be afraid to like talk about their spouses um things like that so i think the bill wasn't wasn't it wasn't written to appeal to me though the bill was written to sort of red meat for the base um and i think the same is true of many of these these anti-crt bills um there are ways to do this but at least this this ain't it i i wonder if there are ways to do it though you know i i really more and more i think if if you try to use a law to outlaw the teaching of bad ideas it may not be possible to to write the language in a way that can't be abused so it's it's so tough to know what to do because i actually agree with i i think i agree with the mainstream conservative take about what the problem is it's like i follow libs of tick tock okay and if you go on live libs of tick tock you will find teacher after teacher after teacher that just came out of you know columbia teachers college and claims to be some sort of expert about gender identity and is going to teach your child in a way to to um leverage all of the child psychology that wants to please the teacher right like children they want to be the teacher's favorite right and will you use all of that psychology to elicit the answers the basically the far left progressive take on gender that your gender you have this soul essentially and only you know it and will essentially reward the children with the teachers praise those children who say that they're not the gender that they were assigned at birth and from the little i remember of being a kid i i remember how strong the temptation was to be the teacher's favorite right and then that puts you on a track it could contribute to putting you on a track towards a towards puberty blockers or is there some kind of some kind of intervention you may not really need so i think that's a problem i mean i think that's what you know that that is a big problem why should the teacher whose salary i'm paying for who has a captive audience of our children be able to indoctrinate them on something that's totally unscientific right it's not like i'm saying don't teach evolution in schools right that's just science it's like you're saying don't teach astrology yeah it's like saying don't teach astrology or don't teach your religion i'm like i don't want them lecturing you know if a teacher got up there and said here's what happens after death you burn in hell and here's the way not to get there that would piss me off because that's if i you know i should have the right to indoctrinate my kids or or not and i certainly don't want my tax money going to people that are not experts on the issue you know an issue where expertise isn't really even defined yet right it's like not a scientific issue gender identity we don't know we can't even agree how many genders there are right how could it be a scientific issue where the research all says this so i agree with the problem but i just you know when i see the the the so-called don't say gay bill which which was you know name that's the name its critics give it of course um the you know the problem i have with it is is what you said which is i have no problem with sort of banning sexual orientation or gender identity talk for like kindergarteners through third graders i don't remember being told any crucial information about those issues in class at that age i'm too young to even understand it really but then it goes on to ban you know teaching those issues in a in a non-age appropriate way to any age which is who gets to define that i mean that's just going to be used by actual bigots to throw prosecution that at any teacher that says something that they don't like right and the a lot hinges on the word instruction in the bill what is instruction you know if a teacher says yes some families do have two mommies and some families do have two daddies and that is probably exist in this classroom does that count as instruction could you get sued for that so i think yeah i think that bill in particular is really poorly written and i'm i'm with you when it comes to the law and the state uh attempting to solve these these culture war issues i don't think that's the ideal solution and i don't think it works and it leads to things like two different americas where even within the state of texas say they're teaching something totally different in austin than they are in wherever else houston dallas river i don't know round rock um i think that's that's a problem you know and i i think you also you mentioned teaching colleges i've i've interviewed a number of people who come out of teaching colleges teaching colleges have always been pretty far to the left my mom was a she taught in a teaching college um and i think that that's increasingly true and what they are turning out is activists and activists go to their schools and they want to raise little revolutionaries and they might not even see it as such i mean some of them are are transparent about that and some of them aren't some of them just really believe that they're doing the right thing of course it's just a matter of values okay did you i think i was sort of at the end of a sentence there yeah a lot of them want to raise little revolutionaries and they don't see it as i have a question for you what do you think about teachers putting like pride flags and blm flags in classrooms huh that's that's a very interesting question um i mean on its face it seems inappropriate i you know i i immediately go to the shoe on the other foot test you know like would i be would liberal parents be okay with an nra affiliation symbol in a classroom 100 not um no they wouldn't be and they would they would come up with all sorts of arguments a principled arguments about how it's irrelevant to teaching math to demonstrate your support of gun ownership and the nra or you know any other right-wing symbol but blm people often say it's not a political statement right which obviously it is um you know it's like saying pro-life isn't a political statement you're just pro-life right it's like no well the you just love life exactly if that were really you know obviously it's it's it's it's great to brand political causes as non-political as simply affirming what any halfway decent person would believe you know i'm pro-happiness i'm pro-li you know that that's that's the branding you have to get under the packaging to understand what is actually being sold and then we can agree or disagree about it but i just don't see why a teacher should be able to bring politics into a classroom that is not about politics yeah i think i agree with you and i i sort of i'm uncomfortable with agreeing with that but exactly i mean if you if you try to imagine a parallel a parallel flag it does seem like politicking the pride flag may be less political than a blm yeah it's it signals something it signals to to gay students you know this is a safe space or or whatever but now but the pride flag too it's so aesthetically unpleasing that i wouldn't want to see that in a classroom just because it burns my eyes [Laughter] yeah you know i don't think i would have a problem with a pride flag i think i would have a problem with a blm slogan or blm poster right because black lives matter is an organization that was founded by three individuals and has a manifesto you can read online it's it's like if you had a hammer and sickle in a class presumably that would be something you'd have to defend and it's only because of the cultural moment we live in that you you would be able to get away with sort of not defending that choice but you know it's an explicitly political organization blm it's sort of a genius name though if you know if it was called the black power movement right oh yeah no it's a the genius in the branding is is is obvious and one of the reasons the reason why it blew up so much because it's it's a the phrase like any great political branding is is just perfect um and it allows for this kind of mott and bailey style argument where you can fall back on simply claiming that you think black lives matter which who could disagree with that really and then when push comes to shove you're actually for defunding the police right which is a highly controversial unpopular policy in the black community and the community at large but then when you get when you get dinged on that you fall back on well really we're just saying black lives matter and who could disagree with that but a bigot um whereas the pride flag i guess i just see as a symbol of like what specific policy other than probably support for gay marriage does a pride flag like explicitly signal i think the old pride flag much more politically neutral although it's not entirely neutral equality uh equal rights the new pride flag the progress flag which has the it has the the little trans flag like eating the eating the rainbow flag besides being oh i wasn't aware of there's a new there's a new private there's yeah there's a new one every year um yeah yeah i i just bought one recently someone made a sort of spoof pride flag that has every corporate logo you could possibly imagine in it as well as the isis flag the antifa flag uh the furry flag it's it's hideous it's hanging outside my house right now it's got a hammer and sickle as well as like the google logo the amazon logo um i'm waiting for somebody to steal it and then i can claim to be a victim of a hate crime but that one i think the new it's called the progress pride flag i think that one's a little bit a little bit more political and it it's also just it's ugly i think we should we should ban all ugly flags god hates flags so i guess the last thing that's been in in the news recently are our drag shows yes and i guess this this breaks into two different kinds of i mean there are drag shows where you have a drag queen uh i'm not sure if that is that still the term is that still the proper term yeah i think i think drag queen is still allowed been reclaimed okay drag queen like doing almost stripper-like dance in public and it's like you watch it and you bring your it almost seems like a tourist a tourist attraction like oh look at this we have this tradition of men dressing up like very ornate and heavily made up women and then doing a almost like a poll routine and it's you can feel however you want to feel about that it's like it's awesome or it's gross or it's neutral it's it's however you feel about it and then there are sometimes children at the shows and then there's a separate thing of schools hiring drag queens to paying drag queens to come into class and read the class a book you know like dressed ornately and and new york city has spent two hundred thousand dollars apparently on this um for some inexplicable reason over the past four years so yeah what do you make of all that yeah this whole thing is so confusing in some ways i mean the drag queen this started with drag queen story hour where drag queens would go read books to kids at libraries i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that about that it's sort of a clownish thing kids wouldn't there's nothing inherently sexual about it uh if not you know if you're not like flashing the children which lips of tic toc posted a video of a drag queen actually doing that my basic take on this is that if a drag queen is doing something that would be inappropriate for a woman to do in public then you probably shouldn't take your kids to do it i don't think i think drag is an adult thing i don't i don't think kids belong and you know belong in bars obviously and also like who wants kids running around where you're watching that kind of so it's not something that if i were a parent i would probably take my kid to but like ron desantis said that he was going to like order cps to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows and that is also that is crazy that and he's supposed to be the parental rights guy this is a parental right do i think it's inappropriate to take a kid to a sexualized drag show absolutely but i don't think that you should be you should lose your child for that that's just that's crazy state overreach oh yeah that's nuts i mean i i saw one of the lives of tick-tock video that i think was actually happening in the town i grew up in and i recognized the street it was it was like a drag queen doing a dance outdoors in a sort of a cafe when there were kids there and again i think if i had a kid there i don't know what i would do i would sort of be like it's a it's just it's it's um a spectacle and it's kind of inappropriate and it definitely would be inappropriate if it were a woman but somehow the fact that it's a drag queen makes it like a conversation piece in a way that it wouldn't be if it's a woman it's a very strange kind of thing right i i just when it comes down to it i really think that this is about parents choice like if uh if i were a parent i wouldn't want my kids i wouldn't let my kids watch horror films you know but some parents do that and should they be allowed to do that yeah i think they should be allowed to do it even if i personally think it's bad parenting and i think a lot of this is people like chris ruffo who's been very transparent about what he's doing he's a master propagandist redefining he wants to redefine the term drag and call them trans strippers well most drag queens are not trans that's not some of them are but chris ruffo is trying to try to attach the drag queen issue to the trans issue and i think a way that's it would be more dishonest if he weren't so blatant about what he's doing but i think this is also part of this just sort of panic that's happening right now drag queen this is not a huge deal i mean i don't think that new york city should be paying 200 000 for this that's crazy um but right i think that's my objection to it like i don't think it's um i don't think you're harming kids by having a drag queen read a book unless the book is crazy and most of the books you know they're reading like where the wild things are and i tweeted this but they should have the drag queens read abigail schreier's irreversible universal damage just really screw everyone up so yeah but i mean obviously it doesn't make me more excited to pay my taxes when i learned that you spent a quarter of a million dollars and like 50 000 in the last month hiring drag queens to read book that books that you could just have the teachers read which i'm also already paying for as a taxpayer it does not inspire confidence it really brings out my inner ron swanson in the sense that like why the why the is the government taking so much of my money and then just pissing it away when we have so many problems right like we resources are scarce and our kids are failing in math and reading and you know richard carranza the the school chancellor of new york budgets 23 million dollars to anti-bias trainings to be spent over four years 23 million dollars to be spent over four years telling teachers new york teachers adults to be less racist to the kids you should get in on that it's very lucrative yeah i mean my god it must it must be you know these di anti-bias trainings at this point must be like a several hundred million dollar industry oh absolutely if if new york city alone is paying 23 million for it over four years i mean that's it really it does actually as a new york city taxpayer that materially sees my bank account change depending on what the the city tax rate is it uh it does bring out my inner libertarian to see see my money pissed away on things when they're this city is like there's a homeless problem there's a crime problem the schools are in so many places there are neighborhoods that you can't walk in like east harlem because you you know like the crime on the on the street is so rampant it's like it's it's absurd and it totally it destroys my faith in not that i had all that much to begin with but in public servants and how they choose to spend other people's money yeah typically you can get parents to come in and volunteer to read to their kids classrooms for free they will do that that happens that's a thing that people do maybe they should have the parents dress up in drag or the teachers dress up in drag i think part of this comes from the immense popularity of rupaul's drag race we could probably blame bru paul for this that drag has gone from something that was subversive an adult to something that was family friendly and now something that is in classrooms and libraries the uh the i think concept creep really or mission creep is a a sort of convenient explanation for for many facets of our current moment yeah no doubt and um well we've come to the end of this i think we've dealt with everything i think we've solved everything actually i think we solved it everything we solved it uh you're welcome the one podcast that's in the mall yes well uh if you don't know blocked and reported uh katie herzog and jesse single go listen to it it's a really fun podcast and um what else are you up to these days that my listeners should be aware of uh not much i don't yeah yeah it's summer time so uh um what am i watching lately i just watched dope sick that was pretty good um i do a periodic podcast with nelly bowles on barry weiss's substance called tgif that's right i i heard the yup i heard the last episode this week it's really good tgif every friday that's honestly barry weiss it's not every friday it's like it's like every third friday it's whenever we feel like it but uh but yeah that's pretty much it i'm on twitter otherwise um i'm usually sitting in my backyard with my dog nice what are you on twitter kitty something kitty purrzog kitty purseog yeah all right well thank you katie yeah it's great to talk to you if you appreciate the work i do the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website colemanhughes.org and to subscribe to my youtube channel so you'll never miss my new content as always thanks for your support

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 43,826

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, americanpolitics, thisisamerica, political, whiteamerica, society, highsociety, bluecollar, modernsociety, contemporary, culture, music, blackmusic, blackhistory, hiphop, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect, thoughts, opinion, voice, publicintellectual, dialogue, discourse, talkshow, talks, question, interview, answers, speech, motivational, poweful, art, arthouse, Katie Herzig, Herzig, Lost and Found, Katie Herzig Lost

Id: ruvlgINs70c

Length: 88min 6sec (5286 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022