00:02:58.520We love we love going on X. This is from September 2022. Matt says, breaking, breaking. My team and I have been investigating the transgender clinic at Vanderbilt here in Nashville. Vanderbilt drugs, chemically castrates and performs double mastectomies on minors. But it gets worse. Here is what we found. Let's start at the beginning. He's like, buckle up, chuckle fucks. Here's a threat. Me and my team, three 21 year olds.
00:03:26.080also investigating is like we've been googling things that the medical center puts out so that
00:03:32.400we can take them out of context he says vanderbilt opened its trans clinic in 2018 during a lecture
00:03:38.060the same year dr shane taylor explained how she convinced nashville to get into the gender
00:03:42.540transition game she emphasized that it's a big money maker especially because the surgeries
00:03:47.900require a lot of follow-ups they did this at the urging of big pharma they are doing this for pure
00:03:53.560profitability we are going to watch this clip now okay some of our vumc financial folks in
00:04:01.720august of 20 i'm sorry october of 2016 started a couple years ago put down some costs of how much
00:04:08.620money we think each patient would bring in and this is only including top surgery this doesn't
00:04:12.940include any bottom surgery and um it's a lot of money these surgeries make a lot of money
00:04:18.800so females and male chest reconstruction can bring in $40,000 a patient just on routine0.98
00:04:26.720hormone treatment who I'm only seeing a few times a year can bring in several thousand0.97
00:04:31.460dollars because it requires a lot of visits and labs it actually makes money for the hospital
00:04:35.260now these I got from the internet but it's from the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery
00:04:42.500which has done a lot of surgery for patients I just want to give you an idea of how much
00:04:47.120these bottom surgeries are making and this is I think this has to be an
00:04:52.100underestimate this is for a vaginoplasty they're saying they're quoting roughly
00:04:57.260around $20,000 for a vaginoplasty but that doesn't include your hospital stay
00:05:01.580that doesn't include your postdoc visits and then the female to male bottom
00:05:05.480surgeries these are huge money makers again I think this has to be an
00:05:10.340underestimate if they're quoting around $20,000 for a valoplasty there's been
00:05:14.420different things that I've read that said it could be up to $100,000.
00:05:18.860Am I supposed to be like offended by this? I guess I understand that if you were just sort
00:05:24.000of like listening to doctors talk about how profitable certain procedures are in any context,
00:05:28.520it'll always feel like a little bit cold or whatever. But like, I don't know, Matt Walsh
00:05:32.320doesn't want to socialize healthcare. So until he does, yeah, this is just people talking about the
00:05:37.640business of healthcare. I would love a system where doctors didn't have to think of this.
00:05:42.900But the fact that somebody is talking about this is not necessarily disqualifying.
00:05:47.920Also, she doesn't mention children here.
00:05:50.760Bottom surgeries are essentially not performed on children.
00:07:49.820that saying that you're not going to do
00:07:52.700something because of your conscientiousness because of your religious beliefs is not without
00:07:59.000consequences and it should not be without consequences and i just want to put that out
00:08:06.520there we are given enormous if you don't want to do this kind of work don't work at vanderbilt
00:08:13.520yeah okay so she's just basically saying objections to this are rooted in bigotry
00:08:20.660Without saying that, I actually feel like the fact that she dances around it makes it sound worse rather than just being like, you know, I believe that anyone who objects to this is is doing so due to bigotry, which is correct.
00:08:33.140So this is a clip from a woman called Ellen Clayton, who is a pediatrician at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, but she's also a law professor and ethicist.0.98
00:08:45.700So the thing to know about this woman is she's not a transgender medical provider.
00:08:50.660In more than 300 publications, she's only published one thing about LGBTQ people, and it's about, like, privacy stuff.
00:08:57.740And her specialty recently seems to be, like, AI and LLMs.
00:09:02.540And before that, it was about, like, genetic testing and privacy concerns.0.98
00:09:06.720So this is not somebody who, like, does transgender medicine on kids and is like, get the fuck out of my OR if you have a problem with it.0.98
00:09:15.180It's not clear that this has any kind of relevance.
00:09:17.380another thing you may not notice is that she does not mention the word transgender in this clip0.86
00:09:22.840because matt walsh does not provide basic fucking context to his clips or like hey if you'd like to0.65
00:09:28.360see the whole thing right here it is but behind her on the slide is an article called the celestial0.95
00:09:35.080fire of conscience refusing to deliver medical care which i was able to find this was published
00:09:41.460in 2005 and it's an article about abortion there was this whole movement in the early
00:09:47.1802000s where conservatives were claiming conscientious objector status, right? If you're
00:09:52.640a pharmacist, you're like, I object to this. I don't want to give out plan B pills. And then
00:09:57.340some blue states passed laws saying, no, you have to actually do your job. If you work at a pharmacy,
00:10:02.620you can't do this shit. And then red states were like, no, no, we're going to protect1.00
00:10:06.500conscientious objector status. And this kind of went back and forth in the early 2000s.
00:10:10.900But Matt Walsh does not give us a year when this clip is taken from.
00:10:16.520So there's some percentage chance that she's actually not even talking about trans health care here.
00:10:20.220I think it's a relatively high percentage that she's actually talking about abortion in this clip.
00:10:24.420Because this whole thing of like, I declare conscientious objector status, that was a sort of trope on the right around abortion and also stem cells and all this stuff like George W. Bush era.
00:10:34.460It's also slightly odd in the trans health care context because a lot of the relevant clinics are established for trans health care.
00:10:44.260Exactly. It doesn't make the same kind of sense because it's not like you're a pharmacist where you're like, quote unquote, forced to give out Plan B pills. It's like you would affirmatively apply to work in a transgender youth clinic. So again, we have no context for this clip. I have no clear evidence that like 100% chance that she's talking about abortion here. But there is nothing in this clip that indicates she is talking about transgender medicine. And Matt Walsh does not give us any context for this. And it's at least plausible that she would be talking about abortion in this clip.
00:11:12.700Well, Ellen, if you're out there and you're a lesbian, we know you're listening.0.68
00:11:16.720If you're straight, you have a child who listens.0.99
00:13:33.840This is just like how this movement talks.
00:13:35.580So holistically, he starts off basically saying, this clinic is doing all this stuff to minors. And then he just sort of puts a bunch of clips together of things that a median right winger might find distasteful. Someone talking about money, someone saying that they think religious objections are problematic or bigoted, the trans buddies program.
00:13:57.660And it's sort of presented as if he's like building a case for what he originally described.
00:14:04.140But what he originally described is a clinic that, quote, drugs, chemically castrates and performs double mastectomies on minors.
00:14:12.600Looking at this, this is like completely deranged.
00:14:14.200This is immediately picked up by the governor.
00:14:17.980So on September 28th, the governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, calls for an investigation into the clinic.
00:14:23.900And the House GOP, the state house is controlled by Republicans.
00:14:28.220They issue a letter demanding answers from the clinic on October 7th.
00:14:35.380So this is just like two weeks after the original tweet thread by Matt Walsh.
00:14:39.640The clinic itself issues a letter responding to the accusations.
00:14:44.960In the letter, they note, as this always fucking happens, Peter, they note they only perform around five top surgeries per year.0.59
00:14:52.960This is a relatively rare thing. All of the people who got top surgeries were over 16. All of them had parental consent. This happens over and over again with this, that there's these like whistleblowers coming forward. And then clinics release extremely basic data and they're seeing a number of patients in like the single or double digits.0.97
00:15:10.400They don't say so in their letter, but according to later legal filings, it appears the clinic only ever treated 106 patients.
00:15:19.860Because the AG of Tennessee, Scrimetti, the famous Scrimetti of this Supreme Court decision, demanded that they turn over all of their patient records.
00:15:28.740So again, the whole narrative is that large numbers of kids are receiving irreversible medical procedures without assessment.
00:15:35.020They can't even establish that there are large numbers getting this care at all.
00:15:38.200What's frustrating about this is that, like, the right wing doesn't care about these numbers because, like, their concern is not that children are being rushed into it.
00:15:47.260Their concern is that they don't believe trans people are real.
00:15:50.300Which they're very on the record about.
00:15:52.460And so they're trying to crack down on it and draw attention to it.
00:15:55.460And the fact that this is a very tiny minority of people doesn't dissuade them at all.
00:16:00.860Yes. Where the disconnect is, is with like media coverage and the willingness of more moderate politicians to bite on this.
00:16:11.820Yeah. Like even if you think that it's outrageous that trans girls can compete in sports with cis girls in high school, it's happening so little that like it should occupy basically none of your mind space.
00:16:28.100Right. I just don't understand how anyone operating in good faith in like the political center could possibly spend their like mental energy on this.0.85
00:16:40.580I think this is really the distinction between the far right version and the centrist version, because to the far right, every trans person is just lying, deranged, fetishist, weirdo.0.99
00:16:50.320Right. According to the centrists, some trans people are real, but some trans people are lying.0.98
00:16:56.400And the problem with this field is that it's not separating the real trans people from the fake ones.
00:17:02.300I think the like the New York Times concern is there is like the social contagion argument.0.96
00:17:08.940The idea that like the left is so out of control that young kids are essentially being brainwashed into believing that they should transition.
00:17:20.700And it's only the correct course for a very tiny number of kids who say that they're transgender.
00:17:24.380This is like a big part of that narrative.
00:17:26.120I mean, it must be and it must be extremely tiny, right? Because they are willing at the end of the day to endorse laws that ban it for all kids.
00:17:35.260For everybody. And I think that it just aligns very nicely with like the New York Times view of the world, which is, yes, reactionaries are extreme in various regards.
00:17:47.480They're unserious. And in fact, they're not to be taken seriously.
00:17:50.860But the real problem with American politics is that the left is out of control.
00:18:01.700And without the left being out of control, the right wouldn't really matter because a moderate consensus would emerge.
00:18:10.740It's the left that's preventing the moderate consensus, right?
00:18:14.120The right is sort of like a clown show off in the distance, even when they are in power.
00:18:20.660We were originally going to do a COVID mistakes bonus episode.
00:18:24.300We're just like, what were the actual mistakes?
00:18:25.980Yeah, originally everyone, Michael, was like, what if we did a fourth consecutive COVID episode?
00:18:30.280And I was like, Michael, I'm not going to say no, but please.
00:18:34.740I also was just so I started reading for it.
00:18:36.660I was like, I I've done I cannot keep doing this.
00:18:39.580But one of the articles I came across was like a New York Times, like allegedly serious
00:18:43.400New York Times article about like the mistakes during the pandemic.
00:18:45.780And the number one mistake was it was like vaccines.
00:18:55.360It's it's saved like 20 million lives.
00:18:58.100but also at first people were like oh yeah it'll save like even more it's like why is this the
00:19:03.200important thing to stress as like a mistake right millions of people on the right were saying the0.96
00:19:07.360vaccine didn't work that's the mistake people who slightly exaggerated don't fucking matter
00:19:12.320the idea that the number one mistake during a pandemic was insufficient vaccine skepticism0.94
00:19:17.660is fucking hilarious but it's like it's a perfect distillation of that ideology right0.74
00:19:23.100isn't it actually kind of your fault for exaggerating very slightly the benefits of0.96
00:19:28.540vaccines that's why we have those anti-vaxxers right so anyway we get the letter from the house
00:19:34.620gop the clinic responds and it's like uh we only have five patients but also out of an abundance
00:19:40.420of caution they close down the gender clinic okay but of course that doesn't matter yeah so
00:19:46.220So three weeks later, Matt Walsh hosts the Rally to End Child Mutilation in downtown Nashville.
00:19:54.180And a bunch of like Republican lawmakers show up and like give talks.0.56
00:19:58.380But then in January of 2023, they come back for the legislative session and Tennessee Republicans, who have already passed a ban on drag shows, they already passed a law in 2021 banning hormones for prepubescent kids.
00:20:15.180which doesn't make sense because they're not really doing that for prepubescent kids but
00:20:17.500whatever they pass a law protecting teachers who refuse to use the correct pronouns for kids
00:20:23.380they're just on like an anti-lgbt crusade right and as part of that in march of 2023
00:20:30.840they pass the law in question that ends up at the supreme court which is uh sb1 state bill one
00:20:37.020the law is like very straightforwardly discriminatory yeah so it says so in the
00:20:42.520sort of like summary. It says, it is the purpose of this chapter to prohibit medical procedures
00:20:47.620from being administered to or performed on minors when the purpose of the medical procedure is to
00:20:53.140enable the minor to identify with or live as a purported identity inconsistent with the minor
00:20:57.180sex or to treat purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor sex and
00:21:02.180asserted identity. So this is what's interesting about the law is that it doesn't actually prohibit
00:21:08.220any medical procedures per se it's only the purpose of the medical procedure it only prohibits
00:21:13.380medical procedures that are intended to help with medical transition yes it's just sort of bizarre
00:21:19.780i mean the the law itself is basically openly transphobic right it says that there's a section
00:21:27.880in the beginning of a lot of laws it's basically like here's why we're doing this it's the findings
00:21:33.100in this case and part of what they say is that they want to encourage kids to appreciate their
00:21:38.640sex their biological sex i like that part too yeah it's straightforwardly like we're doing this
00:21:43.620to ensure that biological sex and gender identities are like legally aligned that it's one thing yeah
00:21:51.740it's very like obviously transphobic i don't even think that the authors of it would disagree with
00:21:58.980that? No, it's very, it's really obvious. It's very, it's very weird that we're going to segue
00:22:04.420into the Supreme Court arguing that this is not discriminatory. Because the majority of people
00:22:10.360who get puberty blockers every year are cisgender kids. It's for precocious puberty. Kids who go0.96
00:22:15.200through puberty early, it can have physiological effects. And so we give it to, I think it's like
00:22:18.580three to 5,000 kids a year, cisgender kids are getting puberty blockers. And so it renders
00:22:23.800completely moot all of these alleged concerns about like, oh, the bone density. Oh, we don't
00:22:28.640know the long-term effects. All the big pharma stuff, all of the arguments that they make against
00:22:33.660puberty blockers theoretically would also apply to cisgender kids getting puberty blockers. But
00:22:38.240when it comes to legislation, they're like, oh no, puberty blockers only affect your bone density if0.77
00:22:42.660you're like doing it because you're trans. The thing that really jumped out to me about this
00:22:46.840little section of the law where it's like, we find at the beginning, just like laying out the
00:22:50.780factual basis, is that the law itself quotes Matt Walsh. So it says the legislature finds that
00:22:57.420healthcare providers in the state have sought to perform such surgeries on minors because the
00:23:01.700surgeries quote make a lot of money and quote are huge money makers not necessarily because0.98
00:23:06.920the surgeries are in a minor's best interest straight line from a fucking matt walsh tweet0.77
00:23:12.940to actual text of legislation i think you'd be surprised uh if just reading your median piece1.00
00:23:19.220of state legislation uh how stupid they tend to be uh the average state legislator is dumber i0.99
00:23:25.480believe than the average baby then we get into the legal process which i do not understand1.00
00:23:31.300the law passes in march of 2023 there are now 26 states that ban gender affirming care which is
00:23:38.560really fucking bleak yeah and then there's an injunction in july of 2023 but then like it's
00:23:47.100granted and then overturned and like please take over peter i have no idea what it's like stayed0.96
00:30:23.300Like, yeah, but her argument is that that should not be subject to a higher level of scrutiny because there's no history of legal discrimination against transgender people.
00:30:33.500The ACLU brought up like laws against cross-dressing going back centuries.
00:30:40.200And, you know, of course, those laws predate the concept of transgender in like the broad social vocabulary.
00:30:48.040Not to mention what the dissent brings up is just like, well, when does history start?
00:30:52.940Because there's hundreds of these laws now.
00:30:55.620The transgender people are being banned from the military.
00:31:00.340Like, is it just like that stuff doesn't count because it's too recent?0.95
00:31:03.500Some of the analysis that you guys have come back to over and over again on 5 to 4, I guess you say the same thing over and over again because that's podcasting, is this idea that like a dumb person looking at this would be like, oh, yeah, they hate transgender people and they're legislating against transgender people.
00:31:17.100But like a smart law professor would be like, oh, actually, it's about the equal protection clause of the second order of like whatever.0.99
00:31:23.900It's like, no, like the stupid person is closer to being right here.1.00
00:31:28.860Of course, the whole point of the Supreme Court is doing this Calvin Ball thing where they're like, OK, what magic words can we use to make this sound sort of reasonable?
00:31:37.680I mean, yeah, there's some of history's great bullshitters, right?0.96
00:31:40.520And this one is just an embarrassment.1.00
00:31:43.820Like to say this is not discrimination based on transgender status is so on its face absurd.0.99
00:31:49.760Like, again, you don't you don't need to like peel it back too much.
00:32:44.100I personally, I don't find all that stuff.
00:32:46.560I mean, I do find it interesting, but mostly as like kind of rhetorical maneuvers, because
00:32:51.080of course you could look at the same set of facts and come to the opposite conclusion like this is
00:32:54.440all the fucking supreme court does right i'm much more interested in like the empirical stuff
00:32:58.700and so the main opinion by roberts doesn't really get into the empirics it's like let's0.94
00:33:03.600it's not for judges to decide whether gender affirming care works then it gets to the clarence
00:33:07.980thomas concurrence and he's like oh it is for me to decide i'm here to decide whether this stuff
00:33:12.540works and then his whole concurrence or like the vast majority of it is just like attempting to be
00:33:18.160like a little systematic review yeah so for the next little segment of the episode we're going to
00:33:22.780dive into his concurrence and some of uh his thoughts about the evidence base for this treatment
00:33:29.200so here is the part where he kind of lays out his overall argument i'm going to send this to you
00:33:36.620in case you don't uh have it memorized yeah this is unfortunately i've read this concurrence like
00:33:42.320five times now because i'm writing about it and doing the 5-4 episode and this one uh and usually
00:33:47.440i offload thomas concurrences to 5-4 michael and he has to deal with the trauma it is shocking how
00:33:55.500much this is just like facebook uncle shit yeah and what i always think about thomas he's a very
00:34:01.480interesting window into the american right because he is high iq facebook grandpa yeah yeah he's like1.00
00:34:11.300the best they can do yeah and it's still so fucking stupid his brain is cooked dude he says1.00
00:34:18.760there are several problems with appealing and deferring to the authority of the expert class1.00
00:34:22.980first so-called experts have no license to countermand the wisdom fairness or logic of
00:34:29.520legislative choices this by the way classic supreme court move whenever you're upholding a
00:34:36.100law you're like the state legislator the wisest creature in our nation and then when you're
00:34:42.440striking a law down you ignore that and you're like individual liberty the most beautiful thing
00:34:48.060in our nation that what our nation is founded upon he says second contrary to the representations of
00:34:53.880the united states and the private plaintiffs there is no medical consensus on how best to
00:34:57.800treat gender dysphoria and children third notwithstanding the alleged experts view that
00:35:02.600young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex transition treatments.
00:35:07.060Whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that states must decide for
00:35:11.160themselves. Fourth, there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here,
00:35:15.680as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence
00:35:20.140and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance. We wouldn't want ideology
00:35:24.400anywhere near this. So yeah, I'm interested to hear your thoughts. I've also gone through this
00:35:28.600And my overall impression of his concurrence, I think it's important to contextualize this.
00:35:36.840Many, many leading medical associations submitted briefs in this case saying gender-affirming care, safe and effective.
00:35:46.740And so he's frustrated by the idea that this makes a consensus.
00:35:50.500Why does all the prominent major organizations coming out on one side of this mean that there's medical consensus even though the Koch-funded freak organizations founded in late 2019 disagree?
00:36:07.140Yeah. He's another thing that stuck out to me is he keeps saying so-called experts or self-described experts. It's like if you're like a gender health person who works in a gender health clinic and you're like licensed to do gender health. I don't know if that's a so-called expert or like a self-appointed expert. That's just like you are objectively an expert.
00:36:26.340Thomas cites research from these, like, right-wing affiliated researchers, right?
00:36:30.680He isn't so skeptical of expertise when it supports his point, but it is telling that
00:36:35.940you can look through his concurrence, and the majority of the substantive citations
00:37:07.220One of the things he says like, oh, puberty blockers don't work.
00:37:09.580And then the citation is to like frontiers in gender studies or something.
00:37:14.120Whenever you see frontiers in the title of a journal, it's like, yes, go to that link, dude.0.98
00:37:19.460You're about to read some of those banana shit you've ever seen.
00:37:22.620The source he uses to say that puberty blockers are not not effective, or at least haven't been shown to be effective, is an article where the conflict of interest statement is about as long as the abstract.0.99
00:37:36.180And that's because almost everyone involved is affiliated with the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, which is like this right-wing group founded just like a few years ago by William Malone, who does not seem to believe that trans people are real.
00:38:57.860Like if they weren't reversible, we would not have been giving them to cisgender kids for like three decades now.
00:39:03.260You wouldn't really know it if you're not familiar with the research, but he's trying to draw a clean line between the mountains of evidence we have about puberty blockers for the treatment of precocious puberty and the relatively small amount of evidence we have for treatment of gender dysphoria to say like, well, we don't know the long term effects.
00:39:31.020Yeah, that's functionally irrelevant because we do know about the long term effects because a ton of people have used these medicines.
00:39:40.120There have been a ton of studies just in a slightly different context.
00:39:42.960Right. And there's no reason to believe that we've seen that the long term effects would be different when the treatment is for gender dysphoria.
00:39:49.420And then he runs through hormones.0.60
00:39:51.220He then gets into surgery where he, of course, includes this like lurid description of like the surgery.
00:39:57.200What stood up to me is that he says, for boys, surgical interventions include removal of the testicles, blah, blah, blah.
00:40:03.120And then he gets into this long description.
00:40:04.500But it's like, boys, these surgeries aren't really being performed on minors.
00:40:09.060But he, of course, uses the term boys throughout to imply that young kids are having their genitals removed constantly.
00:40:14.840Then he gets into the ongoing debate over the efficacy of sex transitions and how other countries – he has a whole section about how, like, other countries are now pulling back from this care.
00:40:24.900But, of course, if you look at any one of those individual countries, it's like, oh, yeah, they're in the same moral panic that we are.
00:40:31.280He then, of course, cites the cast review.
00:40:33.560This is the UK review that is like if you pick any fucking page at random, it's like so obvious that this is like a political document.0.99
00:40:40.660It's like it says that like kids are becoming trans because of porn.0.91
00:40:44.320But then what really stood out to me was this like weird talking point that you find on the sort of turf right.
00:40:53.440Among other things, the Katz review determined that the evidence the researchers found did not support the conclusion that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide among children suffering from gender dysphoria.
00:41:04.060Quote, the evidence does not adequately support the claim that gender affirming treatment reduces suicide risk.
00:41:09.380This is one of the canonical examples of like the overreach and mendacity of quote unquote trans activists that like they call this life saving care, but there's no evidence that it reduces suicide.
00:41:20.040On one level, it's kind of true in that when you look at the actual studies of gender-affirming care, they can't find that the number of completed suicides is lower in the treatment groups than the control groups, right?0.79
00:41:36.460But the issue with this, I mean, this is – I was going to say like the problem with this, but this is actually like a blessing and a good thing, is that completed suicides by teenagers are extremely rare.
00:41:46.060So there are 42 million Americans between 10 and 19, 42 million kids.
00:41:51.300There are around 2,800 suicides among adolescents every year.
00:41:55.840So that's one in 15,000 teenagers kills themselves every year.
00:42:00.160The rates are much higher among trans kids.
00:42:02.740But if you wanted to do a study large enough to show, okay, the control group had four suicides and the treatment group had two suicides to prove that gender-affirming care reduces suicides,
00:42:15.420You would need like tens of thousands of children in these studies.
00:44:44.400I mean, if you just like subpoenaed 3,000 emails of like the National Physical Therapy Association, you would probably have weird cranks.0.98
00:45:01.460And if the New York Times was writing 20 of these articles a year, within a couple of years, you would have a body of work that could be cited in the Supreme Court's reporter and look authoritative.
00:45:15.680You would also have public polling showing that like 30 percent of the population now thinks physical therapy isn't such a great idea.
00:45:21.340Like you could easily gin up a moral panic around anything if you subjected it to this much scrutiny.
00:45:26.880The next section of this concurrence is just a series of, like, really weird conspiratorial claims about WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
00:45:38.760They have these standards of care that give guidelines for, like, how should you perform care?
00:48:40.800This is Clarence Thomas talking about WPATH.
00:48:44.020In one instance, the chair of WPATH guidelines committee testified that it was ethically justifiable for the authors of the WPATH 2022 guidelines to, quote, advocate for language changes in these guidelines to strengthen their position in court.
00:48:57.300So this is based on a super hostile deposition of Eli Coleman, who is one of the people who's on the board of WPATH doing like the evidence review.
00:49:06.300apparently there's an email where somebody is saying like hey right now the draft of the
00:49:12.500standard of care say that like there's insufficient evidence for gender affirming care yeah i don't
00:49:17.180know if it's like super smart to say that because like we're under all this political attack i don't
00:49:20.360think that's a great idea and then they like go back and forth this guy eli coleman is in this
00:49:24.600deposition with this lawyer who says did you as chair of the sock eight project consider it ethical
00:49:31.820and consistent with good practice for the development of evidence-based guidelines
00:49:35.300for an actively serving expert witness to advocate for changes in language to strengthen his position
00:49:41.120in court. Here, I'm going to send you the Eli Coleman's answer. The main thing that I would
00:49:46.040say is that lots of different people, lots of different opinions and everything was listened
00:49:50.400to. But that was the beauty of our methodology, that we had such a rigorous process of checks
00:49:54.660and balances so that no one individual would be able to dictate the outcome. It would be heard,
00:49:59.060but that would not be able to hold sway in the process. And so, yeah, I think that some
00:50:04.840individuals might have wanted certain things for whatever reasons, but we always stuck to the
00:50:08.600science and we stuck to a consensus process in arriving at the final recommendations.
00:50:13.260So again, Clarence Thomas says the chair of the guidelines committee testified it was
00:50:17.820ethically justifiable for the authors of the guidelines to advocate for language changes
00:50:22.180to strengthen their position in court. That's not what this guy is saying at all.
00:55:52.260thing where it's like, well, this New York Times article is weaponizing her work. You're doing the
00:55:56.620thing that she's worried about, right? She's like, we don't want someone to take like our random
00:56:00.820shit out of context and say that the entire field is bunk. And then this article says that the entire0.98
00:56:05.920field is bunk because of an out of context quote, a single quote. Right. Again, there's no real
00:56:10.400content to this. It's like, OK, so someone was slightly delayed in publishing their results and
00:56:15.220freely admitted to what their results are and also then published them. What's the actual scandal
00:56:19.860here? I don't know. There's something something exhausting about like exhausting. You're meant
00:56:24.540to believe that like the American Academy of Pediatrics or whatever is like living under the
00:56:31.460storm cloud of politics and you should just be ignoring them entirely. But like some dipshit0.99
00:56:37.320journalist gets front billing and like whatever fraction of an email they can throw at you to cast0.97
00:56:44.900doubt upon trans health care, you should put your trust in it. So now we get to the Biden
00:56:49.760administration. This is the accusation of the Biden administration warping the WPATH guidelines
00:56:54.880for its own ends. So here is Clarence Thomas. Recent reporting has exposed that WPATH changed
00:57:02.900its medical guidance to accommodate external political pressure. Unsealed documents revealed
00:57:08.780that a senior official in the Biden administration pressed WPATH to remove age limits for adolescent
00:57:14.040surgeries from guidelines for care of transgender minors on the theory that specific listings of
00:57:19.400ages under 18 will result in devastating legislation for trans care. Despite some
00:57:25.420internal disagreement, WPATH acceded and removed the age minimums in the eighth edition of its
00:57:31.160standards of care. So you looked into this one a little bit, right? Yeah. What was your read on it?
00:57:34.800So what's sort of missing from Thomas's analysis is like what actually played out here, which is
00:57:41.220that this is about the minimum age at which they recommend certain gender affirming care, right?
00:57:48.680What they were going to do was specify certain lower ages below 18, 14, 15, depending on the treatment.
00:57:56.460They were going to lower the ages from previous recommendations.
00:57:59.760The Biden administration, Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary of HHS, says, hey, I don't think you should do this basically because it's going to incur the wrath of the right.
00:58:11.620They're going to react to this saying, oh, my God, you're recommending surgeries for minors or whatever.
00:59:46.520suppression the adolescent has had at least 12 months of gender-affirming hormone therapy or
00:59:50.940longer if required to achieve the desired surgical results so there are not age minimum guidelines in0.60
00:59:57.400here but what everybody always fucking melts down about is like oh they're being rushed into0.77
01:00:01.800surgeries and medications but the guidelines themselves are like no make sure that the kid0.97
01:00:06.460does not have severe mental health problems right make sure that this kid has been on hormones for0.94
01:00:11.180a year all the shit that they say they want that's the thing it's sort of like well what do you want0.88
01:00:15.300Like, every medical provider understands, like, the basic premise that, like, yeah, kids experiment with identity at that age and, like, kids say things that they may want to change later.0.99
01:00:25.860Like, every doctor of, like, adolescence fucking knows this, right?0.89
01:00:29.900So it's like, okay, we have this sort of conceptual acknowledgement that, like, yeah, kids are experimenting with their identities at this stage.
01:00:35.380We want to make sure that this is, like, a persistent identity before we do anything irreversible.
01:00:38.920Everyone agrees with that conceptually.
01:00:40.680And then in practice, we have no evidence of kids being rushed into these procedures.
01:00:44.100You just don't find either in the rhetoric of WPATH or in the actual evidence of the number of kids and the conditions under which kids are receiving this care, you don't find evidence of large numbers of kids being rushed into it.
01:00:55.680But those sort of basic facts always get lost.
01:00:58.760Like, did you know in an email they said it will be weaponized?
01:01:00.940Well, I mean, and let's not lose sight of what's happening here. You have literally dozens of professional organizations chock full of experts saying, hey, Supreme Court, we think this is safe and effective for what that's worth. And then you have Clarence Thomas, a career lawyer.
01:01:21.140Yeah. And not just a career lawyer, but a guy who's been on the Supreme Court for actually
01:01:27.280almost half of his life. Yeah. Being like, no, I don't think so, guys. He's like, didn't you
01:01:31.820forget to ask someone? I don't consent. You know, this is anti-intellectualism at its core. Yeah.
01:01:37.720Yeah. What Clarence Thomas believes is that trans people are just extra gay. That's what he believes.0.99
01:01:44.700But then do you want to get into that now, Peter? The bizarre fucking victory lap after this0.99
01:01:48.840decision? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.1.00