Maintenance Phase - ＂Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria＂ Part 2： Panic! At The Endocrinologist.

00:00:00.000 yo dude smoothies are such bullshit 1.00

00:00:14.740 welcome to mike's hot takes what are you talking about buddy i've been fucking lied to everyone is 0.99

00:00:23.680 telling me to drink smoothies they're like because you know i i like drink too much coffee 0.92

00:00:27.700 in the morning and then i go to the gym and then i'm like dead tired i'm just like a black hole for

00:00:31.840 like three hours yes i'll be like try a smoothie instead of breakfast and so now i'm drinking 0.94

00:00:35.600 smoothies and i drink a smoothie and then like 30 minutes later i'm fucking starving no smoothies 0.52

00:00:40.060 are delicious but the idea that they're gonna stay with you is yeah false we're back to my 0.87

00:00:46.260 my beefs with soup and salad why what's the point of this i want to be done eating i want to go do

00:00:53.060 things other than eating do you want to go grab a spoon of peanut butter now no i think it's good

00:00:57.800 actually i think i'm i think i'm at my best when i'm only running on like coffee tums and

00:01:02.820 wellbutrin i did see a sticker this weekend that just said at my best when i'm at my worst

00:01:10.540 oh that's pretty fun i do feel like that is what you described well maybe we have a tagline maybe

00:01:14.700 we have a tagline maybe that's it no i got a i got a tagline for us don't worry about it you

00:01:19.180 thought about it in advance i thought about it while i was falling asleep so it might be terrible

00:01:25.600 all right give it give it to me hi everybody and welcome to the sass report wait what are we not

00:01:32.940 talking about the cast report oh god jesus christ 0.96

00:01:39.340 okay no more before you go to bed augury no more dream journal fucking taglines no more 0.97

00:01:47.760 thinking of it in advance you know what we're trying we're doing our best are we is that our 0.97

00:01:57.580 best uh i'm michael hubbs i am aubrey gordon if you would like to support the show you can do

00:02:06.520 that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase michael aubrey today we're continuing our

00:02:13.580 conversation about rapid onset gender dysphoria. Yes. Yes. So Aubrey, do you want to recap us on

00:02:20.980 what we learned last episode? Rapid onset gender dysphoria made its way into the news cycle

00:02:28.400 sounding very legitimate and diagnostic and so on and so forth. But last time we learned that

00:02:35.200 its origin was in basically like transphobic message boards. Yes. And that the primary sort

00:02:44.000 of storytellers around this were parents who appeared to be having a profoundly transphobic

00:02:49.920 response, or at the very least, like high levels of discomfort with their own kids having come out

00:02:59.380 as trans yes last week's episode was essentially a bizarre human centipede story where there's

00:03:06.620 these parents whose kids come out as trans to them and they essentially speculate oh i don't

00:03:13.780 think she's really trans i think she's being pied pipered by the internet and her peers and the

00:03:20.240 culture around her and so uh i'm just gonna assume that this is some sort of like fake temporary

00:03:26.280 thing. And if I resist it long enough, she will drop it. And despite there being essentially no

00:03:32.380 evidence for this, this narrative starts to appear in the mainstream media. Eventually,

00:03:37.080 we have a poster abstract in an academic journal where a researcher named Lisa Littman does what

00:03:43.580 looks like an exploration of this phenomenon, but it's actually just a survey of the same

00:03:50.140 pretty small number of parents. So that doesn't really tell us anything about the phenomenon

00:03:55.540 itself it only tells us about the perceptions and beliefs of these parents i would be very upset if

00:04:01.800 there was research into gay people and the way that they got their data was by like asking james

00:04:07.960 dobson why didn't you ask the gay people who were right there huh so we are now going to do

00:04:14.380 back to 2018 this is the first time we get mainstream quote-unquote evidence for rapid

00:04:23.400 onset gender dysphoria. This is the publication of the full version of that very, very brief study

00:04:29.600 we talked about last episode by Lisa Littman. This is basically just an anonymous survey of

00:04:34.660 a bunch of parents. Lisa Littman posted recruitment advertisements on these three

00:04:38.840 anti-trans websites, asked parents to fill out this survey, and then they filled it out. There's

00:04:43.280 90 questions. That's it. That's the whole study. Gotcha. So there's going to be a lot of debate

00:04:47.540 and discourse about this article, which we will get into. But one of the most striking things

00:04:52.120 about going back to the research for this episode is how almost all of the documents that this

00:04:58.180 movement cites as part of its kind of evidence base for this narrative, how just openly low rent

00:05:05.940 and transphobic they are. So we are going to read some excerpts from the study. This is an excerpt

00:05:12.760 from the results section where she is talking about parents describing the experience of hearing

00:05:20.320 their kids come out to them as trans 81 of the parents answered affirmatively that their child's

00:05:27.100 announcement of being transgender came quote out of the blue without significant prior evidence

00:05:32.180 of gender dysphoria almost a third of respondents noted that their child did not seem gender

00:05:37.460 dysphoric when they made their announcement this one's so weird dude it's like oh they didn't they

00:05:42.280 didn't seem like they had gender dysphoria when they told me they're trans did you believe it

00:05:46.280 did they really sell it i didn't seem gay when i told my parents i was gay that's not that's not

00:05:53.280 really for them to decide this goes back to the post that we read last time around right which

00:05:57.960 is just like they didn't seem like they were deeply unhappy and tortured by their own body

00:06:03.780 like whatever it was right yeah people are looking for like a deep sense of suffering also i was

00:06:10.060 lying i i did seem gay when i told my parents i was gay you seemed gay at every moment i see

00:06:14.920 at every moment of my family photo that i've seen 0.87

00:06:17.600 i can hear our parents butting and you seemed real gay you actually did seem super gay all right 0.83

00:06:26.000 69 of respondents believed that their child was using language that they found online when they

00:06:33.740 quote-unquote came out come out in scare quotes i had never seen that before i started researching

00:06:38.720 this oh man this was all over our many many many anti-lgbt testimonies oh yeah oh coming

00:06:46.000 god of the 51 responses describing reasons why respondents thought their child was reproducing

00:06:54.200 language they found online the top two reasons were that it didn't sound like their child's voice

00:07:00.040 and that the parent later looked online and recognized the same words and phrases that

00:07:05.320 their child used when they announced a transgender identity. One parent said, quote, it seemed

00:07:10.900 different from the way she usually talked. I remember thinking it was like hearing someone

00:07:15.640 who had memorized a lot of definitions for a vocabulary test. Another respondent said,

00:07:21.440 the email my child sent to me read like all the narratives posted online, almost word for word.

00:07:27.520 The obvious explanation here is that like, if your parents are kind of conservative or a little

00:07:32.300 bit anti-trans you're gonna google like things to say to them for the coming out process also like

00:07:37.460 maybe that's something you come across and looking to talk to your parents about it it also might be

00:07:42.540 stuff that you come across in like figuring out your own identity stuff totally there are lots

00:07:48.220 and lots of ways that this could come to be that don't mean like oh no invasion of the body snatchers

00:07:55.220 I actually think the study is very useful and very interesting because it's a portrait of parental anxieties.

00:08:03.700 Yes.

00:08:03.920 It says in these respondent answers, it says it mirrors language that I found online afterwards.

00:08:11.400 So it's like their kids come out to them as trans.

00:08:13.380 They then immediately go on the internet and they're like, where is she getting this stuff?

00:08:16.960 They basically self-radicalize, right?

00:08:19.300 They find these videos.

00:08:20.280 They find tumblers.

00:08:21.300 They find other things online.

00:08:22.620 And then they start thinking that their kid is like some sort of automaton.

00:08:26.620 My kid has been taken from me.

00:08:28.260 I feel completely hooked on this idea of like, what does it mean to say something gender dysphorically?

00:08:34.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

00:08:34.940 Oh, yes. 0.95

00:08:35.640 That is a statement of gender dysphoric. 0.95

00:08:37.800 Got it. 0.97

00:08:38.440 She was doing the John Wayne voice the whole time she told us?

00:08:42.080 Seems a little.

00:08:42.900 She kept saying partner.

00:08:44.180 I don't know why she did that.

00:08:45.580 Da-ha, da-ha.

00:08:47.440 So we're going to read one more excerpt.

00:08:49.740 and like this is this is just unbelievable okay okay the groups targeted for mocking by the

00:08:55.140 friend groups are often heterosexual people and non-transgender people sometimes animosity was

00:09:01.660 also directed towards males white people gay and lesbian non-transgender people aromantic and

00:09:07.800 asexual people and quote-unquote turfs don't respond don't respond quote-unquote me the writer 0.96

00:09:18.060 of this one participant explained quote they are constantly putting down straight white people for 0.99

00:09:28.100 being privileged dumb and boring boring another participant elaborated in general cisgendered 0.99

00:09:37.420 people are considered evil and unsupportive regardless of their actual views on the topic 1.00

00:09:42.720 i fucking love this regardless of their actual views they call you transphobic regardless of 0.97

00:09:47.140 What you believe. 0.99

00:09:47.920 What do you believe? 0.99

00:09:48.580 My daughter's not trans. 1.00

00:09:49.960 Definitely. 1.00

00:09:51.020 Well, to be heterosexual, comfortable with the gender you were assigned at birth and

00:09:58.020 non-minority places you in the most evil of categories with this group of friends.

00:10:04.700 Statement of opinions by the evil cisgendered population are considered phobic and discriminatory

00:10:10.860 and are generally discounted as unenlightened.

00:10:14.000 another participant said quote i hear them disparaging heterosexuality marriage and

00:10:20.500 nuclear families what another participant said on my daughter's tumblr blog she has liked or

00:10:26.600 favorited or reposted disparaging comments about those who aren't transgender or seem to

00:10:32.480 misunderstand the transgender identity boy if you are digging through your kids tumblr likes

00:10:40.640 Dude, that's exactly where my brain went.

00:10:43.120 I was like, this is a level of, like, self-radicalization that is really alarming.

00:10:48.120 Yeah.

00:10:48.440 Later in this paper, it says also, as evidence that, you know, my daughter's being taken from me or whatever, it says she edited her diary.

00:10:55.360 I was just about to make a diary joke about, like, she thinks I'm invading her privacy, which I wouldn't know if I didn't have to read her diary all the time.

00:11:03.720 Yeah.

00:11:04.120 If you're looking for someone who's being radicalized on the internet, may I introduce you to a mirror?

00:11:10.640 No, I mean, that's also the social contagion thing is also fascinating too, right?

00:11:14.420 Right.

00:11:14.600 Because it's clear that these parents are like whipping each other up and like, you know, they're posting, you know, quote unquote research that shows that like trans people don't really have high suicide rates, blah, blah, blah.

00:11:23.140 Some of these stories from the parents are like honestly very sad.

00:11:27.260 It's like these parents who essentially choose like online forums over their relationships with their own kids.

00:11:32.300 A lot of them are just not in contact with their kids anymore because they can't handle just saying we love you no matter what.

00:11:38.420 I actually think there's something a little bit more insidious even than like they're

00:11:43.660 positing that all trans identities are fake.

00:11:46.720 That's not what they're positing.

00:11:48.260 They're positing that all trans identities are subject to the approval of cis people.

00:11:53.280 So this is actually the explicit project of this study.

00:11:56.960 I am going to send you an excerpt from the conclusion.

00:12:01.040 The conclusion of this exploratory study is that clinicians need to be very cautious before

00:12:05.880 relying solely on self-report when adolescents and young adults seek social medical or surgical

00:12:11.920 transition. Adolescents and young adults are not trained medical professionals.

00:12:17.260 When they diagnose their own symptoms based on what they read on the internet and hear from

00:12:22.780 their friends, it is quite possible for them to reach incorrect conclusions. It is the duty of

00:12:28.460 the clinician when seeing a new adolescent or young adult patient seeking transition to perform

00:12:34.640 their own evaluation and differential diagnosis to determine if the patient is correct or incorrect

00:12:40.220 in their self-assessment of their symptoms and their conviction that they would benefit from

00:12:45.180 transition. If a patient is correct or incorrect in their self-assessment, it also says, this is a

00:12:52.740 couple paragraphs later, the patient's history being significantly different than their parents'

00:12:57.900 account of the child's history should be seen as a red flag that a more thorough investigation is

00:13:03.800 needed this was an entry point to weakening abortion protections in the u.s was parental

00:13:08.700 notification yeah and that's essentially what they're advocating here right yeah it's actually

00:13:13.560 good for these kids if you out them to their parents who they probably haven't told for a

00:13:18.500 fucking reason there's also the thing that we see in a lot of reactionary movements where the demands 0.95

00:13:24.160 of the reactionaries are things that are already in place right they're like we think kids should 0.98

00:13:29.020 be assessed before they get hormones and surgery it's like yes they are right the the barriers to

00:13:34.640 getting hormones and surgery as a minor are extremely high and you can't transition without

00:13:39.820 parental permission already all of this really hinges on the idea that like legal minors who

00:13:46.960 are transgender have an undue amount of social power and influence and need to be checked yeah 0.97

00:13:55.160 we're sick of coddling these trans kids yeah as a society too much enough is enough but then okay 1.00

00:14:01.840 but then my favorite thing about this study not only just how kind of like on its face janky it 1.00

00:14:05.820 is is like essentially every other study of this kind while trying to generate evidence of rapid

00:14:14.480 onset gender dysphoria it ends up generating evidence of the opposite so as one of the

00:14:19.920 questions to these parents. It's like, when did your kid come out? Did your kid go to a gender

00:14:25.200 clinic? Did your kid change their hairstyle? Blah, blah, blah. So there's 256 parents who

00:14:30.160 fill out this survey. Only 11% of their kids ended up getting hormones. 2.7% ended up getting

00:14:37.440 puberty blockers and 2% ended up having surgery. So if it were the case that people are tricking

00:14:42.880 doctors into giving them this care, if it were the case that doctors themselves were like tractor

00:14:47.220 beaming kids through all these medical procedures we would see way more than 10 15 percent of kids

00:14:53.800 getting gender affirming care i also think this is where it reveals the whole sort of endeavor

00:14:59.540 reveals itself to be less about concern and more about concern trolling right yeah yeah it's

00:15:04.600 certainly not about the ins and outs of what health insurance covers yeah no one what doctors

00:15:11.160 are permitted to do or any of that kind of stuff this is all just ways of like eating around the

00:15:16.360 edges of like a much bigger thing that they're trying to eliminate which is the health care for

00:15:21.600 trans people yeah this is also i mean this this episode like all episodes that we do is a extended

00:15:27.420 subtweet of brexit and this is exactly what happened with brexit too they're like all we're

00:15:31.420 asking for is like a slightly updated arrangement and then like every single time they get what they

00:15:35.940 want they just push it farther and farther and farther and they they've ended up with like the

00:15:39.200 hardest imaginable brexit and like you can't you can't negotiate with people who are not actually

00:15:43.420 saying things in good faith. They're saying what they know you will agree to. And the minute you

00:15:47.200 agree to it, they'll push you to the next, quote unquote, reasonable ask. And that's what's

00:15:51.020 happened in like the UK. I was going to say something specific, but it's just the UK at

00:15:55.100 this point. Yeah, the whole thing. The whole thing. All of it. So this article comes out in August of

00:16:01.420 2018. In November of this year, Lisa Littman, the author of the paper, presents it at the annual

00:16:08.260 meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. And there's a description

00:16:15.580 of her presentation, which we're only reading because I think it's extremely funny.

00:16:20.300 Following Dr. Littman's presentation, there was no applause.

00:16:25.340 Sorry. Got her.

00:16:31.020 Okay. Following Dr. Littman's presentation, there was no applause before several audience

00:16:37.900 members launched into questions. Some were more civil than others, but pretty much all were

00:16:43.780 critical. One audience member pointedly asked Dr. Littman what she had previously studied in her

00:16:49.940 research, OBGYN, public health issues, and whether she has worked with any transgender patients in

00:16:56.360 the past. She has not. Narrator voice. Narrator voice. Her?

00:17:00.420 another questioner at the end repeatedly asked her why did you do this study and what's wrong 0.90

00:17:12.360 with taking on a different gender identity to which she would only say that we should keep

00:17:17.100 open the possibility that there may be social contagion occurring yeah i love i love that the

00:17:23.280 questions are just like why what why why are you doing this like you're just like sputtering what

00:17:29.700 if it's neutral but what if it's happening because of social contagion you're just describing like

00:17:36.080 fashion at this point wow we may be why else would people be wearing cargo pants right now

00:17:41.880 so i think this is a good summary of the kind of academic response to this and before you know it

00:17:48.560 there start to be more formal methodological critiques in various journals so the main thing

00:17:53.960 is that Littman is trying to identify a phenomenon among kids that doesn't interview any kids. So

00:18:01.960 just as a starting point, that is like pretty janky. And then secondly, we've got the parents

00:18:07.880 who were recruited from anti-trans websites. So it's not a remotely representative sample.

00:18:12.400 And then it's even worse than that. So when Littman recruits participants, you have to get

00:18:19.540 like a consent form from everybody where it's like you, you sort of, this is what the study's

00:18:23.380 about and you like sign it right and so in the consent form for this study participants are told

00:18:28.860 you are being asked to take part in a research study if you have a child who when they were

00:18:33.160 between the ages of 10 and 21 developed a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria this may have

00:18:38.860 occurred in the context of either increased social media internet use and or belonging to a friend

00:18:44.200 group in which one or multiple friends have developed gender dysphoria and come out as

00:18:48.240 transgender during a similar time frame. So basically, this is the conclusion of the study

00:18:52.560 being used on the consent form before people fill out the questionnaire.

00:18:57.060 Another way of putting this is, did your kid recently come out and have they found community

00:19:02.280 among their peers? So there's lots of discourse around this. There's open letters, there's

00:19:06.380 petitions, there's lots of debate after this article comes out. And eventually on March 19th,

00:19:10.540 2019, the journal that published the paper republishes it. So they issue a statement that

00:19:16.720 It says, correcting the scientific record on gender incongruence and an apology, where

00:19:22.120 they say, in discussion with two academic editors, a statistics reviewer and an academic

00:19:27.520 who treats gender incongruence in adolescence, we've reached the conclusion that the study

00:19:31.140 and resultant data reported in the article represent a valid contribution to the scientific

00:19:35.200 literature.

00:19:35.980 However, we have also determined that the study, including its goals, methodology, and

00:19:40.420 conclusions were not adequately framed in the published version, and that these needed

00:19:44.380 to be corrected.

00:19:45.000 The changes include revisions of key sections such as title and abstract, which required us to republish the paper.

00:19:51.780 This is a pretty big deal and, like, doesn't happen all that often, right?

00:19:55.260 That the changes are so meaningful that they have to change the title and the abstract.

00:19:59.460 Yeah.

00:19:59.640 So the previous title of the paper, the original title, was Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults, A Study of Parental Reports.

00:20:07.680 And the updated title is Parent Reports of Adolescent and Young Adults Perceived to

00:20:12.780 Show Signs of a Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria.

00:20:15.360 What I find so frustrating about this is that Littman herself and a lot of conservatives

00:20:21.040 do like this weird victory lap about this statement, we've reached the conclusion that

00:20:26.800 the study and the resultant data represent a valid contribution to the scientific literature.

00:20:32.060 Like the thing they say before the but, essentially.

00:20:34.440 because oftentimes what you see what you see like in kind of debates about this in like reply guy

00:20:40.520 world is that you're like yeah the study's like discredited and then people will be like well it

00:20:44.160 wasn't retracted well okay this is like a movie poster where the quote from a critic is just like

00:20:51.280 watchable yeah it is so damned with faint praise there's also an unbelievably tedious thing

00:20:57.980 where originally brown university where lisa lipman was employed puts out a press release

00:21:03.120 saying, like, our researcher has a study that found these things. And after these major

00:21:10.240 corrections to the paper, Brown then deletes the press release from its website. So there's all

00:21:15.580 this, like, outcry. And the president of Brown releases a statement saying, we respect the

00:21:22.100 academic freedom of everybody who works at Brown. We don't want to sort of spread messages that

00:21:27.560 might cause harm to the transgender community. We're leaving up the study. Like, we're not

00:21:31.580 retracting the study. We're not deleting it from anything. We're just deleting the press release.

00:21:36.520 Ultimately, I don't know, relatively minor thing, but the right goes ballistic. Ben Shapiro writes

00:21:44.280 a piece for the Daily Wire called, a Brown University researcher released a study about

00:21:49.760 teens imitating their peers by turning trans. The left went insane. So Brown caved. The left

00:21:56.060 went insane quillette has as a former dean of harvard medical school i question brown's failure

00:22:03.200 to defend lisa litman they did defend her yeah fox news has brown u censors gender dysphoria study

00:22:10.920 worried that findings might invalidate the perspectives of transgender community the study

00:22:16.380 you can go look at the study and read the study nothing has been censored but i think this brown

00:22:21.300 University little dust-up thing is indicative of one of the big shifts that starts happening

00:22:28.060 over the course of the next couple years after 2019 is that the anti-trans movement starts to

00:22:35.200 become increasingly conspiratorial. This whole kind of narrative, when you think about it,

00:22:41.460 it already kind of is a conspiracy theory in that it requires you to believe hundreds of doctors

00:22:47.380 are giving these irreversible procedures to kids with no assessment because they're like so blinded

00:22:54.300 by their like SJW trans ideology that like they don't even care. You know, you're already in a

00:22:59.860 conspiracy mindset. And then this whole thing of like Brown University censored the research and

00:23:06.080 the trans activists are coming after us. It creates this thing that we see in other conspiracy

00:23:10.320 theories where everything becomes about like these meta debates about like you can't even ask the

00:23:14.880 questions anymore. When you look at sort of anti-trans rhetoric and these organizations

00:23:19.560 of parents or whoever it is, they spend a huge amount of time on like, she tried to publish her

00:23:25.520 research, but then it was censored. Whether or not it was censored is kind of irrelevant to whether

00:23:30.520 or not the narrative holds up on the merits, right? Like people's work can be censored for

00:23:35.360 political reasons, but it can also be censored because it's bad, right? Like research on flat

00:23:39.380 earth also gets censored. This actually appears in a later interview with one of the people who's

00:23:44.360 kind of leading this crusade. He says, researchers who have touched this topic have been punished for

00:23:49.560 their curiosity. Just ask Lisa Littman. Ultimately, her paper on the subject resulted in unnecessary

00:23:55.280 correction by the journal that published it and the loss of Littman's academic affiliation with

00:24:00.600 Brown University, which prioritized activist outrage over Littman's academic freedom.

00:24:05.540 Wait, did she get fired? 0.96

00:24:06.600 No, she left. She left to go do anti-trans advocacy. All the time I found her tweet 1.00

00:24:13.780 announcing it she says i'm thrilled to announce my excellent colleagues and i are launching a

00:24:18.040 non-profit research organization to study gender dysphoria i will be leaving brown university and

00:24:22.840 appreciate the time i spent there if you had good evidence you would just be telling me the evidence

00:24:26.660 and like sending me citations but the fact that you keep changing the subject to this like meta

00:24:31.440 stuff is just like a little bit suspicious it has the the tenor of like a tiktok video where it just

00:24:39.080 cuts into like some lady screaming like you're impinging my first amendment rights and you're

00:24:46.480 like we can have a conversation about this but i'm guessing there's some other stuff going on here

00:24:51.840 or the anti-mask weirdos on like planes hitler made them wear masks before okay yeah and then

00:24:58.780 the other the other like i think very noticeable conspiratorial element among these rapid onset

00:25:04.240 gender dysphoria boosters, is that like there's a total refusal to engage with all of the

00:25:09.040 counter evidence.

00:25:09.860 So in the years after this paper is corrected, there's actual studies, like actual surveys

00:25:15.920 of trans kids that completely fail to confirm this diagnosis.

00:25:21.580 One of the things we noticed in the anti-vax episodes was that like if anti-vax narratives

00:25:28.240 were true, it would actually be very easy to tell.

00:25:31.520 you would be able to say like oh they changed the vaccine schedule in like michigan and then like

00:25:35.520 one year later there was a massive spike in autism cases and it's kind of the same thing

00:25:39.700 with rapid onset gender dysphoria that if there was this massive wave of kids showing up to gender

00:25:45.960 clinics who you know a week ago they saw a transition video and now they say they're trans

00:25:51.360 or they have a lot of trauma and they're they're thinking they're trans is like a coping mechanism

00:25:56.220 or whatever we would actually see that in the data and clinicians would see this too and it

00:26:00.600 would show up in studies yes so there's a survey of 173 trans youth across 10 different clinics

00:26:07.580 in canada that concludes controlling for age and sex assigned at birth recent gender knowledge was

00:26:13.800 not significantly associated with depressive symptoms psychological distress past diagnoses

00:26:18.460 with mental health issues or neurodevelopment disorders gender dysphoria symptoms self-harm

00:26:23.360 past year suicide attempt having gender supportive online friends general support from online friends

00:26:28.820 or transgender friends or transgender support from parents. We also have like much larger surveys.

00:26:34.280 So in 2023, we get a survey of 27,000 participants where 40% of trans people say that they realized

00:26:42.520 that they were trans in adolescence. It doesn't mean they're bewitched. It doesn't mean they saw

00:26:46.140 it on TikTok. It doesn't mean that they're not trans. It's just like a different way

00:26:50.020 of discovering themselves. It's just not the case that we have a bunch of kids who are essentially

00:26:56.120 confused and they see something on the internet and the next day they tell their parents i'm trans

00:27:01.360 and the next week they tell the doctor i'm trans and then the week after that they're getting

00:27:05.540 surgery i will say i remember the gender confusion as the lead message sort of era yeah one of the

00:27:12.900 reasons that i recall it so vividly is that we had a volunteer leadership summit at one point

00:27:19.900 and uh trans woman attended wearing a t-shirt that just said i'm not confused but you seem to be 0.97

00:27:26.900 oh that's good that's very this is all shit that you come to when you're looking for reasons to 0.99

00:27:32.920 disbelieve your kid yeah yeah when they tell you that they are trans right that you're like oh the 0.99

00:27:38.040 timing of it is wrong the onset was too rapid or i didn't see you i didn't observe you as being 0.73

00:27:45.120 deeply deeply unhappy or you know emotionally distraught about your gender yeah and it's to me

00:27:52.520 it's just like so telling that it's like the minute somebody asks actual trans people they're

00:27:56.960 like oh that's not my experience at all yeah that probably should just be like the end of the debate

00:28:01.060 then right rather than asking more people who are not trans kids and would would have no way of

00:28:07.340 knowing what the subjective experience of trans adolescence is yeah but then in 2023 we get

00:28:13.520 another attempt to prove that rapid onset gender dysphoria exists i know this this one's even worse

00:28:21.160 but we're not going to spend as much time on it so this one is called rapid onset gender dysphoria

00:28:26.920 parent reports on 1655 possible cases so one of the co-authors of this is someone named j michael

00:28:36.940 bailey who i i don't know how else to put this he's basically just like a disgraced sex researcher

00:28:44.440 so the scandal with him is all around his 2003 book called the man who would be queen the science

00:28:52.340 of gender bending and transsexualism where i know he he's we're just we're just gonna read it i i

00:29:00.760 was gonna try to preface this i i went to his website and it has like an excerpt of his book

00:29:06.040 I just like that we got the belabored sigh before you even said anything.

00:29:11.740 Like, you just, you couldn't even start a sentence without just being like,

00:29:15.500 I'm like, what can I tell Aubrey about this guy?

00:29:18.580 But like, I think I'm doing a show don't tell thing.

00:29:21.180 So this is, got it.

00:29:22.100 This is, I believe the first like five paragraphs of his book.

00:29:26.420 And he, this is on his website.

00:29:27.980 This is not like leaked secret documents.

00:29:30.180 This is, this is something he has put out as like, this is an exemplar of my work.

00:29:34.620 The most expert cosmetic salesperson at the local upscale department store is a man.

00:29:41.300 A female friend told me about him and, intrigued, I went to see him.

00:29:45.980 He was young, tall, and African-American, and his head was shaven.

00:29:50.480 His fingernails were long and covered with clear nail polish.

00:29:54.180 I watched him as he helped a woman choose the right makeup.

00:29:57.680 After he was done with her, I introduced myself.

00:29:59.920 he was slightly taken aback that i a psychologist wanted to meet him what i don't know but he also

00:30:07.480 appeared slightly flattered he told me his name was edwin edwin is a feminine man one of the most

00:30:14.760 feminine men i have ever met i do not ask edwin about his childhood because i do not need to

00:30:21.620 i already know that edwin played with dolls and loathed football that his best friends were girls

00:30:28.880 there is some chance that if i ever see edwin again his name and appearance will be changed

00:30:35.340 to those of a woman even for a gay man edwin's appearance and manner are exceedingly feminine

00:30:41.800 he would stand out in a gay bar but he'd receive little romantic attention there

00:30:47.320 first of all how do you know yeah what is this weird dig at edwin oh god yeah i mean i mean 0.99

00:30:53.100 gay men are like misogynistic as fuck on this stuff but like when straight people talk about 1.00

00:30:56.520 this shit i'm like take edwin's name out of your mouth also fems are getting laid oh don't worry 1.00

00:31:02.080 about it wait i have to take off my carpal tunnel splints hang on hang on fems are getting laid 1.00

00:31:07.140 he is near the boundary of male and female and someday he may cross it if he does one primary 0.63

00:31:15.600 motive will be lust one cannot understand transsexualism without studying transsexual

00:31:22.900 sexuality. Transsexuals lead remarkable sex lives. Those who love men become women to attract them. 0.95

00:31:31.200 Jesus Christ. Dude, I know. Those who love women become the women they love. Although transsexuals 0.98

00:31:39.200 are cultural hot commodities right now, writers have either been too shallow or too squeamish 0.98

00:31:47.300 to give transsexual sexuality the attention it deserves no longer also like trans writers have

00:31:55.280 not been too shallow or too squeamish to write about trans sexuality that's been happening for

00:32:00.180 a long time right about it dude this is the this is the excerpt he put on his own website

00:32:05.740 that he's proud of sight years so one primary motive for transition is lust for the stranger 0.97

00:32:16.500 that you fucking met at sephora yeah you gotta see you gotta see this homo working it's working 0.98

00:32:21.520 at the mall who by the way exists at every sephora what are we doing j michael bailey is like fairly 0.99

00:32:32.120 open about the fact that he thinks there's only two kinds of transgender people and one of them

00:32:38.820 is basically gay dudes they they want to get men and they can't get them as a man so they become a 0.87

00:32:45.760 trans women so they can get men and then the other kind of transgender people is autogynophilic 0.96

00:32:50.480 transsexuals people who basically are turned on by the idea of themselves being women right so 0.99

00:32:57.560 basically like it they're they're sex perverts it gives them a boner to like dress up in women's 1.00

00:33:01.360 clothes and like live as a woman and they're only doing it for this like lifelong fetish 0.96

00:33:04.840 this is the buffalo bill of it all yes yes yes exactly and so like i mean this is like the kind 0.63

00:33:10.560 of rhetoric that you got in like the fucking 50s and 60s and he's publishing this book in 2003 0.99

00:33:14.260 And he's still saying this shit now. 0.99

00:33:16.220 He now has revised this to say that there's three kinds of trans people. 0.99

00:33:21.240 And the third one is rapid onset gender dysphoria.

00:33:24.120 This is you are now turning into Brian Cox in succession looking to anti-trans movements saying you are not serious people.

00:33:33.000 Exactly.

00:33:33.480 exactly but then okay so the other reason we're talking about j michael bailey is that one of the

00:33:41.080 first steps of researching this guy was to go to his wikipedia page and mostly it's like a normal

00:33:47.360 wikipedia page it has like career stuff it has you know information about these various scandals

00:33:52.020 and so i'm scrolling and scrolling and then i get to the final section of his wikipedia page 0.54

00:33:58.540 which is the fuck saw incident what and i was like mike you have 180 pages of notes don't open 0.97

00:34:08.780 a bunch of other tabs don't find out what the fuck the fuck saw incident was but come on i 0.98

00:34:13.720 didn't have the strength you and i know why we do this show i didn't have this finding out about 0.91

00:34:18.780 is a non-zero factor okay and then all day i'm thinking about it i'm like 0.98

00:34:27.420 what is the fuck saw incident what is it also i would just say anything involving a fuck saw 0.98

00:34:36.880 is an incident 0.99

00:34:38.520 it's not like a quiet evening with the fuck saw 0.98

00:34:47.020 sunday afternoons 0.99

00:34:50.120 oh no michael i might be destroyed okay do you want to know what the fuck saw incident was 0.95

00:34:58.940 i don't know if i can take it okay okay tell me so 2011 he's a teacher at northeastern 0.98

00:35:06.500 and he's, he teaches about like sexuality. He does like sexuality classes. And so he's doing

00:35:11.600 like an optional lecture on kink, like the kink community. And so he brings in like two kinky 1.00

00:35:19.280 people. I thought, I thought the fuck saw was going to be like a joke name or something that 1.00

00:35:23.720 like a student came up with. This is what the kink performers call it. So it's a saw, 1.00

00:35:28.560 like a saw blade, you know, that you use for like home construction. But if you take off the saw

00:35:33.660 and you put on a dildo then it's like a dildo like going in and out i'm doing this my hand right now 0.74

00:35:38.960 you can't see it sure so it's like a jackhammer it's like a dildo jackhammer basically yeah and 0.99

00:35:44.780 so apparently they're having this class and they're describing having sex with this woman 0.99

00:35:50.100 with the fuck saw and one of them is like you know we actually have the fuck saw with us right now 1.00

00:35:55.920 should we demonstrate this oh hello students i happen to have my fuck saw on me 1.00

00:36:03.840 it's in my civic outside give me a second i brought it to school then they go out and they 1.00

00:36:14.720 get the fuck saw i love this this man like uses the fuck saw on this woman and brings her to like 1.00

00:36:22.680 numerous orgasms you're this this is made up this is fucking real this is this becomes like a whole 1.00

00:36:29.760 big thing and like the whole country is like clowning on this professor who like let this 0.99

00:36:34.480 happen because apparently they're like is this cool and he's like yeah yeah whatever we're all

00:36:37.620 adults here there's eventually an uh an interview with him in salon where they're like what what is

00:36:45.000 like the deal with this whole outcry and he's saying like it's not a big deal because it's like

00:36:49.040 an optional lecture all the kids in college are adults and he says it took no more than 10 minutes 0.94

00:36:56.100 of the hour-long presentation so it's one fucking sixth amazing of 10 minutes of this woman just 0.99

00:37:06.760 having orgasm after orgasm watching somebody have sex in a lecture hall for 10 minutes is a long 0.99

00:37:13.140 amount of time so boring honestly after the first one like how much fuck saw do we need 1.00

00:37:20.420 so that's uh that's j michael bailey jesus hells that's our guy that was like a weird 0.98

00:37:28.740 long digression about the fuck saw we're keeping it good i love that you're like this is totally 0.94

00:37:34.640 inappropriate for a university let's just dedicate 25 minutes of our podcast i wanted to be exactly 0.98

00:37:42.180 one-sixth of our podcast the way that it was one-sixth of the lecture oh i think that's fair

00:37:46.240 i want to keep structural integrity how many of the lecture halls full of students are we going

00:37:51.940 to reach so back to the reason why we're talking about the fuck saw this 2023 article that is 0.99

00:37:58.220 attempting to prove the existence of rapid onset gender dysphoria one of the authors is the fuck 0.98

00:38:02.960 saw guy j michael bailey the other author is a woman named suzanna diaz and the way that the 0.93

00:38:09.900 study comes about is j michael bailey goes to a conference organized by suzanna diaz and he's

00:38:16.540 talking to her about this website that she founded called parents of rogd kids she mentions that she

00:38:23.460 has all of this data she has a survey that she has sent to the users of this site and that is the

00:38:30.160 basis of this study so right off the bat you can tell that this has exactly the same problems as

00:38:37.580 the previous study, right? This is just essentially a sketchy online survey and it's recruited parents

00:38:44.380 who already believe in the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria. So of course, they're going to 0.87

00:38:49.700 report that they've seen it in their kids. That's why they're on this website. But the kind of

00:38:53.440 amazing thing is that both of those factors are even worse in this study. So first of all, the

00:39:00.020 data is even sketchier because Susanna Diaz is not her real name. J. Michael Bailey says that like,

00:39:06.580 oh, because the trans activists were so mean to Lisa Littman, she has no choice but to use a

00:39:11.440 pseudonym. He says, my co-author Susanna Diaz doesn't go by her real name. I don't even know

00:39:17.700 it, despite having met her in person once and spoken with her many times. She uses a pseudonym

00:39:22.720 to protect her family, especially her daughter, whom Susanna believes has rapid onset gender

00:39:27.460 dysphoria. Yeah. This is just a lady who founded this website and then says that she surveyed

00:39:31.940 people, but there's very little information about the sort of methodology and like logistics of the

00:39:37.840 survey. And secondly, this website that she founded, Parents of ROGD Kids, I mean, the previous study

00:39:44.620 also recruited parents from these anti-trans websites. This website makes fourth wave now

00:39:50.820 look like PFLAG. So if you go to the like our position, like the basic about us statement on

00:39:57.880 their website it says our position one identifying as the opposite gender is not normal oh good in

00:40:05.080 most cases it's a symptom of severe psychological pain or dysfunction or an attempt to resolve some 0.82

00:40:10.780 other issue two our children are subjected to strong cultural influences that promote transitioning

00:40:16.240 three the gender affirmative model is a form of conversion therapy what i know sorry dude this is 0.99

00:40:22.500 the rhetorical equivalent of a fuck saw okay okay there were fuck sawing us not in the good way 0.98

00:40:27.880 for the current standard of care the gender affirmative model is unproven five our gender 0.99

00:40:33.680 dysphoric children youth and adults are being experimented on six the gender affirmative model

00:40:39.480 prolongs suffering and causes further trauma seven professionals who accept an individual

00:40:45.020 self-diagnosis and propose medical intervention are negligent jesus christmas eight medical

00:40:51.640 intervention for gender dysphoria should be a last resort. So this is very openly an anti-trans

00:40:58.220 organization. As you know, my brain is broken in such a way that it can only be treated by

00:41:04.780 recreationally watching the Montana legislature. Yes. And this was a huge, huge, huge fight last

00:41:13.000 session. Yeah. There were people making these sorts of claims about like kids are being rushed

00:41:18.860 in to transition and but and the whole time I was watching it I was like in Montana yeah I know

00:41:26.140 in Montana right like the places where the moral panic is the strongest are the places where it is

00:41:33.800 also like the most disapproved of it's just real nonsense and it's a real dead giveaway that people

00:41:42.200 are just turning off their critical thinking brains at all yeah they're just freaked out and

00:41:47.880 their hypothalamuses are like this is the only part of your brain that works right now and so

00:41:51.740 so we're not going to spend as much time on this as we did on the lisa litman survey mostly because 0.97

00:41:56.940 this is are we going to spend as much time on it as we did on the fuck song no 0.80

00:42:01.840 mostly because this this is essentially the same thing again but like even jankier so in the sort 0.80

00:42:13.040 of consent form it says who should complete this survey you should complete this survey if your

00:42:19.640 child a had a relatively normal childhood without showing any signs of discomfort with their gender

00:42:25.300 and b suddenly seemingly out of the blue decided they identified as the opposite gender or some

00:42:31.540 other quote-unquote gender boy gender and scare quotes is a new one for me just like the whole 0.60

00:42:38.860 concept of i know i don't fucking know and then in the recruitment criteria they say that their 0.52

00:42:45.480 respondents are reporting like they get like a median age of rapid onset gender dysphoria and 0.91

00:42:52.300 they say that the range is between three to greater than 25 years so like what child at age

00:42:59.720 three is doing rapid onset gender dysphoria like how would you like is the three-year-old on tiktok

00:43:06.560 They say, we limited subsequent analyses to parent reports on youths whose gender dysphoria was reported to begin between ages 11 and 21.

00:43:17.660 So why are you including people over 18?

00:43:19.740 They're not children then.

00:43:20.900 Again, this guy is just like so non-credible to me.

00:43:26.460 He says this in interviews afterwards, after this paper gets a lot of criticism.

00:43:30.820 He says, we identified 1,655 cases of rapid onset gender dysphoria, a significant number

00:43:38.420 for activists to ignore.

00:43:40.280 You didn't identify cases.

00:43:42.140 Yeah.

00:43:42.440 These are not cases.

00:43:43.380 You identified parents.

00:43:44.720 Yeah.

00:43:45.000 Also that whole like for activists to ignore.

00:43:48.640 I'm like, A, what are you doing?

00:43:50.320 Yeah.

00:43:50.700 And B, like what else have people been ignoring?

00:43:54.100 Right?

00:43:54.400 Like again, this is the like, unlike some grocery stores, you'll never find rent.

00:44:00.600 yeah yeah yeah yeah you're sort of like trying to insinuate that anyone who is supportive of

00:44:06.500 trans people is like ignoring data or willfully shutting down some kind of like more science

00:44:14.680 driven conversation but you're not making the implicit explicit right you're sort of like 0.99

00:44:19.620 doing these big broad gestures to be like you know how they are and it's like no you have to

00:44:25.080 tell me how they are there's then we're not going to go into it but like there's been a whole tedious

00:44:29.620 like debate thing and this paper is eventually retracted the reason why it's retracted is 0.63

00:44:35.940 because they never got ethics approval oh jesus always a good fucking sign the funny thing is too 0.61

00:44:42.440 is like on the kind of broader and more substantive critiques he's like well the 0.91

00:44:46.540 limitation section of the paper like said these weren't representative which like i guess but

00:44:51.840 also you can't just publish a super shitty study and then have limitations be like well the study

00:44:56.680 is super shitty so after this happens the paper is retracted you then get another tedious wave

00:45:04.100 of like someone published an article that questioned the trans orthodoxy and they were

00:45:09.640 canceled he writes like two different first person accounts one of which for barry weiss's website

00:45:17.860 you gotta give me a trigger warning before i know i know it's bad don't say it three times you know

00:45:23.300 The headline is, my research on gender dysphoria was censored, but I won't be.

00:45:27.780 Oh, Lord.

00:45:28.740 If Rapunzel gender dysphoria was real, you would be talking about the real evidence for it. 0.94

00:45:33.520 You would be pointing us to evidence.

00:45:34.740 You wouldn't be talking about, like, this guy's paper was retracted.

00:45:37.540 This guy's, like, super jank ball's paper was retracted.

00:45:40.020 Well, I think part of, like, what's at the core of what's happening here is a thing that

00:45:45.080 I thought about a lot as an organizer, which is what happens when people believe that their

00:45:50.980 discomfort has to be resolved in order for other people to do other things with their own lives

00:45:57.720 right yeah like you feel uncomfortable when a conversation comes up and you're nervous about

00:46:03.820 becoming the new like larry david of your friend group like oh no you can't say anything right

00:46:09.240 yeah and like meanwhile people are not getting health care that they urgently need yeah yeah

00:46:16.180 Like I both have a lot of empathy for folks who feel like changes happening

00:46:22.200 really rapidly and I'm struggling to keep up with it.

00:46:24.660 And I feel really confused by it and whatever that discomfort becomes the

00:46:29.880 cultural thing that we're responding to instead of like the actual needs of

00:46:35.060 actual trans youth.

00:46:36.640 Right.

00:46:36.820 You know,

00:46:37.060 but you're very clear and like,

00:46:38.200 you can just ask them and find out what they are.

00:46:40.540 Totally.

00:46:41.380 Yeah.

00:46:41.920 Totally.

00:46:42.360 So we have the one Lisa Lippman study, which is heavily corrected.

00:46:46.480 We then have this Michael Bailey fucksaw study officially retracted.

00:46:51.480 So these are the only two pieces of evidence for rapid onset gender dysphoria.

00:46:55.860 Okay.

00:46:56.420 We also accidentally during this period get a bunch of evidence against rapid onset gender dysphoria.

00:47:04.480 I'm stealing this point from Julia Serrano, who has pointed this out numerous times,

00:47:08.860 that over the last couple of years, the anti-trans movement keeps just declaring victory

00:47:15.120 and saying that they've discovered this like smoking gun that all of their concerns have

00:47:19.900 been proven. And every single time it ends up proving the opposite. The first one of these

00:47:26.460 alleged smoking guns is a lawsuit from 2020 that's filed in the UK called Tavistock versus Bell.

00:47:33.880 It is filed by two claimants. The first claimant is somebody named Kira Bell, who was a patient at England's only youth gender clinic, which we will talk about in great detail later.

00:47:47.940 We're not going to go into too much detail, but I'm just going to read you a couple of choice excerpts from the timeline that is laid out in the kind of discovery fact stage of this lawsuit.

00:47:58.000 If you read the decision, these are little sentences that I'm cutting out because they're

00:48:02.580 like amidst all of the legalese.

00:48:04.760 It says, when she was 15, the first claimant was referred to the Tavistock Clinic.

00:48:09.880 That's the gender identity clinic.

00:48:11.400 She was first seen at the Tavistock Clinic, aged 16, and had a number of appointments

00:48:15.660 spread out over one year and nine months.

00:48:18.500 She was referred to another clinic in June 2013, and after three appointments, commenced

00:48:23.900 puberty blockers.

00:48:24.760 after commencing testosterone at 17 changes to her body commenced rapidly and when she was 20

00:48:31.000 she had a double mastectomy and then she detransitions a couple years later so just to

00:48:36.980 lay this out really clearly according to the timeline presented by somebody who claims she

00:48:41.200 was rushed through gender affirming care she identifies as trans at 15 she doesn't get her

00:48:46.440 first appointment at the clinic until she's 16 because there's a huge waiting list she then has

00:48:51.000 a bunch of appointments spread out over one year and nine months before she gets puberty 0.93

00:48:56.140 blockers. She then starts testosterone at 17. So another year goes by and she gets a mastectomy 0.61

00:49:02.420 at 20. Yeah. Five years. Big rush. This also explains why in the lawsuit they mentioned 0.95

00:49:07.440 that in the previous year, the clinic only gave puberty blockers to 161 kids, which is

00:49:15.340 minuscule, right? We're talking about 8 million kids between 10 and 19 in the UK as a whole.

00:49:20.320 And if you compare this to antidepressants, 500,000 kids in the UK are on antidepressants.

00:49:27.540 And I don't want to cast aspersions on antidepressants or whatever, but it's like you can get antidepressants after one appointment.

00:49:32.960 I feel like between this and your last episode saying your therapist called you a nervous wreck.

00:49:38.380 Look.

00:49:38.780 That you might be telling on yourself more than you mean to. 1.00

00:49:42.640 You can get this shit in one appointment. 1.00

00:49:44.960 I don't know if you know this. 1.00

00:49:45.860 I was rushed into dealing with my anxiety issues.

00:49:49.780 After a scant 40 years, I would have rushed into it.

00:49:53.580 It was very funny.

00:49:54.780 He's like, yeah, you have like a sort of fast talking, kind of urgent, nervous energy.

00:49:59.360 Has anyone ever told you that?

00:50:00.460 And I was like, about 1,500 people on iTunes.

00:50:03.120 You can actually see reviews of my personality.

00:50:06.800 You can get a second and a third and a fourth opinion if you'd like.

00:50:09.380 Only every time I talk, which I do for a living.

00:50:13.020 For a living?

00:50:16.220 So, okay.

00:50:17.320 So that is the first claimant.

00:50:19.480 So someone who was rushed through a five-year process.

00:50:23.540 And then the second claimant, I'm going to send you this excerpt from the lawsuit.

00:50:30.180 The second claimant, Mrs. A, is the mother of a 15-year-old girl who has autism spectrum disorder. 0.75

00:50:36.740 The daughter has a history of mental health and behavioral problems.

00:50:40.660 She is, quote, desperate to run away from all that made her female, end quote,

00:50:45.180 and has been referred to child and adolescent mental health services.

00:50:48.860 Which is not the gender identity clinic, by the way. This is just like mental health for kids.

00:50:53.100 Mrs. A is very concerned that her daughter would be referred to the Tavistock Clinic and prescribed 0.96

00:50:58.220 puberty blockers. However, the daughter has not currently been referred to the Tavistock Clinic

00:51:03.760 and having regard to the defendant's current practice would not meet the criteria for puberty

00:51:08.480 blockers because her parents would not support that treatment. Mrs. A's interest in this action

00:51:14.340 is therefore largely theoretical this is so english in the best way

00:51:19.600 that's english bless your heart this is literally just a random person

00:51:25.020 oh her daughter has mental health problems okay we think she might be rushed into medicalization 0.99

00:51:31.640 if she was referred to this clinic but she wasn't can you imagine filing a lawsuit against the 0.82

00:51:37.000 sacklers and be like well if i was in a motorcycle accident i would have been prescribed opioids and 0.59

00:51:42.560 then i would have gotten addicted i really like how close we're getting to calling this lawsuit

00:51:47.180 stolen valor for all the fictional people who really were rushed into treatment this does a

00:51:56.480 disservice to their sacrifice yeah pour one out yeah for all the made up people this decision

00:52:01.460 in which all of these facts come out actually results in banning puberty blockers for people

00:52:05.760 under 16 the case is later overturned thankfully but this actually results in making it much harder

00:52:12.040 for people to get puberty blockers after this?

00:52:14.040 Puberty blockers are something that I worked on specifically.

00:52:17.080 Oh, did you?

00:52:17.460 Yeah, absolutely.

00:52:19.120 And it fits in a category that almost all sort of transition related or gender affirming

00:52:24.760 care fits into, which is we already provide it to cis people.

00:52:29.260 I know.

00:52:29.680 But we're specifically denying it to trans people because they are trans, right?

00:52:34.400 Yeah, there's this like really bizarre talking point going around about puberty blockers

00:52:37.640 for trans kids that like, they're not reversible.

00:52:39.680 We don't know if they're reversible.

00:52:40.900 And like the whole point of puberty blockers is that they're reversible.

00:52:44.940 People take them when they're going through puberty too early and you take them for a

00:52:48.440 couple of years and then you wait for like the appropriate age to go through puberty

00:52:51.460 and you stop taking them and you go through puberty.

00:52:53.860 So like if they weren't reversible, they would not be prescribed to a few thousand

00:52:57.540 cisgender kids a year. 0.66

00:52:59.280 Like the whole point of them is the reversibility. 1.00

00:53:01.480 That's why people like them and seek them out.

00:53:04.560 Okay.

00:53:04.760 So that lawsuit was the first rake stepping that the anti-trans movement has done where

00:53:10.000 they're accidentally ginning up more evidence against their entire narrative. The second one

00:53:15.700 is the Missouri Gender Clinic whistleblower. I know that you as a scholar of my tweets have

00:53:22.500 probably been following this very closely. Here's what comes up when I open up my fucking Chrome 0.99

00:53:27.240 on my computer is it has a bunch of suggested like, hey, here are places you go often. And 0.97

00:53:32.520 one of them is just Michael Hobbs on Twitter. I feel like what it actually does, it opens up

00:53:36.360 75 tabs but they're all just different photos of your dog no that's my phone the new ios has a

00:53:42.200 thing where you can just rotate through pictures of a person or a thing or whatever and my phone 0.98

00:53:47.440 was immediately like you got a lot of pictures of this fucking dog siri is like look i don't 0.98

00:53:51.880 usually do this but tone it down look that's enough so this woman who was an employee at a 0.99

00:53:58.800 gender clinic in st louis wrote an article for barry weiss's blog called i thought i was saving

00:54:04.800 trans kids. Now I'm blowing the whistle. And this was part of a kind of a media rollout that also

00:54:10.420 included a sworn affidavit that she filed with the Missouri Attorney General. And in this affidavit

00:54:16.340 and in this article, she basically says that like kids were being rushed through processes.

00:54:21.140 They're barely getting seen by psychologists. And yet the doctors are like, we think you're trans.

00:54:25.880 Here's some hormones. But once she files this, once it goes public, people start noticing

00:54:29.900 that she's making some implausible claims in this affidavit as well. So at one point she says that

00:54:36.820 a kid comes in identifying as a communist attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non-binary,

00:54:45.240 and was put on hormones. And I don't know if you know this, Aubrey, but this thing of I'm an attack

00:54:50.540 helicopter, it's like a really well-known right-wing meme. It's something that right-wing

00:54:55.540 people say to basically invalidate trans people like oh you identify as a woman well i identify

00:55:00.560 as an attack helicopter it's all the bumper stickers that say my truck identifies as a prius 0.99

00:55:05.820 or yeah it's the one fucking joke they only have one fucking joke right and so this attack 0.96

00:55:10.300 helicopter thing strikes people as like is was this maybe someone who was joking or maybe 0.98

00:55:14.760 this whistleblower like read it on a website and like thought it was real or something like

00:55:19.400 something weird is going on but then to me the far more implausible claim that she makes in this

00:55:24.580 article and in this affidavit, she says the clinic routinely issued puberty blockers or

00:55:29.380 cross-sex hormones without parental consent. If those kids are under 18, that's extraordinarily

00:55:35.720 unlikely. If this was true, I mean, it's a very risky strategy for this clinic, right? Because

00:55:42.360 you're opening yourself up to litigation. And there's also the question of like insurance and

00:55:46.520 kind of the administration of the American healthcare system that someone is paying for

00:55:49.760 these procedures. And so the parents are getting a bill from a gender clinic for, you know, a shot 0.90

00:55:55.140 of puberty blockers every three months and they're not noticing. Right. And also their kid is like

00:56:00.220 visibly transitioning. Every single person who like works in healthcare is like, I don't think 1.00

00:56:06.440 so. Yeah. As usual, this is something that of course, like there's this big victory lap of

00:56:10.340 like, we're finally, you're finally have to admit that like these clinics are pushing kids through,

00:56:13.560 but then local reporters start looking around and saying, well, okay, this person alleges that

00:56:18.480 like a ton of kids are pushed through procedures. Well, let's find some of them. Let's go talk to

00:56:22.580 people. And so a local reporter finds almost two dozen parents of kids who were seen at the clinic

00:56:28.440 and every single one of them says that they don't agree with the characterization of this

00:56:32.380 whistleblower at all. It took a long time and they were really thoroughly assessed and were happy with

00:56:38.060 the procedures. And they even talked to some kind of like anti-trans parents who were like, yeah,

00:56:42.040 we didn't think that our daughter was trans at all, but we don't think that she was rushed through

00:56:45.700 anything we think that they went really really slow and eventually she didn't get care partly 0.72

00:56:49.800 because we weren't happy with it so it's like they just can't find anybody and to this day

00:56:55.800 as far as i know not a single individual named person has come forward and said yes this happened

00:57:01.640 to me at this clinic all we've had is numerous people come forward and say no this isn't my

00:57:06.440 experience at all it's really fascinating to me that not really anywhere in the sort of storytelling

00:57:12.580 of this stuff does anyone go i think this person might just be really uncomfortable with trans

00:57:18.640 people yeah yeah and as i always say like i'm not going to litigate what is in this person's heart

00:57:23.600 i'm not i'm not going to speculate about their motives or what they really believe or whatever

00:57:26.960 but in her own affidavit and in this barry weiss article she routinely misgenders kids that come

00:57:32.740 to this clinic jesus christ pretty really really really low bar it's also just like a sign of a 0.96

00:57:37.660 fucking gremlin of a person dude i know it's so easy if you introduce yourself to me as michael 0.94

00:57:44.520 hi my name is michael i wouldn't be like mikey mdog what does your birth certificate say you 0.99

00:57:51.540 wouldn't do that that's weird you're being weird the third rake stepping i hadn't even heard of

00:57:57.900 this one before i started researching this episode but in march of 2023 there was something called

00:58:03.480 the WPATH files. So WPATH is the World Professional Association of Transgender Health

00:58:09.760 Providers. It's basically like the AAP or the Endocrine Society or whatever for like

00:58:14.400 trans medical providers. And basically, I'm not going to go through the whole fucking 300 page 0.98

00:58:19.200 document, but the introduction basically presents it as like we have leaked documents from inside 0.88

00:58:24.060 WPATH where they're admitting that they're rushing kids through these procedures, right?

00:58:28.760 the only problem is first of all these are not internal w path chats this is not a private forum

00:58:37.000 so our friend evan urquhart has like looked into this in more detail and found that like this is a

00:58:43.660 professional forum where anybody can pay 225 and like participate in it it's like a moderated

00:58:50.640 forum for like health professionals oh no it's your voters pamphlet where you're like look man

00:58:56.180 for 800 bucks anybody can put a statement in here and then the other the other significantly larger

00:59:02.420 problem is that if you actually read the the evidence like the leaked evidence that they amass

00:59:07.680 it again proves the opposite of what they're saying so if you get to the actual leaks like

00:59:13.220 the actual text parts where they're like we got it this is it the first example of this is a doctor

00:59:20.880 in brazil posts on the forum it's kind of like a reddit thing he's like posting a question he says

00:59:25.560 look, I've got a patient who identifies as trans, and they're 14 years old, and they want

00:59:29.920 genital surgery. What should I do? One of the replies is a doctor who says, I wouldn't do it. 0.97

00:59:35.880 Tissue too immature, dilation routine too critical. Okay, so don't do it. Another person posts,

00:59:42.460 we at GS Montreal would not undertake a surgery at 14. Genital surgery is delayed until the patient

00:59:48.320 is 18. Okay, then there's another post, which is like much longer, more detailed, where it's

00:59:53.380 Somebody saying, look, in my entire, like, 30-year career as a gender-affirming care

00:59:58.680 practitioner, I've only done maybe, like, four or six genital surgeries on people under

01:00:04.700 18, and they were in, like, very specific circumstances.

01:00:07.560 These were basically kids who wanted the surgery before they went off to college, and they

01:00:11.560 wanted it to be in the summer so they could have, like, the recovery time and kind of

01:00:14.200 start fresh in college.

01:00:15.600 But, like, that's something that's done with, like, a tremendous amount of care, and that's

01:00:19.340 not something that we do lightly, and, like, I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you,

01:00:22.360 like really know the patient and like definitely don't do it at 14 so someone asked can i do

01:00:29.520 surgery on a young kid and everyone was like no and they just present this as if like well

01:00:36.240 we've proven they're giving surgery to young kids we got them folks and also we have statistics

01:00:41.500 about how many people under 18 get general surgeries and it's like so close to zero you

01:00:46.160 might as well fucking round it down to zero it's like basically people are not getting these 0.87

01:00:50.420 procedure is under 18 so michael i'm so tired dude it's it's exhausting right and again you 0.99

01:00:57.220 get this fucking victory lap it just sucks to see all this shit playing out and be like 0.99

01:01:01.900 okay cool so this is gonna be you know the fabulously wealthy trans community is gonna 1.00

01:01:08.260 be fucking spending their money yeah no kidding and all their fucking advocacy time beating back 1.00

01:01:12.480 this fucking bullshit it's also so frustrating to do this like pretty recently after we just did 1.00

01:01:17.820 this with the gay marriage debate fucking honestly it's like do you really need a trans cousin 1.00

01:01:22.540 really we have to start from scratch with this it's really sad and frustrating and demoralizing 0.99

01:01:28.340 and the people who are doing it really think that they are bringing up reasonable and good points 0.97

01:01:34.280 and they're forcing us to make a series of tedious podcast episodes talking about fucking 0.84

01:01:38.200 methodology again yeah michael's being forced constantly i'm not doing this to win internet 0.92

01:01:45.420 beefs aubrey i'm doing this for science but then the thing is that i mean this is the really dark

01:01:51.140 part of the episode so please bear with me the the really sad thing about this is that despite

01:01:55.740 all of this just years-long rake stepping this this strategy is working yeah so over the last

01:02:01.560 couple years we've seen an unprecedented legislative assault on trans people yeah 21 states have banned

01:02:07.080 trans kids in sports 11 states have banned lgbt content in schools six states have banned trans

01:02:15.240 people using the bathroom they want to use florida just banned gender identity cards so like if you

01:02:22.020 want to change your driver's license so it says female they're not letting you do that anymore 0.93

01:02:25.000 which is like just an unbelievable dick move it's just so shitty there's nine states now are 0.90

01:02:30.240 legislating pronoun use and are making it illegal for teachers to use kids preferred pronouns if it 0.93

01:02:35.560 doesn't match their birth certificate jesus god almighty do you want to hear that do you want to

01:02:39.880 hear the galaxy brain justification for these no god what is it michael you say no but i'm just

01:02:46.780 gonna keep going regardless i was just waiting it's a formality to hear i understand i'm asking

01:02:52.120 the consent on this show is fake look i'm going all right let me proceed you're like those little

01:03:02.700 wind-up chattering teeth once he starts there's no you just gotta let him fall off the edge of

01:03:09.700 the table or just run out of juice or whatever. So the justification for banning social transition

01:03:15.440 is that most kids who socially transition go on to puberty blockers. And most kids who go on

01:03:21.280 puberty blockers go into hormones. But that's an argument that most of the people who socially

01:03:26.580 transition are trans and they're actually pretty firm in their identity, relatively young. They

01:03:31.140 know young, but somehow transphobes have galaxy brained themselves into this idea that this is 0.97

01:03:36.620 like putting them on a medical pathway and that this is like bewitching them and like keeping them

01:03:41.660 trans against their wishes and this weird inversion this like darvo nonsense where it's like well 0.89

01:03:47.920 there's stigma against detransitioning what so we have to actually make sure that they feel 0.56

01:03:52.840 comfortable detransitioning as if parents who are like we affirm your trans identity but when they 0.99

01:03:59.320 say mommy i'm cis they'll be like fuck you that's why so many cis kids are homeless it's like what 1.00

01:04:05.080 the fuck are we talking about dude darvo is such a good analogy for what's happening here 1.00

01:04:13.000 uh for folks who are unfamiliar darvo deny attack reverse victim and offender yes the thing is i 0.99

01:04:19.440 didn't actually know that i just have a friend named darvo and she sucks so i was just saying 0.94

01:04:22.680 this darvo shit that's what i meant okay okay okay it's a lady named darvo yeah 0.99

01:04:27.260 the doctor was a woman you know uh stop making me giggle during dark shit do you understand my job 0.99

01:04:37.520 but like i think darbo is such a good example because honestly like part of what people are 0.97

01:04:43.100 so like whipped up about right now is children their parents and their health care provider

01:04:50.240 making decisions about what kind of health care they ought to access and when yeah right like it 0.98

01:04:57.540 is such a deep darvo shit that you're like sorry like a kid in i don't know where modesto california 0.98

01:05:06.440 got some health care that they wanted and you're this bent out of shape about it so we're also of 0.99

01:05:11.780 course seeing this wave of bans on gender affirming care and like it it really is hard to

01:05:18.340 convey like how serious these laws are so this is from a new york times article last month florida

01:05:24.060 joined at least four other states that make providing gender affirming care a felony florida's 0.99

01:05:29.540 law penalizes doctors who violate the law with up to five years in prison jesus fucking hell dude 0.92

01:05:36.340 also changes child custody rules to treat transition care as equivalent to child abuse yikes the this 0.95

01:05:42.900 rapid onset gender dysphoria narrative is central to the passage of these laws in florida they have

01:05:49.820 like a a long kind of briefing like allegedly studious document that goes along with the law

01:05:56.220 where they're kind of laying out the evidence base which refers to lisa litman's papers numerous 0.94

01:06:00.080 times in georgia a congressman reads lisa litman's study into the record jesus fucking christ i also 0.89

01:06:07.580 got obsessed with this like evidence brief frequently asked questions thing that was 0.88

01:06:12.040 submitted to the Utah legislature that has numerous explicit references to rapid onset

01:06:18.360 gender dysphoria and also includes a bunch of testimonials from de-transitioners. The first

01:06:25.700 one is by somebody named Ashira. And she says, I was about 17 when I heard the word for transgender.

01:06:31.900 All I did was Google gender therapist in Calgary. And that was how that happened.

01:06:36.360 After like three sessions, I got my permission slip or whatever for transitioning medically

01:06:40.520 for hormones. And so I started in 2013 on testosterone and it wasn't until 2015 or 2016

01:06:47.000 actually that I had any surgery. And then the link to it is a link to YouTube. And if you watch like

01:06:53.680 just a little bit longer after this, the person interviewing her is like, oh, so how old were you

01:06:58.260 when you transition? And she's like, oh, 23 or 24. Fully illegal adult. They also have somebody

01:07:04.540 who in the document, it says, Billy Burley took cross-sex hormones and getting surgeries to

01:07:10.260 change his outward appearance after a difficult childhood and being sexually assaulted by his

01:07:14.420 swim coach. He did his best to live as a woman, but ultimately the truth of his biology won out.

01:07:20.880 So I followed the link, which goes to a sort of like a born again ministry website. He's kind of 0.93

01:07:27.700 a little bit vague on the details, but he's like, I never felt comfortable in my body.

01:07:30.860 and then in college I fell in love with someone and then I was denying it and after five or six

01:07:37.200 years in a failed marriage I finally decided to transition and I'm like I don't I don't think all

01:07:42.760 this happened before he was 18. Guys we have other policy interventions if someone before 18 has a

01:07:50.060 six-year failed marriage. It appears to be in his 30s or his late 20s that he transitioned. Boy oh

01:07:55.940 boy. The thing that I really want to stress here and I know I do this on the show all the time

01:08:00.320 is that this is not normal, right? Both of us have worked in kind of development and NGO

01:08:06.280 charity world. And like, if you're talking about a real social problem, you should be able to point

01:08:12.700 to instances of it that everyone agrees are examples, right? So if I say that like school

01:08:18.200 shootings are a problem in America, if I talk about Uvalde, Texas, the most hardcore far right

01:08:23.000 gun nut will be like, yep, that's a school shooting. If we're going to talk about kids

01:08:27.740 being rushed into transition it's like sorry your examples need to have kids and they need to have

01:08:33.720 rushing it's really fucking suspicious that you cannot provide straightforward examples of your 0.65

01:08:41.580 own claims that that is not what we see from like real movements that are seeking to you know 0.96

01:08:46.640 safeguard women or like whatever they say they're trying to do protect children that's something we

01:08:50.700 see from anti-vaxxers i also just want folks to like flash forward in their brains dear cis

01:08:55.760 listeners, come along with me on a journey. Sisteners. Sisteners. Do you think that 50 years

01:09:01.760 from now people will be going, hey, remember that chapter when we thought some people were

01:09:07.320 transgender and we were all totally wrong? Yeah. Mass psychosis. Or do you think we're going to be

01:09:12.700 going, hey, look at this additional chapter in the horror show of American history where we once

01:09:18.840 again decided to scapegoat a group of people who already had very little? Yeah. Even if you don't

01:09:25.160 give a shit about trans people give a shit about you saving face in a couple decades i love that 0.99

01:09:32.380 you're like we're taking names i just want you to know the lgbt community sees you and we have 1.00

01:09:38.880 an excel spreadsheet gay reverse santa he keeps the naughty and nice lists yeah yeah good so these

01:09:46.560 were all of the alleged smoking guns that the anti-trans movement has pointed to as like 0.68

01:09:52.120 irrefutable proof that kids are being rushed into surgeries and hormones, all of which turned out

01:09:57.880 not to be proof of that and evidence of, in fact, the opposite. The final crescendo, the biggest

01:10:04.240 smoking gun and the greatest example of this happening is something that happened last month.

01:10:10.680 This is very recent history. In April of 2024, the United Kingdom published something called

01:10:17.900 the cast review so what do you know about the cast report already aubrey first i'm gonna say 0.96

01:10:23.580 how i feel about the cast report which is oh god i forgot you have your fucking soundboard next to 0.92

01:10:30.760 you i found my slide whistle i hate it so here's the situation what i know about the cast report 0.98

01:10:36.540 is a person who does not treat trans people and does not have expertise in gender affirming

01:10:43.840 healthcare or like related fields, like did an audit of the NHS's gender clinic and found a bunch

01:10:53.520 of wild things or like made a bunch of claims that have led to a dramatic reduction of the NHS

01:11:00.700 gender affirming care. Yes. Wait, say the thing about her qualifications one more time, but,

01:11:04.820 but sound meaner sound like really like put your, put your throat into it. Do it, do it. 0.98

01:11:09.700 Are you trying to force me to reply, guy?

01:11:12.500 No, no, do it, do it, do it.

01:11:13.580 Just make the voice thing. 1.00

01:11:15.200 Look, all I know is that this lady has no qualifications for treating trans people. 1.00

01:11:25.380 Who also has a soundboard on their phone? 1.00

01:11:28.640 You know how I feel about that, Mike?

01:11:32.440 You can't even do it.

01:11:34.140 I started laughing.

01:11:36.740 That's how I feel about that one.

01:11:38.240 That's good.

01:11:39.700 You were so hesitant to do the voice.

01:11:41.580 You're like, I don't know if she's good.

01:11:43.580 I don't know what's happening here.

01:11:45.500 I wanted to say it as if you know a rap air horn is coming.

01:11:49.800 But that would reveal the whole thing.

01:11:52.360 Is that an app on your phone?

01:11:53.980 Yes, it is.

01:11:54.580 Is that what's happening? 0.99

01:11:55.240 God damn it, Michael. 0.98

01:11:56.440 It's in like Siri. 0.99

01:11:57.740 When Siri like suggests apps, it's like most opened.

01:12:00.340 Michael, on this show, we value sound effects, which is why I say.

01:12:05.700 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:12:06.360 I know.

01:12:06.820 I knew you'd escalate.

01:12:08.060 I knew you'd take it there. Again, we are giggling about some of the darkest social forces in the

01:12:14.520 world that we live in. Giggle about dark shit. Basically, the cast review is the entire reason 1.00

01:12:19.080 I wanted to do this series of episodes because over the course of the last decade, effectively

01:12:24.740 every institution in Britain has been captured by this like anti-trans movement. It's like

01:12:28.880 allegedly polite anti-trans movement, especially led by parents. But the same kinds of messages

01:12:33.700 that we started to see on those forums in 2016 are showing up on the BBC. They're showing up in

01:12:40.040 politics. Both the Tories and the Labor Party are echoing this stuff. We see it in the courts,

01:12:45.040 right, that blocked puberty blockers after this case that was not somebody getting rushed into

01:12:50.220 care, right? And so this report is yet another, I think, very obvious example of somebody looking

01:12:58.260 around for any excuse to invalidate this kind of care and to completely ignore the underlying facts

01:13:06.020 as they do it. The number one thing to know is that the CAST report does not provide any new

01:13:12.300 information with one exception. The vast majority of the report is basically like it's a review.

01:13:17.300 They're putting together all of the existing data. They've commissioned these reviews from

01:13:20.600 the University of York. And it's kind of supposed to be like a factual overview of like, what does

01:13:24.840 the data say? What do the records say, et cetera? The only piece of new information contained in

01:13:30.460 this report is an audit of England and Wales' only gender clinic. So again, we're looking at

01:13:37.480 the question of whether or not kids are being rushed into care, right? And so we have the

01:13:43.260 medical records of every single person who was seen by this gender clinic between 2018 and 2023. 0.54

01:13:49.740 I just want to go, this is going to be boring, but I just want to go through it because it's 0.82

01:13:52.520 really important to like stay grounded in reality which like everyone else seems to refuse to do

01:13:57.740 i love this as a statement from a podcast host this is going to be boring but i know i'll do 0.99

01:14:05.480 the rap air horn at like 10 second intervals to keep you awake yeah fuck off so they did this 0.96

01:14:14.360 audit so as a starting point between 2018 and 2023 this clinic only saw 3 306 patients so that's 0.98

01:14:21.580 661 patients per year, over the course of five years, only 892 kids were referred to endocrinology.

01:14:30.020 So 178 kids per year were even eligible to get puberty blockers or hormones. 73% of the people

01:14:37.660 who were seen by this clinic got nothing. So just as a starting point, right, only 178 kids were

01:14:43.780 referred to endocrinology. Of the kids who were referred to endocrinology, only 145 kids per year

01:14:50.700 got puberty blockers. 97 kids per year got puberty blockers and hormones. So these are

01:14:57.000 minuscule numbers. Which isn't like good news that not a lot of people are getting care.

01:15:03.400 Yeah, exactly. But it is evidence that that sort of inundation just isn't really happening.

01:15:09.480 Yes. And even if it was that the sort of filter function that is built in is doing a pretty

01:15:16.960 rigorous job. I mean, speaking of filtering function, the audit also includes numbers on

01:15:21.760 how many appointments the kids had before they were referred to puberty blockers and hormones.

01:15:26.140 The average kid had 6.7 appointments before a referral. And then the report also notes

01:15:31.000 that the average total appointments is 10 before this court decision. And then after the court

01:15:36.240 decision made it harder, 14 appointments. So even after they're referred to endocrinology,

01:15:40.520 they then have another couple of appointments of gatekeeping.

01:15:43.420 I mean, I think this is, again, where, like, anti-trans rhetoric really reveals itself,

01:15:47.880 right?

01:15:48.200 Which is, like, there is not an amount of gatekeeping that makes people feel comfortable.

01:15:52.600 Yes.

01:15:53.080 The last thing that this audit found is that fewer than 10 kids detransitioned during these

01:15:58.600 five years.

01:15:59.620 So the anti-trans brain trust loves pointing out, they're like, well, they might have aged

01:16:03.280 into the adult clinics and then they later detransitioned, which, fair enough, like,

01:16:08.040 we don't have perfect data on this.

01:16:09.520 But a lot of these kids were getting puberty blockers and hormones at 15.

01:16:14.100 And so what this means is that over the course of the following three years, fewer than 10

01:16:18.680 of them detransitioned out of 3,300 kids.

01:16:21.760 If we were seeing a mass wave of detransitioners, we would see some sign of that from kids who

01:16:28.560 were getting hormones at 15. 1.00

01:16:30.340 But then to me, the best sign that this is a moral panic document that is the output

01:16:36.800 of a years-long moral panic that has taken over all these institutions in the UK is that these

01:16:41.460 are the central findings of this cast report. To me, this should be like the beginning of the

01:16:46.660 report. There were concerns that kids were being rushed into care. Like, hey, we looked into it.

01:16:51.680 There's really no cause for concern. This audit, all of the data that I have just given you,

01:16:55.900 this is Appendix 8. Oh no, come on. Of the cast report. All of the rest of it is just

01:17:02.520 filibustering. Is there any point in this report where they talk about like the issues that trans

01:17:09.400 kids face that could be remedied by healthcare? Dude, no. There's a whole thing about like 0.78

01:17:15.260 context, but at no point does it mention like the rise of transphobia in the United Kingdom.

01:17:21.160 The word transphobia only appears three times in the entire document. Jesus hell. We will find out

01:17:27.180 more about the process by which this came about. And I'm very confident that it will look extremely

01:17:31.080 bad, but also just the text, the straightforward text of the document is just a series of anti-trans

01:17:36.900 talking points. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. This is from the introduction to the report written by

01:17:43.980 Dr. Hilary Cass herself. We have to start from the understanding that this group of children

01:17:49.140 and young people are just that. Children and young people, first and foremost,

01:17:54.140 not individuals solely defined by their gender incongruence or gender-related distress.

01:17:59.680 They're not defined by it.

01:18:01.160 We have to cut through the noise and polarization to recognize that they need the same standards of high-quality care to meet their needs as any other child or young person.

01:18:11.260 When you talk to these young people and their parents, they want the same things as everyone else.

01:18:16.020 The chance to be heard, respected, and believed, to have their questions answered, and to access help and advice.

01:18:22.760 it is only when they have been on very long waiting lists and sidelined from usual care

01:18:28.440 and local services that they are forced to do their own research and may come to a single

01:18:33.380 medical answer to their problems. They are forced to do their own research and may come to a single

01:18:38.400 medical answer to their problems. This is like a slightly more grounded sounding version of the

01:18:46.860 ROGD stuff in general. Yes. Hey guys, let's really empathize with these kids. And then

01:18:52.500 from there we can understand how wrong they are essentially the only evidence for rapid onset

01:18:57.360 gender dysphoria at this point is the fact that there were more referrals to gender clinics

01:19:01.660 like starting in 2014 referrals went up very rapidly yeah personally i think this is just

01:19:07.500 very easily explained by the fact that trans people are more visible in society and are less

01:19:12.160 stigmatized than they used to be i don't see that as like a particularly big mystery but just over

01:19:16.600 and over again this is another anti-trans talking point over and over again people just say like

01:19:20.300 Well, that can't explain it.

01:19:21.400 Yeah.

01:19:21.580 So in the report, it says, although it is certainly the case that there's much greater

01:19:25.060 acceptance of trans identities, particularly among Generation Z, and this may account for

01:19:29.840 some of the increase in numbers, this is not an adequate explanation for the overall phenomenon.

01:19:34.880 Why?

01:19:35.380 Yeah, there's no citation given for that.

01:19:37.740 And then it says, the exponential increase in numbers within a five-year time frame is

01:19:43.200 very much faster than would be expected for the normal evolution of acceptance of a minority

01:19:48.140 group.

01:19:49.500 So our friend, the health nerd, Gideon, he did a whole post about like whether or not

01:19:53.860 this is really exponential, but it's to me, the fact that referrals went from roughly

01:19:58.740 700 to roughly 2,500.

01:20:01.560 Like if you look at it on a relative scale, it kind of looks like, oh, they tripled in

01:20:05.000 a couple of years, but it's also just a very small number of kids.

01:20:07.680 The fact that we have 1,800 extra kids getting referrals over the course of five years is

01:20:13.980 not that weird.

01:20:14.660 And then the other thing that it doesn't mention is that the numbers have leveled off.

01:20:18.600 So since 2018, even before the pandemic, the numbers basically flatlined around 2,500.

01:20:24.640 There's some data that like sort of makes it look like it's spiking, but then the footnotes

01:20:28.580 of the report say that this is likely a duplicate.

01:20:30.940 So it kind of looks like it's doubling yet again, but it appears that that's like, that's

01:20:35.180 falsely counted.

01:20:36.260 So it's plateaued.

01:20:38.120 So again, if we're talking about social contagion, right, the way that a virus spreads, it would

01:20:43.540 continue going up.

01:20:44.800 Yeah.

01:20:44.880 So the other component that we saw in these parental accounts was this idea that like

01:20:49.000 they're being influenced by their peers and online.

01:20:51.580 Sure.

01:20:51.840 The internet did it.

01:20:52.920 The internet, the computer.

01:20:54.520 Again, you're going to love this language.

01:20:56.400 I'm sending you an excerpt.

01:20:58.880 Gender questioning young people and their parents have spoken to the review about online

01:21:03.660 information that describes normal adolescent discomfort as a possible sign of being trans

01:21:09.200 and that particular influencers have had a substantial impact on their child's beliefs

01:21:15.020 and understanding of their gender this is the precise sewage that we saw in the litman study

01:21:20.380 right kids are having normal teenage issues and because of the internet they think that 0.59

01:21:25.520 that means they're trans i've never wanted an air horn app on my phone more i will send it to you

01:21:31.940 Peer influence during this stage of life is very powerful.

01:21:37.760 As well as the influence of social media, 0.99

01:21:40.280 the review has heard accounts of female students

01:21:42.900 forming intense friendships with other gender questioning

01:21:46.500 or transgender students at school

01:21:48.240 and then identifying as trans themselves. 0.99

01:21:51.420 This is someone who doesn't understand

01:21:53.520 what the coming out process is. 1.00

01:21:55.240 Yep, they're turning the frogs gay, 0.93

01:21:57.240 but the frogs are teenagers, teenage social groups. 1.00

01:21:59.960 this is like totally fucking anecdotal everything but like that could just as easily be trans 0.96

01:22:06.800 students seeking out other trans students because they sort of like have a sense that they're kind 1.00

01:22:12.520 of on the same page in some important way yes this is like all the fucking gay kids at your 1.00

01:22:17.040 school i know after high school and you're like yeah no shit there's also i'm man we can't go 0.98

01:22:22.520 into every single one of these but i was putting these paragraphs in categories and one of my

01:22:27.600 biggest categories was just like general jankiness so in this in this section it says clinicians and

01:22:34.840 parents reported that gay students are still being stigmatized and bullied in school and there's

01:22:39.420 sometimes a perception that there is less validation for them than for trans pupils what are we doing 1.00

01:22:45.640 this shit again this is another bizarre fucking conspiracy theory that trans folks always trot out 1.00

01:22:50.360 that gay kids are saying that they're trans because like it's easier to be a trans person 1.00

01:22:54.960 than a gay person which is also wild because in our continuing like journey to the way back machine 0.85

01:23:00.280 a very standard response to queer people coming out in the 90s was like so you think you're a 0.74

01:23:06.680 woman or so you think you're a man yeah you're just finding reasons not to listen to us and i

01:23:12.380 wish that you could just get right with that that is what's happening within you right yeah because

01:23:17.520 it's like real clear from the outside that like most transphobes and homophobes don't really

01:23:24.360 deeply know the difference between those two identities there's also this is also the part

01:23:29.660 where the misogyny at the heart of this also comes out there's something very weird how this whole

01:23:35.280 movement says that it's like we're out to protect girls right like fairness and women's sports and

01:23:39.160 all this kind of stuff but then the only other piece of evidence for rapid onset gender dysphoria

01:23:44.420 is there's more kids coming to the clinics and most of those people are assigned female at birth

01:23:50.080 That's like the only other piece of evidence that they can point to.

01:23:53.380 And this report has so much stuff about how like girls are mentally unstable.

01:23:59.080 It says puberty is an intense period of rapid change and can be a difficult process where

01:24:03.940 young people are vulnerable to mental health problems, particularly girls.

01:24:07.760 Girls reported more hours of social media use than boys.

01:24:10.660 43% of girls use social media for three or more hours per day compared to 22% of boys.

01:24:16.980 Girls were more likely to have low self-esteem, to have body weight dissatisfaction, to be

01:24:21.220 unhappy with their appearance.

01:24:22.860 Girls were more likely to report fewer hours of sleep than boys, and to report experiencing

01:24:26.880 disrupted sleep more often or most of the time.

01:24:29.980 Again, it's not really saying what it means, but it's like, yeah, girls are like so, I 0.99

01:24:35.000 guess like sleep deprived and mentally ill that they all think they're trans?

01:24:39.280 Girls were more likely to be diagnosed with neurasthenia and hysteria. 0.94

01:24:44.040 girls were more likely to report a menacing figure hidden in the yellow wallpaper of the

01:24:51.500 room where they're confined what are we doing i'm hitting my desk this is another thing that i just

01:24:57.700 don't find all that mysterious i think the the super basic fact is that young girls are kind of

01:25:04.280 allowed to experiment with gender presentation in a way that young boys typically aren't right

01:25:08.940 and so i think what's happening is that if you're trans and you're assigned female at birth your

01:25:13.500 parents are going to kind of let you experiment and maybe let you wear boys clothes. Whereas if

01:25:18.140 you're assigned male at birth, and you're like, Oh, I want to wear mom's dress or something,

01:25:21.800 or I want to grow my hair long. Parents are gonna be like, fuck, no, you don't. 0.99

01:25:25.760 Most like school dress codes or school uniform codes allow for girls to wear pants, but do not 0.99

01:25:32.060 allow for boys to wear skirts. Yeah. And in terms of like the repercussions, right? If if you are a

01:25:37.840 person who has attended a Trans Day of Remembrance event, you've heard the reading of the names,

01:25:42.140 you have maybe seen photos of people who passed those are overwhelmingly trans women and they 0.99

01:25:48.060 are overwhelmingly trans women of color yeah there's just a lot of garbage like i yeah i think 0.99

01:25:53.420 it's also important though to mention that it's not just trans kids that have it really tough 0.99

01:25:57.880 it's also really tough for their transphobic parents oh good so this is our next excerpt

01:26:03.560 the review heard concerns from many parents about their child being socially transitioned

01:26:08.440 and affirmed in their expressed gender without parental involvement.

01:26:12.900 I love being socially transitioned.

01:26:14.880 They've been transitioned.

01:26:17.000 This was predominantly where an adolescent had, quote unquote, come out at school,

01:26:21.840 quote unquote, but expressed concern about how their parents might react.

01:26:25.960 This set up an adversarial position between parent and child,

01:26:29.480 where some parents felt, quote unquote, forced to affirm their child's assumed identity

01:26:35.660 or risk being painted as transphobic and or unsupportive.

01:26:39.800 Again, we have this thing where it's like,

01:26:41.620 they're going to be called unsupportive

01:26:43.040 just because they don't support their kids. 0.88

01:26:46.760 Yep.

01:26:47.500 Wow, I didn't think we were resorting to name calling,

01:26:51.340 but I guess we are.

01:26:52.800 They're going to call me short just because I'm five foot six.

01:26:55.320 Some parents who spoke to the review

01:26:56.740 felt that social transition was of more benefit to their child

01:26:59.760 in terms of its social impact 0.99

01:27:01.400 than in helping to manage their gender incongruence.

01:27:04.680 they describe how their children were previously isolated and bullied but their status amongst

01:27:10.400 peers has improved as a result of quote-unquote coming out this is like straight from transphobic

01:27:15.840 websites oh when pro-gay parents get together they get to be p flag and when anti-gay parents 0.95

01:27:21.580 get together we're suddenly bigots oh so it's okay to be nice to kids but as soon as you're mean 0.97

01:27:26.860 really interesting hypocrisy much i don't know i just find this whole thing like

01:27:34.380 so sad. And also, I mean, the saddest thing, of course, is this document is an extremely

01:27:40.320 obvious and relatively explicit call to put more barriers in front of kids who identify as trans.

01:27:47.400 It has this kind of like this proposed restructuring of the NHS to basically put

01:27:53.600 more roadblocks in place so that when kids identify as trans, instead of getting referred

01:27:58.540 directly to the gender identity service, they have to go through like psychologists and people

01:28:03.740 who aren't trained in gender dysphoria to make sure to rule out all of these other things and

01:28:08.620 to basically make transition a last resort. So kids are already, again, 10 to 14 appointments

01:28:14.740 before they get onto puberty blockers. That's so long. That's so long.

01:28:21.020 You know, they've already just banned puberty blockers in the UK. And because puberty blockers

01:28:27.120 are considered to be a necessary precursor to getting other forms of gender affirming care,

01:28:32.480 this basically results in a ban on gender affirming care as such. A ban on care for youth,

01:28:38.000 right? Yeah. Although there's also plenty of kind of coded stuff in this report about

01:28:42.320 the need for like more responsive services for people 17 to 25. Yeah, great. Good. I mean,

01:28:47.560 people are going to yell at me for saying this, but this is the very explicit project of this,

01:28:51.640 this entire review. Like if you actually read it and you engage with what it's saying,

01:28:55.660 at every turn, it's saying we need to, we need to consider all the options before transition.

01:29:01.180 we need to maybe consider slowing down right recommendation number two in the report is that 0.94

01:29:06.760 hormones should be used with extreme caution well all fucking evidence is that they are it's 97 kids 0.95

01:29:12.140 a year in the entire fucking england and wales are getting hormones i would call that extreme 0.97

01:29:16.240 caution yeah what would extreme caution look like if not that but again they're winning and it 0.97

01:29:21.860 appears the nhs is going to be restructured around this like quote-unquote new model

01:29:25.260 that is just going to make it even harder to get a form of care that's already extremely hard 0.88

01:29:31.080 that's the output of all of this right that's the legacy of the rapid onset gender dysphoria

01:29:35.680 narrative is no evidence and a huge what appears to be global at this point crackdown on kids

01:29:43.400 getting a kind of care for which there's very good evidence that it helps and no evidence that

01:29:47.720 it harms anybody you need a different soundboard where's your sound you need a groaning soundboard

01:29:53.240 i need a custom i need a bespoke soundboard an aubrey grunt machine if we were going to make

01:29:58.740 like a taxonomy of maintenance phase episodes one of them would be the like there's a kernel

01:30:03.780 of truth here but it's gotten blown out of proportion and people think it's universal

01:30:07.660 or there'd be another one that's like uh the studies were much more nuanced but the pr really

01:30:13.560 blew it out of proportion yeah the it's fully made up and originated on the internet category

01:30:21.420 of our shows is one of the smallest categories it's like brags and this yeah yeah like that

01:30:28.560 is really telling and makes me again profoundly upset

01:30:33.040 i was waiting for you to use the voice i mean i have my thumb on that for like six minutes

01:30:42.280 give me the voice woman 0.99

01:30:44.720 Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. 1.00

01:31:14.720 You

Maintenance Phase - June 18, 2024

＂Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria＂ Part 2： Panic! At The Endocrinologist.

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