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One of the things you do in the book and maybe you can you can talk about this is document the The the nature of the treatment the medical treatment for gender dysphoria when the treatment is gender transition So you you talk about the use of testosterone and its subsidy on university campuses and then you talk about the more invasive surgical transformations double mastectomies Phalloplasty and and which is the creation of a new penis if you use that word loosely These are very These are not minor procedures including the use of testosterone and it’s Remarkable to me given that how fast these guidelines for treatment have changed Well, I think you’re right the medical the the activists have been very aggressive and very effective here in the medical accrediting Institutions, but I think that all of at the root of all of these changes is a series of polite lies that we were That we swallowed unfortunately in the public sphere so in the last week for instance the California Insurance Commissioner has has said that for the purposes of insurance in California that Breast surgery top surgery double mastectomy on healthy breasts for even teenage girls needs to be regarded regarded no longer as cosmetic but something that corrects abnormal structures Because if you’ve accepted the lie that a young woman who says she’s a boy truly is a boy Then healthy breasts become abnormal structures. This is the corruption of language So you must remove them regardless of her age. Mm-hmm Yeah, what language tends to be associated with action and it was the corruption of language that I objected to You know four years ago because it has consequences now, you know, you made the strongest statement so far I would say that you made in our interview Which is the lie that an adolescent girl who thinks she is a boy truly is a boy And I suppose it’s language like that that gets you in trouble to the degree that you get into trouble Because that’s a pretty strong statement The gender theorists who are driving this movement I would say Put forth the proposition that First of all that an individual always knows What gender they are? even if that changes from day to day there isn’t an authority outside the individual themself that can Opine on gender identity That’s that’s part of the philosophy that that drives the gender affirmation movement I would say Correct Right, that’s part of the philosophy But unfortunately, there’s no biological or empirical or means of verifying that we have no means right say of Establishing that a girl who believes she is a boy is truly a boy Well, it’s a lot more it’s more of a definition than anything else, right? It’s a place to start It’s an axiom the axiom is that the only person who can offer an informed opinion about the About their gender is the person themselves. No medical professionals. No parents. No loved ones No one else only the individual and that’s even the case if it changes from day to day or hour to hour Right exactly, okay begin with the conclusion, okay, and then Then the other claim and this is the one that that I have difficulty with logically is that a Girl who thinks she is a boy is in fact a boy Trapped in a girl’s body which seems to me and that that’s been the case ever since birth and It seems to me that this is a form of the biological essentialism that the gender theorists Typically decry Proposing as they typically do the gender is a social construct now it isn’t obvious to me how gender can be a social construct and be something immutable From birth that’s only known to an individual themselves, which sounds a lot more like a biological explanation to me So right Right, I mean I interviewed affirmative therapists and I would say to them and they would say well some kids are gender-fluid And I would say to them well, then how can you recommend? Revert, you know top surgery on a young woman who’s who may be turn out to be gender-fluid meaning She decides at some point. She isn’t she was wrong. She isn’t a boy. She’s a girl and and You know, this response was essentially well only she can know her truth. I mean we are we are we’re this is not medicine any longer It’s closer to witchcraft So Let me let me let me start at the beginning and outline the hypothesis of the book so Over the last five years there’s been a tremendous transformation in the language and the conceptualization That’s been applied by medical associations in relationship to gender and gender is being defined as something that’s a personal choice essentially and That personal choice has been extended to the to the domain of physiological transformation and And medical professionals have been required are now required to exceed to any requests for physiological transformation on the part of their clients or patients as a consequence of the mandates of their professional organizations and the consequence of that has been a shift in the transgender phenomenon from a tiny percentage of primarily males to a 1 in 50 percentage of primarily adolescent females many of whom are undergoing the full physiological or Many of whom are undergoing at least part of the physiological transformation process that sums it up essentially I believe I’m not sure I totally followed that but I think so. Okay Well I probably should have asked you this at the beginning of the interview But the basis I was trying to outline the basic argument that you were making right the basic argument that I’m making is that girls are Is that a lot a large population of teenage girls who probably do not have gender dysphoria? They certainly have an atypical form of gender dysphoria are able to Quickly obtain hormones and surgeries. They are they are very much, you know, they’re Acting under so, you know social media influence and peer influence. We have numbers on that Certainly not my studies, but others have done studies on this And they’re acting under the influence of peer influence and social media influence They are quickly obtaining hormones and surgeries and there is a virtually no over medical oversight of this process That’s the thesis of the book, right? And so so the alternating hypotheses are either that there’s been an explosion in Transgender identifying individuals because the social structures have been taken off the diagnosis Or that this is a form of psychological contagion Right, I don’t I don’t think it’s the former I started to explain why I mean one of the reasons I said is you would expect You know a large, you know rise in gender in transgender identification across populations It wouldn’t just be teenage girls You would see women in their 40s 50s and 60s and 60s and 60s and 60s And they’re 40s 50s and 60s. You would see more men, you know coming out as transgender in incomparable rates But but not only that you’re seeing among this population We know that rates of suicide and depression are rising as social acceptance Of gender dysphoria is going or transgender identification is going up But but we would have predicted that those things going down with social acceptance instead It seems to be you know coincident and co-morbid with teenage girls mental health crisis In which we’re seeing very very high rates of anxiety and depression