Maintenance Phase - ＂Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria＂ Part 1： The Cooties Theory of Transgender Identity

00:00:00.000 uh wait you have you have to you have to tagline us i do what have you you can tell me to pull

00:00:17.700 this one back if it's too close to home you'll hear a loud buzzer sound hi everybody and welcome 0.98

00:00:22.960 to maintenance phase the podcast that's pretty much just on twitter to start shit with transphobes 0.53

00:00:28.060 oh oh this you're subtweeting me you were 10 seconds in and you're like i saw mike's online

00:00:33.640 presence yesterday i did that is accurate i did see your online presence yesterday i apologize

00:00:38.580 for who i am on the internet and in person and on podcasts for the record i'm very sorry this is a

00:00:45.240 good way to approach growth and accountability i apologize for who i am all of my behavior

00:00:50.920 and thoughts i'm michael hobbs i'm aubrey gordon if you would like to support the show you can do

00:00:56.660 that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We have news on that

00:01:00.740 though. And we do have news on that. God, we have so much housekeeping. Okay. Let's do this as

00:01:05.040 quickly as possible. Mike and I have been talking about the show and how to keep it going with his

00:01:09.520 other podcast, with my books and movies and all of that. And the way that we're going to do that

00:01:15.960 so that the show doesn't go away is we're just going to have a slower pace than we have in the

00:01:21.120 past. Instead of, you know, an episode every two weeks, it'll probably be closer to an episode a

00:01:27.920 month. The thing is, we're both stretched thin lately because Aubrey is finishing her next book

00:01:32.740 and has been doing this movie and I'm doing other podcasts. And also I have some like other upcoming

00:01:36.700 stuff happening. Basically, we were talking about like what our options are. And it's like one of

00:01:41.780 them is to just like lower our standards for the show and just like churn out episodes and like

00:01:46.600 stick to a every two weeks schedule but like we don't want to do that and the other option is to

00:01:51.420 just stop doing the show and we also don't want to do that yep and so what we're gonna do is we're

00:01:55.980 gonna keep our shows to like the the level of quality that we're comfortable with and we're

00:02:00.700 just gonna like release them when they're done yeah we're gonna continue doing patreon bonus

00:02:05.140 episodes every month those are like a little bit like more hangouts those aren't that difficult to

00:02:09.520 keep the pace going we think like we've always said that like there is no such thing as a bad

00:02:14.440 reason to stop supporting us on Patreon. Like if you're not comfortable because the pace of the

00:02:18.700 episodes is going to slow down and you're like, eh, there's probably other shows that I could

00:02:21.800 support, completely fine with us. Like we absolutely do not want you to feel bad about that.

00:02:27.660 And you have been very outspoken about this and I could not agree more. We're also big fans of like,

00:02:32.860 hey, do you want to go join the Patreon and then download everything and then quit the Patreon?

00:02:37.160 Yes, yes.

00:02:37.800 That's totally fine.

00:02:39.400 So also if you want to do that and just like once a year sign up,

00:02:41.800 done a lot of bonus episodes and then canceled, that's also super chill. Anyway, this is just to

00:02:46.060 say that like, the episodes will continue until morale improves. We love you. We don't want to go

00:02:51.800 away. We don't want to make bad shows. Yeah, we want to be able to meet our own standards being

00:02:57.160 like, you know, productive, helpful media. Speaking of helpful media, Aubrey has further

00:03:02.440 housekeeping. Oh, it's very fun. It's happening. It's finally happening. I am the subject of a

00:03:07.840 documentary called your fat friend and you can currently stream it anyone it's directed by genie

00:03:15.000 finley who is like an absolutely brilliant director this is her ninth feature and it was shot over a

00:03:21.980 six year period starting when i was writing anonymously on medium and your makeup was

00:03:28.980 hella different it was so different i was really into an extremely dark lip yeah it's available

00:03:35.900 almost everywhere all you have to do is go to jolt.film rent it for yourself you can send it

00:03:42.060 as a gift to friends and family and i'm just really excited for people to actually all the

00:03:47.040 way be able to see it go watch it yay okay we're finally into the show housekeeping done

00:03:51.700 housekeeping complete today aubrey we are talking about rapid onset gender dysphoria yes which

00:03:59.880 according to what you told me eight minutes ago before we were recording you don't know anything

00:04:03.840 about you haven't heard of this concept we've touched on this a little bit in the show i spent

00:04:07.600 a number of years of my life organizing around trans health care as like a yes as my main thing

00:04:14.080 i continue to know and love many many many trans people and sort of like stay tapped into parts of

00:04:21.060 the conversation but the parts that i have tapped out of are the parts that are like full moral 0.82

00:04:26.260 panic shit which is a lot of it right now although okay so i was gonna actually ask you for a favor

00:04:31.740 in this episode. I know there's a lot of people who just like don't know that much about like 0.98

00:04:37.760 youth gender affirming care, which is what we're going to be getting into. And one of the things

00:04:42.540 you find in a lot of moral panics is there's always this argument that like, we should be

00:04:45.940 allowed to ask questions. You can't even ask questions. And like, I want to stress, you are

00:04:50.960 allowed to ask questions. And like, people are allowed to be curious about this issue and even

00:04:54.720 a little bit concerned about this issue, right? Like all of us have dealt with the American

00:04:58.620 medical system. I, you know, I know friends that were prescribed antidepressants, like very young

00:05:03.940 and look back and we're like, I don't think I was ready for that. And I don't think that was

00:05:07.200 appropriate for me at that time. And so what I'm trying to do in this episode is to like speak to

00:05:12.180 those legitimate concerns and like lay out the information of like what we know. And so I was

00:05:17.980 going to ask you to be our like proxy for like people who might be a little bit concerned about

00:05:24.260 this yeah and so channel your inner reply guy be free to ask me ask the tough ask the tough

00:05:30.520 questions i have an inner reply guy you have an outer reply you're just channeling me now you're

00:05:38.440 doing a mic impression but so i think really the starting point for this entire conversation and

00:05:44.280 like the good faith people that we're trying to speak to is that like there have always been

00:05:48.340 trans people trans people are real yep if if you don't agree with that as a premise then like i i

00:05:53.640 have nothing to say to you. Trans people are real and not new. Yes. Pretty much every kind of person,

00:05:59.880 including trans people, have been around for as long as there have been people.

00:06:04.420 So for this, I talked to Jules Gil-Peterson, who is a historian, and she wrote an entire book about

00:06:09.260 the history of trans medical care and trans medical care for kids. The field of trans health

00:06:15.380 care. I mean, again, this goes back much further, but kind of modern trans gender affirming care

00:06:20.080 starts with the synthesis of estrogen and testosterone in the 1930s. In the 1960s is when

00:06:26.420 we first start developing like the field of gender affirming care. We start using hormones 0.97

00:06:30.680 and plastic surgery for trans people. By 1979, we have the first medical standards of like exactly 0.99

00:06:36.720 the steps and like what this should start looking like. Those are the Harry Benjamin standards. Yeah.

00:06:41.200 He pioneered the care and then we got the sort of formalization of standards. I think it was like

00:06:46.000 10 or 12 years after his book came out. Yes. And I will say the Harry Benjamin standards are not

00:06:50.820 beloved by trans people. I mean, this is also something that Jules Gil-Peterson talked about

00:06:55.600 is that like the history of trans gender affirming care is like, I mean, first of all,

00:07:01.120 we didn't call it gender affirming care, right? It was mostly like trying to talk trans people

00:07:05.180 out of being trans. You know, a lot of the stuff that you hear now kind of uses this much more

00:07:09.500 recent history as like the starting point. They're like, oh, they just like out of the blue started

00:07:13.340 doing gender affirming stuff on trans people but like they were doing stuff to and with trans

00:07:18.800 people for much longer than that but it was mostly trying to to talk them out of it and trying to get

00:07:23.460 them to live as cisgender people yeah and so in the 1990s is when we start getting the first

00:07:28.600 studies on like does this kind of care work how do people feel about it afterwards the the first

00:07:34.540 studies come out of sweden there's one that tracks every single person who got gender affirming

00:07:39.740 surgery between 1972 and 1992, and only 4% of people regret getting the surgeries and have

00:07:47.300 gone back. In 2014, we get a comprehensive review of every single surgery that's been done over 50

00:07:53.740 years in Sweden, 2.2% regret rate. It's fascinating to me that regret rates have become such a big

00:07:59.740 part of this conversation because most of the rest of the time, cis people do not care

00:08:08.820 how trans people feel or do not act as if we care how trans people feel right yeah so much of the

00:08:15.040 history of trans health care is the history of cis people's discomfort with giving trans people

00:08:22.000 what they have been very clearly very consistently needing for a long time that's a weird thing for

00:08:27.420 a reply guy to say oh sorry a little bit weird i'm switching into a little bit for someone who

00:08:31.360 has one job for someone who has one job for this show oh i'm gonna be bad at it but i'm gonna try

00:08:35.500 Put on a goatee and some Oakleys.

00:08:37.060 The thing that I thought I would say as the introduction to my reply guy,

00:08:40.480 I think this is how bad I'm going to be at this, was I know you are, but what am I?

00:08:44.540 Oh, yeah, that's pretty good, actually.

00:08:46.600 Just go, nuh-uh.

00:08:48.280 Yeah, fourth grade reply guy.

00:08:50.860 One of the things to really say, and this isn't something that is really disputed,

00:08:56.260 if you really get down to it, is that like gender affirming care in adults is extremely successful.

00:09:01.020 I mean, we're talking about regret rates that are like one half to one third what regret rates are for like nose jobs and like knee replacements.

00:09:07.780 Like people really feel better after they get this kind of care.

00:09:12.900 It's still preliminary, but there's early results from a survey of 90,000 trans people and among people who have been taking hormones.

00:09:20.960 The regret, like I strongly regret getting this is under 1% and just kind of transition in general.

00:09:27.140 it's only 3% of people say that they're either less satisfied with their life or like very

00:09:32.380 unsatisfied with their life. There's also a systematic review that looks at 55 studies

00:09:37.340 of gender-affirming care in adults. 51 out of 55 find that gender transition improves well-being.

00:09:44.540 And the other four find mixed results or just like no finding at all. So basically you can't

00:09:50.660 find studies that find harms. Like I'm worse off. And so again, I mean, this is a show about like

00:09:56.520 the foibles of having overconfidence in medical research and overconfidence in existing medical

00:10:02.940 systems. And so I'm not going to say that like every single person who's ever gotten

00:10:06.940 gender affirming care loves it and it's perfect in every way. Like this is a field that continues

00:10:11.260 to be refined, but there are very few fields in medicine and medical procedures for which you find

00:10:18.420 this kind of satisfaction. The idea that there are simply two genders is something that we have 0.98

00:10:25.720 built up so many systems around. It's a major organizing principle. And I think part of what 0.74

00:10:34.280 happens for this stuff is that people feel this sense of like worldview upheaval happening and

00:10:40.020 they take it out on trans people who are the people who they see as being responsible for

00:10:44.440 that worldview upheaval, right? So basically, as we start getting more and more data on gender

00:10:50.220 affirming care and how it makes people more satisfied with their lives, it sort of makes

00:10:53.980 sense to people in the field that we have this kind of care that works for adults. And we know

00:11:00.180 that a lot of trans people, not all, but many trans people start to show signs of being trans

00:11:05.500 at like four years old. We should probably start to explore this for kids. And so another thing

00:11:11.960 that Jules Gil-Peterson mentioned was that, again, this is not the first care for trans adolescents,

00:11:17.220 but the care for trans adolescents had always just been conversion therapy. They're like, 0.96

00:11:20.820 i'm a girl no you're not that was basically how it worked and so basically everything else they've

00:11:25.140 tried manifestly isn't working right and so they're like okay as a last resort let's try

00:11:32.080 like affirming these kids gender and so in 1987 the first clinic in the netherlands starts providing

00:11:39.140 the first gender affirming care to kids in 1997 we get the first study that is published of these

00:11:46.640 like very early patients actually i was gonna this isn't yellow but i'm gonna send it to you

00:11:51.240 usually it's in green oh it's not in anything it's just in well for you when i pasted it's

00:11:55.240 nothing but for me it's a good thing we had that lead up then fascinating fascinating look behind

00:12:02.980 the scenes scintillating peek behind the cushion if you sign up on patreon this is the stuff you get

00:12:09.560 it's it's pure gold but i can't see the gold

00:12:17.140 adolescence is a phase in which many identities e.g political or religious are developed

00:12:26.040 professionals fear that experimenting with certain aspects of gender such as gender role behavior

00:12:31.020 will lead adolescents to conclude that they have a gender identity problem and that they will as a

00:12:36.640 result wrongly seek a medical means of resolving their confusion. The chance of making the wrong

00:12:43.020 diagnosis and the consequent risk of postoperative regret is therefore felt to be higher in

00:12:48.760 adolescence than in adults. I think that this is the heart of all of the anxieties around this

00:12:54.460 issue, especially from people that haven't had gender dysphoria as kids, is that you think about

00:12:59.100 your time as an adolescent and you're like, yeah, I was playing around with my identity. You know,

00:13:03.400 you're a goth this week and you're a prep the next week and you are in different social groups.

00:13:07.740 And, you know, we want to make sure that we're establishing that kids are really trans and

00:13:12.100 really sort of settled in this identity before they get any kind of irreversible medical procedures.

00:13:16.760 That's something that strikes most people as like fairly reasonable, right? But the reason why I

00:13:22.080 wanted to include this is it shows that from literally the first study on this, the doctors

00:13:28.080 know this too the the idea that like this extremely obvious thing is not also obvious to the doctors

00:13:34.760 who are who are practicing this kind of medicine is like fairly implausible and it shows up in the

00:13:40.060 studies they're like hey look we know this is the time when kids are experimenting and that might

00:13:44.080 include some like gender expression experimentation and so we want to make sure in this field that

00:13:49.360 we're you know we're talking to the kids we're getting some kind of holistic assessment this is

00:13:52.800 something that the field has been aware of since literally day one i'm in the bag for big child

00:13:58.100 i'm in the pocket of big child i was you know raised by a lady who's an early childhood brain

00:14:04.700 development expert that was her her field piaget hive rise up her assessment has very consistently

00:14:13.640 been that like our issues around children are that we don't believe them when they tell us

00:14:18.500 what's going on yeah like we get ourselves into really sticky situations when we decide that

00:14:24.580 children as a whole are unreliable narrators like necessarily that's not a carte blanche i believe

00:14:31.200 you when you say there's a monster under your bed right but that is a you're telling me there's a

00:14:36.020 monster under your bed and i believe that you're really afraid of something and that fear deserves

00:14:40.420 tending to and so this first study kind of sets a precedent of like a lot of the further studies

00:14:45.100 The study, they basically look at the first 22 kids who got gender-affirming care, and they ask them three years later, are you happy about it?

00:14:54.200 And zero regret.

00:14:56.220 All of the kids are, like, very happy with this.

00:14:59.260 And we get another study in 2011 of the first 70 patients at this Dutch clinic.

00:15:05.060 Two-year follow-up.

00:15:06.180 All of them continue the treatment.

00:15:07.620 They're now doing puberty blockers and hormones.

00:15:10.020 We also start getting surveys from other countries.

00:15:12.240 So in 2014, we get a survey of 84 kids, which is every single patient that this clinic in

00:15:18.220 Vancouver saw over 13 years.

00:15:20.800 They find a reduction in suicide attempts.

00:15:23.700 We also get the first studies out of the UK gender clinic.

00:15:27.360 One of them follows 201 kids and finds improved psychological functioning.

00:15:31.840 In 2014, we get a study that follows 55 patients for an average of seven years, and they find

00:15:38.620 that they have the same mental health markers as cisgender kids.

00:15:42.240 which is actually huge because trans kids tend to have higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, lower quality of life, 0.53

00:15:49.940 and of course, higher gender dysphoria than cis kids. 0.98

00:15:53.300 And so the fact that if we're intervening early enough, it's like, holy shit, these kids are roughly the same as their cisgender peers. 0.98

00:15:59.580 That's actually like a really big deal. 0.97

00:16:01.700 That phenomenon is something that I feel like I observe more sort of weaponized by like deeply anti-trans folks

00:16:08.780 than like understood with compassion as like oh my god we could tackle a bunch of mental health

00:16:14.880 stuff before it even really develops right yeah but it very often ends up being like look at these 0.74

00:16:20.440 unstable trans people right yeah exactly more often how that gets billed so i just want to

00:16:26.200 pause here in like 2014 2015 to say that like all of what we're seeing in youth gender-affirming care

00:16:34.060 medicine at this point is like fairly standard right we do this with lots of other medical

00:16:37.760 treatments. We have this thing that seems to work in adults. Over time, we kind of slowly expand it

00:16:43.200 to kids, right? We have like a migraine treatment that's like, hey, it works in adults. Let's see

00:16:47.620 if it works in kids. As you get more data, you kind of make bigger studies and you start giving

00:16:52.240 it to more kids and you just develop like a body of research over time. You know, this is a podcast

00:16:58.600 that, you know, has criticized other studies for being really small. And like a lot of these early

00:17:04.060 studies are on like, yeah, 100, 200 kids. They're really small. So we're not going to say that we've

00:17:10.060 established that this care is like definitively great for every single person who gets it under

00:17:14.700 every single circumstance. But yeah, this is promising enough to continue doing it and to

00:17:19.300 continue doing it on larger numbers of kids. And this is essentially what has happened, right? In

00:17:23.900 the first two decades of this field, you have a lot of small studies coming out, mostly because

00:17:28.260 you're simply not giving this care to that many kids, right? The clinic in the Netherlands says

00:17:33.140 they have nine patients per year for the first couple years. This isn't really a debate about

00:17:39.400 like, is this the perfect care for every single person all the time or not? It's like, is this

00:17:44.560 promising enough to keep giving it to people? And at this point, it would be bananas to stop

00:17:51.820 giving care to kids on the basis of the fact that there aren't larger studies when large studies

00:17:57.000 are literally impossible. It becomes this sort of chicken or the egg thing, which is like,

00:18:01.980 we need larger studies in order to provide more care to more trans people and we can't provide

00:18:09.460 more care to more trans people until we have larger studies exactly so what we have basically

00:18:15.660 is is the the field exploring gender affirming care for kids throughout the 2000s 2010s but

00:18:21.980 that's all kind of under the radar i don't know about you i i like was not aware of this at all

00:18:26.280 until it started showing up in popular media and kind of the mid 2010s it's like you know it's a

00:18:30.200 Again, it's like a very small field.

00:18:32.380 And so we finally get the first appearance of this as an issue in the mid 2000s where

00:18:38.120 I can't find exactly sort of patient zero for this.

00:18:42.640 But in 2006, we get a Barbara Walters special about this kid named Jazz Jennings who transitioned

00:18:50.600 and was living as a little girl.

00:18:53.280 And then there's an Atlantic article called A Boy's Life.

00:18:57.400 god the amount of misgendering in this era they're misgendering and dead naming this kid 0.98

00:19:02.780 throughout the article jesus fucking christ so there's this entire decade where trans people 0.96

00:19:07.800 in general are getting more visibility and we start getting these little inklings of like 0.95

00:19:11.820 the trans kids thing there's a oprah special in 2011 there's a 2013 article in the new york times

00:19:19.900 we then in 2014 get the time cover like the transgender moment right because like orange

00:19:25.480 The New Black is on and Laverne Cox is in it.

00:19:28.400 Caitlyn Jenner comes out in 2015, you know, cover of Vanity Fair, huge deal. 0.82

00:19:33.200 There's all these bathroom bills in 2016.

00:19:35.800 Yeah.

00:19:36.000 Prior to all that, we get Chaz Bono.

00:19:37.900 Yeah, Chaz Bono.

00:19:38.660 Yeah, exactly.

00:19:39.420 It's just like this is becoming a much more prominent issue.

00:19:42.800 And also, this is really the end of the gay marriage fight, right?

00:19:46.180 Obergefell is 2015, I believe.

00:19:48.380 And it's sort of like at the time, the Christian right, they just lost, right?

00:19:52.620 like gay marriage you know in public polling in the law is recognized everywhere yeah there's a

00:19:57.900 lot of all of a sudden there was a lot of anti-porn advocacy which yeah yeah yeah it's like

00:20:04.060 you guys just have free time it was just a real mission drift moment of like yeah we lost our

00:20:08.960 thing and unfortunately they have found their new thing what you start seeing is these inklings of 0.99

00:20:13.880 this issue of what they call gender confusion right that's the whole fucking trans trender 1.00

00:20:20.480 fucking bull. Yeah. And like, this is the way that they conceive of like trans people just 1.00

00:20:26.640 like as a group is basically people that people that, you know, as kids, they're confused as 0.99

00:20:31.100 adults, they're like sex perverts. I mean, that's the thing that I find really remarkable 0.97

00:20:34.800 about so much of the sort of both the studies and the discourse around this is that it feels

00:20:40.300 like there's so little accounting for the immense force of transphobia. Aubrey, I just want to point

00:20:46.540 out that we've been recording for 40 minutes and you haven't done any reply guy shit not one reply 0.92

00:20:51.900 guy the duality of the show is that you can't pretend to be a reply guy and i can't pretend 0.82

00:20:56.740 not to be a reply guy for like even five minutes neither one of us can listen our identities on

00:21:02.580 this are consistent and persistent that's actually the perfect metaphor for this we can stop now

00:21:09.740 it doesn't work so for this i interviewed uh julia serrano who is a biologist wonderful

00:21:17.040 yeah like i'm drawing heavily on her work she has a very detailed timeline the way that she

00:21:23.520 described it was there there's just kind of these like swirling anxieties right because a lot of

00:21:29.960 parents are reading these articles and so in 2015 we have the establishment of three websites

00:21:37.520 the first is called fourth wave now which is supposed to be referenced to like fourth wave

00:21:42.920 feminism wow uh-oh i hate it so this is an excerpt from the about page you should probably

00:21:50.600 do a british accent for all these because whenever i think of transphobia it's in a british accent

00:21:54.340 in my head they're mutating the kids no no no absolutely not they do that was impeccable governor

00:22:02.180 fourth wave now was started by the mother of a teenage girl who suddenly announced she was a

00:22:13.660 quote-unquote trans man after a few weeks of total immersion in youtube transition vlogs

00:22:20.560 the daughter has since desisted from identifying as transgender after much research and fruitless

00:22:27.540 searching for an alternative online viewpoint, this mom began writing about her deepening

00:22:32.820 skepticism of the ever accelerating medical and media fascination with the phenomenon of

00:22:39.660 quote unquote, transgender children. Boy, oh boy, the level of scare quotes in this.

00:22:45.960 There's a weird, like reluctance to identify these as like transphobic websites. But I feel

00:22:52.640 Like if you're putting the term trans man and transgender children in quotes, remember

00:22:58.520 in the 90s how they used to put gay marriage in quotes in like extreme rate publications?

00:23:04.620 It was like, like they're trying to call wives and wives.

00:23:08.440 I think we can be comfortable looking back on that and being like that this was homophobic.

00:23:12.300 If you look through the archives of this website, it's every single post is about how, you

00:23:18.580 know discrimination against trans people is kind of overblown and the suicide rates aren't really

00:23:23.380 all that high you know some of the post titles are neuroplasticity the gaping logic hole in the

00:23:30.200 transgender house of cards another one's called how is this not a cult another one is baby boomer's

00:23:36.620 head explodes how did identity politics gain all this traction oh good it's part of identity

00:23:41.640 politics discourse exactly there's i was going to read you a whole paragraph but it's so boring

00:23:45.740 they also have some like soros stuff so there's a post called the open society foundations and 0.89

00:23:52.220 the transgender movement oh fuck maybe you don't want to say it's transphobic i i don't know if i 0.96

00:23:56.820 really want to litigate that but like this is an anti-trans blog this is a blog of anti-trans 0.99

00:24:01.460 messages i think that's like pretty well established i think we can probably all agree 0.97

00:24:05.380 at this point that like ex-gay conversion therapy is also like a pretty fucking homophobic venture 0.99

00:24:11.120 right? And the contours of the sort of debate around the existence of trans people 0.97

00:24:18.000 are really similar to that. You aren't who you say you are. You can't be trusted to narrate

00:24:22.980 your own identity. I would say actually, arguably the unreliable narrators of their own identity

00:24:28.560 are people who display this kind of gatekeeping to other people's identities. If you're doing

00:24:35.860 this kind of thing, I don't know that you get to decide if your actions are bigoted or not.

00:24:40.640 So that's one of them. That's fourth wave now. There's another one called Transgender Trend,

00:24:45.920 which I'm going to send you. Oh, fuck off. I know. We are an organization of parents, 1.00

00:24:52.080 professionals, and academics based in the UK who are concerned about the current trend to 0.97

00:24:58.000 diagnose children as transgender, including the unprecedented number of teenage girls

00:25:04.240 suddenly self-identifying as quote-unquote trans suddenly we are also concerned about legislation

00:25:11.160 which places transgender rights above the right to safety for girls and young women in public

00:25:18.280 toilets and changing rooms along with fairness for girls in sport it's about fairness in girl 0.84

00:25:24.220 sports this like idea that this gives aid and comfort to people who want to sexually assault

00:25:31.760 girls and women. That's the one where I'm like, I don't know how you see this as anything other

00:25:37.580 than bigotry. Well, this is this is what's so fascinating to me is like, you know, slippery

00:25:41.260 slope arguments are a mainstay of conservative rhetoric, right? It's like a man's gonna marry

00:25:45.940 his horse or whatever. But what's wild about the bathroom stuff, the trans bathroom stuff, 1.00

00:25:50.600 is that the slippery slope they're warning of is already in place. People already use whatever 1.00

00:25:55.680 fucking bathroom they want. What I would say to a paragraph like this is it sounds like you're 0.99

00:26:00.000 really concerned with sexual assault, what is your work here on actual sexual assault, right?

00:26:08.120 It's very strange to be like, I'm very concerned about sexual assault. Therefore, man, do I hate

00:26:14.080 trans people, right? Or like, I don't trust them, right? Where you're like, that's not a one-to-one. 1.00

00:26:19.640 Those are two disconnected statements that you are making.

00:26:23.320 So those are the first two websites. There's also one called youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org,

00:26:29.060 which we're not going to go as far into. It's now defunct. But it's basically the same thing.

00:26:33.260 We're medical professionals. We're doctors. And we're concerned about the medicalization

00:26:36.980 of trans kids, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So these websites pop up in 2015. On February 20th,

00:26:44.320 2016, we have the first ever claim that social contagion is the reason why kids are trans. 0.98

00:26:53.460 this appears as a comment on the about page for fourth wave now boy oh fucking boy we're gonna 0.73

00:27:02.680 we're gonna dive into this because it has a lot of components that we still see now so i'm gonna 0.88

00:27:08.040 send you this this is from a commenter called skeptical therapist there is this episode of

00:27:14.580 star trek the next generation where the crew is introduced to a mysterious alien video game

00:27:20.880 It slowly infiltrates the crew, and Wesley Crusher and another young ensign watch as the adults around them slip into addiction.

00:27:30.120 Wesley begins to sense that something is amiss and goes to find Captain Picard.

00:27:36.300 He is so relieved to find the captain and to be able to confide in him.

00:27:40.880 As Wesley leaves, we see the captain reach into his desk with signature sang-froid and take out a gaming device.

00:27:49.260 he too has been infected as we suspected the game is really an insidious mind controlling apparatus 0.98

00:27:57.120 that will allow an alien race to gain control of the ship this is what this trans madness feels 0.91

00:28:04.780 like to me long wind up i have some comments about the length and tone of this so this is

00:28:10.100 another relatively long excerpt where she talks about her own experience the alien mind control

00:28:18.100 device made its way into my home about two years ago when my then 11 year old daughter begged me

00:28:25.280 for a tumblr account since her friends all had one foolishly i consented without looking into

00:28:32.580 it further i wish i hadn't this trend toward all things pan slash bi slash non-binary slash

00:28:40.720 gender fluid slash trans etc has had a huge amount of energy among kids my daughter's age

00:28:47.660 I have watched it with some degree of suspicion and concern, but last month the degree of my alarm

00:28:54.580 grew. She started dropping provocative hints, such as asking if she could get a buzz cut.

00:29:01.160 I found some writing she had left around the house where she wondered to herself whether she

00:29:06.200 were quote-unquote really a girl. She was very excited a few weeks later when a new friend came

00:29:12.300 out as trans. For the record, this is a kid who has never had any gender nonconforming behavior

00:29:19.060 at all. She has always been interested in art and dance at school. She is a little socially anxious,

00:29:26.640 and that is the only thing that makes her susceptible to this, I think.

00:29:30.960 This is really the ur example of this social contagion phenomenon, right? Where we have a kid,

00:29:36.780 no signs of transness. And then all of a sudden, right, they get on Tumblr,

00:29:42.360 a couple of their friends are trans, and then boom, mom, I'm trans. We then have another

00:29:48.620 important component. I'm going to read this paragraph. It isn't that I am a hating ogre.

00:29:55.200 I think if I really believed that my kid were profoundly unhappy in her body,

00:29:59.820 that this narrative was coming from her and not from social media and the kids around her,

00:30:04.460 I would be reacting very differently. I would also be having a different reaction if I could

00:30:09.860 convince myself that gender identity experimentation were essentially harmless. 0.99

00:30:15.320 Girls want to pretend to be boys? Sure, why not? But it is absolutely chilling to think that these 0.94

00:30:21.960 kids who are just doing what teens do get support from the adults around them that let them get

00:30:28.520 stuck in the experiment so that many of them wind up permanently changing their bodies this is

00:30:34.880 another very important component and comes up so often in these accounts it's like i'm not a

00:30:39.540 transphobe yeah if all i thought was this was like a little identity thing i wouldn't be so mad but

00:30:45.260 this is different something is going on that is going to push her into medicalization and in all

00:30:51.500 of these irreversible procedures it feels like it's operating on this like emotional register

00:30:56.940 where it's like, I need permission to be uncomfortable with this.

00:31:01.200 Also, it feels really telling this. I think that if I really believe that my kid were profoundly

00:31:07.080 unhappy in her body, that kind of language is like requiring an amount of performed suffering

00:31:15.160 in order to believe this identity. And I think that sort of rhetoric is feels like it's popping

00:31:22.400 up more and more yeah you can't be trans because you're not unhappy enough right i'm not seeing you

00:31:29.440 suffer in the body or gender presentation that you currently have ergo your identity is not real 0.90

00:31:37.740 which is also something that is boy oh boy pretty much guaranteed to create some suffering so i

00:31:43.500 guess you did it so okay final thing this is like the final component of this and i'm really

00:31:49.140 belaboring this because all four of these components will show up in every single account

00:31:52.520 of social contagion, like from now until forever. So here's this. Her current school is wonderfully

00:31:58.660 progressive and nurturing, but the school administrators all seem keen to jump on the

00:32:04.100 quote unquote trans is terrific train. They proudly proclaim to prospective parents that

00:32:09.560 there are several kids transitioning in the upper school. Ooh, this is a private school, baby.

00:32:14.740 upper school i recognize my people okay i thought it was like the top floor but okay it seems like

00:32:21.380 this fact is sort of exciting to everyone and establishes without question they're all accepting

00:32:26.820 super liberal cred i have decided that the cult indoctrinators have had free access to her

00:32:34.220 beautiful 13 year old brain for two years now and it is time that i intervene and fight for my

00:32:40.740 daughter this also relies on this myth that it's like you're a lone voice of reason in a in an

00:32:46.780 unreasonable world it's so fascinating to me that being like hey we've had trans students here who

00:32:54.260 are allowed to be who they are has been translated in this person in their brain to the trans is 0.91

00:33:02.420 terrific train right it feels like such similar energy to the like glorifying obesity energy

00:33:09.980 right right where you're like you just saw a fat person who didn't look sad right and you're

00:33:15.000 seeing it as like you're trying to indoctrinate me like it just is wild to me the ways in which

00:33:20.380 people tell on themselves in public right i was talking to my brother about this last night he

00:33:25.260 was like man a thing that he has said to me many times is that the things that are most opaque to

00:33:30.820 us about ourselves and the things we're keep we think we're keeping as secrets we're actually

00:33:35.660 just like blaring out to everyone around us. Yeah, this is like when my therapist said that

00:33:40.400 I'm a nervous wreck. Thanks. Throughout this entire panic, we're going to see a lot of claims

00:33:46.940 about existing institutions being worryingly pro-trans in ways that seem a little dubious

00:33:53.060 to me, partly from what I've read. And I've interviewed numerous like trans teens around

00:33:57.540 the country. I've interviewed parents of trans teens. I've interviewed clinicians.

00:34:00.660 this is not an experience that i've seen even in affirming contexts we don't see this like i hope

00:34:07.940 you're trans i want you to be trans it's still a really really difficult process of coming out

00:34:13.200 i just think about like being this kid and if your mom was saying these things about you

00:34:17.940 on the internet although i actually part of me thinks that this might be fake there's something

00:34:23.580 a little perfect about the fact that it all started with a fight over having a tumblr account

00:34:29.600 That's something Julia Serrano mentioned to me because we were talking about this decade before this increased visibility of trans rights and the emergence of this myth.

00:34:39.200 A lot of this is a proxy for anxieties around kids and the internet, right?

00:34:44.520 Whenever we have a new technology, whether it's graphic novels or jukeboxes or automobiles, there's a huge panic about how kids are using this technology.

00:34:53.840 And, of course, there's huge anxiety about the internet and teenagers and social media and everything else. 0.89

00:34:58.260 And so the fact that there's this trans thing, you know, people transgressing gender norms, which makes people uncomfortable in general, and then we can also kind of blame it on the internet, right? 0.79

00:35:08.060 We can say, well, she's going on Tumblr and now she's trans. 0.67

00:35:10.840 It's just like this perfect combination of two existing sites of huge anxieties for parents. 0.93

00:35:18.000 And there's later studies of like the people who are using these websites and it's mostly middle class, you know, upper middle class white women. 0.51

00:35:26.060 Nothing bad has ever come from the anxieties of white upper middle class parents, right?

00:35:30.920 This is like the same kind of suburban fear that gave us like the stranger danger panic.

00:35:35.680 Sure.

00:35:36.200 This is just a group that is like, you know, prone to anxiety, especially anxiety around

00:35:41.420 teens, anxiety around technology.

00:35:43.780 And it is a group of people who are very accustomed to their anxieties becoming a centerpiece

00:35:50.420 of public policy.

00:35:51.980 Exactly.

00:35:52.280 It's also, can I speak to the manager energy?

00:35:55.560 I demand to speak to whoever, who can fire you.

00:35:59.620 I say this as a person who is of that group of people.

00:36:03.760 As a member of the Karen community, I just want to call out my own people.

00:36:08.140 It's the idea that every feeling that I have deserves tending to through policy and public discourse.

00:36:15.280 Exactly.

00:36:16.260 So this is just a random comment on the about page of this blog in 2016.

00:36:22.860 So a week later, the blog turns it into a post.

00:36:26.420 It has the headline, Tumblr snags another girl, but her therapist mom knows a thing or two about social contagion.

00:36:34.740 I was planning on going down a deep rabbit hole on the concept of social contagion.

00:36:40.640 This is something that has come up tangentially in other episodes.

00:36:43.460 I decided not to mostly because it seems like it's a pretty contested concept.

00:36:47.820 I read this really interesting meta-analysis that had something about gun violence.

00:36:52.660 Like there's this theory that gun violence is socially contagious.

00:36:55.780 There's these kind of peer influences that normalize using guns to like solve disputes, right?

00:37:01.700 And there was one study that found that like one of the best predictors of somebody who's arrested for gun violence is like how many previous incidents of gun violence have there been in their neighborhood?

00:37:12.040 Okay, that might be social contagion, but that also might just be like a poor neighborhood.

00:37:15.680 Yeah. And the other one they mentioned was that apparently there's a spike in gun violence

00:37:19.800 when there's more depictions of gun violence on TV. But that actually feels like a different

00:37:24.880 phenomenon to me because it's not peer to peer influence. I started to notice this since I came

00:37:29.740 across this literature that people just invoke social contagion as like, oh, it's social contagion.

00:37:33.820 But like, isn't that just like we do things that our friends do, which is just totally normal

00:37:38.320 behavior, right? Like my friend says, this book is good. And then I read the book. But then also

00:37:41.920 if a friend of mine is like clinically depressed, I don't know if that would transfer to me in the

00:37:46.740 same way, right? And, you know, there are studies of depression. There's a study that compares

00:37:52.300 roommates, college roommates, when one has depression and the other doesn't. And you

00:37:55.960 would expect if social contagion was true, the second roommate to develop depression over time.

00:37:59.800 And that doesn't happen. It clearly depends on what is being contagious and the relationship of

00:38:06.600 the two people. It just is like, we should just talk about transgender identity as transgender

00:38:11.120 or identity rather than trying to put it in this frame of this concept that kind of works sometimes

00:38:14.980 and doesn't and just isn't really like all that useful of a way to look at this. The energy of

00:38:19.460 this feels so similar to the post Columbine is Marilyn Manson to blame sort of discourse where

00:38:26.600 I'm just like, guys, we got to rule out like 129 things before we get to Marilyn Manson.

00:38:34.800 Exactly. So it's not totally clear how this happens. But relatively shortly after this blog

00:38:40.320 post on fourth wave now the concept of social contagion starts like going viral among conservative

00:38:48.240 writers so in august the american conservative publishes a piece called the cult of transgender

00:38:54.280 dude which quotes a parent who like emailed the author and says as a parent living the nightmare

00:39:01.900 of having a teen who suddenly announces she's transgender i can tell you there are no doctors

00:39:06.800 who will do anything but agree there is no science behind this there is no way to medically diagnose 0.83

00:39:12.020 her her therapist knows that she is not transgender but fears there's no way we can stop her there's

00:39:18.500 also shortly thereafter a david french current new york times uh opinion columnist column in the 0.60

00:39:25.100 national review called the tragic transgender contagion where he basically repeats this myth

00:39:32.200 of like gender confusion he's like yeah there's some people that like say they're trans but

00:39:35.220 actually they're like confused about their gender. And he also says, gatekeeping has been replaced by

00:39:40.340 cheerleading. In the UK, where records are easier to obtain, clinics are facing an explosion in

00:39:45.720 demand for quote unquote gender identity treatment. At one major clinic, referrals quadrupled. At

00:39:52.280 another, they increased 20 fold in 10 years. So these are all relative statistics, right? They're

00:39:57.500 increasing tenfold. Remember the first year that the gender clinic opened, it had two patients?

00:40:01.980 Right. I mean, you could say that about a lot of small businesses from year one to year two.

00:40:06.740 It's always wild to me how like the actual articles on this always contain

00:40:09.840 the information debunking themselves. He mentions later in the piece, he's like,

00:40:14.060 oh, the staggering rise, et cetera. And then he says this UK gender clinic,

00:40:17.660 they've had an unprecedented increase from 697 referrals to 1,398 referrals in 2016.

00:40:25.720 So that's like 1,400 referrals to this gender clinic in the UK. There are 8 million kids.

00:40:31.980 between 10 and 19 in the UK. So that's 0.0175% have gotten referrals to the gender clinic or

00:40:39.200 one in around 6,000 kids. Right. These are also just referrals, right? There's already at this

00:40:44.760 time years long waiting lists. And then once you get referred, you still have appointments and you

00:40:49.280 sort of then go through the process and you may or may not get a referral to endocrinology. So

00:40:54.020 these are very small numbers. But of course, all of this kind of reinforces this idea of like

00:40:58.880 social contagion they're just reaching for like somebody has to be responsible for this right 0.83

00:41:04.700 right it can't just be that some people are trans and now there is like more of a way for more of

00:41:11.900 those people to come out right than 50 or 100 years ago we have been recording for an hour and 0.73

00:41:18.260 44 minutes and we're getting to the the thing that's in the title of the episode fucking 0.76

00:41:23.120 we're getting to the actual oh no this is a left-wing podcast it's like 90 context is this 0.86

00:41:28.500 a two-parter or a no-parter we just never get to the topic so all of that is bouncing around

00:41:37.160 in 2016 in february of 2017 we get the first appearance finally of the term rapid onset

00:41:47.240 gender dysphoria. This appears in a study by a woman named Lisa Litman, who is a professor at

00:41:54.400 Brown. Before she was studying women's and reproductive health, she has no like background

00:41:58.580 in trans anything. But she publishes in February 2017, this like very short poster abstract. It's

00:42:06.620 like a column and a half in the Journal of Adolescent Health. The title is Rapid Onset

00:42:13.980 of gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults, colon, a descriptive study. So this is

00:42:19.740 the text of the study. So this is under purpose. This is what it says. Parents online are observed

00:42:27.180 reporting their children experiencing a rapid onset of gender dysphoria appearing for the first

00:42:32.700 time during or after puberty. They describe this development occurring in the context of being part

00:42:39.260 of a peer group where one, multiple, or even all friends have developed gender dysphoria and come

00:42:45.100 out as transgender during the same time frame and or an increase in social media slash internet use.

00:42:52.960 The purpose of this study is to document this observation and describe the resulting

00:42:59.200 presentation of gender dysphoria inconsistent with existing research. The existing research

00:43:04.820 indicates that most trans people realize relatively young and it's not something that just kind of like

00:43:11.420 suddenly occurs in adolescence. So kind of on its face, it's like, okay, this might be like a new

00:43:16.700 phenomenon. However, the first two words of this are parents online. So this is not a survey of

00:43:24.840 trans people who say, hey, I suddenly got this identity. It's not that they developed gender

00:43:30.200 dysphoria suddenly, it's that it felt sudden to their parents. As a project, it's so weird

00:43:37.800 to try to propose and describe a phenomenon of self-discovery from other people.

00:43:45.580 And by asking other people who have alarmingly high rates of rejecting their own children for

00:43:52.140 this specific thing. Exactly. This is not just a survey of parents. This is a survey of parents

00:43:59.400 who were recruited on Fourth Wave Now, Transgender Trend, and Youth Transcritical Professionals.

00:44:06.880 Those three websites we talked about earlier are where the researcher posted the advertisement

00:44:12.900 recruiting participants.

00:44:14.960 Boy, oh boy, oh boy.

00:44:16.180 It's like saying, oh, we wanted to find out how many teenagers are worshiping Satan.

00:44:21.160 So we went to parents who think their teens are worshiping satan.com and we surveyed a

00:44:27.460 bunch of parents. And wouldn't you know it, 99% of teens are worshiping Satan. Yeah, it just it

00:44:33.600 feels like a reverse engineering of like, the science is here because I'm uncomfortable. Exactly.

00:44:38.880 It just feels like such a classic overreach. So the study, it just says like, okay, we got 164

00:44:44.540 parents to fill out this survey. It says, you know, 93% are female 94% are white. I think this

00:44:51.580 is important. 88% of parents answered that they believe transgender people deserve the same rights

00:44:57.080 and protections as other individuals but not my kid this is again this thing this this constant

00:45:02.240 invocation of like we're not transphobes we just want to say right you know what it is

00:45:07.380 it's the parental version of nimbyism like it's fine in theory but not in here not in my back

00:45:16.000 child okay nim yes so despite this thing of like 88 of respondents say that like i'm chill with

00:45:24.960 trans people, 76.5% of people say that they believe their child is incorrect in their belief

00:45:32.640 of being transgender. And then we get into the like super red flag stuff. Oh, that wasn't the

00:45:37.300 red flag stuff. Well, it's getting to like the sort of like the more comedic red flags, honestly.

00:45:42.680 Some of the things that are in this are like genuinely hilarious. So here's the next couple

00:45:47.020 paragraphs. It's not all hilarious, but we'll get there. Although the expected prevalence rate for

00:45:53.320 transgender young adults is 0.7%, 39% of the friend groups described had more than half of

00:46:02.260 the pre-existing friend group becoming transgender. On average, 3.5 friends per group became gender

00:46:10.440 dysphoric. So this is again asking parents for like objective information that they would have

00:46:15.360 no idea about. Like my parents did not know the makeups of my friend groups. Where friend group

00:46:20.580 activities were known 64 of friend groups mocked people who were not transgender or lgbtq 1.00

00:46:29.420 this is my favorite shit honestly seems low they hate you because you're straight it's reverse 0.99

00:46:36.520 discrimination this is such a fucking tell to me of just like how janky the survey is it's also 1.00

00:46:42.920 like you're talking about teens and children yeah there there's no this has no relevance they're 0.98

00:46:48.380 making fun of you because you wear skinny jeans they're not making fun of you because you're

00:46:53.780 straight also it's like you're asking parents what their teens are making fun of them for

00:47:00.200 the answer is everything everything you embarrass them in every way wait keep reading keep reading

00:47:05.640 keep reading where popularity status was known 64 of adolescents had an increase in popularity

00:47:12.520 within the friend group after announcing they were transgender again it's like how would parents

00:47:18.560 know this how would parents know that also ask the trans kids yeah it's not do people like you

00:47:26.260 more for being trans it's really weird adolescents and young adults received online advice that if

00:47:32.360 they didn't transition immediately they'd never be happy and that parents who didn't agree to

00:47:38.100 take them for hormones are abusive and transphobic. You said that it's like, this is coming from a

00:47:43.780 place of anxiety. It's also, you can tell it's coming from some place of resentment too. It's

00:47:48.600 like they're sitting around and they're mocking us. Like, why would you even ask this? Adolescents

00:47:53.120 and young adults expressed distrust of people who are not transgender, stopped spending time

00:47:58.820 with non-transgender friends, withdrew from their families, and expressed that they only trust

00:48:04.460 information about gender dysphoria that comes from transgender sources cis people are like

00:48:09.920 super on one about trans people so i'm like that's reasonable the thing is it's it's funny

00:48:15.940 that like it's sort of purporting to be a description of this phenomenon where people

00:48:20.760 realize they're trans really quickly what it really is is a portrait of like what transphobic

00:48:25.900 parents yeah think is going on with their kids and online like none of this actually sounds

00:48:31.000 like what you find on the internet or like the advice around trans people and this whole thing 0.65

00:48:35.980 of like they're gonna call you transphobic they don't even spend time with their non-transgender

00:48:40.320 friends anymore it's like dude like one percent of the population is transgender these every

00:48:45.160 trans person is spending time with people who are not transgender also this is like a core part of

00:48:50.140 identity development right yes when i was in college i was like i don't talk to straight people 0.96

00:48:54.480 right and then you fucking come out of it like whatever yeah the place that that comes from 0.95

00:48:59.380 is not like a deep-seated bigotry against straight people or cis people or whatever. 0.99

00:49:05.500 It comes from hard and fast signals from other people that you are not wanted here.

00:49:11.960 That is born of very clear behavior from other people. It's born of transphobia.

00:49:18.900 Another thing that I think is really important to stress here after this study gets published is 0.89

00:49:24.680 the entire concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria is actually distinct from social

00:49:31.960 contagion in like meaningful ways, right? Because just because somebody discovers that they're trans 0.58

00:49:38.280 quickly or suddenly doesn't mean it's not true, right? There's something very weird 1.00

00:49:44.540 at the center of this, that it's like your discovery of your status somehow invalidates

00:49:49.900 the status. So, I mean, the thing that I always think of is I have an uncle who lives in Berlin

00:49:55.260 and his husband, whose name is not Fritz, but I will call Fritz, grew up in East Germany and like,

00:50:01.420 of course, was not exposed to any information about homosexuality the entire time that he was

00:50:06.220 growing up. What Fritz says is that like he knew he was different, but he couldn't put his finger

00:50:11.260 on it. And when he was, I believe, 19, he was watching a documentary on East German TV that

00:50:17.500 was like not a sympathetic documentary but it was a documentary about like homosexuals and he says

00:50:22.660 the minute he heard the word he was like that's what i am yeah yeah on some level that is rapid

00:50:29.400 onset homosexuality right he finally had a term for it but first of all he he is gay like he he's

00:50:35.620 he's now married to a man and like that that's not invalid for people to sort of have this epiphany

00:50:42.460 or sudden realization and like yeah you know what sometimes that does come from a friend 0.50

00:50:46.140 sometimes that does come from something you see on tv or fucking tumblr who knows yeah but that 0.58

00:50:51.140 doesn't mean that it's not true yeah right there's just this really weird desperation to find some 0.63

00:50:58.400 some excuse to say that this whole thing is invalid but like it's not even clear at this point 0.74

00:51:03.880 that rapid onset gender dysphoria even is a fucking thing because nobody's interviewed actual 0.99

00:51:08.340 trans kids about their experiences right so the the this entire concept is from a fucking blog 0.98

00:51:13.180 comment right yeah but then also nothing about this this phenomenon even if it is true means 0.98

00:51:19.280 that it's all a fucking trend or it's fake or they're going to desist eventually it just is 0.55

00:51:23.220 like another way that people discover things about themselves i think one of the biggest tells in a 0.97

00:51:27.460 bunch of the stuff uh that we've talked about today is the lack of curiosity it's fascinating

00:51:35.020 to me how rarely uh when people go oh there are all these kids and they might all be trans and

00:51:41.460 blah, blah, blah, blah, that no one just goes, okay, then what?

00:51:44.400 Yeah. 0.79

00:51:44.940 Then there's trans adults.

00:51:46.660 Yeah.

00:51:46.940 And then, unclear.

00:51:51.260 So basically after this extremely brief, not very indicative of anything study of, quote,

00:51:57.840 rapid onset gender dysphoria comes out, we then get this concept slowly moving from the

00:52:04.700 right, from conservative publications into kind of polite mainstream news.

00:52:09.720 So in 2017, there's a BBC documentary called Transgender Kids, Who Knows Best?

00:52:15.940 In the Globe and Mail, which is kind of a center-right publication in Canada,

00:52:20.440 there's an article called Don't Treat All Cases of Gender Dysphoria the Same Way.

00:52:26.260 This is a little excerpt, but...

00:52:27.960 Rapid-onset gender dysphoria, seen primarily in teenage girls and university-aged young women,

00:52:33.840 is characterized by a sudden desire to transition without any signs of gender dysphoria in childhood.

00:52:40.880 It typically emerges after an individual has spent much time researching gender dysphoria online.

00:52:47.040 A 2017 study found an association between this phenomenon and having a friend or multiple friends identify as transgender,

00:52:55.120 suggesting similarities to a social contagion.

00:52:58.020 these girls frequently also have other mental health conditions like autism or borderline

00:53:04.380 personality disorder that should be the focus of concern instead this is another this is kind of

00:53:10.080 the the final component of this myth that starts appearing at this time that what we're really

00:53:15.860 talking about here is kids with mental health problems and they might say they're trans but

00:53:20.000 they're really just acting out the fact that they have autism or they're borderline or they're

00:53:24.220 depressed or something else this is like a very important component of this myth going forward

00:53:29.560 well also this is where i'm going to channel matt bernstein oh match if this is indistinguishable

00:53:35.640 from the rhetoric in like the 2000s and early 2010s specifically around marriage was just like

00:53:41.800 yeah if we do this then it will be cool to be gay yeah it's very funny to me that there are so many

00:53:48.260 straights as people out there who are like wait a minute what if there are more somewhere and i'm 0.98

00:53:53.240 like surprise there totally are that's the thing it's this is what is so frustrating to me is like

00:53:58.880 so much of this is driven by like very explicit homophobia and transphobia there are people who

00:54:04.700 have like legitimate questions and like i'm fine to speak to those people but there are also a lot 0.98

00:54:09.660 of people who cosplay yeah as someone with reasonable questions who are just fucking 0.99

00:54:13.520 transphobes and homophobes absolute sea lions yeah exactly there's lots of that shit going on 0.99

00:54:18.280 too to me it's just like such a fucking yeah it's just such a perfect like little distillation 1.00

00:54:22.940 of like where this is because it's the same messages right but it's sounding it's like 0.96

00:54:27.000 sounding more polite now yeah it's like well you know there's a study that says you know this rapid

00:54:31.320 ounce of gender dysphoria there's like these it has these characteristics it's like i can see

00:54:35.380 reasonable people reading this and being like oh interesting yeah yeah like not like in in totally

00:54:40.000 good faith and being like oh wow okay because most people don't know a trans person and they

00:54:44.280 don't really have a lot of context for this issue at one point we did a focus group specifically on

00:54:49.500 trans healthcare with cis people i had heard for years and years and years just like knowing one

00:54:55.400 queer or trans person like can make a whole world of difference for people and i was always sort of

00:55:00.160 like yeah we did a focus group and asked people to list off the words that they associated with

00:55:06.620 the word transgender as the like opening exercise pariah was a word that came up over and over again

00:55:13.420 someone wrote murder okay and then we got to this last guy and he was like wine lover

00:55:20.740 what hard working uh hall and oats fan was one of it and i was like what is going on so the

00:55:31.340 moderator of the discussion group was like it sounds like your words are different than everybody

00:55:35.160 else's words what's going on there and he was like oh i work with a gal down at the post office

00:55:40.340 she's great oh that's so funny he was the one person in the room who was like close to a trans 0.52

00:55:47.820 woman yeah and his words were just like night and fucking day it's also it's so funny that he also

00:55:53.060 seemed to misunderstand the brief where they're like what do you think about transgender people 0.96

00:55:56.560 as a group and he's like janine loves steely dan and the orioles it's like i don't know that you

00:56:04.240 understood the question but you know what i'll take it your heart is in the right place but then

00:56:08.560 And I don't know if you remember this internet blow up, but in this kind of wave of laundering,

00:56:14.440 we have an article in The Stranger, Seattle's alt-weekly newspaper, called The Detransitioners.

00:56:21.420 They were transgender until they weren't. 1.00

00:56:23.720 What the fuck, The Stranger? 1.00

00:56:25.960 Let's read a couple paragraphs. 1.00

00:56:29.600 Oh, fucking shit. 1.00

00:56:31.400 This one's kind of long. 1.00

00:56:32.680 Jane, a 53-year-old woman in Southern California, lived as a trans man for nearly 20 years before discovering radical feminist forums online and, soon after, opted to transition back.

00:56:46.440 I really thought I was trans, Jane said. I really believed it, 100%. I was even fired from my job for coming out.

00:56:53.860 The idea that the perceived boom in the trans population is due to peer pressure or social contagion can be uncomfortable for trans people and their supporters.

00:57:02.680 It's also a theory frequently pushed by the right

00:57:05.880 In reality, no one knows exactly why so many people seem to have recently come out as trans

00:57:12.460 Or some other form of genderqueer 0.59

00:57:14.880 It's a mystery

00:57:15.540 The writer and trans woman, Julia Serrano, argues in an essay on Medium

00:57:19.660 That this is due to the shift from the old gatekeeper system of trans healthcare

00:57:24.060 To the newer model that, quote, takes trans people's experiences and concerns seriously

00:57:29.720 Increased visibility and social acceptance are also logical explanations for the perceived growth in the trans population

00:57:36.960 More people are aware it's an option now

00:57:39.860 But, as a study published this year in the Journal of Adolescent Health notes

00:57:44.320 Parents have begun reporting, quote, a rapid onset of gender dysphoria in adolescents and teens

00:57:51.500 Who are, quote, part of a peer group where one, multiple, or even all friends have developed gender dysphoria

00:57:58.260 and come out as transgender during the same time frame.

00:58:02.220 So what do you think overall? 1.00

00:58:03.340 It just feels like it is holding all this shit at arm's length 0.98

00:58:06.840 and is like, oh, it could be increased visibility. 0.99

00:58:09.720 It could be social acceptance.

00:58:11.380 It could be all these other things, but it's not.

00:58:13.800 Right.

00:58:14.240 We still have the fundamental problem

00:58:16.200 that there's no actual evidence of this phenomenon

00:58:19.120 of rapid onset gender dysphoria, right? 0.96

00:58:21.340 Yes, correct. 0.97

00:58:22.100 We don't have anything other than this study

00:58:24.420 that is proposing it.

00:58:25.120 And also, as we see in almost all of these articles, the story doesn't even have examples of it.

00:58:31.400 So Jane, the lead character, we meet her when she's 53, it appears she transitioned in her 30s.

00:58:37.220 There's one other source in this article who started taking testosterone at 20.

00:58:40.720 I mean, maybe it's peer pressure, maybe it's not.

00:58:42.460 But as a country, we're kind of comfortable with adults making their own decisions as far as the medical care that they need.

00:58:49.220 Also, none of these people appear to have been rushed through medical transition.

00:58:52.540 another source in this article who the author calls jackie is 17 when she starts reading about

00:58:59.160 trans issues online and then it says in the article it took another three years and the

00:59:04.120 passage of the affordable care act for her to start hormone therapy at this point we're talking

00:59:08.360 about adults and adults can do whatever they want with their bodies there isn't really any question

00:59:12.800 of like people being rushed into surgeries and rushed into care these are the conclusions of

00:59:17.200 someone who has never sought health care in the united states yeah yeah yeah like doctors will

00:59:21.860 just be like right this way i'm gonna take us i'm now gonna take us down a 45 minute tangent about 0.95

00:59:26.520 my carpal tunnel and how long it's been since anyone has given a shit about it hang on i gotta 0.76

00:59:31.340 pop some popcorn we're gonna do some wax skeleton talk the article is basically just saying like 0.94

00:59:36.700 there's some people who identify as trans and then at a later point in their life they no longer

00:59:40.540 identify as trans which i've never seen anybody deny like there's this weird thing this kind of

00:59:46.300 narrative that goes around online that like you know trans people refuse to acknowledge the

00:59:49.560 existence of detransitioners. I've never heard a trans person say that, even like privately.

00:59:54.420 Like some people, like your identity changes over the course of your life. And so some people

00:59:58.860 transition and later detransition. This is a phenomenon that exists. Based on all the data

01:00:02.960 we have now, it's quite rare, but like I mostly see trans people being like really charitable

01:00:07.720 and really chill with these people. And also I see most detransitioners saying just like,

01:00:13.140 yeah, this, it's part of like the journey that I'm on. There's also, according to the research

01:00:17.300 that's come out about this there's also a huge amount of people who detransition because it's

01:00:20.680 really fucking hard to live as a trans person if you would ask me about my regret rate on pax lovid 0.96

01:00:25.540 when i was tasting pennies i would have been like really high but also it fucking got rid of coven 0.99

01:00:32.900 for me so like i'm good i do regret the cherry bark extract for my whatever the fuck that was 0.95

01:00:38.100 where's my where's my article so we're seeing this narrative start to show up like almost

01:00:43.040 everywhere, right? We have like centrist publications, far right, center right, and even like

01:00:47.460 relatively far left publications who are all kind of pushing this thing of like, it's a little

01:00:51.660 mysterious. I'd like so many kids are trans and like, there might be this thing where it's like

01:00:55.460 rapid onset. I think this really crescendos and an important chapter in the mainstreaming of this

01:01:02.080 is a 2018 cover story in The Atlantic. The story was originally called Your Child Says She's

01:01:10.060 trans she wants hormones and surgery she's 13 but they've since changed the pronouns because the

01:01:16.220 model on the cover was using he him or they them pronouns at the time and it appears that this

01:01:21.420 outed them to their parents it's not totally clear what happened fuck but it's now called

01:01:26.880 when children say they're transgender to be fair to this article it doesn't use the term

01:01:31.860 rapid onset gender dysphoria it's not explicitly proposing this as an explanation but again we see

01:01:38.320 the same pattern where it's kind of entertaining this social contagion theory as if it's like on

01:01:44.600 the same level as greater trans acceptance means that more people are coming out as trans, right?

01:01:49.560 It's kind of proposing these two things almost as if like it's like a 50-50 thing, right? And

01:01:54.100 it's really constructing this like the mystery of why so many people say that they're trans all

01:01:59.520 of a sudden. So we're going to read a relatively long excerpt because I think you really have to

01:02:06.320 get like the full context of this article to see what it's doing. When parents discuss the reasons

01:02:11.820 they question their children's desire to transition, whether in online forums or in

01:02:16.160 response to a journalist's questions, many mention quote-unquote social contagion. These parents are

01:02:22.900 worried that their kids are influenced by the gender identity exploration they're seeing online

01:02:27.960 and perhaps at school or in other social settings, rather than experiencing gender dysphoria.

01:02:34.440 Many trans advocates find the idea of social contagion silly or even offensive, given the

01:02:39.860 bullying, violence, and other abuse this population faces. They also point out that some parents

01:02:45.780 simply might not want a trans kid. Again, parental skepticism or rejection is a painfully common

01:02:51.540 experience for trans young people. Michelle Forcier, a pediatrician who specializes in

01:02:57.500 youth gender issues in Rhode Island, said the trans adolescents she works with frequently tell

01:03:02.600 her things like, no one's taking me seriously. My parents think this is a phase or a fad.

01:03:08.620 But some anecdotal evidence suggests that social forces can play a role in a young person's gender

01:03:13.900 questioning. I've been seeing this more frequently, gender clinician Laura Edwards-Leeper wrote in an

01:03:19.580 email. Her young clients talk openly about peer influence, saying things like, oh, Steve is really

01:03:26.180 trans, but Rachel is just doing it for attention. Scott Padberg, one of Edwards-Leeper's patients,

01:03:32.600 did exactly this when we met for lunch.

01:03:35.980 He said there are kids in his school who claim to be trans,

01:03:38.560 but who he believes are not. 0.99

01:03:40.660 Quote, they flaunt it around like,

01:03:42.860 I'm trans, I'm trans, I'm trans, he said.

01:03:45.100 They post it on social media.

01:03:47.220 I heard a similar story from a quirky 16-year-old theater kid

01:03:51.000 who was going by the nickname Delta when we spoke.

01:03:54.220 She lives outside Portland, Oregon with her mother and father. 1.00

01:03:57.440 A wave of gender identity experimentation

01:04:00.300 hit her social circle in 2013.

01:04:02.600 suddenly it seemed no one was cisgender anymore it says you know some anecdotal evidence suggests

01:04:10.880 social forces can play a role in a young person's gender questioning we've got this kid delta who's

01:04:16.780 like well suddenly everybody's trans around me you don't really notice it doing it but it is

01:04:21.600 proposing this as like a legitimate option based essentially on just like anecdotes like teens

01:04:27.460 saying this really appreciating that portland looms large in these anecdotes i think this is

01:04:32.920 portland when in doubt sure sure i mean i think listen i think the language of this section is a

01:04:40.400 lot like the perceived boom language in the last one right which is like journalistically

01:04:44.860 your editor isn't gonna let you say yeah like this is caused by social contagion and a smart

01:04:52.520 journalist who's been around the block kind of knows that they have some level of responsibility

01:04:56.720 to like accurately describe what's going on here, regardless of how they feel about it.

01:05:01.860 So this to me reads like another example of like, we want to promote this idea. We want to elevate

01:05:08.600 this idea. And we have to do that in a careful way so that it sticks. We're going to dive in

01:05:14.500 on the story of Delta in a second. But this article does something that we see the same

01:05:20.000 pattern that we see in so many of these kind of identical at this point feature stories that are

01:05:23.860 like about the tricky debate over trans medicine for youth, it doesn't really investigate whether

01:05:28.740 or not this social contagion theory makes any sense. Like we looked at the evidence. Here's

01:05:32.660 what we found. It basically just like proposes it as a theory while not actually offering any

01:05:38.080 evidence for it. So in the article, the article profiles a bunch of different people who

01:05:41.780 transitioned and later ended up detransitioning, but none of them were rushed through medical

01:05:46.780 procedures. So the opening anecdote of the article is somebody named Claire who identified

01:05:51.860 as trans for a while and then eventually doesn't identify as trans anymore. And her parents say,

01:05:56.880 like, we're worried that if we had taken her to a gender clinic, they would have pushed her through

01:06:01.260 physical transition and she would have regretted it. But nothing happened. That's just a hypothetical.

01:06:08.060 This is where this as a project really reveals itself to be about cis people's anxieties about

01:06:13.660 the existence of trans people. This is not and has never really been about health care. Health

01:06:19.180 care is just sort of a foothold. It's a system where we can have some influence. And you focus

01:06:24.000 on kids because, again, that's another place where you can be like, I'm just concerned for

01:06:28.040 their safety. Are you not concerned about kids? It's a very Mrs. Lovejoy. Won't somebody please

01:06:33.840 think of the children kind of thing. There's also someone whose timeline is a little murky,

01:06:38.520 but it appears she socially transitions at 15, gets hormones at 16 and a mastectomy at 17.

01:06:44.840 There's also somebody who socially transitions at 15, starts hormones at 17, gets a double

01:06:50.380 mastectomy at 20, and detransitions at 22.

01:06:52.960 So that's a five-year process.

01:06:55.180 There's another person who transitions in her late 20s.

01:06:57.540 So just irrelevant to this issue completely.

01:07:01.100 This Scott Padberg kid who was mentioned in the previous paragraph starts getting assessed

01:07:06.420 by therapists at age 13.

01:07:08.560 He is 16 when he's featured in this article, still has not had top surgery.

01:07:12.200 So he's in the middle of a three-year process.

01:07:14.460 That includes, it appears, very intense assessment by a medical professional.

01:07:18.820 There's yet another kid who identifies as trans in 2014 and gets a mastectomy in 2017.

01:07:24.940 So it's not really clear what the intermediate steps are, but again, three-year process.

01:07:29.080 And this kid talks about an eight-hour assessment by two clinicians and weekly visits with a

01:07:36.780 psychologist before they transition.

01:07:39.060 I don't know what the, like, scandal is about any of these, right?

01:07:42.700 They're just, like, straightforward.

01:07:43.440 really are not being rushed this is the other thing about the like sort of this idea of like 0.98

01:07:47.560 rushed care if you know anything about the fucking standards of care for trans people 0.83

01:07:54.320 you know that it's almost impossible to quote unquote rush care yeah it's really funny to read 0.98

01:08:01.120 like the popular press that's just constantly raising the specter of like kids being pushed

01:08:05.680 into these surgeries versus the academic press that is all about like the barriers there's cost

01:08:11.380 barriers. There's logistical barriers. Not everybody lives near a clinic. I mean, it's like,

01:08:14.580 it's actually in reality really hard to get this care. And yet we're like constantly being told by

01:08:20.440 these magazine articles that it's too easy or that we should be worried that it's too easy.

01:08:24.400 There's a debate over whether it's too easy. And it's like, it's a fairly easily answerable

01:08:29.060 question, even in the text of these articles, right? They can't come up with any examples of

01:08:33.280 it happening. It actually reminds me a lot of the razor blades in apples on Halloween myth.

01:08:37.580 there's no example of this ever happening can i can i prove that it hasn't happened no but like

01:08:44.880 surely at some point if we're supposed to be afraid of something we should have like a decent

01:08:50.600 number of like clear-cut examples of it taking place and the fact that you know this is 2018

01:08:56.960 when this article is published but we're now in 2024 and like there's a couple things that

01:09:01.600 maybe get close although a lot of those haven't really been confirmed but we're still getting in

01:09:07.180 these articles, these stories of, you know, people transitioning at 25 and, you know, people with

01:09:12.020 like years long transition periods, like the person who sued the UK gender clinic had a five

01:09:17.420 year process and admits that she saw psychologists more than 10 times in that process. If that's

01:09:24.040 rushed, then all medical care in the US and the UK is rushed. It's not happening at a breakneck

01:09:30.480 pace. Yeah. So we're going to zoom back into Delta, who is this kid who identifies as trans

01:09:37.820 at 13. And so we are going to read the description from the Atlantic article.

01:09:44.160 Delta's parents took her to see Edwards Leaper. The psychologist didn't question her about being

01:09:49.860 trans or close the door on her eventually starting hormones. Rather, she asked Delta a host of

01:09:55.220 detailed questions about her life and mental health and family. Edwards Leaper advised her

01:10:00.760 to wait until she was a bit older to take steps toward a physical transition. As Delta recalled,

01:10:05.900 she said something like, I acknowledge that you feel a certain way, but I think we should work

01:10:10.880 on other stuff first. And then if you still feel this way later on in life, then I will help you

01:10:16.200 with that. Other stuff mostly meant her problems with anxiety and depression. Edwards Leaper told

01:10:21.960 Delta and her mother that while Delta met the clinical threshold for gender dysphoria,

01:10:27.380 a deliberate approach made the most sense in light of her mental health issues.

01:10:32.100 At the time, I was not happy that she told me that I should go on and deal with mental health

01:10:36.460 stuff first, Delta said. But I'm glad she said that because too many people are just gung-ho,

01:10:41.440 like, you're trans, go ahead, even if they aren't. And then they end up making mistakes that they 0.99

01:10:46.720 can't redo. Again, we include a quote from a teenager saying that this is common when we've

01:10:51.380 seen no evidence that it's common, but anyway. Footage not found. Yeah. Also, if people can't

01:10:56.720 get health care until they deal with their anxiety and depression, uh-oh, I'm never getting health

01:11:02.440 care. Yeah, no one will get health care. We're all anxious and depressed. Fuck. Delta's gender

01:11:07.640 dysphoria subsequently dissipated, though it's unclear why. She started taking antidepressants

01:11:13.380 in December, which seemed to be working. I asked Delta whether she thought her mental health

01:11:18.420 problems and identity questioning were linked. They definitely were, she said, because once I

01:11:24.000 actually started working on things, I got better and I didn't want anything to do with gender

01:11:28.720 labels. I was fine with just being me and not being a specific thing. So basically, I mean,

01:11:33.860 I know that's a long excerpt, but essentially the story we have here is she says that she's trans,

01:11:38.960 but then it turns out she's experiencing some kind of depression, anxiety stuff.

01:11:42.820 And once we start working on the depression, anxiety stuff, it turns out, ah, she's not

01:11:47.940 trans, like the transness was kind of an output of the fact that she was depressed and anxious. 0.75

01:11:53.400 And once you deal with those underlying issues, the transness goes away. It's essentially a 0.98

01:11:57.800 symptom, right? This is extremely important to this narrative, right? The fact that these kids

01:12:03.520 are, again, basically confused. Right. They're not trans. They're just mentally ill. It's very

01:12:09.220 similar to the narratives that we got around gay people in the 80s and 90s, when gay people also

01:12:13.440 had much higher rates of depression and anxiety, were more likely to use drugs, were more likely

01:12:17.020 to kill themselves that was seen as an output of the gayness right why should we affirm gay 0.98

01:12:22.740 identities like these people are killing themselves at high rates they're all sad to be gay we should 0.99

01:12:26.340 be fixing the gayness right because it's obviously causing them a lot of distress but when we have 0.98

01:12:31.740 marginalized groups that have higher rates of mental health problems we should at least entertain 0.75

01:12:36.940 the possibility that the depression and anxiety are outputs of being trans in a transphobic family

01:12:43.660 and a transphobic school and a transphobic country.

01:12:46.120 I came out when I was like 15 and got medicated for depression and anxiety that same year.

01:12:53.380 That medication didn't make me straight.

01:12:56.500 Right.

01:12:57.400 Zoloft is not a conversion therapy.

01:13:00.460 Once we get deeper into Delta's story, things get even worse.

01:13:04.940 So after this article comes out, both Transgender Trend and Fourth Wave Now,

01:13:09.600 these anti-trans blogs, both positively promote the article.

01:13:13.460 they're like we think this is great at one point someone says kind of in reply to one of these

01:13:18.620 tweets someone says hey it's it's kind of weird that the atlantic article didn't link to fourth

01:13:23.340 wave now because fourth wave now has a lot of like resources that parents could use right if

01:13:28.160 their kids are trans yeah and someone from fourth wave now replies families profiled our fourth

01:13:34.940 families that was the censor's line in the sand removal of any mention of fourth oh so fourth

01:13:41.420 wave now according to this person helped this article come about and provided sources and then

01:13:48.700 it appears late in the editing process any mention of that was removed yikes this is where it gets

01:13:55.600 really bad aubrey so this kid delta her mother is a blogger at fourth wave now and at some time

01:14:05.260 before the Atlantic article, she writes a post laying out her timeline of what happened with

01:14:11.720 Delta. She starts off with sort of scene setting. She says that she got, you know, her daughter

01:14:16.680 started to identify as trans. She then got really radicalized on this when she saw a special about

01:14:22.460 a National Geographic cover about like the changing nature of womanhood and have these like the way

01:14:27.420 that femininity is changing in like different cultures around the world. And she talks about 0.99

01:14:32.020 this a little bit. And then she says, from that point, it was like a cascade of ideas came into

01:14:36.720 focus for me. I had small epiphanies about how all this impacted civil rights. The transgender

01:14:41.500 politics and policies have the potential to undo civil rights for all people. If civil rights are 1.00

01:14:46.680 not based on material reality, then anyone anywhere can undo them and change them. This

01:14:51.280 seemed extremely dangerous to me. When that idea hit me, it was like a sucker punch. It was the

01:14:56.120 pulling of the thread that began to unravel the tapestry of transgender ideology. This is the UK 1.00

01:15:01.780 shit of just like somehow acknowledging and making space for trans people is like an assault 1.00

01:15:10.200 on cis women? You said pregnant people and now nobody can get medical care at the hospital 0.99

01:15:16.140 anymore. Right, right, right, right. That's the reason we don't have abortion. People use different 1.00

01:15:21.720 words. Okay, but then here is this mother describing her account of what actually happened

01:15:28.280 with Delta. Just before this time, my kid was insistent on seeing a gender therapist and getting

01:15:33.740 into a gender clinic to start transitioning. I dragged my feet. When we went to doctor appointments

01:15:39.020 for totally unrelated things, they would refer my child to the gender clinic, even though we'd

01:15:43.520 already been, and tell my child they shouldn't have to suffer and that they could easily take

01:15:48.600 testosterone to alleviate these horrible symptoms like periods and breast development.

01:15:52.900 It happened every time. The doctors wouldn't stop dangling the bait. Because of the turmoil

01:16:00.040 this caused, I had to stop taking my child to the doctor unless it was an emergency. Jesus hell.

01:16:07.840 When we started on the new transgender journey together, my child and I decided that no matter

01:16:13.220 what, this was not going to be the life focus. We opted not to join any queer youth support groups.

01:16:20.220 What I've seen in those groups is that life becomes very narrow. One doesn't play music, 1.00

01:16:25.200 they play queer music. One doesn't do art, they make queer art. My kid even began to notice this 1.00

01:16:30.980 and didn't want to make life all about being transgender. What? 0.60

01:16:35.400 So she then describes what is essentially like a campaign years long of telling her daughter that

01:16:43.000 she's not really trans. Right. She says that they watch this BBC documentary together,

01:16:47.420 what appears to be at her behest and then as they're watching it she sort of reiterates to

01:16:53.160 her daughter that like you'll never really be a man like you can transition you can get surgery

01:16:57.040 hormones whatever but like you're never really going to be a man it's never going to work

01:17:00.080 and the daughter apparently breaks down crying and sort of accepts this and eventually kind of

01:17:06.880 drops this whole thing god this narrative of like oh she started working on her depression and like

01:17:11.340 then the trans thing went away i mean maybe that's true right i don't love the way that we litigate 0.98

01:17:16.020 these fucking anecdotes in like national media. But also another fairly plausible explanation of 0.96

01:17:20.400 this is that she has a pretty transphobic mom who just kept saying, no, you're not, no, you're not,

01:17:25.280 no, you're not. And eventually she capitulated. Right. And this person lives with their parents,

01:17:30.140 their parents determine what their life is going to look like, what they have access to, 1.00

01:17:34.660 whether or not they go to the fucking doctor. Exactly. It's telling that none of this, 1.00

01:17:39.720 I think, fairly explicit anti-trans rhetoric shows up in the article, right? We get a little

01:17:46.080 bit of explanation of like, the mother was skeptical, but nothing on the level of this.

01:17:49.740 It seems like the mother really self-radicalized during this process. And then we have this idea

01:17:54.300 of that, like, oh, well, you know, it was really, you know, the mental health stuff all along.

01:17:58.560 And like, maybe it wasn't. Maybe she would have desisted anyway. We don't know. But it's like,

01:18:03.840 it's very telling to me that, you know, again, we're constantly told to worry about parents

01:18:09.600 and doctors kind of pushing kids into transitioning too quickly.

01:18:12.580 But the much larger problem is people talking their kids out of it

01:18:16.900 and people refusing to get their kids' care.

01:18:19.160 And parents who are so skeptical,

01:18:20.940 the kids do have to go through a really upsetting puberty

01:18:22.920 before they can get any appointments with doctors, right?

01:18:25.680 Much less the money and the insurance and all the other barriers.

01:18:28.200 We're talking about this issue as if it is a level playing field

01:18:32.000 and not kids with marginalized identities

01:18:36.640 versus very politicized adults with all kinds of social, cultural, and political power that

01:18:44.680 those kids do not have. There is this sort of tone and tenor of a bunch of this stuff that's

01:18:50.420 like, I'm speaking truth to power. And I'm like, do you mean children? I also think it's worth

01:18:56.160 noting that it's like, you know, it's now 2018 when this article comes out. What we're basically

01:19:00.920 talking about here is a two-year process where this concept of social contagion and rapid onset

01:19:05.660 gender dysphoria, appear on a pretty fringe anti-trans blog. And within two years, they are

01:19:11.980 on the cover of The Atlantic. Man. Next episode, we are going to talk about the extremely unfortunate

01:19:18.240 story of how this ends up getting further laundered into government policy. But for now,

01:19:25.540 you know, first of all, I have no idea how this Atlantic article came about. I have no idea behind

01:19:28.940 the scenes what their recruitment was. I also don't really care, right, if you're telling the

01:19:34.120 biography of a moral panic. What you're looking at is the messages that were available to the

01:19:38.780 public. What were people reading and hearing at the time? And what Americans were hearing

01:19:43.760 was that trans rights are becoming more visible. You have these fairly fringe websites. You have

01:19:51.360 this social contagion theory that starts bouncing around on the right. You then have academic

01:19:56.460 journals who begin to explore this phenomenon of rapid onset gender dysphoria. And then you have

01:20:03.280 cover stories in prestigious national magazines kind of further exploring this phenomenon and

01:20:09.740 talking about the debate within medicine, right? But then if you zoom in on any of these components,

01:20:15.400 it's all just the same fringe websites. This website invents the concept of social contagion.

01:20:21.920 The concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria is based on interviews with people from these

01:20:26.680 websites. And then The Atlantic writes an article that includes people who are bloggers on this

01:20:32.540 website. Again, it appears like this groundswell, but we're just talking about like one blog

01:20:38.200 that's doing this and a relatively small number of people. And again, we have no real evidence

01:20:42.900 that there's any reason to consider this possibility at this point. And I also, in the

01:20:48.600 same way that we talked about rapid onset gender dysphoria, that just because your onset was rapid

01:20:53.100 doesn't mean that it's not true. I also think the entire concept of social contagion is also worth

01:20:59.340 kind of thinking about a little bit because to me it's like the conversation about whether or not

01:21:05.740 kids identify as something they're not because it's trendy just feels totally irrelevant to me

01:21:10.640 like i i'm gay some kid who identifies as gay when he's 13 because he sees something on tv

01:21:16.360 and then eventually a year later he's like yeah probably not i okay i i that actually like a world

01:21:23.340 where that kid is able to explore in like a affirming environment is great. I would much

01:21:29.960 rather have quote unquote too many people identifying as LGBT and have the space to

01:21:35.640 figure it out for themselves relatively young than a world where people are constantly telling

01:21:40.260 them, no, you're not, no, you're not, no, you're not. I just don't care that much, right? The actual

01:21:44.800 debate here, the extent to which this is a social dilemma or like something that needs to be 0.96

01:21:49.980 litigated in the cover of fucking national magazines is a medical systems question, right? 0.62

01:21:55.900 It's like, are people getting irreversible treatments when we don't know what their actual 0.98

01:22:00.820 status is? To me, again, I think that is a reasonable question to ask, right? There's a

01:22:06.220 good faith way to have this conversation. And again, years of this panic now, speaking from 2024,

01:22:12.860 we still don't have any evidence that that's happening, right? The fact that a kid identifies

01:22:18.420 as trans because they see it on TV? I think that's much more rare than like people think it is. But

01:22:24.460 like, is that possible? Sure. But the solution to that, if we're really so concerned with kids

01:22:30.340 finding out whether they're really trans before they get any kind of medical procedures, then we

01:22:34.200 should make social transition as easy as possible. Then we should make schools as accepting as

01:22:38.520 possible, right? The best way to know if you're like really a girl is to try living as a girl for 0.99

01:22:43.520 a while in a supportive environment. There is this idea that just questioning itself is like

01:22:49.020 a sinister activity that has to be born of something, you know, manipulative or something

01:22:54.900 again, sinister. Right. And I just don't think that that's true. Right. And actually in a lot

01:23:02.320 of ways, that's sort of what your teenage and twenties years are for. You try on a bunch of

01:23:08.120 shit and you go oh actually i don't really like death metal yeah and that's absolutely okay and i 0.99

01:23:14.460 think if we slotted this into that territory of just like oh you're trying shit on maybe it's a 0.99

01:23:20.860 thing you love for forever and maybe it's not like that feels like actually a really healthy place to

01:23:27.840 be yeah that kind of framework makes space for trans identities to be as legitimate as cis

01:23:35.380 identities right when we consider it a choice worth making a lifestyle a lifestyle choice

01:23:41.560 yeah that's right that's what i meant to say i know your real views but like when we make space

01:23:46.600 for people to actually explore and actually interrogate instead of just fucking defending

01:23:51.600 themselves against attacks all the time yeah then more people can come to clearer understandings of 0.94

01:23:58.220 who they really are i also think like to kind of pull rank here as a gay person

01:24:03.000 break over who over the straights over the straights i thought you were saying over me 0.67

01:24:08.620 oh no no that would be so fucking funny if i'm like gatekeeping this podcast now as a gay man 0.53

01:24:14.220 i think as queer people first of all this entire idea feels identical honestly to this whole panic 0.93

01:24:21.500 of like they're recruiting your kids yes i think nobody wants to say recruitment because that is

01:24:25.140 like anita bryant sort of flavor to it at this point right and the panic about gay teachers in

01:24:29.420 the 80s but this is what they are talking about right it's like indoctrination gen you know they're 0.54

01:24:34.660 going to use your your child's confusion and their their mental illness and their vulnerability to

01:24:38.980 tell them they're trans right that's that's basically what they're saying right and i think 0.92

01:24:42.180 as queer people i think we know very intimately that like you can't be recruited into a sexuality

01:24:49.960 and a gender identity that you don't have right because we all tried recruiting ourselves into 0.80

01:24:54.780 fucking streetness and there's no amount of stigma that will make queer or trans people 0.98

01:25:02.000 cease to exist it will just make their lives fucking impossible like i like when i was a 0.99

01:25:07.740 teenager i like tried making out with girls and stuff and like dating girls and like it did 0.99

01:25:13.000 nothing for me it was like oh my tongue is on someone else's tongue it was so fucking gross 0.93

01:25:18.240 like the whole thing of like sexual attraction is like it's more than the sum of its parts right 0.99

01:25:22.600 you don't think about like oh i'm putting my like my mouth hole on someone else's orifice right it's 0.77

01:25:27.140 like how did we get here michael well give give let give me space let me let me get there i'm 1.00

01:25:33.060 getting are your grinder notifications going off again fuck off i pulled rank and you even let me 0.99

01:25:41.040 keep it fuck off but like i think the i i think there's a fear among like straight cis people 1.00

01:25:49.180 that like experimentation is going to like somehow ruin their kids. And I think like most people are 0.99

01:25:55.620 not gay. I think if your straight kid like dates a boy for a while, he'll be fucking bored the way 0.98

01:26:00.800 I was bored when I dated girls. And then you figure out like, oh shit, this doesn't work for 1.00

01:26:04.980 me. You're not going to be tempted by something you don't want, right? And this is why when we 0.99

01:26:10.700 talk about these like, you know, as if like telling young kids about the existence of trans

01:26:15.660 people is gonna like make them trans i i've been really lucky to get to know a lot of trans people

01:26:19.720 and the way they talk about their gender identity when they were kids like somebody i talked to for

01:26:24.620 me and peter's episode on this said that it's like she felt static in her brain and then when

01:26:28.760 she put on girls clothes for the first time the static went away and she like felt at peace and

01:26:33.300 like i have put on girls clothes for like costume parties and stuff and like i don't feel anything

01:26:38.640 because i'm not trans i i'm not afraid of experimentation in that way because if you're

01:26:43.780 not trans you're not it's not gonna like tempt you it's like this is this is what i think like

01:26:49.320 is really missing from this is that like people are afraid of somebody exploring their identity

01:26:54.080 as if they're going to be like bewitched into thinking that they're gay or trans but like that

01:26:58.500 isn't how it works but michael the doctors wouldn't stop dangling the bait that was my

01:27:06.120 attempt at being a reply guy you finally got there i finally got there you couldn't do it with your

01:27:11.880 voice though. That was like the least convincing. I had to have a voice. I can't. I can't.

01:27:41.880 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - May 09, 2024

＂Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria＂ Part 1： The Cooties Theory of Transgender Identity

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